Death of Enéa in Dax: the worrying profile of her mother, accused of having poisoned her for years

He’s talking about a little girl “mischievous, full of life, naughty”. Yannick Reverdy’s last memories of happiness with his daughter Enéa date back to his childhood. His ties with her and his little sister were broken at the time of his divorce from his ex-wife Maylis Daubon. An event which set off a nightmarish cycle, leading to the death of his eldest daughter. “She was a great chick who was smashed, and I can’t digest that. We could have saved her many times, and we didn’t.” he testifies in the video above, replay of the investigation into this affair broadcast this Sunday in “Sept à Huit”.

On November 13, 2019, Enéa, just 18 years old, suffered convulsions while she was at her mother’s home. She was then hospitalized at Dax University Hospital, where she died five days later. Experts reveal that she ingested the equivalent of 50 tablets of propanolol, a beta blocker which, in high doses, can cause a heart attack. Her mother explained to the police that her daughter was depressed, but no medication packet was found at her home, nor any goodbye note, and Enéa’s phone had disappeared.

The police suspect Maylis of having concealed it and discover searches made six months earlier on beta-blocker overdoses on her phone. The police then retrace the mother’s journey. An investigation which paints the portrait of a charismatic woman, but also a storyteller.

“I’ve investigated it, but I’ve never seen that”

Yannick Reverdy met her at the end of the 1990s. A professional handball player, he decided to leave her after a few months of living together to go play in a club abroad. But Maylis then claims to be the victim of a heart attack. A “first alert a bit strange”, followed by the unexplained fire in their apartment. “I stand firm, I say that I am still going to go to Germany and resume my career, and she tells me that she is pregnant. I still have the feeling of having been obliged”, he confides.

Enéa was born in 2001, followed two years later by a little sister. The family moved as Yannick’s career progressed before returning to France in 2009. The athlete announced that he wanted a divorce and left the family home. Maylis then disappears with her two daughters. When Yannick arrives at the police station, he learns that she filed a complaint against him for violence, but that the medical examiner overturned what was indicated on her medical certificate.

For Yannick, she will then “trying to oust me from my children’s lives”. The family court judge grants the father visiting rights for two afternoons per week and orders a social investigation. An investigator describes the two children as “mama’s little soldiers”and notices psychological and physical disorders in Enéa: “She had holes in her hair, she tore it out, she threw fits, she said to her sister ‘I’m going to kill you, I have to stop, mom is going to kill herself’, it was extremely deadly, that’s what it was , I investigated it, but I had never seen that, never, and above all, I repeat, she was 8 years old.”

A tendency towards manipulation

The investigator recommends that the girls be able to see their father more and makes a concerning report to the children’s judge. From that moment on, Maylis was under permanent surveillance by the courts, and warnings about her harm to her children multiplied. A psychiatrist noted in 2014 a tendency towards manipulation and theatricalism. “The breakup was inconceivable for her, it caused a real narcissistic injury to her, in terms of her self-image, and the only way to restore her image was to demonstrate that she was a victim of her ex-partner The bad object is the father, the good one is her, so she shows that she takes care of her daughters, she believes that they are sick because of the father and that she has them treated. “, he explains.

After him, it was a child welfare psychologist who put forward a complementary hypothesis, a year before Enéa’s death: her mother could be suffering from Münchhausen syndrome by proxy. It is a disorder that manifests itself by “very serious mistreatment, very often by a parent, very often the mother, who deceives doctors, inducing health problems either by inventing them, or sometimes also by falsifying medical data” in order to “the mother complains about those around her”, specifies the specialist in a document.

In fact, the young girl consulted around thirty doctors with her mother in the two years preceding her death. They prescribed anxiolytics, neuroleptics and psychotropic drugs for depression and propranolol for migraines. The high school student is also gradually dropping out of school, without her absences being justified, and parents of students assure that Maylis also announced to them the imminent death of her daughter. “At the end, she had an extremely scarred head, bleeding from her nose and eyes, it was absolutely terrible, this young girl was in total pain.“, remembers the principal of his high school, who made a report to the courts.

“When the object of submission escapes us, anything can happen”

After Enéa’s death, Maylis assured in police custody that she had not administered anything to her daughter, explaining that she was “the apple of his eye”. His second daughter also defends him, even when the police reveal to her that they also found traces of propanolol in her blood tests. Maylis was indicted for poisoning and imprisoned in January 2022.

For Yannick’s lawyer, the act could be explained by the disorder she is suffering from. “The Münchhausen syndrome by proxy works from the moment when the child who is under the influence has no desire to leave, but those close to Enéa say that she perhaps had plans to leave the house , it is very consistent with this syndrome (…), from the moment we have the impression that the object of submission escapes us, the worst can happen”, he says.

Maylis’ lawyer recalls for his part that the syndrome remained only a hypothesis during the expertise carried out. He also claims that she was not present at the family home for a large part of the morning during which Maylis had convulsions, that she had “heavy, serious psychological problems”, and that psychiatric hospitalization had been considered, but that Enéa was not in favor of it.

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But the mother brought a new indication of the hatred she has for her ex-spouse. At the Pau remand center, several of her fellow inmates reported that she had asked them for help to eliminate her and make her body disappear. “I have always said it, she is capable of anything, there is no limit, (…) we can say that it is endless and chilling”, deplores Yannick. The Mont-de-Marsan public prosecutor’s office has requested the referral of Maylis Daubon to court, she must be judged in 2025.