48 years in prison for “the couple of monsters”

Jacques Hubinon, 75, and his companion Marie Simon, might have lived a peaceful retirement in Marcinelle, behind Charleroi station. Marie suffers from mental deficiency, but with Jacques, they had a nice pension of almost 4000 euros per month. Unfortunately for the couple, they crossed paths with Johnny Falise (49 years old) and Francine Genicot (54 years old).

Johnny was Jacques’ son-in-law, via a woman he had known for a few years, who later died… and he didn’t hesitate to go regularly to empty his ex-father-in-law’s bank account and his partner, leaving them with almost nothing in their precarious little apartment. Every month, in fact: Johnny, at the CPAS, knew when Jacques received his pension and beat him to force him to give him his bank card. He took advantage of Mary’s distress to do the same. Francine, at the mutual, had for her part succeeded in persuading retirees to pay them a whole series of things. Until they deprive themselves.

Extortion is the word. But that is generally not enough to end up in front of the Assize Court, where Johnny and Francine have just been sentenced to 25 and 23 years in prison respectively. No, it’s because in addition to these horrors, on the night of April 27 to 28, 2019, Johnny beat Jacques to death. That day, as often, Johnny was drunk, high on cocaine, and exploded when Jacques once once more tried to protest the continuous racketeering he had suffered for three years. In court, Johnny lied saying he had “did everything to help his stepfather who suffered from heart problems”. The big deal: the pathologist’s analysis showed that Jacques suffered from bruises on his head, broken ribs and traces of strangulation.

That night, once Jacques was dead, he and Francine fled. Their murder almost went unnoticed: Marie, mentally deficient, terrified by the “couple of monsters” and regular punching bag, never dared to say anything… the funeral directors had to give the alert , seeing the state of the corpse. The emergency doctor sent on the spot had concluded a little quickly to a natural death, in this old man with a fragile heart. Then investigators were able to link the murder to Francine, when she confided in a friend saying that Johnny had killed someone, a friend who then contacted the police.

A week following the murder, they denied everything. The police found insurance papers at their home, while they were obviously trying to collect the meager thousands of euros set aside by Jacques to pay for his funeral. At the assizes, they ended up confessing… pleading social misery, addictions, trying to pass themselves off as something other than hopeless cases. Despite the Advocate General’s request not to go below 30 years in prison, the jurors decided that, given the absence of prior records and the unstructured family context, they were going to limit themselves to 25 and 23 years’ imprisonment for the two defendants.