They are no longer there to testify but the words of their testimony resonate in the hall of assizes of Evry (Essonne).
The court judges since September 15 Aïssa Z., accused of being the "rapist on a moped" or "the rapist of the Sénart forest" and of having raged in this peri-urban forest, located astride the Essonne and Seine-et-Marne, between 1995 and 2001.
This Wednesday, the jurors will study two assaults suffered by victims now deceased.
Seven of the thirty-four victims died before they could attend the trial.
Their words are brought to the bar by relatives, children or companions, who come to express the horror and also, often, the unspoken out of modesty, sometimes more out of shame.
The daughter of a victim thus discovered the ordeal experienced by her mother during this trial.
Jacky
(Editor's note: the first name has been changed)
, he had scraps of it during the fourteen years of living together with Francine
(Editor's note: the first name has been changed)
.
This is what he will tell this Wednesday at the bar.
"I am here for her memory, to represent her, out of respect for her, even if I have rebuilt my life," he explains to Parisian / Today in France.
Francine died in 2017.
Another news item is on TV, she cracks
On August 12, 1999, she was 52 years old.
While walking her dog in the town of Draveil (Essonne), she is assaulted by a man riding a burgundy scooter.
"She had the reflex to say that she had AIDS," says Jacky.
She thus avoids rape, the attacker masturbating all the same before leaving on his two-wheeler.
“I didn't know right away that she had been through this sort of thing,” he recalls.
But there were certain behaviors that alerted me ”.
A tendency to quicken the pace in the street, “to shave the walls” in Jacky's words and to appear anxious when going out in the forest.
When they meet, the facts took place four years ago.
It is a report on a news item that makes her crack.
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Francine then puts words on her anxieties.
"We were watching a report devoted to the killer in the classifieds which had raged in Essonne at the same time and suddenly she burst into tears and told me what she had lived", continues Jacky.
The speech is not linear.
But he understands.
"She never spoke about it again"
"It was never me who spoke about it," he continues.
He also remembers difficult times for Francine like the day she got lost in the forest.
“She had joined a walking club and was left behind.
She had to go home on her own.
She was traumatized.
The arrest at the end of 2015 of a suspect revives these memories.
Patricia
(Editor's note: the first name has been changed)
, she did not live long enough to see this new development of the business.
She died in 2014. Informed that the trial had started, her daughter became a civil party at the hearing.
Patricia is, chronologically, the second victim of the rapist on March 12, 1996. She was then 63 years old and a few weeks away from retirement.
The assault is violent.
She is taken by the throat, finds herself thrown to the ground.
He threatens her: "Shut up or I'll kill you."
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"His daughter was in a way the direct witness of this attack," describes Me Arnaud Simonard, lawyer for the civil party.
She had accompanied her to the hospital in shock.
Afterwards, Patricia never mentioned it again.
My client remembers everything and the fact that she is now the same age as her mother was at the time of the assault causes a transference.
This event changed his life.
The lawyer continues: "She is especially present today so that her mother is not just a number in the list of victims."
