IThey look like grandfathers and they are. Gray tonsures for one and white for the other, who also suffers from hearing problems and receives hearing aids. Since October 7, Jean-Claude Lemaitre, a 66-year-old retired printer, and Michel Dumon, a 73-year-old former worker in a foundry, have been on trial before the Gironde Assize Court for a crime punishable by life imprisonment: assassination attempt committed on October 11, 2021 in Coutras, in Libourne. That day, in the early morning, Alain C., in his fifties, went to work by bike. It cuts through the countryside, along the Chemin des Petits Champs. A car follows him, an explosion rings out, the cyclist collapses. He was just shot in the back.
The vehicle does not stop. Luckily, another motorist passed the area a few minutes later, and raised the alarm when he discovered the man on the ground. Hit by a shower of pellets measuring 4 mm in diameter – ammunition that can be used for deer hunting – he was seriously injured and underwent emergency surgery. Three years later, as a civil party, he still suffers from significant after-effects.
Obsession et manipulation
Jean-Claude Lemaitre and Michel Dumon quickly appeared on the list of suspects. The first knows the victim, who frequents the same pétanque club, in Saint-Seurin-sur-l’Isle, and has had a fierce hatred for him since an ex-partner, 26 years his junior, also a bowler and with whom he lived a story of a few months, left him for him. The second, a former cousin by marriage of Lemaitre, has no connection with Alain C., but confesses immediately, after his arrest. It was he who shot the cyclist on the orders of Jean-Claude Lemaitre who was driving the car, which the latter confirmed during the investigation.
“He’s a child. You tell him: ‘Do that’, he does it.”
A position from which he does not seem to have changed: “I apologize and I ask forgiveness from Alain. I greatly regret what I did against him. He didn’t deserve that,” spontaneously declared the alleged sponsor, the only one to appear detained, on the first day of the trial.
The crime was planned for weeks. The victim was followed, his journeys and habits dissected. But how did these two retirees, apparently without history, arrive at such a project? Operating in an “obsessive mode”, according to an expert psychologist, Jean-Claude Lemaitre has not recovered from his breakup. He, whom those close to him describe as “never violent”, “sloppy”, “always in disarray”, ruminates and focuses his distress on Alain C., whom he “invests as being the one through whom his misfortune happened”, analyzes the psychologist.
He finds his armed wing in Michel Dumon, a hunter. How ? Through “pressure” and “manipulation”, the shooter will be supported during the judicial investigation. Jean-Claude Lemaitre would have played on a very sensitive chord at home, telling him and repeating, without it ever being confirmed, that Alain C. was “a pedophile”. However, more than twenty years ago, one of Michel Dumon’s daughters, now deceased, was raped by a man when she was a child. An event that traumatized his father. An “influenceable” personality, with “weak” intelligence, Michel Dumon “can easily believe what a person with a stronger character can tell him,” notes a psychiatrist expert. “He’s a child,” his wife testifies. You tell him: ”Do that”, he does it. » Verdict Wednesday October 9.
