YESTERDAY'S FACT – 40 years ago, Le Figaro looked back on the arrest of the three young criminals whose story will inspire the book and the film The Bait.
“The murderers of lawyer Gérard Le Laidier and clothing designer Laurent Zarade, murdered in their apartments in the seventeenth arrondissement of Paris, were arrested Thursday evening by the criminal brigade”reports Le Figaro in its edition of Saturday December 22, 1984. It is the end of a mystery and the beginning of the media coverage of a dark affair immortalized a few years later in the book The Bait by Morgan Sportès adapted for the cinema by Bertrand Tavernier, with Marie Gillain in the title role.
An «infernal trio»
The news item in fact brings together all the elements that strike the imagination. The two heinous crimes are the work of a «trio infernal» : Laurent Hattab, 19 years old, spoiled son of a sweatshirt merchant, Jean-Rémi Sarraud, 21 years old, former apprentice pastry chef and above all Valérie Subra, 18 and a half years old, saleswoman in a boutique in Le Sentier, whose pretty face will appear on the front page of the newspapers. They were arrested while planning further murders.
Le Figaro
Their two victims, tied up, had been tortured, violently beaten and stabbed before being finished off, one on December 7, the other on the 16th. And this for a pittance: a wad of notes, lighters Cartier, Dupont pens, a watch or a ring.
Martyred victims
Why such an outbreak of violence among three young people who dreamed of the good life in America? Valérie, a pretty girl who had barely reached the age of majority, served as bait, flirting with gentlemen with deep pockets in the capital's bars and encouraging them to invite her to their homes. Her two accomplices then intervened while she took refuge in front of a film in another room, unable to ignore the sound of the blows and the groans of the martyred victims. Laurent Hattab, the gambler daddy's boy who drove an Alfa Romeo, was the leader, Jean-Rémi Sarraud, a modest young boy, the executioner of the dirty deeds.
A dissonant mixture of ingenuity and cruelty that the trial in 1988 will attempt to unravel while refusing to distinguish the role of each of the three “diabolical”.
Le Figaro
“Associated in horror, they must be associated in punishment”will also thunder the Advocate General. Accomplices or killers, all three will be sentenced to life imprisonment with a security sentence of eighteen years for the two young men and sixteen years for Valérie Subra.
