Omar Raddad on trial in Nice, France in January 1991. Photo / Getty Images
Omar Raddad on trial in Nice, France in January 1991. Photo / Getty Images
A Moroccan-born man convicted three decades ago in the grisly killing of a wealthy widow on the French Riviera will not get a new trial, a top French court ruled Thursday, the latest twist in one of France's most enduring murder mysteries.
Omar Raddad had been found guilty of the1991 murder of Ghislaine Marchal, 65, who lived by herself in a large villa north of Cannes. Police found her dead in the locked basement of an annex to the villa, where a message written in Marchal's own blood seemed to accuse Raddad, her gardener at the time.
Raddad, now 60, has always maintained his innocence. He was released from prison more than two decades ago but sought a new trial to reverse his conviction and clear his name.
France was long captivated by the unresolved mysteries of the brutal murder and by the social undertones of the case, which involved two protagonists from starkly different backgrounds: a wealthy victim from a prominent family and a working-class Arab immigrant who was unable to read or write and spoke little French.
The case proved particularly gripping because of a strange grammatical error in the message supposedly scrawled by Marchal, who was found with multiple bruises and cuts behind a barricaded door. While she appeared to have written "Omar killed me," the sentence contained a glaring mistake — in the original French, "Omar m'a tuer," instead of "m'a tuée," using the infinitive rather than a form of past tense.
Raddad's defenders argued that a woman of Marchal's background would not have made such an error, even in her dying moments.
Ghislaine Marchal's body was found in the locked basement of an annex to her villa.
His DNA and fingerprints were never found at the crime scene. Raddad's supporters suggested that he was framed and easily convicted because of his background, and famous intellectuals took up his cause.
His lawyers succeeded in partially reopening the case last year and requested a retrial, after presenting new DNA evidence that they said exonerated him. Judges on France's top appeals court ordered further analysis of the new evidence, in what Raddad's supporters had hoped was the first step toward a new trial.
Sylvie Noachovitch, Raddad's lawyer, told reporters at the courthouse in Paris that she was "absolutely scandalised" and said she would appeal before the European Court of Human Rights.
"I will never abandon Omar Raddad," Noachovitch said. "My determination is even stronger, stronger than ever."
Retrials are rare in France, and retrials in which convictions are overturned are even rarer. In 2002, a similar request by Raddad, based on new testimony and earlier DNA evidence, had already been rejected.
Marchal's family has always maintained that Raddad is guilty and had opposed a new trial. In a statement issued Thursday by Sabine du Granrut, Marchal's niece, the family said it hoped the decision would "put a definitive end to a case that it has painfully experienced".
"The family regrets that for the past 30 years this affair has been the subject of media agitation," the statement said.
At his trial, in 1994, prosecutors said that Raddad had a gambling problem and had killed his employer in a fit of rage when she refused to give him an advance on his wages. Raddad's supporters argued that he got along well with Marchal and had no reason to kill her.
DNA of four men at crime scene
Raddad was convicted and sentenced to 18 years in prison, although he was freed after four years following a request from King Hassan II of Morocco, where the case was followed closely, and a partial pardon from France's president at the time, Jacques Chirac.
In 2015, advances in DNA technology placed the DNA of four unidentified men — none of them Raddad — at the crime scene, including one whose genetic traces were mixed with the victim's blood.
Raddad's supporters said the new evidence would help identify the real murderer. Marchal's family countered that evidence was handled with less care three decades ago and that the DNA traces were contamination from an unrelated source.
In its ruling on Thursday, the court said that the discovery of new DNA at the scene did not constitute sufficient grounds to order a new trial. There was too much uncertainty about where it came from, and it was impossible to establish when it had been left there, the court said.
The newly discovered DNA "is not sufficient, in itself, to establish their connection with the case, as these traces may have been left before or after the murder", the court wrote in its ruling.
Noachovitch, Raddad's lawyer, disputed that reasoning, arguing that the judges had ignored a 2014 law that relaxed the criteria for retrials and that the new evidence, even if impossible to date, cast enough doubt on Raddad's conviction to justify a new hearing.
