A suitor stabbed, strangled, robbed and put away in a closet: Camille Anguenot, 20, was sentenced Friday to 30 years of criminal imprisonment by the Haute-Saône Assize Court for the murder of Théo Decouchant in 2021.
The accused, dressed all in white, collapsed in tears when she was told she had been sentenced to 30 years in prison for “voluntary homicide, theft and fraud” by the Haute-Saône Assize Court, which did not find that her judgment was impaired at the time of the events.
“Camille Anguenot’s version is only Camille Anguenot’s version and it is unverifiable. It is that of a person who needed money and a car, and who thought that Théo Decouchant would make a good ‘pigeon’,” said attorney general Arnaud Grécourt, before requesting a sentence of 25 years in prison.
“Théo Découchant is helpful, he is kind, but he does not want to be fooled. Did he refuse? Did they argue? Although she denies having killed Théo Découchant to get his money and his car, it is clear that she is going to use them the very next day,” he added.
The accused’s lawyer, Catherine Bresson, on the other hand, firmly denies this nefarious motive. According to a psychiatric expert, her client, who was only 18 at the time, “acted radically in the face of a narcissistic injury,” she recalls.
“We cannot reduce Camille Anguenot to this seductive, manipulative and perverse woman. We must go beyond appearances,” argued Mr. Bresson, referring to the difficult childhood of the accused, “a young girl who saw her father hit her mother and try to strangle her.”
– “Verbal insistence” –
Camille Anguenot met Théo Decouchant at a nightclub in November 2021. On November 29, she invited this shy and introverted 23-year-old boy to spend the evening at her place in Oiselay-et-Grachaux, a small town in Haute-Saône, between Vesoul and Besançon.
According to the accused, they fell asleep in the same bed, but she was woken up during the night by the caresses of the young man, whom she pushed away and who was insistent.
She then punches him several times in the face, before grabbing a kitchen knife and stabbing him in the stomach. She then goes to get a cord from her room before returning to Théo, who is lying on the ground, and killing him by strangling him.
“These caresses do not correspond to the personality of Théo Decouchant”, who “no one around him imagines as a sexual aggressor”, according to the attorney general. Camille Anguenot “was not attacked that evening and simple verbal insistence does not justify this act”, he added.
– “Best burial” –
In the following days, the young woman uses the victim’s car and bank card to lead her life as if nothing had happened. Even though she doesn’t have a driving license, she joins a new lover in Bordeaux, then an old one in Dijon.
She claims she wanted to run away, but a car accident puts an end to her escapade and she eventually returns home.
A week after the murder, alerted by the young man’s mother, the police came to his home and discovered the body of Théo Decouchant wrapped in garbage bags, closed with thick brown tape, hidden in a broom cupboard in the living room.
“A broom cupboard: even an animal deserves a better burial. That’s what a man is, for Camille Anguenot: a mummy in garbage bags,” denounced the lawyer for the victim’s family, Christophe Bernard, brandishing photos of Théo’s wrapped body in front of the jury.
Théo Decouchant was “a young man of his time”, professionally integrated, polite and well-educated, “he is like his family, respectful and friendly”, emphasizes Me Bernard.
But the life of this boy “in search of feelings, of relationships”, notes the council, was gone in “six minutes, the six minutes that Camille Anguenot took to take away his air, asphyxiate him and kill him”.
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