Ordinary people immersed in a sordid affair.
If the news item dampened the atmosphere of the end-of-year celebrations for the 500 inhabitants of this small village surrounded by forest and ponds in the depths of the Sarrebourg region, for Madeline Vautrin and Dominique Mathieu, it was the life that has turned upside down.
They are the owners of the house in Gondrexange (Moselle) in which the remains of a corpse packed in a metal trunk were discovered on December 20 by firefighters initially called for a simple cellar fire.
“Not a couple of killers”
On Christmas Eve, they were both indicted for “murder”, “concealment of a corpse” and “attacking the integrity of a corpse” and then placed in pre-trial detention.
Their two children, aged 13 and 9, were entrusted to the ASE.
“This affair is also a family drama,” sighs Me Loraine Biernaczyk, the lawyer for Dominique Mathieu, whose only statement in police custody aimed to exonerate his partner.
On January 11, 2024, Madeline Vautrin was released.
“She didn't know anything and I believe her.
The only thing we can blame him for is his naivety!
», Explained his counsel, Me Romain Hellenbrand, concluding: “They are not a couple of killers as one might imagine.
»
Originally from Vosges, he, like her, have never been talked about.
Neither here nor elsewhere.
No criminal record or even a traffic ticket.
Employed at the Center Parcs “Les Trois Forêts”, Madeline, 35, left early in the morning to lead a small team responsible for maintaining the cottages and saw people all day.
His partner, Dominique, 49, worked as a driver for a passenger transport company, only a few hours a day.
The rest of the time, he developed his side business from their home: he had recently started creating stickers and advertising automobile vehicles.
If "their temperaments are polar opposites, she is as smiling and energetic as he is reserved and passive", according to Me Hellenbrand, they have been together for seventeen years.
The smell would have come from the sewers
In Gondrexange, we know neither enemies nor really friends.
They barely still met their neighbors, the Seeberts, with whom they had become friends when they arrived in the village.
“I got angry with him because I thought he treated her like shit!
He said she was a good-for-nothing, yet the cleaning, the shopping, the laundry, she was the one who did everything,” says Gilbert Seebert.
It was on the first floor of the house, on the same level as the bedrooms, in a large room which formerly served as a ham smoking room, that the metal trunk was discovered in front of which a scented candle was burning, probably to hide the smell... How could the mother not have noticed anything?
“Madeline and her children had been complaining for a while that the house stank but her partner claimed it was a problem with the dishwasher which was backing up the sewers,” says Me Hellenbrand.
In this case, why, according to a source close to the case, was Madeline Vautrin seen a few days before the sordid discovery, on the cameras of Brico-Leclerc in Sarrebourg buying tarpaulins, rope and white coats?
Did Dominique Mathieu, who was waiting for her in the car, as usual, send her on these errands in order to quickly make a body that had become embarrassing disappear?
A link with a missing young person?
At this stage of the investigation, although many questions remain, certain avenues have already been ruled out: the lover as well as the family dispute or the settling of scores against a background of drug trafficking.
In recent days, a more serious hypothesis has been circulating according to a source close to the investigation.
On the small plot of land he owns on the edge of a pond, in Val-et-Châtillon, about twenty kilometers from Gondrexange, Dominique Mathieu could have come face to face with an intruder and things would have gone badly.
In the village some speak of “a marginal”, others of a “man of Romanian origin”.
“We knew that he had a shed in Val-et-Châtillon, from time to time he would mow the field,” confirms his neighbor.
Before the press reported it, my wife wondered if something serious could have happened there.
» And the same one speculates: “But why the hell didn't he call the gendarmerie?
What's the idea of taking him home?
And then cut it out?
But he's going to get a life sentence!
» According to Me Loraine Biernaczyk, Dominique Mathieu “recently asked to explain himself, he should be questioned soon by the investigating judge.
»
In Val-et-Châtillon (Meurthe-et-Moselle), we have barely heard of the affair of the corpse in the trunk.
Here, the only news item that has left its mark is the disappearance on August 28, 2022 of Guillaume Mongin, a 27-year-old young man suffering from schizophrenia.
After a walk in the forest, he never returned home.
Despite arduous and lengthy searches, the police were unable to locate him.
For sixteen months, his parents and his brother have increased their calls for witnesses.
Onlookers say they saw him but “no official check could be carried out by a police or gendarmerie service to formally identify him,” the Blâmont gendarmerie assured the Parisian.
Could the two cases be linked?
“We thought about it…” But for now, the mystery remains.
Including the identity of the victim.
The only thing that the Metz prosecutor's office confirmed was that it was a "young man, between 25 and 35 years old".