An investigator leading the probe into a French man accused of orchestrating multiple rapes of his wife told a court Wednesday of painstaking efforts to identify the perpetrators via the husband's detailed records of the assaults.
Dominique P., a 71-year-old retiree, had abused his wife between 2011 and 2020, drugging her with sleeping pills and then recruiting dozens of strangers to rape her.
He documented the decade-long abuse of his wife, Gisele P., with meticulous precision, allowing French police to track down more than 50 men suspected of raping her while she was drugged.
On the third day of the trial in the southern city of Avignon, the commissioner in charge of the inquiry said investigators sifted through numerous telephone bills, pictures and videos and used facial recognition software to identify the suspects, all of them men.
"I chose to put together a very tight team of four investigators," Jeremie Bosse Platiere, director of the Hautes-Alpes interdepartmental police force, told the court.
"And I chose people who had the stomach to face the images."
He said they had drawn up a list of 72 individuals suspected of abusing Gisele P., 72.
The investigators counted around 200 instances of rape, most of them by Dominique P. and over 90 by strangers enlisted through an adult website.
The assaults took place between July 2011 and October 2020, mainly in the couple's home in Mazan, a village of 6,000 people in the southern region of Provence.
Given the sheer number of suspects, police had to carry out arrests in five waves between late 2020 and September 2021.
Apart from the husband, only 50 suspects, aged between 26 and 74, have so far been identified and tracked down. Most of them face up to 20 years in jail for aggravated rape if convicted.
Eighteen of the 51 accused including Dominique P. are in custody, while 32 other defendants are attending the trial as free men.
The last one, still at large, will be judged in absentia.
Investigators initially identified 54 suspects, but one has since died and two others have been excluded for lack of evidence.
'Libertine practices'
Dominique P. was exposed by chance when he was caught filming up women's skirts in a local supermarket.
Many suspects have said they thought they were helping a libertine couple live out its fantasies. Not a single man tipped off the police.
"In libertine practices, it's very important to get the woman's consent," said the investigator.
Antoine Camus, a lawyer for the family, said the suspects insisted they were not raping the victim, but at the same did everything not to wake her up.
"In reality, you hear whispers," he said.
Gisele P. never appeared "conscious" in the videos, but sometimes the team heard her groan or snore, the investigator said.
"On no video does Madame P. appear conscious or make any gesture," Bosse Platiere said. He said that in her sleep she sometimes reacted to the men's movements including choking.
Dominique P. put together a dossier containing thousands of pictures and videos of the assaults, which were stored on a hard disk in a folder named "abuse."
The folder contained sub-folders for each man who came to rape his wife.
"A list was then drawn up for each individual according to the name of the file," said Bosse Platiere, adding that his team worked to identify men behind nicknames such as "Chris the fireman", "Quentin", "Gaston" and "David the Black".
'You like it rape style'
An initial list of 11 contacts recruited via Skype was identified on Microsoft's software, and the investigators asked the US giant to help track IP addresses.
The police have also scrutinised countless telephone exchanges and online conversations between the husband and his wife's potential attackers.
Several snippets of audio conversations were found.
"You are like me, you like it rape style," the husband told one man.
Bosse Platiere said the police worked to see if there was a link between the calls and instances of rape by looking at Dominique P.'s phone bills and the recovered images.
Dominique P. had also blocked numerous contacts on his phones, arousing the suspicion of the investigators.
"It's unusual," Bosse Platiere said, adding that it had taken them nearly two years to identify the men behind the phone numbers.
The team also used facial recognition software.
"This would enable us to identify a third of the perpetrators," he said.
The trial is due to hear from civil parties in the case on Thursday, including Gisele P. herself.
AFP