Jonathan Boillet was sentenced Friday to 30 years in prison, including a 20-year security sentence, for the murder of his partner Sandy Cucheval, who was burned alive in 2020. These sentences are in accordance with the prosecution's requisitions, as is the socio-economic monitoring. judicial to which Mr. Boillet will be subject for ten years following his incarceration, and an obligation of care to combat his addictions to alcohol and cannabis.
“You belong to me, you can never leave me.
The day you leave me, I die you”
: during his requisitions before the Pas-de-Calais Assizes, the attorney general, Xavier Alloy, recalls these words of the accused, pronounced shortly before the death of his partner .
Doused with gasoline and burned alive in the car where the couple was on November 10, 2020, Sandy Cucheval died a week later at Lille hospital.
The accused, who had maintained the accident theory until the trial opened on Tuesday, ended up recognizing on Thursday that the evidence overwhelmed him, while ensuring that he had no memory.
“I'm taking a step aside (...) I'm saying it: Jonathan Boillet is guilty of the murder of Sandy Cucheval, let it be said
,” launches the accused's lawyer, Anne- Céline Lemonnier.
Saying she is
“absolutely convinced”
that this is a traumatic denial, Me Lemonnier calls on the justice system to
“accompany Mr. Boillet in a process so that he can move past this”
.
The latter did not seem to react to the verdict.
Before the court retired to deliberate, he assured with sobs in his voice
“I would like to apologize, but if my apology is not acceptable to the family, I understand very well”
.
Already convicted eight times in the past, including four times for violence against a previous partner, the mother of his children, the man was released from prison on June 29, 2020. He was the subject of socio-judicial monitoring at the time of the facts, an
“outstretched hand”
that he did not grasp, underlines the attorney general.
A feminicide “quite unique in its monstrosity”
“For feminicides and more particularly for this one, quite unique in its monstrosity, the sentence must be commensurate with the suffering of the victims
,” argues the lawyer for Sandy’s daughter and ex-mother-in-law. Cucheval, Nathalie Tomasini.
With Jonathan Boillet, with whom she had been in a relationship for three months at the time of her death, Sandy Cucheval was
“locked up”
, points out Me Cherifa Benmouffok, her mother's lawyer.
He also threatened to burn her and her children.
On the last day of the trial, a series of photos of the victim were broadcast, notably in the company of her children and still smiling.
Then a photo presented by Me Tomasini shows her face completely charred, her skin blistered and scorched, her scalp without hair.
Astonishment and sobs invade the family benches.
Jonathan Boillet looks down.
Jonathan Boillet assures that he had a “blackout”
But he does not change his position, now that the alcohol consumed throughout the day of November 10, 2020, beers and vodka, led him to a
“blackout”
from which he only woke up when the car caught fire.
Certainly,
“it was I who doused her with gasoline, we cannot say the opposite
,” he admitted Thursday, cornered by damning expert opinions.
But he refuses to admit to having deliberately started the fire and to having wanted to kill her.
This alcoholism and his dependence on various drugs are linked, according to him, to rapes suffered when he was a child, committed by an uncle.
Abuse that he
“carries across his shoulder, like a totem of immunity”
, accuses Nathalie Tomasini.
“You killed Madame Cucheval, you kill her a second time by not offering the victims this truth that they so need,”
asserts Alexandre Braud, lawyer for two of the victim’s children.
On average, a feminicide occurs every three days in France.
The Ministry of Justice counted 94 feminicides in 2023.