2023-11-19 18:54:19
Lawyer Mathieu Monfort, in Foix, November 17, 2023, before the opening of the trial before the Ariège Assize Court of his client Jean-Paul Vidal. LIONEL BONAVENTURE / AFP
They are there. Sitting in the dock, one meter apart. A policeman separates them. Friday November 17, on the evening of the first day of their trial for the assassination of Christophe Orsaz in Bélesta (Ariège) and the murder of his daughter Célia in Puivert (Aude), on November 30, 2017, we still did not know the sound of their voice. At the end of this first day, the president of the Ariège Assize Court, Hèlène Ratinaud, did not give them the floor.
For now, Marie-José Montesinos, 61, and Jean-Paul Vidal, 53, are just two faces frozen in wax immobility. Her head erect, gray sweater matching her hair pulled back in a bun, with a slight twitch that makes her blink. Him, black vest from which a white shirt collar protrudes, his head most often tilted towards the ground. During this twelve-hour day, they will both try not to meet their empty gazes fixed towards nowhere.
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The ace. So here they are reunited again, these two ex-lovers, as on that disastrous day of Thursday, November 30, 2017 during which they had set a fatal trap for Marie-José’s ex-companion, Christophe Orsaz, in this farm lost in the hamlet of Rieufourcant in the depths of a deserted countryside. They beat him with an iron bar, before throwing him into a septic tank. “I wanted to beat him up,” Marie-José would later tell investigators, a way of minimizing the act and denying premeditation of homicide.
But in their macabre scenario that they thought they had written flawlessly, they had not anticipated that Christophe would come with his daughter Célia. So, after realizing its presence, we had to get rid of it. A little further, about fifteen kilometers. A shotgun shot to the head and that was the end of the girl. They had hidden his body under some foliage in a wood, away from a main road. Case settled.
Two castaways from childhood
Friday in Foix, the expert psychologist, Alain Penin, tried to unravel the mental mechanisms of these two accused. “Two fragile personalities”, he noted. Two castaways from childhood. She, with an incestuous father who raped her at the age of 9. Him with a depressed, unstable and angry mother – “whose name was Marie-José”, underlines the shrink – and a father convicted of financial embezzlement. Placed in a religious establishment at the age of 4, he was mistreated by nuns. “Only bad childhood memories”, he reported to the practitioner.
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