“Now the truth should come out, especially for children who no longer have their mother and no longer see their father”. This Tuesday evening, at the headquarters of the petanque association of Cagnac-les-Mines, the inhabitants were waiting to know what the reconstruction of the night of the disappearance of Delphine Jubillar would bring to this affair which has been agitating for two years the life of their town.
A few hundred meters away, in a district cordoned off by the gendarmes, one of the last acts of the investigation of this criminal file took place in the couple’s house, in the presence of the husband, Cédric Jubillar, suspected of the murder of his wife. Extracted for the occasion from the Seysses remand center, where he has been imprisoned for eighteen months in pre-trial detention, the 35-year-old plasterer was questioned about what happened during this night from December 15 to 16. 2020. In the presence of his lawyers, those of the nurse’s relatives, the two investigating judges, but also investigators from the gendarmerie’s research section, the prosecution scenario was replayed.
That of blows that the plasterer would have carried to his wife, with whom he was in the process of divorce. A thesis that the defense rejects. That night, Cédric Jubillar claims to have gone to bed after 10 p.m. and only been awakened around 3:50 a.m. by the cries of his daughter. It was then that he would have realized the absence of his wife, whose body was never found, and that he would then have called the gendarmes.
What happened between late evening and early morning? During an audition, the couple’s son, Louis, said he saw his parents arguing. A damaged pair of Delphine’s glasses was also found by the investigators. But no trace of blood, nor material clues has so far come to support the prosecution’s thesis.
Cries, two different readings
This Tuesday evening, in the middle of the night, the cries of women rang out. They were intended to reproduce those heard on the evening of December 15 by a neighbor living 130 meters away, when she had gone out to smoke a cigarette. “We were able to see that these cries could be heard 130 meters away, without any difficulty. The testimony of the neighbor is all the more credible this evening. Similarly, we were able to move forward on the pair of glasses which were found in several pieces scattered around the apartment on which Cédric Jubillar could not explain himself. We were able to understand what happened with the violent argument that happened that evening, corroborated from the inside by little Louis, from the outside, we are sure today, by the neighbor who heard these cries of terror”, estimated Mourad Battikh, the lawyer of the uncle and the aunt of Delphine, civil parties.
For her part, Emmanuelle Franck, one of Cédric Jubillar’s three lawyers, made a completely different reading of the reconstruction of the cries outside the house. “You have a witness who says ‘I heard a woman separating dogs barking and screaming to separate them’ and a woman is made to scream to death without there being any dogs and the witness is asked if it is true, obviously this lady said “no, not quite”. If for her, these hours spent at the Jubillar’s home brought nothing new, for Me Malika Chmani who represents the couple’s two children, this scenario, in the presence of a Cédric Jubillar “equal to himself” , made it possible “to consolidate the serious and concordant indications which are already in the file, which is not empty at all”.
No scenario for the defense
In any case, the main suspect will not have delivered new details, nor delivered a version different from the one he has been holding since the beginning. “We reconstructed small points of this evening, witnesses came to confirm what they had said about the direction of the car, we tried to see what the child had been able to see from the corridor. We realized that the door had to be wide open. In the end, it brought nothing and we have confirmation that no one on the prosecution side is able to present us with a scene against which we should defend ourselves, ”lamented Me Alexandre Martin.
If no new act is ordered by the investigating judges, and no new document added to the file, the next step could be the referral to the assizes of Cédric Jubillar. Certainly within the next year.