For 18 years, this man lied to everyone. He said he was a doctor and researcher. Unfortunately, this story ended very badly.
Welcome to this new episode of Learn French with News. Today, I offer you a special crime episode. I'm going to tell you the story of a crime that dates back to the 90s.
The end of this story is quite violent, so sensitive soul, refrain, as they say in French. As usual, you can download the vocabulary sheet for this video for free to review the words and vocabulary from the lesson. Just click on the link in the description of this video.
The story that I am going to tell you today is that of Jean-Claude Romand. The case of Jean-Claude Romand is a major criminal case in France. This affair, this news item is very well known in France.
Miscellaneous news is a section in the media where we talk about tragic events, for example accidents or crimes. These are all events that cannot be classified into classic categories such as politics, economics, culture or even sport. I'm going to start by telling you a little about the story of this man.
Jean-claude Romand was born in 1954 in a town in the Jura. Jura is a department in the east of France. His father was a farmer and his mother was a housewife.
Jean-Claude Romand is an only child. That means he has no brothers and no sisters. At school, Jean-Claude Romand was a very good student.
He worked well, he got good grades. He was studious. He also obtained his baccalaureate a year early in 1971.
He then began studying medicine in Lyon. He wants to become a doctor. Unfortunately, he did not succeed in his second year of medicine.
He fails. And that's where everything will change. This moment in history is really very important.
This is where his life will take a turn. Jean-claude Romand will make his family and loved ones believe that he has successfully completed his second year of medicine. And above all, he tells them that he succeeds with great success, therefore with very good grades all the following years.
He is going to attend classes. On exam day, he goes to the hall, but obviously he does n't take the exams. All this, of course, until he graduated as a doctor.
In any case, that's what he says, that's what he tells his loved ones. Of course, you understand, it's a lie. His whole life is a deception, a deception.
Everything is false. In reality, between 1976 and 1986, he re -enrolled in the second year of medicine every year. During his studies, he will become closer to his cousin by marriage.
This means there is no blood relationship between them. She entered his family through marriage. He will get closer to this cousin by marriage called Florence and he will form a relationship with her.
They are in love. This woman is a pharmacist. She works in a pharmacy.
This is the place where you can buy medicines. They will also get married in 1980 and they will have two children, a girl and a boy, Caroline and Antoine. Together, they live in a town near Geneva, close to the Swiss border.
During all the years that will follow obtaining his diploma as a doctor, for all the years that follow, Jean-Claude Romand will get bogged down in his lies. He will sink into his lies. So I remind you that he is supposed to be a doctor.
He will therefore tell his wife, his parents, his family that he was hired at the WHO in Geneva, Switzerland. The WHO is the world health organization. He says he is a doctor and researcher for this organization.
But the reality is quite different. This expression, “reality is completely different” means that what is really happening is not that at all. He actually spends his day in highway rest areas, at the library.
. . He even pretends that he is going to international conferences, in Japan or even in the United States.
All this time, Jean-Claude Romand continued to be interested in medicine and during all these hours in the library or on highway rest areas, he read books and accumulated a lot of knowledge. He would have been able to have conversations on very specific topics related to medicine. You understood, in reality, Jean-Claude Romand did not have a job.
But what did he live on? How did he get money? In reality, he was borrowing money from different people.
And actually what he does is he borrows money from other people to pay off the debts that he owes. So people continue to lend him money since he repays by borrowing from other people. He will also do little scams, little scams.
For example, he will sell fake medicines that would cure cancer. He will also suggest to his loved ones to invest their money in Switzerland to make it grow, to earn more money. And of course, he doesn't invest this money at all, he keeps it for himself.
So it is thanks to all these little scams, these little scams that he will have money and make people believe that he has a salary. Quite simply. But at one point, in the early 90s, it was a bit too much.
He told a few too many lies, he borrowed too much money and he doesn't really know how to get out of it. He really feels like his lies are going to be discovered, that the truth is going to come to light. I remind you that he has been lying to everyone for almost 20 years .
His family and friends start asking questions. For example, his wife doesn't understand why she can't call him directly on his office phone at WHO. A family acquaintance who works at the WHO says he never heard talk about him and that he is not part of the employee list.
He also has a debt. He borrowed around €200,000 from his former mistress called Chantal and who asked him to repay. He's cornered, he's stuck.
He feels trapped. He doesn't know what to do anymore. So, he will do the irreparable.
Committing the irreparable is an expression in French that we use to say doing something with catastrophic consequences . We are going to do something and there is no going back . We are doing something extremely serious.
To put you in context, he was 38 years old at that time. The year is 1993. One Saturday morning in January, he kills five people.
He will first kill his wife and two children in their house. He is going to murder his wife. Murder means to kill, to commit murder.
While she's sleeping, in her sleep with a rolling pin, so he's going to hit her with a rolling pin and he's going to kill her. Then he will kill his two children with a rifle. He's going to shoot them dead.
He had equipped his weapon with a silencer. It is an object that can be put on a weapon to camouflage, to reduce the noise of the gunshot. Then, and this is very strange, he will behave as if everything were normal.
He's going to tidy up his house. He's going to check his mail in his mailbox, so he's going to get his mail. Then he will go to the city center, buy newspapers and read them quietly.
The same day, he then leaves for lunch, i. e. to eat at midday, at his parents' house.
And you may suspect what happens next, he will also kill them with his rifle. He will also kill their dog. But Jean-Claude Romand's day doesn't end there.
He will then take a car and go to Paris, where his former mistress, Chantal, lives. I remind you that Jean-Claude Romand has invented his whole life and so he makes his mistress believe that he is going to take her to dinner that evening with Bernard Kouchner. Maybe that name means something to you, because he's a public figure.
He's someone well-known, famous, especially at the time. At that time, Bernard Kouchner was Minister of Health. He is also known for being a humanitarian action activist .
He was part of the creation of Médecins sans frontières and Médecins du monde. Of course, as you can imagine, he doesn't know him at all. They are not friends.
During the trip, he pretends to get lost and stops in a forest. There, he will try to assassinate Chantal, his former mistress, with tear gas. Tear gas is gas that stings the eyes and creates smoke.
And he's going to try to strangle her. Strangling is when you squeeze someone's throat to prevent them from breathing. Chantal will beg him to stop and he will do it.
He's not going to kill her. So he spares Chantal. Spare someone, it's when you intend to harm a person and ultimately give up and don't do it.
He's going to take her home and make her promise, make her swear not to say anything. He explains to him that he has a brain tumor, therefore a brain disease , and that this illness, this tumor, alters, modifies his behavior, that he is not himself and that is why he made this inappropriate gesture. I remind you, it is still the same Saturday when he killed his wife, his children and his parents.
He will then return to his house and he will put gasoline everywhere in the house. And he will also put gasoline on the bodies of his wife and children. He's going to put on his pajamas and swallow some barbiturates.
This word barbiturate is almost no longer used today, because it is the ancestor of sleeping pills. Sleeping pills are medications taken to help you sleep. It's people who have insomnia, who can't sleep at night, who generally take it.
So he takes barbiturates, but expired 10 years ago. He will then set the house on fire, starting a fire. The fire started when the garbage collectors were collecting the trash.
Garbage collectors are the people who take care of picking up people's trash. They will therefore very quickly be able to alert the firefighters who will intervene and save Jean-Claude Romand. They find Romand who is unconscious, but who is alive.
He will then be transported to Geneva hospital. In his car, the police will find a note that says. .
. Banal, that means that it's common, that it's not something exceptional. And injustice is when something shouldn't have happened, it's not fair.
We can understand that he took his failure in medical school as a real injustice. Madness is when you are crazy, when you do actions that have no meaning. It is the investigation which will show all this deception, the whole life that Jean-Claude Romand invented for himself.
We will discover that he completely lied about his life and that the way his loved ones describe him is not at all the reality. Before talking to you about the trial, let's go back five years earlier, to 1988. At the time, he had borrowed money from his father-in-law, from his wife's father.
A few days after his father-in-law asked him to pay him back, he died by accident when he fell down the stairs. And the only witness to this accident is Jean-Claude Romand. Today, of course, we can somewhat doubt the accidental side of this event.
But at the time, five years before the killing committed by Jean-Claude Romand, an investigation was carried out and the conclusion of this investigation was indeed the accident. We believed Jean-Claude Romand at the time. The Romand trial took place in 1996 for the murder of his wife, his two children and his parents.
He didn't really explain why he lied during all these years. He did not explain his motivations. On the other hand, he explained the murders, his action, by the fear of disappointing his family.
According to him, he was so afraid of disappointing his family, he couldn't face his lies. It was too painful for him to tell the truth. He preferred to kill everyone.
In his trial, he even said. . .
The psychiatrists who were present at the trial described Jean-Claude Romand as a mythomaniac. A mythomaniac is someone who has an illness and this illness is telling lies all the time. Jean-Claude Romand will receive a life prison sentence.
To scoop means to receive. In general, we use it to talk about a punishment we receive. Get a prison sentence.
Here, there is a rather interesting word to analyze, it is the term “perpetuity”. This word is normally very simple, it means “for life”. But in the vocabulary of justice in France, perpetuity is not life.
Life imprisonment is equal to a sentence of 30 years in prison. After 26 years of detention, detention means remaining in prison, Jean-Claude Romand will be released in June 2019. The courts accepted his conditional release.
This means that he has not completed his prison sentence, but that he has the right to get out, for example, because he behaved well in prison. It is the early release, in advance, of someone before having finished serving their sentence. The detainee is free, but he must obviously respect certain conditions.
In the case of Jean-Claude Romand, he wore an electronic bracelet. It lets you see where he is. During his probation period, this is the period in which he is not 100% free, he was housed by monks in an abbey.
He was housed for two years, until 2021 and today he is free. There you have it, the story of Jean-Claude Romand is coming to an end. If it interested you, there is also a film called "The Adversary" with the actor Daniel Auteuil, who is a very famous actor in France, who plays the character of Jean-Claude Romand.
I recommend you watch it if you're interested. It's called "The Adversary. " If you liked this video, give me a like or leave me a comment to support my work.
Don't forget, you can download the vocabulary sheet to review all these words we saw today by clicking on the link in the description. I'll see you soon for a next French video.
