Maurice Agnelet, the man at the centre of one of the most high-profile murder mysteries in France over the past five decades, died on January 12th, at the home of one of his sons, in the Pacific Ocean French territory of New Caledonia. “I found him in the morning in his bed,” Thomas Agnelet told Mediapart. “He died in his sleep.”
Agnelet, 82, apparently died of a heart attack. He had been found guilty in 2014, for the second and final time, of the murder of Agnès Le Roux, the heiress of the Palais de la Méditerranée casino in the French Riviera city of Nice, who disappeared without trace towards the end of October 1977 at the age of 29.
In an unprecedented judicial saga, which included a ruling in his favour by the European Court of Human Rights, it was 37 years after the disappearance of Le Roux that a court in Rennes, north-west France, definitively sealed Agnelet’s legal fate by handing him a 20- year jail sentence at the end of his third trial.
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Agnelet had always protested his innocence, and nothing in the case file formally proves his guilt. Agnès Le Roux’s body was never found, rendering it impossible to know where, when and how she died. Her white, Paris-registered Range Rover vehicle has also never been found.
During the trial in Rennes, one of Agnelet’s sons, Guillaume, who had until then publicly supported his father’s claims of innocence, caused a stir when he unexpectedly announced that his father was, in fact, guilty of the crime. Guillaume Agnelet said he had decided to reveal this in order to relieve his conscience, after his father had confessed to the killing several years earlier. He added that his mother Annie and his brother Thomas were also aware of the admission, which the two firmly refuted, claiming Guillaume made it up to settle family scores.
The case remains mysterious, even for those who are convinced Agnelet murdered Le Roux.
She was born into a wealthy family and grew up in Monaco, with British and Swiss nannies and three siblings. She has been described by several who knew her as having a strong character but with an inner soul of a child, and that she became infatuated with Agnelet, then a lawyer with a practice in Nice, ten years older than her and a follower of philosophers Jiddu Krishnamurti and Lanza del Vasto.
A female friend of Le Roux, whose name is withheld, remembered her as being, “an endearing girl, complex, very mature, very perspicacious, but [also] very ingenuous, naïve, secret”, adding: “Because she hadn’t much of an education, she had a little bit of a complex. She was fascinated by his [Agnelet’s] words. A master. He had an incredible hold, and she, an addiction.”
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Reportedly, the more she became attached to Agnelet, the more he became distant towards her. Agnès wanted to set up home with him, and to travel together. He would promise things and then duck out. He saw their relationship as a free one, and had liaisons with three other women and also with men. According to one witness, Agnès once said: “I’d prefer that he was after my fanny rather than my money.”
He apparently showed indifference to her inner turmoil, despite her two suicide attempts. “Where are you? Where are you?” she asked in a letter she wrote him. “I am far away from everything.” She also declared: “With you all the way until death, and perhaps even after.”
At the time, Agnès was engaged in a battle with her mother over her demand to receive her share of the 50% stake the family jointly-owned in the Palais de la Méditerranée casino. One of the biggest in France, it was first acquired by Agnès’s father, Henri, a banker who died in 1967. Frustrated by the refusals of her mother, Renée Le Roux, she ended up allying herself with Jean-Dominique Fratoni, aka “Jean-Do”, a nefarious figure reputedly connected to an Italian mafia mob and a friend of then mayor of Nice, Jacques Médecin. Fratoni was the boss of the rival casino Le Ruhl, opened on the seafront Promenade des Anglais in 1975, who wanted control of the Palais de la Méditerranée as well.
Fratoni, who enjoyed the nickname of “the Napoleon of the green baize”, offered Agnès 3 million francs (450,000 euros, at the time a much larger sum than its conversion rate today) in return for transferring to him her stake in the family casino, which would in turn place her mother, Renée, in a minority on the board. At the conclusion of the deal, Renée was ousted as boss of the casino, and replaced in a board vote for Fratoni.
For Renée Le Roux, her daughter was a traitor, and she blamed Agnelet who she believed had seduced Agnès with the sole aim of getting his hands on the family fortune and who, as part of that plan, had introduced her to his fellow freemason Fratoni.
Sometime in October 1977, four months after that successful coup at the casino, Agnès disappeared along with her car. Because of the hostility between her and her mother, it was only several weeks later that her disappearance was reported.
Agnelet became a prime suspect because he had opened a bank account in Switzerland into which was placed the 3 million francs from Fratoni. After the account was discovered, he was banned, in late 1978, from exercising as a lawyer because of his grave professional misconduct over the casino deal (in 1985 he was found guilty of breach of trust, including shareholder vote-buying, when he was handed a two-year prison sentence).
Agnelet emigrated to Canada in 1980, after which the judicial investigation into the disappearance of Agnès Le Roux issued a warrant for his arrest on suspicion of murdering the young woman. He was arrested on his return to France in August 1983, and placed in preventive detention. Agnelet claimed that Agnès had agreed to share the money placed in Switzerland, and that he therefore had no motive for killing her. Importantly, he said that when Agnès disappeared he was in Switzerland with one of his mistresses, Françoise Lausseure, who confirmed his account.
Agnelet was released and the case against him was eventually dismissed in 1985 on the grounds of insufficient proof, which Renée Le Roux would claim was the result of the powerful influence exerted on his behalf by fellow freemasons.
“I am deeply convinced that he murdered Agnès,” said her brother Jean-Charles Le Roux. “He will never tell the truth. We will never find her body.”
In 2000, Françoise Lausseure, who became Agnelet’s second wife, confessed she had lied about being with him in Switzerland when Agnès disappeared. The admission set in train a new investigation which eventually led, in 2006, to a fresh trial of Agnelet on the charge of murder, at the end of which he was acquitted. The public prosecution services appealed the verdict and at a new trial, one year later, he was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
But the legal saga continued after Agnelet took his case for unfair trial to the European Court of Human Rights, which in 2013 found in his favour and which rendered the 2007 verdict void. In 2013, a re-trial was ordered, that which took place in Rennes in 2014, when he was definitively found guilty and sentenced, again, to 20 years in jail.
The prosecution’s version of events was that Agnelet convinced Agnès to turn against her mother in order that she would receive Fratoni’s payment of 3 million francs, after which he, Agnelet, murdered her. While no solid proof exists that he killed her, the case against him was largely based on his curious behaviour after her disappearance, including things he said and wrote.
He appeared, according to witnesses, to be convinced after her disappearance that Agnès would not return. The latter’s brother, Jean-Charles Le Roux, said that soon after she vanished, “His big phrase was ‘she’s gone off to take time out’”. The police investigation into her disappearance began only four months later. When his home was searched, it was found that Maurice Agnelet had kept copies of phone conversations which he had, strangely, systematically recorded.
During a search of Agnès’s apartment, they found a note signed by her which read: “Sorry, I’m going off the rails. My path stops here. All is well. Agnès.” The note added: “I want Maurice to look after everything.” Ten months later, the police found a copy of that note in Agnelet’s office. If he had himself placed the note found in her apartment, why would he keep an incriminating copy?
Then there was the discovery of his scribbled notes in a collection of classic works (the series called “La Pléiade”), which the prosecution argued was further evidence against him. Dated around the time that Agnès had disappeared, he wrote in one, “reclassifying of the file, freedom”. But none of this could surely be considered as significant evidence.
The investigation into Agnès Le Roux’s disappearance was marked by a series of failures, beginning with its inability to establish precisely when the young woman disappeared. Agnelet’s lawyers highlighted the fact that no-one could say when the crime occurred, nor where nor how, nor, with any certainty, who took part. Meanwhile, Georges Kiejman, lawyer for the Le Roux family as civil parties to the case, declared at Agnelet’s retrial in 2006: “The perfidity of Maurice Agnelet has led to the disappearance of the proof.” Kiejman argued that for Agnelet, there was “no security without Agnès’s money, no freedom without the death of Agnès”. The case against Agnelet was compelling for some, while for others it was unconvincing.
In place of established facts, at each of his trials the prosecution spoke of his lies, his privileges and his dark personality. One police officer said that when Agnelet was taken into custody for questioning early on in the case, “We did him a favour. He had a notebook. He jotted down our questions and his replies, which he dictated to us. Imagine the time we lost”. He said that when Agnelet was asked if he had a bank account in Switzerland, the then lawyer took 55 minutes before he eventually refused to answer.
Agnelet, who was active in his early life as a member of a Christian student movement, the JEC, and later in the Parti Socialiste, and who created two freemasons’ lodges and became an active local member of the League of Human Rights, was described by witnesses as, variously, “brilliant”, “likeable” and “enterprising”.
“He was called the man we just love, or the man we don’t like,” Thomas, one of his three sons, now recalls. “He could please very different people, from a wealthy heiress to the boss of a casino, and artists and marginal types in between. How many people admired him? Detested him? Or one after the other? The wealthy, the poor, the intellectuals, workers – what pleased about him was also what displeased.”
At one of the trials, a psychiatric expert called as a witness described a manner Agnelet had of “making reality opaque”. Agnelet teased the court at his trials, once declaring: “I’m telling you that I’m a liar!” The mother of his sons, Annie, declared that she was “always being had”, while the eldest of the sons, Jérôme, who later died of AIDS said, “My father makes rotten everything he comes into contact with”. An expert psychiatrist concluded that it was “very difficult to grasp the true nature” of a man he described as “ambivalent” and who had “an excessive appetite for omnipotence”.
A former colleague of Agnelet said he behaved as if he was “above the law and morality”, and who seemed to boast of his amorality as if it were “a sign of intelligence”. Another former colleague said he “believed in nothing, neither in himself nor in others” and, she added, he was “a contrast of great ideas and bad actions, a big pervert”.
Since the disappearance of Agnès, the whole affair essentially became a battle between Renée Le Roux and Maurice Agnelet. “I had not been firm enough with Agnès [when] this monster came into her life,” Renée once said. “That gnaws away at me.”
It was after the death of her husband, in 1967, that Renée became the formidable boss of the Palais de la Méditerranée. She decided everything, including in place of her four joint-owner children. During the notorious and deadly Riviera “casino war” in the mid-70s, involving rival organised crime gangs seeking control of the lucrative gambling businesses, and to which the Palais de la Méditerranée became prey, she refused to sell up. After she lost control of the casino in June 1977, through the deal Agnès made with Jean-Dominique Fratoni, the relationship with her daughter deteriorated to the point that they communicated only through bailiffs.
But after Agnès vanished, Renée became an intrepid investigator determined to establish the truth of what happened to her daughter, which she was convinced was the work of Maurice Agnelet. She hired private detectives (some of whom swindled her), built up thousands of files on organised crime, wrote books about the case, and went about secretly recording her conversations with people who had something to say about her daughter’s disappearance.
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Her investigations led to the revival of the case against Agnelet at the end of the 1990s; by filing a legal complaint against Agnelet and Françoise Lausseure for “concealing a corpse”, she succeeded in sidestepping the statute of limitations – the time limit after which a case which has remained dormant can no longer be reopened or prosecuted. In total, by the time Agnelet was definitively convicted, Renée had employed 15 lawyers to represent her in judicial investigations successively led by seven investigating magistrates. “I sold everything that belonged to me,” she once declared. “They saw that I’d never give up.”
After Renée filed her complaint in 1997, Françoise Lausseure (nicknamed Zoune) in 1999 said she had lied when, in 1978, she confirmed Agnelet’s alibi that they were together in Switzerland at the time of Agnès Le Roux’s disappearance. In early 2000, Lasseure, who had settled in Canada, gave a statement repeating that she had lied, and later that year Agnelet was again placed under investigation for the murder of Agnès. He claimed Zoune was simply taking revenge for his past bad behaviour with her. Who could be believed, given that Lausseure herself admitted to telling lies?
Agnelet returned to France from Panama, where he had then been living, just as he had returned from Canada after the warrant issued against him in 1983. “He never had an attitude of running away,” said his lawyer, François Saint-Pierre. In 2006, he was sent for trial by jury in Nice on charges nearly identical to those when the case against him was finally dismissed in 1986. His lawyers highlighted the lack of proof and obtained his acquittal but, after a successful appeal by prosecutors, he was retried one year later and found guilty of the murder of Agnès Le Roux, when he was handed a 20-year jail sentence. Agnelet in turn appealed the verdict before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), arguing there had been an unfair trial due to a lack of reasoning in the judgements, which the ECHR upheld in January 2013.
In its ruling, the ECHR noted that “only two questions had been put to the jury and, considering the complexity of the case, those were succinctly worded and made no allusion to the specific circumstances: the first was whether the applicant had intentionally murdered Agnès Le Roux and the second, if so, whether the murder had been premeditated. They thus did not “refer to any precise and specific circumstances that could have enabled the applicant to understand why he was found guilty”.
At the new retrial ordered as a result and held in Rennes in 2014, the damning testimony of Agnelet’s son Guillaume, when he declared that his father had confessed the murder to him, was regarded as a “moral betrayal” by Agnelet’s lawyer François Saint-Pierre. According to Guillaume’s testimony, Agenelet had killed Agnès during a visit to Italy, an accusation that appeared pretty much impossible to verify. “If he had to incriminate his father, he should have done so earlier,” said Saint-Pierre. “I don’t believe it. I can’t imagine Maurice Agnelet murdering Agnès Le Roux in cold blood.” On April 11th 2014, Agnelet was again found guilty and sentenced to 20 years in jail. He lodged an appeal, but after the application was rejected in 2015, his sentence became definitive.
That same year, the 3 million francs deposited in Switzerland, which in the blocked account had grown, with interest, into a value of 3 million euros (equivalent to 19.6 million former French francs), was handed by the bank to the Le Roux family. Renée, the matriarch, died in 2016 at the age of 93.
Since the 2014 verdict, Agnelet’s son Thomas remained the only member of his family to continue supporting his father, whose physical and mental health began declining. On September 8th 2020, a regional magistrates’ tribunal responsible for reviewing prison sentences (the tribunal d'application des peines), in Caen, northern France, ordered that Agnelet should be released from jail on medical grounds, a decision which the prosecution services unsuccessfully appealed against. “One cannot leave a man to die in prison in those conditions, it’s a question of dignity,” commented Saint-Pierre. “He experienced a terrible treatment by the judicial authorities. One can always say that it was because he denied his guilt, but that was his fundamental right.”
Once he was freed, Agnelet travelled to visit his son Thomas at the latter's home in the Pacific Ocean French territory of New Caledonia. On arrival, he spent two weeks self-isolating, coronavirus oblige, before joining Thomas. He spent three days with his son before his death last Tuesday. “They freed him too late,” Thomas told Mediapart. “Why didn’t they release him earlier? He could have benefited from the law that allows for the conditional release of the over-70s. He was 82.”
“At least he did not die in prison, but rather free, surrounded by his family, in front of the Pacific Ocean,” he added.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version, with some additional reporting, by Graham Tearse