Ill Met by Moonlight

By René Weis

On a steamy August night in 1952, a British family settles down to sleep beside their car in a lay-by. Before daybreak all three of them, a father, a mother, and their ten-year-old daughter, have been brutally murdered.

In a remote corner of Provence two worlds collide under a full moon. The British family are pioneering scientists and cosmopolitan; the French family accused of the crime are farmers defined by their land and codes of conduct which struck outsiders as feral. The accused farmers closed ranks and lied repeatedly in the shadow of the guillotine and to save the family’s honour. An inspector calls. With extraordinary tenacity he tracks down the man dubbed ‘the monster of the farm of the damned’.

This is the true story of the most contested murder in France since the Second World War, the inspiration for films and tales of espionage, hit squads, wartime bullion treasure, and chemical weapons research. Doubts still linger locally in this part of France as to the final judicial outcome. Conspiracy theories about the reason for the murders are routinely aired, and some family members of the man finally convicted of the crime still claim his innocence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Sep 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781805146377

René Weis

René Weis is a freelance writer and academic from University College London. He has published books on history, biography, and a notorious miscarriage of justice. His books include The Yellow Cross (‘utterly absorbing’ – Daily Telegraph; ‘succeeds enthrallingly’ – The Times) and The Real Traviata (‘superbly readable and meticulously researched’ – Sunday Times).

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Contents

Foreword

Jack Cecil Drummond, known as J.C. to his friends, was the first holder of the chair of biochemistry at University College London (UCL) in Bloomsbury. Over forty years later I in turn started teaching at UCL. For nearly four decades I passed almost daily under the arch of UCL’s Medical Sciences and Anatomy building where Drummond had worked and taught. It was on UCL premises that he met his second wife Anne. It was here that together they wrote their classic study of nutrition in Britain, The Englishman’s Food. It was here too that he taught Guy Marrian, a pioneer researcher into oestrogen, and his future wife Phyllis. The Marrians and their daughters would become lifelong friends.

I had long known about the so-called ‘Affaire Dominici’ from my grandfather’s repeated references to it in the 1950s. Later in life, as my wife and I started renting holiday gîtes in far-flung corners of France, Gaston Dominici came to mind as a kind of childhood bogeyman: a nightmare caricature stalking strangers in rural cottages where doors did not always lock properly and where roving mountain men or hunters might pay a visit at night.

But in truth I knew nothing about the Drummond-Dominici affair other than that an old shepherd by the name of Dominici had murdered a British family called Drummond in the 1950s. I still had no idea where the murders had occurred but guessed that it was probably somewhere in Provence. Wasn’t that where most British people headed for their French holidays? The possibility that the victims might be connected to my own university had never occurred to me. Then, about ten years ago, we started spending more time exploring rural France and I found myself wanting to know more about the ‘Affaire Dominici’, one of France’s most notorious post-war crimes, with a string of books and television programmes in its wake. If in France almost everyone knows about the affair, in Britain it is virtually unknown. So I started reading up about the affair, and soon we were heading for Forcalquier, not far from Manosque and Aix-en-Provence, to visit the town’s famous cemetery. And there, to this day, Elizabeth, Anne, and Jack Drummond rest side-by-side.

While surfing the web for more information about the Drummonds, I found a vast database which ranges across politics, history, literature, education, grammar, orthography and, intriguingly, also this 1952 crime and its aftermath. Even though a relatively small portion of the site deals with the Dominici affair, it still runs to well over one thousand pages. After a couple of hours on the site I was engrossed. Its relentless intellectual acuity renders it an essential resource for all serious students of the case. It is the brainchild of Samuel Huet whose bracing prose and fearsome erudition let nothing pass.

In addition to a range of reviews and essays on the affair, one of M. Huet’s guest contributors was called ‘ComDiv’. I wondered about this: why not give his name? It seemed important to know who this individual was because his long analytical essay on the case, like Samuel Huet’s writings, was singularly incisive and alert: not just a commonsense approach to the multiple contradictions that are a hallmark of the Dominici affair, but a brilliant interpretation of evidence. Someone clearly with an expert grasp of forensics and a deep knowledge of the minutiae of countless testimonies bearing on the tragedy. I now know him as Jean-Louis Vincent, a former divisional commander (hence ‘ComDiv’) in the French police force turned into one of France’s most respected investigative writers on crime. Today Jean-Louis Vincent and Samuel Huet speak with unrivalled authority on the ‘crime de Lurs’, cutting through the conspiracy theories and downright untruths which still plague this tragic story.

We will never know exactly what happened on that awful night of 4–5 August 1952 because the Dominici family have never told the whole truth and never will. This book takes a fresh approach to the analyses of the stream of lies and obfuscations of the Dominicis by using them as pointers to the truth. I hope it will help to counter the self-serving nonsense that continues to bedevil the case. Jack, Anne, and Elizabeth Drummond deserve to have their brutal murders properly acknowledged and understood and to rest in peace.

I am grateful to Gérard de Meester, our twice-host at Grand’Terre, the former home of the Dominicis; to Michel Olléon, for letting me rent his lovely apartment in the Seminaire in Lurs on several occasions; to the staff at the archives in Digne, who were welcoming, efficient, and ever ready to advise and help; to the mairies of Forcalquier, Lurs, and Peyruis, for talking to a stranger and for their interest in the Drummonds. I want to thank Christopher Thiéry for sharing his memories of Anne Drummond first, and then of her and ‘J.C.’ together on one of their earlier visits to the Riviera. Tony Horton and Ian Naylor, both of the Nuthall History Society, were most helpful. Nicholas Burgoyne responded with great generosity when I contacted him about his tragic cousin Elizabeth Drummond. It was kind of Valerie Marrian to allow me to be in touch over this tale ‘of old sorrow, written in tears and blood’, to quote Eugene O’Neill from his tragic play Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a title that would also serve for this book. Samuel Huet, Jean-Louis Vincent, Alain d’Orso, and Jean-Claude Marie proved to be the most welcoming and instructive of friends. They know how much I owe to them. It is a pleasure once again to thank UCL, Jack Drummond’s university and mine, for helping to fund my various stays in the archives in Digne and in Lurs.

My greatest debt of all is acknowledged in the dedication.

List of Illustrations

Illustrations

(Images are © René Weis unless otherwise indicated)

1.Jack and Anne Drummond in early days. © Nuthall L. H. S.

2.Elizabeth, Jack, and Anne Drummond in c. 1944. © Nuthall L. H. S.

3.Jack Drummond (right) in ceremonial robes. © Nuthall L. H. S.

4.Elizabeth, Jack, and Anne Drummond (at Royal Ascot?), c. 1948. @ Nick Burgoyne.

5.Anne Drummond in the drawing room of Spencer House, c. 1950. © Nuthall L. H. S.

6.Jack Drummond (left) and his wife Anne (right), with members of the Morley family. © Nuthall L. H. S.

7.The Drummond family in 1952. © Nuthall L. H. S.

8.Elizabeth Drummond on Frisky, spring 1952. © Nuthall L. H. S.

9.The Drummond-Marrian cottage at Vallon de la Murta (Villefranche-sur-Mer) is on the left.

10.The former Grand Hotel in Digne and its café La Taverne.

11.The Boulevard Gassendi, Digne, during the Fête de la Lavande, with La Taverne.

12.Looking towards the beach from Villefranche-sur-Mer.

13.La Trinquette in Villefranche-sur-Mer.

14.View of the Durance from Lurs, looking south.

15.The main street of Peyruis. Sébeille and colleagues lodged in flagged building.

16.Father Lorenzi’s abbey in Ganagobie.

17.Looking towards Grand’Terre from the lay-by today.

18.Grand’Terre seen from the bridge today, with the alfalfa and apricot trees long gone.

19.View of Lurs today.

20.Looking north towards Peyruis from the bridge, with the site of the landslide marked by arrow.

21.Contemporary panoramic view of the Durance valley, looking north towards Peyruis: 1 = Grand’Terre; 2 = hangar with Rock-Ola carbine; 3 = the Drummonds’ lay-by; 4 = the Morins’ camp; 5 = escarpment where Elizabeth Drummond died.

22.Chip left by the bullet that missed Elizabeth Drummond.

23.The bridge, looking towards the Nationale from the Durance end.

24.The spot on the embankment where Elizabeth was found.

25.The Café des Alpes, the HQ of the Marseilles investigators.

26.Elizabeth Drummond between her mother and father.

Timeline

5 August 1952: Murder of the Drummond Family

August 1952–November 1954: MARSEILLES investigation

November 1953: Confessions

November 1954: Trial and verdict in Digne

December 1954–end of 1955: PARIS investigation

People

The Farmers

Gaston Dominici (father): the patriarch of Grand’Terre

Marie Dominici: wife of Gaston, nicknamed ‘Sardine’

Gustave Dominici (son): owner of the farm

Clovis Dominici (son): first-born son of Gaston and chief accuser

Yvette Dominici (née Barth): wife of Gustave

Roger Perrin (‘Zézé’): grandson of Gaston

The English

Jack Cecil Drummond (father): nutritionist and professor of biochemistry

Anne Drummond (mother): nutritionist and author

Elizabeth Drummond (daughter)

The Marseilles Investigation (1952)

Roger Périès (‘juge d’instruction’ / Examining Magistrate)

Émile Barras (‘greffier’ / clerk of the court)

Edmond Sébeille (commissaire, 9e brigade mobile, Marseilles)

Fernand Constant (commissaire principal, 9e brigade mobile, Marseilles)

Capitaine Henri Albert (commandant, brigade gendarmerie, Forcalquier)

The Trial 1954

Marcel Bousquet (president)

Louis Sabatier (procureur / prosecutor)

Calixte Rozan (avocat général)

Claude Delorme (partie civile)

Émile Pollak (lead defender)

Pierre Charrier (defender)

Léon Charles-Alfred (defender)

The Paris Investigation (1954–55)

Pierre Carrias (‘juge d’instruction’ / Examining Magistrate)

Charles Chenevier (commissaire divisionnaire, Sûreté Nationale, Paris)

Charles Gillard (commissaire principal, Sûreté Nationale, Paris)

The Doctors

Dr. Dragon (General Practictioner)

Dr. Paul Nalin (General Practictioner)

Dr. Pierre Nalin (pathologist, father of Paul Nalin)

Dr. Robert Girard (pathologist)

Prologue

Three graves in Provence

Since Thursday 7 August 1952 a little English girl called Elizabeth Drummond has lain in the cemetery of Forcalquier, a hilltop town in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. On either side of her rest her mother and father.

For over 70 years the people of Forcalquier have tended the graves of the British family. Every year visitors, mostly from Britain and France, pass through the town’s Office du Tourisme and ask after ‘la tombe des Anglais’: where is it, and are the murdered ‘English’ really buried in the town’s cemetery? For several years now it has been whispered locally that the remains of the family were repatriated to Britain under cover of night. Who after all would leave their loved ones in a far-flung cemetery in Provence, close moreover to the spot where they were assassinated? Unless there were murky reasons for doing so, that the English were not what they seemed, that they had been sent on a cloak-and-dagger mission by their government. Time and again the town hall and tourist office assure visitors that the English were never secretly moved from Forcalquier, that no-one has come to claim them since 1952, and certainly not the British government.

Uncertain, the tourists eventually head north from the central square to the shaded Avenue Fontauris. At the end of it, in full view of the snow-capped Alps, spreads out a cathedral of yews sculpted into stupendous labyrinthine arches. It is the town’s cemetery. A steep granite staircase descends to its central avenue. Some fifty yards to the left of this evergreen topiary path stretches a plot the size of a tennis court. At its western edge three sober wooden crosses mark three graves. The central one, using the French spelling of her name, today reads ‘Drummond Elisabeth 22­­ mars 1942–5 août 1952’. The grave is covered with a marble slab, while those of her parents’ are decked in Provençal scree and stone. Into the marble, underneath their names, are stencilled the words describing Saul and Jonathan from the second book of Samuel:

JACK DRUMMOND ANNE HIS WIFE

AND

ELIZABETH THEIR DAUGHTER

5th August 1952

THEY WERE LOVELY AND PLEASANT

IN THEIR LIVES

AND IN THEIR DEATH

THEY WERE NOT DIVIDED¹

On the day of the funeral all shops closed as the town crier of Forcalquier summoned local people to join the tragic cortège that had started to form at the morgue of the Hôpital Civil of Forcalquier. Throughout the town Tricolores and Union Flags, draped in black crêpe, flowed side-by-side when the bells tolled for the funerals. Little girls from Forcalquier and the surrounding villages were invited to dress in white, as a mark of respect for Elizabeth Drummond’s innocence. They processed in silence alongside her horse-drawn hearse, with her father’s in front and her mother’s following. The world’s media had descended on Forcalquier that day to cover the sombre procession. It was late in the afternoon of 7 August 1952 when it set out on its mile-long journey to the cemetery.

Immediately behind Anne Drummond’s hearse walked a further column of little girls and young women, five-deep; they too wore white and carried wreaths. Then came the ranks of mourners, led by an Anglican pastor and Jack Drummond’s godson. They were followed by two women, a mother and a daughter, behind whom walked her sister and her father. The four were members of the Marrian family, all in black and white mourning, with the mother wearing a British Armed Services beret. They were intimate friends of the victims. Behind this quartet walked the British consul from Marseilles, the mayor of Forcalquier, and other officials and colleagues of Jack Drummond. By the time the hearses reached the cemetery such was the crush of people that the whole town and surrounding region seemed to have emptied to pay their last respects to the murdered family.

At the graveside, facing the three coffins, the Protestant pastor, René Mordant of Digne, conducted a brief funeral service while a choir of Swiss schoolchildren, holidaying in Nice, sang the stirring popular hymn ‘Lord of all hopefulness’. The hymn ends with ‘Lord of all gentleness, Lord of all calm, / Whose voice is contentment, whose presence is balm, / Be there at our sleeping, and give us, we pray, / Your peace in our hearts, Lord, / At the end of the day.’

After the pastor’s address the mayor of Forcalquier, Léon Espariat, stepped forward. He spoke from the heart. The Drummond family had loved France deeply, he remarked, and now Elizabeth, Anne, and Jack would

forever sleep in this earth of Forcalquier and France as if they were our people. We will look after them and love them as we do our own. The Drummond family will for all time be a symbol of the profound bond between our two nations.

These ties, he continued, had been forged in the hard years of the Second World War when Britain and all freedom-loving people in France had stood shoulder-to-shoulder. Elizabeth, Jack, and Anne Drummond had now, he said, tragically joined the thousands of their countrymen in French soil who had given their lives for a better world. At these words many of his audience started to cry. It all seemed so terrible, that an innocent family of holidaymakers from Britain should have been murdered in the country of their hosts.

This was no ordinary family. By the time the mayor spoke it was widely known that the murdered father was a famous British scientist. Not only had he been knighted, but he had known the British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill whose government he had closely advised throughout the war. Jack Drummond and his wife Anne had been leading nutritionists whose task it was to keep Britain fed during the Axis blockade. He had overseen the country’s food production and diet, in the process making Britain a healthier nation with reforms that are still in place today, including the promotion of brown bread as healthier than white. His duties stretched beyond Britain when, towards the end of the war, during the Dutch hunger winter, he negotiated free passage for food convoys with the occupying forces in Holland. But perhaps his greatest humanitarian achievement was the ‘Drummond mixture’, a cocktail of liquid food that was used to feed the prisoners of Belsen and other camps who desperately needed food but were too starved to digest it. Jack Drummond may have saved literally thousands of lives at the end of the war. Drummond’s friend Paul Holt – together they drank beer and enjoyed fish and chips – wrote:

In the last year of the war he produced his great invention – a mixture of predigested proteins, glucose and vitamins. This came in liquid form and was intended for injection into the veins of the millions of starving Dutch we knew we had to save as war’s end came. This concentrate was flown also to the liberated concentration camps, and I myself saw what happened at Belsen. Within a week of the application of the fluid – we called it F-for-Famine – the death rate had begun to drop below the hundred mark and the victims still alive began to eat again.²

After the mayor the Acting British Consul-General, C. E. Bateman, based in Marseilles, spoke briefly to say ‘England will never forget the depth of feeling with which the people of this corner of France paid homage to three of her children’. A little girl then placed a bunch of flowers on Elizabeth’s coffin. It read ‘from Catherine Lejeune, une petite Française, 5 ans, un souvenir’. Then one by one, the pastor, Sir Jack’s godson, the Marrian family, friends, and colleagues of the victims scattered earth on the coffins.

As the Drummond family were lowered into their graves, the bells of Forcalquier tolled to salute them one last time. Looking on, captured in pictures that would be printed all over the world the following morning, united in sorrow and human solidarity, stood the British consul, Jackie (Jacqueline) and Valerie Marrian, and their parents Phyllis and Guy, both distinguished scientists. The tall man next to them was the barrister J. M. (John Michael) Austin-Smith, Jack Drummond’s godson. He was 34 at the time. To the left of him stood the Protestant pastor. The three women were struggling to control their emotions in this dreadful scene. There is as much dignity as grief in the still and moving images of the funeral.

It is not known who took the decision that the bodies should stay in France, why Elizabeth should rest between her parents, or how the inscription should read. That Elizabeth’s should be the central grave seems entirely fitting: she was a child and hers was the most cruel of these senseless murders. It is likely that Jack Drummond’s godson and chief mourner ruled on all these, even though a few close blood relations of the family were alive at the time of the tragedy, notably Elizabeth’s maternal grandmother to whom she was close. But her grandmother suffered a seizure on hearing the news of the tragedy in her London home, while Anne Drummond’s elder sister Edith had moved to Canada and could not return in time for the funeral. The British consul may have advised on the inscription and Jack’s latest employer, Boots-the-Chemist in Nottingham, was on hand to help too, as were representatives from Jack Drummond’s club, the Savage Club, who also attended the funeral.

At the graveside the Vice-Prefect of the region, Pierre Degrave, assured journalists from the British newspapers that the English graves would never be forgotten or neglected. For seven decades now they have kept faith with the Drummonds. When the mayor of Forcalquier linked the Drummonds’ deaths to the thousands of British troops buried in France, he touched a nerve with the huge crowd in the cemetery. Britain had moreover aided and abetted the local maquis of Provence by dropping guns and ammunitions and, perhaps, agents to liaise with London. Much of this would have been fresh in the minds of the people at the August 1952 funeral in Forcalquier, and some may even then have wondered whether there might not be a connection between these murders and the war. The memory of the war, the abundance of guns on the ground, and the violent excesses of the war’s aftermath are among the reasons, though not the main one, why the investigators soon hit what they came to call ‘a wall of silence’.

The Second World War lay barely seven years in the past from this hot August afternoon in the cemetery of Forcalquier. The war had raged throughout this region with singular ferocity. It included the summary execution of resistance fighters in the town a few days before the liberation, followed in turn by the savage bloodletting against collaborators during the liberation itself.

This was the context of the 1952 murders on the Durance. The people of Peyruis down on the Durance where the killings had occurred knew all about fear and about how lawless a lynch mob could be. In living memory all over France collaborators had been summarily shot, while women who had consorted with the occupier were publicly shorn, then marched through the streets or grouped together on tumbrils and paraded through the towns, with swastikas stencilled or painted on their foreheads. ‘Les tondues’ became a symbol of a betrayed and humiliated nation’s revenge which exacted a death toll multiple times worse than that inflicted by the occupiers. The images of two shorn women paraded naked through the streets of Bordeaux before being shot and dumped into the Garonne shocked a world already reeling from a surfeit of violence and distress.

In Peyruis a woman by the name of Orgias was picked up by one of the marauding militias immediately after the liberation. She was a minor functionary at the mairie and had denounced local Jews and her husband to her lover, a German commander called Altmeyer. She was shorn and dragged naked through the streets of Peyruis, an unimaginable thought in the present serene, off-the-beaten-track small town. She was subsequently taken to Digne to the same prison that seven years later would receive one Gustave Dominici and then, a year after, his father, accused of the Drummond murders. She was tried and sentenced to death but appealed the sentence. One day, between sentence and appeal, the F.F.I. (‘Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur’) stormed into the prison, dragged her and another person accused of collaboration out of it, marched them through Digne, then shot them and threw them into the Bléone river.

The F.F.I. justified the lynching of the collaborators in Digne by referring to the presumed attack (an explosion that may have been an accident) on their members in the Vaucluse town of Pertuis: ‘The painful incidents at Pertuis, like the collaborationist dragging of the Cour de Cassation [the Court of Appeal]… are the cause of the intense emotion that has swept through the Resistance and explains reactions like the F.F.I’s. In the interest of the Resistance, of the French Republic, the cleansing must be carried through and must be total (‘l’épuration soit faite et entièrement’).’ The last sentence of this, to justify the murders with the concept of ‘total cleansing’, for the sake of the Resistance and the Republic (in that order), sounds a cruelly ironic note. The war of the preceding four years had been fought, partly at least, to cleanse forever from the minds of people notions of ‘épuration’.

The vengeful killings of Digne were one of many acts of terror that cast a long dark shadow of lawlessness over the region and its post-war culture and left people with a deep sense of unease about the kind of protection afforded by the law. It is worth remembering that the admired Provence writer Jean Giono from Manosque was also in the sights of the Resistance for perceived acts of collaboration. Under the circumstances Giono got off lightly, or perhaps he was just luckier than the two prisoners from Digne. By the time of the murders of the Drummond family in Lurs Giono was fully rehabilitated. Indeed he sat in on the eventual trial as a privileged observer, even earning himself an honourable mention by the chief prosecutor; and he would write a pamphlet about it.

Such was the world inhabited by the family of the killer, their friends, and their enemies. It provides a context for local people’s fears, their awareness of a raw and violent world on the very edge of so-called civilisation. An official map of summary reprisal executions in France shows that the Basses-Alpes, which is the original name of what is now the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, had the most savage record of any, because of its deep penetration by the maquis.

Of course not all the maquisards of the F.F.I. were lawless or assassins. One of the heroes of this story is Paul Maillet, a former F.F.I. ‘chef de groupe’ from the Vaucluse. At the time of the tragedy he worked for the railways. In the aftermath of the Drummond murders he put the common good before his personal safety and comforts. As a father of young children he demanded justice for the murder of the ten-year-old Elizabeth Drummond. Maillet, who had been at school in Ganagobie with two of the killer’s children, will become a familiar figure in the course of this narrative.

Another F.F.I. ‘résistant’ was a monk from the ancient Benedictine abbey in Ganagobie. It perches high above the spot where the Drummonds were murdered. For centuries the abbey held the region in vassalage, and one of the homes implicated in the murders depended on it as late as 1952. The killer of the Drummond family had farmed for the abbey during the First World War. He had lived in one of its outbuildings adjacent to the grand 12th century portal that leads into the restored church today. His children were born in Ganagobie and went to school there, at a time when over a hundred people inhabited the plateau. When a journalist from Paris-Presse explored the cemetery in Lurs in 1953, looking for the family graves of the accused killer, a local man informed him that they were not from Lurs, but from Ganagobie. A short walk away but here even the neighbouring village made one an outsider.

The monastery was dissolved and plundered during the French Revolution. It staged a brief comeback afterwards and then, at the start of the 20th century, it was again in trouble. By the time of the tragedy of Lurs in 1952 a single monk lived here permanently, a Corsican by the name of Father Lorenzi. He was 74 at the time of the murders – he died in 1959 – and had arrived in Ganagobie in 1922 by when the future killer and his family had already moved down to a farm on the Durance.

Father Lorenzi left a wreath on the Drummonds’ grave. He was deeply affected, he professed, by the horror of the crime; that so close to his own homestead – a mere two miles away – usually peaceful people could suddenly turn into wolves, if not worse. He was proud of the fact that during the war his F.F.I. cell had included the filmmaker Pierre Renoir. Father Lorenzi had sheltered local ‘réfractaires’ in the ruins of the abbey and hidden them in the surrounding woods. He was adamant that his maquis behaved impeccably at the liberation. He had heard of the excesses of others and deplored them.

He knew all the farmers of the area well and shortly after the tragedy he was photographed sharing a glass of wine with the old farmer who would eventually be tried for the Drummonds’ murder. When he was asked by the journalist Jean Bazal from Détective whether he knew more than he let on about what had happened that night on the Durance – because he knew the accused farmer’s family well – he gently brushed aside the suggestion. He pointed out that he had arrived in Ganagobie after the accused had moved down into the valley and that in any case he could never reveal the secrets of the confessional. Father Lorenzi did say that if he had confessed the man accused and convicted of killing the British family things might have turned out differently. It is not clear whether he meant hearing his regular confession or a specific one about the murders of the Drummonds. Was he implying that he would have persuaded the farmer to give himself up or that, as his regular Father Confessor before the murders, he would have tried to turn him into a less violent, better person? The latter it would seem from close reading of the interview.

Except that it seems that Father Lorenzi may after all have confided in someone, his doctor, and that this doctor in turn shared whatever was said with his own family. This would commonly be the stuff of gossip, and particularly with a case as high-profile as this one.

But the source of this is Samuel Huet whose research into the case stretches back over many years. Over time he came to know a number of the key players in this tragedy. Huet has argued all along that the verdict at Digne was largely correct, that what he calls ‘l’évidente vérité’ was uncovered by Inspector Edmond Sébeille of the Marseilles police force, and that everything else was mostly mischievous attempts at perverting the course of justice. The rigour and fierce integrity of Huet’s research set new standards for students of the affair. From what he reports, it would appear that Father Lorenzi may well have shared this view, that the right person was convicted, even if there is no way of knowing for certain who the source of the monk’s thoughts were on this:

I [Samuel Huet] also decidedly knew well a doctor closely linked to Father Lorenzi. As is to be expected, this man does not appear in the file. And yet… every weekend, long before the triple crime, and long afterwards (until the death of the Father, in, I believe, 1959), he went to Ganagobie to the chagrin of his family… I suppose he was not only Father Lorenzi’s doctor (because he treated for free more often than not), but also his confidant. He did not share any confidences with me. But what I know through one of his sons does not lead me to assume that my conclusions are very far from the truth. The obvious truth. That is how it is. But what I’m saying about it is not found in the books…³

Father Lorenzi, affectionately referred to as ‘the hermit of Ganagobie’ by the countless journalists who found their way to his door, has long since gone, but the plateau is as visited today as it was in his time. More so in fact. He was present, as indeed were the family of the accused, when the new road up to the plateau was inaugurated in 1953. It was being built when the Drummonds parked nearby and has made Ganagobie one of the most sought-after and accessible beauty spots of the region. Even before then the plateau used to swarm with people at Whitsun, for its air and some of the most commanding views of the Durance valley. On Whit Monday 1953 an extended local clan came here for an aperitif and picnic lunch. They posed smiling for the camera. Among them was the murderer of an entire family, and most of them knew it.

Notes

1 2 Samuel 1.23 (AV): ‘Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided: they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions.’

2 Daily Herald, 6 August 1952

3 Author’s translation, from Samuel Huet, https://www.samuelhuet.com/affaire-dominici.html

1

Ariadne’s thread

The brutal murder of an English family in a roadside lay-by in deepest rural Provence one steamy August night in 1952 provoked a chain of events and investigations worthy of comparison with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. The inverted parallels with the crime reported by Capote, the murder of the Clutter family in a forlorn corner of Kansas, are singularly striking. In Capote’s book a family of farmers, pillars of the local community and church, were murdered by outsiders who invaded their home. In Provence a local farmer assassinated a foreign family of tourists who had come to his home for water on a boiling hot day. The cold-blooded murders of the Clutters was a premeditated robbery that escalated into an orgy of violence; the killing of the Drummonds on the Durance river happened at night in hot blood over sex and a clash of cultures.

This book seeks to present a new understanding of what happened to an innocent English family, to describe the almost incredible twists and turns following that fateful night in August 1952, to look at the underlying themes in detail, and to shed light on one of the most culturally troubling crimes of modern times.

A trivial oversight by a local farmer’s wife – she forgot to turn off the tap after watering her fields – led to the murder of Sir Jack Drummond, his wife Anne and their ten-year old daughter Elizabeth, followed by an all-night frenzied attempt by the farmer and his family to tamper with the evidence and cover up the crime.

In the days that followed the deaths, detectives drafted in from Marseilles pursued their exhaustive investigations amid a throng of French and international journalists. The world’s media had descended on this remote and sparsely populated region on learning the identity of Jack Drummond: a prominent English scientist, knighted in Britain and recognised by awards in France and the USA for his crucial pre-war and wartime work on nutrition. An overheated local population was left reeling from the shock of such a horrible crime committed in their midst.

The case, which dragged on for three years, became embroiled in contradictions and conspiracies, confessions and denials, underpinned by local politics and family feuding. Scenes unlike anything witnessed before in what happened to be the smallest courtroom in the whole of France provided a mixture of tragedy and farce. The accused, Gaston Dominici – the septuagenarian farmer whose wife had forgotten to turn off the tap that caused a landslide that led to the murders – sat only yards away from his family, who were divided in their loyalty to him, while the rest of the courtroom was crammed with local people, journalists, lawyers, detectives, policemen, translators, and English friends of the Drummonds.

A guilty verdict was pronounced but almost immediately afterwards, following the convicted killer’s new version of the murders and under pressure from the local Communist party, the government launched a new investigation by detectives brought down from Paris, amid further allegations, rumours and conspiracy theories.

It seemed as though this was going to be a never-ending saga of claim and counterclaim. Indeed, several years later, following a television programme about the case, Madame de Gaulle persuaded her husband to release the by then octogenarian Dominici. This act of mercy (it was not a pardon) unwittingly unleashed a further rash of suppositions by all and sundry.

The Murders of Lurs, as they came to be known, after the name of the commune in which the murders took place, happened in a remote part of provincial France, a place with deep feudal roots and local power structures not unlike those of mafioso Sicily. Although the land was not lush and did not provide much wealth, family ownership of property handed down for generations meant everything in the social structure of the region. The Dominici family, though not well off or educated, were deeply conscious of the threat to their local standing as owners of their farm Grand’Terre. After the murders they were desperate to retain their honour, to