The Guilty Party

For close to three-quarters of a century, hardbitten, weather-beaten Provenqal Peasant Gaston Dominici was virtually a law unto himself. Each year the world passed close to his farm along France's famed Route Napoleon, but the streams of tourists bound for the pleasure domes of the Riviera were as remote from him and his world as so many swallows in the sky. Dirt-poor as all his neighbors, Gaston lived like them close to the soil and the wind and the rain, a hard, dour patriarch who ruled his little family with an iron hand and neither asked nor granted favors. His justice, like his life, was simple, ruthless, but at least straightforward.

Then, in August 1952, three camping Britons--famed Food Expert Sir Jack Drummond. his wife and his ten-year-old daughter Elizabeth--were found brutally slain on the Dominici farm. The murder became a cause celebre (TIME, Aug. 18, 1952). Biochemist Sir Jack was renowned for his part in setting the nutritional minimums for Britain's wartime rations; the failure to find his killer was an international humiliation for the French police. After long and confused police investigations, Gaston Dominici was carted off to prison. Last week the mahogany-faced old peasant, now 77, stood in the dock in a courtroom at Digne to answer the charge of murder.

The eyes of all France watched as Gaston, his weathered features paler after a year in jail, faced his tribunal of seven jurors and three judges. The courtroom was packed with a crowd of 400 eager spectators for the most publicized French trial since those of Petain and Laval in 1945. Banks of reporters from Paris and London came down to tell the story for their readers. A U.S. movie producer dropped by to measure the film possibilities of Gaston's case. Famed French Author Jean Giono was on hand to get material for a book. By comparison with Gaston's trial, said one enthusiastic French crime reporter, "the theaters of Paris are dull."

Just Listen. There was nothing in all of Gaston Dominici's life to prepare him for the intricacies of the judicial procedure in which he suddenly found himself. "I don't make fun of anybody," grumbled old Gaston to the judge as the trial's snarls of conflicting evidence began to unfold, "and I don't like anyone to make fun of me." "I'll do the talking, Dominici," the chief judge shouted back at him. "You just listen!" Diverting as it was, the trial did little to shed light on Dominici's guilt or innocence. Long before it was done, Goncourt Academy Playwright Armand Salacrou voiced one verdict. "I know," he said, "who is the really guilty party. It is French justice."

The case for the prosecution had been badly prepared, and witness after witness took the stand to confuse the issue fur ther. There were police officers to tell how Gaston's younger son had first accused his father of the killings, then retracted his accusations, then repeated them, then retracted them again. "The whole family are liars," complained the prosecutor. There was evidence of a detailed confession by Gaston himself followed by a retraction and the countercharge that he had been drugged into confessing after 23 hours of interrogation. There was another witness, a traveling salesman, who spent his entire time on the stand explaining that the sounds he had heard that long-ago night on a lonely road were not quick, like "tac-tac-tac," but slow, like "tac" "tac" "tac." And there was Gaston's older son Clovis, who insisted that his father was guilty. But, he added, "he should be pitied. He's an old man who lived well all his life. He had just a moment of madness." "You're a coward! You're a pig!" screamed his 44-year-old sister Augusta. "You're dishonoring us all!"

Flanked by two stern-visaged gendarmes, old Gaston stared at his screaming children and chided: "You must simply tell the truth."

A Lot of Trials. What had been the motive for the murders? Robbery? Sex? Sheer perversity? No one could say, and everyone had a different theory. Most of the salient evidence had been trampled underfoot on a muddy road more than two years before. What was left had been talked to shreds in months of contradic tory testimony. On the eve of his summing up, the prosecuting attorney was struck with laryngitis and had to rush off to the hospital. The presiding judge himself threw up his hands. "I've seen a lot of trials in my day," he began--and could say no more.

"Whatever the verdict, it will be a miscarriage of justice," said one prominent French attorney who attended the trial as an observer. "There is every indication that Dominici is involved, but that he could not have committed the murders alone." Nevertheless, early this week the jury reached its conclusion: guilty. The old peasant was sentenced to die on the guillotine, though the sentence would probably be commuted to life imprisonment. "My sons--what swine!" snarled the old man as he was led away.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.