“No, I have nothing to declare”. These are the only words uttered by Cédric Jubillar, this Tuesday morning, during the hearing to examine his request for release before the investigating chamber of the Toulouse Court of Appeal. The shaved head, dressed in a simple white shirt, the husband of Delphine, missing since December 16 in Cagnac-les-Mines, appeared very concentrated, sometimes imperceptibly nodding his head when his lawyers mentioned the documents in charge of the case. , taking them apart one after the other.
For more than four hours, the defense, but also the lawyers for the civil parties and the attorney general recalled what the file contained and the elements which led to the indictment of the 34-year-old painter-plasterer on June 18 for “Spouse murder”. “We have not gathered irrefutable proof after six months of investigation, we are proven in the negative, we have found nothing else so it is him. We present him as the ideal culprit and to support this thesis we have said everything, ”lamented Jean-Baptiste Alary, the early lawyer of Cédric Jubillar.
Screams, pedometer, condensation sifted through
His colleague, Emmanuelle Franck, took up one by one the “serious and concordant indices” exposed by the public prosecutor which led to the indictment of Cédric Jubillar. “We took small elements, we tried to nest them, as that doesn’t work, we forced to give something that looks like nothing,” she pleaded. She first returned to the statements of Louis, 6, the child of the couple in the process of divorce, who during his second hearing indicated that his parents would have quarreled on the evening of the disappearance, just after he went to bed around 11 p.m. “When he is heard the first time, on December 16 at 4 pm, he says that they were talking. His second hearing is more than a month later, it’s huge for a child of that age, ”says the lawyer.
On the pedometer which recorded only 40 steps between the alarm clock of Cédric Jubillar and the arrival of the gendarmes, a sign for the accusation that he did not look for his wife, she explains simply that “if we do not have his phone on oneself, it does not record anything ”. Before tackling the frightened cries of a woman and the barking of dogs heard by a neighbor and her daughter, whose house is located 130 m from the Jubillar home. Beyond the fact that the closest neighbors heard nothing, she worked to demonstrate that the time could not match. Thanks to the TV programs watched by this woman and her daughter, the screams would have sounded between 10:51 p.m. and 10:55 p.m. But at 10:58 p.m., Delphine was sending a good night text to her lover.
The lawyer also returned at length to the duvet that covered the mattress where Delphine was sleeping and which was washed just after her disappearance. When the gendarmes arrived at 4:50 am at the Jubillar’s home, nearly 40 minutes after Cedric’s call, the latter was putting laundry in the washing machine. An important element for the accusation on the behavior of the husband. But no official report is then drawn up. “On the 16th, the gendarmes were not interested in the machine. Why we are talking about the duvet is because on December 17, 34 hours after the call, they notice that there is a duvet in the machine. In their report, they say that nothing has changed except the duvet. I deduce that the duvet was not in the washing machine the day before, ”continues Emmanuelle Franck, before shifting to the condensation found in Delphine Jubillar’s car.
For investigators, this mist would be an argument to say that it was used between 11 p.m. and 4 a.m., possibly to move Delphine’s body. “It’s a vast swindle,” says the lawyer before giving a little weather lesson on the phenomenon of dew point, a phenomenon during which dew is deposited naturally depending on the humidity level and the ambient temperature. But during the night of December 15 to 16, according to her, all the indicators were green to have dew.
The disturbing SMS of a man who accuses himself
Far from being satisfied with dismantling point by point the arguments of the prosecution, the three lawyers of Cédric Jubillar also tried to show that all the tracks had not been followed. In particular that of a man from Albi who sent text messages to his ex-partner in which he accuses himself of the murder. The woman presented herself at the gendarmerie on December 25, with the disturbing text messages from her former husband on her cell phone. “I killed Delphine, because she was in a relationship and did not want to leave him”, “I hit her, she died” or “I killed a woman, I blame myself, she was working at CCB [initiales de la Clinique Claude Bernard où travaillait Delphine Jubillar] “. “He was auditioned and he said he wanted to put pressure on his former partner. She was not auditioned, we did not even check her phone. We have a man who accuses himself and we do nothing, ”criticizes Jean-Baptiste Alary.
Other avenues to search according to the defense
But this is not the only track that would have been swept away by investigators according to the defense which is gradually sowing trouble. On the morning of December 16, a taxi reportedly saw 15 km from Cagnac-les-Mines, around 6 a.m., a woman walking alone by the side of the road and wearing a white top. A color that is not trivial for Cédric Jubillar’s lawyers, since the young woman would have gone to walk the dogs the night of her disappearance with a white down jacket.
Another fact to which they focus their attention, the testimony of two motorists who saw a curious scene in the middle of the night, in a country lane, 2.5 km from Cagnac. “Between 5.15 am and 5.30 am, they will successively see the overhead light of a burning car with an individual running through it. And that is not an interesting track that we pretend to rule out, ”asks Alexandre Martin, Cédric Jubillar’s third lawyer.
“I’m going to kill her”, repeated threats from Cédric
If the defense was able to score points, the prosecution was not left out either. The investigation has indeed revealed that Cédric Jubillar had repeatedly indicated that he was going to kill his wife, bury her in a place where she could not be found. Threats he made in front of his mother, who opened up to cousins and members of his family. And that she repeated during her own custody. “She came out psychologically broken. During her custody, she was instrumentalized from start to finish, ”assured her lawyer, Jessica Chefaroudi.
But these threats, Nadine F. is not the only one to have heard them. It is also the case of a simple neighbor. “This person heard on December 19 as part of the neighborhood investigation indicated that on December 12 she had returned to wood with Cédric Jubillar. Speaking of his couple, he said “things are not going well, I want to kill her, to bury her” “, reports Jean-Luc Forget, lawyer for Sébastien Aussaguel, one of the brothers of Delphine. A sibling for whom Cédric Jubillar “has not said everything” and who blames him for “the pressure” he has sought to exert on them in recent months. Their brother-in-law would have indeed told them to intervene on social networks to stop the accusations against him, threatening them not to give them the children in custody.
Suspicious behavior
It is one of the elements of the personality of Cédric Jubillar pointed out by the Advocate General who pleaded for his continued detention. If he refused to use the testimony of little Louis in his argument, he did not omit the often disturbing attitude of Delphine’s husband. Like on the morning of December 16, when he reconnects his phone at 3:53 am, after being woken up by his little girl and realizing that his wife was no longer there, according to him. The first thing he does is log on to a dating site, “even before calling friends and police.”
The same day, while the disappearance of his wife is now considered worrying by the gendarmes, that the first research begins, he connects on his mobile to the game Game of Thrones. “To all this is added his police custody. He is in total contradiction with himself, he can say one thing, then the opposite, ”points out Bernard Lavigne. Cédric Jubillar will know this Thursday at 11:30 am if he remains in pre-trial detention.