A French city's bizarre tales: Murderer and 2 prostitutes spin a web of high-level scandal

International Herald Tribune/New York Times ^ | 6/23/03 | Craig S. Smith

[DPB101]

TOULOUSE, France Whatever the truth, the tales of rape and murder emanating from this quiet city in southern France have the stink of overripe cheese and, though hard to swallow, are impossible to ignore.

Two prostitutes say that the former mayor joined in sadomasochistic orgies in which young women were chained to a wall and that he ordered the murder of a transvestite who secretly videotaped it all. The former mayor says that people in the pornography industry are out to destroy him, or that a local newspaper is bent on revenge.

New allegations surface almost daily from France's fourth-largest city, holding the nation spellbound and spinning a scandal of such expanding dimensions that one conservative magazine warned it "could turn our public life upside down."

The undeniable facts are few beyond a string of buried corpses, victims of a Toulouse psychopath named Patrice Alegre who was sentenced to life in prison a year ago for half a dozen killings. Police detectives, convinced that Alegre was responsible for other murders, continued to interrogate him and were periodically rewarded with a tip to another unsolved crime. It was while investigating one of those crimes - the 1992 murder of a woman in a seedy local hotel - that the police came across the two former prostitutes, who bit by bit have told their fantastical tale.

According to the prostitutes' story, Alegre acted as a pimp for a handful of municipal government officials. His customers, they say, included the former mayor, Dominique Baudis, and an assistant prosecutor, both of whom the prostitutes say participated in sadomasochistic orgies at a lakeside house south of this steamy river town.

One of the prostitutes has claimed the orgies sometimes included children as young as 13 and involved real torture. At least three women were killed during the sessions, the prostitutes say, and at least one of the bodies was disposed of in the lake. The women claim that it was to keep another prostitute from talking about one of those murders that Alegre strangled the woman at a Toulouse hotel in 1992. Both prostitutes say they were present at the murder. That makes them potentially liable for prosecution, possibly as accomplices, said Laurent de Caunes, the attorney for the assistant prosecutor, adding that the women have an incentive to concoct a story that deflects blame.

As a measure of the frenzy that has developed around the story, even the staid French daily Le Monde ran a sensational, thinly sourced article last week claiming that the lake house's new owner had stripped a bloodstained carpet from a room the prostitutes called "the chapel," where the orgies allegedly took place, and that the police found marks on the wall that, the paper speculated, were left by iron rings attached "at the height of a child or of a person crouching or on all fours."

The two prostitutes' versions of the story are riddled with contradictions but include enough verifiable details that they can not be dismissed. One of the prostitutes, for example, was able to draw a map of Toulouse's Palais de Justice, correctly identifying, according to her attorney, the office of the assistant prosecutor where she says sex acts took place. "It would have been impossible" for her to know where that office was unless she had been there, said the attorney, Georges Catala, in an interview here this week. He said his client also described a tattoo on the assistant prosecutor's shoulder.

So far, the assistant prosecutor is not talking and the police have not yet attempted to confirm whether such a tattoo exists. His lawyer, de Caunes, insisted in a separate interview that the prostitutes are not credible because they have clear reasons to tell their tale and that Alegre's allegations are the product of a diseased mind. The two prostitutes also claim that a local transvestite, Claude Martinez, participated in the orgies and secretly videotaped them. When he attempted to blackmail the assistant prosecutor and the former mayor, they say, the officials ordered Alegre to kill him.

Martinez was found stabbed to death at his home in 1992 and Alegre now admits to the murder. He has repeated the prostitutes' allegations that it was done on the order of the assistant prosecutor and the former mayor.

None of this would have been entertained as possibly true were it not for a troubling history of police ineptitude - or corruption - that has lent some credence to the theory that Alegre was protected by powerful people.

Alegre is the son of a policeman and worked for a time in a police cafeteria. His father's intervention kept him out of jail for at least one theft. Four murders now attributed to Alegre had initially been classified as suicides, even though there was obvious evidence of foul play in some of the cases.

Baudis, the former mayor, was once a nationally known television personality and is Toulouse's most famous son. He was elected mayor when his father retired from the job in 1983, and he gave up the job in 2001. He was later named head of the country's media watchdog organization in Paris.

It seems incredible that a man of such prominence, and so instantly recognizable by the city's residents, would risk indulging in bizarre group sex with the lower rungs of Toulouse society. But if Baudis's defense appears forced, Alegre's allegations, let alone those of the two women, seem fabricated.

Alegre had initially denied the allegations of the prostitutes and only changed his story after being confronted with their account several times.

One of the prostitutes has now been arrested for arranging false testimony from an associate. The other says a rogue police officer coached her on parts of her story and threatened to kill her if she did not obey.

[gcruse]

I'm waiting for the poster who will say, "Something is fishy here. I don't think they are telling the whole story."

LOL

[ZOOKER]

This explains why the Frogs like Clinton so much.

Still working on the Jerry Lewis connection, though...

[HISSKGB]

I often wondered what it would take in the realm of deviancy to upset those who rule France today.

Monsieur Baudis is in big trouble. Either the charges against him are true or he is right by saying his efforts to ban children's exposure to pornography on TV has resulted in a jihad against him by the porno industry.

[DPB101]

Somebody is throwing up a lot of confetti. Difficult to know what is true. Either/Or, as you say, is about all there is to make of it from this article.

[BlackVeil]

You mean the "affair Dutroux", in Belgium. It is still being covered up. They have not yet tried him - finally began a trial a few months ago, but slowly, still at the preliminary hearings stage.

I shall try to chase up some links on that.

[DPB101]

Except for the Muslims. They are, I understand, very devout.

[DPB101]

When the French fined Brigitte Bardot and threatened her for jail time for noticing Catholic churches are empty and Mosques are going up on every street corner, one can surmise France is just about done.