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Sport 29: Spring 2002
People will speak to you of compassion. I reserve mine for the victims2
People will speak to you of compassion. I reserve mine for the victims2
To give a thumbnail sketch of Romand's deception and crimes is not difficult—in many ways he is a thumbnail sketch of a man. A quiet only child who grew into a tubby, timid young man, he attended medical school in Lyon where he met his future wife Florence. For no apparent reason he missed an exam in his second year and began a decade of fake study at the school, attending lectures but never sitting exams or graduating.
Jean-Claude and Florence left school, married, and moved to a town near the Swiss border. They had two children, Antoine and page 210 Caroline. Florence was a full-time mother and temped as a pharmacist; Jean-Claude claimed to work at the World Health Organisation in nearby Geneva. In fact he had no job and was living off funds given to him by his parents and in-laws to invest, since those working in Switzerland get favourable interest rates and tax breaks. At one point, Florence's father tried to get some of his money back from Romand to buy a car. A week later, when he and Romand were alone, the elderly man suffered a fatal fall down the staircase of the family home.
The protagonist of Camus's The Fall admires Adolf Hitler for the efficiency of his method. ‘When one has no character,’ he remarks, ‘one has to apply a method.’3 Romand's method of deception was remarkably simple. After leaving the house each morning he would buy some magazines and newspapers and spend the day reading and dozing in his car, or walking in the nearby forests. He frequently called in on the WHO building, picking up leaflets and newsletters, and using the carpark, post office and travel agency. He never gave anyone his office phone number, and no one thought to require it, not even Florence, who would page him if necessary through an answer service.
For many years Romand wasn't so much leading a double life as not leading a life at all. Eventually, however, he found something to occupy his empty days, beginning an affair with a woman living in Paris. She gave him some money to invest, he spent it, and when she asked for it back Romand realised he was about to be caught out. Instead of fleeing the country or killing himself, he opted to kill his family.
At the centre of this erudite, sensitive and beautifully written book is a crime spree of astounding brutality. The first to die is Florence. At dawn Romand clubs his wife to death with that most vaudevillian of weapons, a rolling pin.
page 211When the two pre-school-age children wake, their father gives them each a bowl of Coco Pops before taking them upstairs one at a time, placing a pillow over their faces, and shooting them in the head. He leaves the house, buys some chewing gum and a newspaper, and drives to his childhood home where he shoots his parents and the family dog.
That evening, he goes out with his mistress, stopping the car in a forest, and attacking her with mace and a stun gun. She survives and, inexplicably, does not report the attack.
Romand returns home and spends the night in the company of his murdered wife and children. At four the next morning he sets the house on fire. Though he is in possession of powerful barbituates, he takes only a handful of ten-year-old Nembutal, and these only after setting the fire in the attic. When firemen begin hammering on the front door, he opens the bedroom window and is rescued. Florence, Antoine and Caroline are removed in body bags. Jean-Claude is taken to hospital; smoke-damaged, burned, comatose, but alive.