At the end of three days of trial and less than two hours of deliberation, this Friday, May 24, 2024, the Pyrénées-Orientales Assize Court found Laetitia Lemaitre, 62, guilty of the murder of her companion on September 8, 2021 in Boulou . The jurors handed down a sentence of 28 years of criminal imprisonment against him, three years more than that required by the prosecution. In addition to a ban on carrying a weapon for 15 years and a sentence of ineligibility for 10 years.
What is the truth about this 62-year-old woman who seems to be floating in the dock of the criminal court? Behind her eyelids weighed down by medication, does she see again those few terrible minutes of September 8, 2021 that only she knows? Three days of hearings were not enough to unravel the mystery. Nor to understand why Laetitia Lemaitre, after having pushed him from the top of the stairs, leaned like the grim reaper over her companion and pierced his body and heart 24 times with the long blade of a knife. Even though he was unconscious.
“A scene worthy of a horror film”, “a massacre”, of “rage”, of “cruelty” and of “fury”, are indignant Mare Jean-Sébastien de Casalta and Nicolas Milanini. On behalf of the victim’s relatives who traveled in large numbers from Corsica and Bouches-du-Rhône to Perpignan to carry their pain and the memory of Tayeb Tahar. “It’s the business of a lady who plays with the truth”, add the lawyers. “She is lying. Tayeb was under her influence. Fascinated by this beautiful woman, he lost himself in this relationship. That evening, she wanted to kill her companion and she wanted him not to escape. Determined, calculating , implacable. But for what pathetic and unreasonable reason did Madame Lemaitre choose to fall into criminal dizziness? We will never know.
On the real mobile of “this act senseless in its savagery and ferocity”, Advocate General Jean-Claude Miquel will not be able to say anything more. “Is she a battered woman? No, she is not the new Jacqueline Sauvage, as she wrote to Brigitte Macron. There are no traces of daily physical or moral violence in this case. Laetitia Lemaitre is simply a woman above ground that we never leave”, he summarizes. Requesting 25 years of criminal imprisonment, retaining as sole mitigating circumstance that “stolen and dented childhood” of the accused.
This painful past, this story, which, precisely, could explain many things according to Me Caroline Anegas, Laetitia Lemaitre’s lawyer. “They were both fragile. And they didn’t know how to live together other than in unhappiness. The only link between them was the consumption of alcohol. With the impossibility of separating. It couldn’t end well “.
“In my family, I had already taken 20 years”
For Laetitia, “dependent on one’s discomfort”, “staying alone is impossible because if one is alone it is because one does not exist“, concedes the lawyer. “So she will cling to this love story. And she let herself be overwhelmed by the anger that she had accumulated during all these years of suffering.” Overtaken by acts so shocking that “perhaps her unconscious does not want to remember it.” “Believe it, she will always remain locked in the dungeons of her unconscious”, ends Me Anegas“She has regrets. She said it as soon as she was in police custody: ‘I will never forgive myself for it’. But this judicial truth that everyone is looking for will consist today of accepting that there are things we will never know.”
So, Laetitia Lemaitre gets up in the box and offers her condolences to Tayeb’s family. “I didn’t want it to end like this,” she told them. “In my cell, I have the impression that I find myself in my parents’ room. Because in my family, I had already spent 20 years, sequestered, at home. I wonder if I would know happiness once day? No, I know that will never happen. We will have to deal with the last words of this inscrutable woman. Who goes back to prison for 28 years… with his secrets.
