Innocent wrongly accused or skillful hoaxer?
At the heart of a dizzying investigation into a series of suspected poisonings in two clinics in Besançon (Doubs) between 2008 and 2017, the "case" of Dr Frédéric Péchier divides psychologists and psychiatrists.
A brilliant anesthetist, this 49-year-old man is suspected of having secretly introduced dangerous products into the injection bags of twenty-four people undergoing surgery, thus causing serious heart ailments.
Nine of them died.
A case all the more insane as he is suspected of having acted to harm his colleagues: by poisoning their patients, he would have embarrassed them while giving himself the good role, then emerging from an adjoining room to "save" the sick. Charges that he strongly denies.
While awaiting forensic conclusions on these repeated heart ailments, Frédéric Péchier himself has been the subject of several expertises.
A first psychocriminological report, in April 2019, based on the investigation file, the viewing of his police custody and his telephone tapping had drawn a disturbing portrait of him: devoid of empathy, haughty, contemptuous, egocentric and narcissistic to a point that the two psychologists speak of "megalomaniac blister".
"Massive need for recognition" and omnipotence, they say again, describing him as an obsessive pervert and paranoid.
Nothing less.
"Caution"
A presentation to which other experts do not subscribe, who rely on interviews with the person concerned. "Caution", summarizes the psychiatrist Daniel Zagury, whose report has just joined the thick investigation file. He describes a depressed man, with dark thoughts: free under judicial control, Frédéric Péchier had to go into exile with his parents, far from Besançon. Forbidden to exercise, he moped, spending his days rehashing his file, sleeping and watching Netflix.
Criticizing in hollow the methodology of the two criminologists and their conclusions, Daniel Zagury is especially astonished by what neither a first college of psychiatrist experts, nor another psychologist, nor himself identified in the anesthesiologist of traits of personality likely to explain such extraordinary facts.
For his part, he finds him neither perverse nor paranoid, without mental or psychic anomaly.
"If Doctor Frédéric Péchier had committed the facts of which he is suspected, he writes, that would only be compatible with a cleavage", this psychic process making two personalities coexist, one perfectly normal, the other capable of the worst. .
Common among serial killers, it is often explained by a trauma in childhood.
None of that, apparently, at Frédéric Péchier.
"Radically reversing medical values, betraying the Hippocratic Oath and working towards death would require a level of hatred and destructiveness towards his colleagues, a perverse indifference towards patients who could only rise to troubles personality
[…]
perceptible at one point or another during the examination, ”continues Dr Zagury.
In short: the facts are so enormous that if Frédéric Péchier was the author, it would be difficult for him to pass under the radar.
"He is responsible for his actions", says a lawyer
Proof for Mr. Randall Schwerdorffer that we cut a suit too big for his client.
"The only event that emerges from his biography is a burnout in 2014 ... We are far from the arsonist firefighter described by the investigators," he denounces.
"We cannot exclude that he manipulated the experts", retorts in the first place Me Stéphane Giuranna, lawyer of civil parties, who adds: "The purpose of a psychiatric expertise is to know if he is responsible for his acts. . The answer is yes, it therefore comes under an Assize Court ”. His colleague Me Frédéric Berna abounds, and tackles: “He is responsible for his actions, as are Michel Fourniret, Francis Heaulme and Guy Georges. "
