“This is the end!” » It was with these words that Franck Martins, former commander of the judicial police (PJ) of Lille, “picked up” Dino Scala, baptized the rapist of the Sambre, in February 2018. Until then, this serial attacker had managed to thwart the hunt he was subjected to for twenty years. This affair, which took place between France and Belgium, largely inspires the television series Sambre broadcast for two weeks on France 2 and the last two episodes of which are scheduled this Monday evening, at 9:05 p.m.
During the trial, you said you stopped Dino Scala by telling him “This is the end”. This sentence is not used in the series, is that surprising to you?
It’s just an anecdote and it was probably too theatrical in relation to the tone of the series which sticks very closely to the book by Alice Giraud*. I met her when she was writing this book. She wanted it to be the basis for a TV series. I knew there would be an adaptation.
With your perspective as a police officer, but also as a screenwriter since your retirement from the PJ, what impressions does this series leave you with?
It’s not a thriller. It is constructed in the spirit of a social fable about the apprehension of sexual assault in the 1980s and 1990s. It accurately evokes the dysfunctions of the police, justice and society, and how victims were considered during this period. It’s a successful series from this point of view. If we look at the police investigation itself, it is very romanticized.
Is the work of police officers well reflected?
Our PJ team took over the file in 2005. And for thirteen years, there was nothing spectacular to show. It is painstaking work based on the documentation and resumption of victim hearings. It’s a fundamental job, but difficult to translate into fiction. The police commander, whose name is Etienne Winckler, is not a copy and paste of me. It represents a concentration of several police officers. But I recognized myself in the auditions conducted by Olivier Gourmet, who plays the role of Winckler. We had to believe the victims, listen to them. That’s what we did.
What is missing compared to the reality of the investigation?
The work of two archivists which was essential. It’s one of them that alerts us, one day, to an attack and puts us on the right track. The police officer who actually discovers Dino Scala’s trail is also absent from the storyline. It is he who, however, finds a car marked in a factory parking lot and makes the connection. Otherwise reality, the series respects the atmosphere of the investigation. The spirit is the right one. The commander who said “we weave our web thread by thread” is exactly what we did, even if this phrase was never uttered. In fact, reality is very well dramatized.
Sequences, however, stigmatize the police quite a bit, like this anecdote of the composite portrait or the flight from the police station to avoid DNA sampling…
A police officer and the rapist, who has not yet been identified, joke about the sketch that looks like him. This scene is indeed linked to the testimony of a police officer, but it is a bit of a caricature. Concerning the distribution of this composite portrait, a friend of Dino Scala had also joked with him about the fact that it looked like him. Concerning the sampling episode, Dino Scala almost had his DNA taken for another case but, at the time, this was absolutely not systematic because we were at the very beginning. The escape episode is therefore a bit exaggerated. But I don’t see the series as an anti-cop indictment. All of this is a reflection of what society was like. There was a different look at sexual assault. Fortunately, we have evolved a lot.
What do you particularly like about this series?
The atmosphere of what the region was like at that time is very well recreated. But also the effort made by the judicial police to reconnect with all the victims. We recognized ourselves in the compassionate and humanist attitude portrayed by the series.
*Sambre, fluoroscopy of a news item, JC Lattès edition.