France has dubbed it the tale of the diva, the debutante and the chorus girl. Now, after more than a year of inquiries, French investigators believe a lesbian crime passionnel is at the centre of the unsolved murder of the daughter of actor Roland Giraud and her female lover.
The double poisoning in the heart of Burgundy, with a forestry warden quickly branded the chief suspect, suggests undertones of love, greed and jealousy. It also reveals the taboo around the L-word in French show business and the media.
Géraldine Giraud (36) and Katia Lherbier (32) were killed and dumped eight metres underground in a storm drain near the home of 41-year-old forester Jean-Pierre Treiber on 9 December, 2004. Géraldine, who had acted in two mainstream films and did dubbing work, lived in the shadow of her showbiz parents. Roland Giraud (63) is a veteran of French film, including the original version of Three Men And A Baby. Géraldine’s mother, Maaike Jansen, is a busy actress, currently appearing in C’est Jamais Facile at the Théâtre Michel in Paris. Katia, openly lesbian, was a talented jazz singer and fronted a pop group.
She was runner-up in a national singing contest in 2004 and worked as a special-needs teacher in Burgundy.
Géraldine and Katia both vanished on 1 November, 2004, after a weekend at the Giraud country cottage at La Postolle in Burgundy. They had met on 14 October at the Sens home of Katia’s singing teacher, Marie-Christine Van Kempen, dubbed by investigators ”the diva”. Katia lodged with Van Kempen, who is Maaike Jansen’s sister, and police are working on the theory that they may have had a relationship.
On 23 November, 2004, while police were still looking for Giraud and Lherbier, they arrested Treiber. He had made purchases on the women’s credit cards and withdrawn more than €2 000. He said he knew nothing about their whereabouts and claimed they gave him their cards and pin numbers, telling him and his girlfriend, Patricia Darbeau, to use them. He suggested that the pair had ”wanted to disappear”. Three weeks later their bodies were found beneath rocks in the drain in front of his house at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne.
A set of Géraldine’s keys were found in his garden, as well as a partly melted portable phone.
Treiber’s house has been shuttered by police. At the end of a narrow road, by a wood, it has an untidy garden in which he spent his evenings pottering alone. As a neighbour, he was always ready to help, but earning €500 a month he struggled to buy necessities, and petrol to visit his sick teenage daughter 50km away. He had given a small-time crook his savings for a ”business venture” that went wrong.
If not for the relatively recent introduction in France of routine DNA testing, Treiber, in custody in Auxerre, might have been found guilty alone. Electrical tape used to tie up Giraud and Lherbier — found semi-naked but not, according to forensic reports, raped or assaulted — carried Treiber’s DNA and traces from two others. At Van Kempen’s flat in Sens police allegedly found the poison chloropicrin — used to make chloroform, the gas that killed Lherbier and Giraud.
Roland Giraud’s lawyer, Sabine Cordesse, said the police were looking for accomplices. ‘Treiber’s motive was money. He is in the red by €1 000 and cannot even apply for a credit card. But he did not act alone.” After being questioned and released in March last year, Van Kempen (51) was taken into custody in November under investigation for complicity to murder.
This week Van Kempen, Treiber and Darbeau will be confronted with three witnesses in the Sens office of investigating magistrate Mickaël Ghir. The witnesses claim they saw the trio plotting the murder at a café in Fontainebleau in mid-October 2004.
A police source, who did not want to be named, said investigators had not ruled out other people’s involvement but were treating Van Kempen as a key suspect.
Treiber’s lawyer, Patricia Croci, said her client ”should not be assumed to have killed the young women just because the bodies were found at his place”. She said Treiber got to know them ”a few weeks before their death”, but did not elaborate on the circumstances.
Strikingly for a celebrity crime passionnel, the French media have been reticent about its lesbian aspect. France has openly gay male personalities but few if any ”out of the closet” lesbian stars. The closest Le Figaro has got is in a coy report on Van Kempen that said she had many relationships ”not only with men”. Other papers have said Lherbier once had a registered partnership with a woman.
On 20 December, 2004, a report on Lherbier’s funeral in the local newspaper, L’Yonne Républicaine, described a ”rainbow-coloured panel celebrating gay and lesbian diversity”.
The next day the paper apologised for the ”regrettable mistake”, saying the panel represented ‘the unity of Christians in the run-up to Christmas’. L’Yonne Républicaine crime reporter Jean-Louis Savignac admitted he had not been explicit about Lherbier and Giraud’s relationship but insisted ”we have never hidden the truth”. – Guardian Unlimited Â