InvestigationThis 39-year-old man, schizophrenic, has been interned since 2005 in a psychiatric care center in Gironde, for the murder of two women in Pau. According to the medical profession, he could be transferred to a more flexible service, but the prefecture opposes it. “Le Monde” met him, and was able to retrace his particularly emblematic story.
Under the winter rains, Avenue Caussil unambiguously invites walkers to quicken their pace: a police station, high walls topped with barbed wire and a cemetery sheltering “brain mutilated people” from the Great War… Don’t linger for no reason in this district of Cadillac, about forty kilometers south-east of Bordeaux. The porch of the Unit for difficult patients, a psychiatric care center, is hidden in a recess in the avenue, guarded by a gatehouse with mirrored windows. On the front door, aligned vertically, three black letters: UMD. The establishment, made up of five pavilions, is so well guarded that most residents have given up on the idea of escaping. The eighty people welcomed here, all men, are too agitated for conventional psychiatric services: violent patients with no criminal record, prisoners whose mental health has deteriorated in prison or criminals and delinquents declared criminally irresponsible.
Once through the entrance hall, you have to reach an obsolete building in the shape of a W to reach a large room with Spartan walls, deprived of a view of the outside. The furniture is to match: a gray table, a few folding chairs. Preceded by a health executive, an imposing silhouette soon looms in the doorway: Romain Dupuy, a 39-year-old schizophrenic, responsible for the murder of a nurse and a caregiver at the psychiatric hospital of Pau, December 18, 2004. That day, at dawn, two lifeless bodies were discovered in a pavilion of the establishment. Lucette Gariod, a 40-year-old caregiver, was stabbed. Chantal Klimaszewski, a 48-year-old nurse, was also stabbed before being beheaded. His head rests a few feet away, on a television.
“Prove that I have changed”
Romain Dupuy comes forward to meet us. With his dreadlocks tied in a ponytail and his curly goatee under his chin, he cultivates a whimsical look that clashes with the severity of the place. For this meeting – the first with a journalist in seventeen years of presence here – he has dressed up neatly: three-piece gray suit, blue suspenders, tie. During the interview, a health manager will remain posted in front of the door.
After the usual courtesies, Romain Dupuy sits down without haste. Then he raises his chest gravely, confident in a slightly nasal voice, as if he had a cold: “Every day, I think of these women whose lives I took, of them and their families. I do not recognize the right to ask their forgiveness, or even to apologize to them, I just want to be given a chance to prove that I have changed. » This exceptional patient, whose story has redefined the relationship between psychiatry and justice in France, has long been the subject of political issues that go beyond him. “I feel like I’m in a wagon going at full speed, which no one can stop. »
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