2023-11-15 15:40:45
Updated15. November 2023, 4:40 p.m.
Ariège: A nurse and a stuntman under investigation for a tragic ambush
For having killed an ex-companion as well as his daughter, a woman and her new lover appear before their judge.
Mirepoix, the town where Christophe Orsaz lived, the ex-companion beaten to death of the co-accused.
AFP
A nurse who might not bear to be left by her ex-companion will appear Friday at the Ariège assizes for having killed, with her new lover, the one she had once loved, as well as her daughter, present by chance . The two accused had set up an ambush.
Marie-José Montesinos, 60 years old, and Jean-Paul Vidal, 52 years old, bodybuilder and amateur stuntman, will appear for six days to answer for the facts that occurred on November 30, 2017.
Fake professional meeting
That day, hiding their true identity, the accused had organized in a small isolated hamlet in Ariège a false professional meeting likely to attract Christophe Orsaz, a landscape gardener looking for new clients, and former companion of Ms. Montesinos.
At the scene, Mr. Vidal and Ms. Montesinos beat him with iron bars and left him for dead in a septic tank, the opening slab of which they had previously moved to the ground.
Tragic coincidence
In the victim’s car, her daughter Célia Orsaz, 18, witnesses the scene. Purely by chance, she was there because her father had to take her to the station following her appointment.
The two accused tied her up, gagged her and then left the scene with her by car. They then stopped on the road to discuss his fate, before, finally, a few kilometers further, Jean-Paul Vidal, in agreement with Ms. Montesinos, took him into a wood and shot him in the head.
File of evil lovers
The bodies of the father and daughter were not found until six months later, in June 2018. Until then, this file was that of the missing from Mirepoix, the town where Mr. Orsaz lived. Subsequently, it becomes that of “evil lovers”.
In June 2018, these were the confessions of Mr. Vidal who, confronted with the first results of the investigations, confessed the terrible circumstances of the double crime and led investigators to the scene.
It begins by minimizing
Placed in police custody in her turn, Marie-José Montesinos also confesses. But in the months of investigation that followed, she retracted her first statements and minimized her participation in the facts, going so far as to deny any criminal intent.
In the eyes of the investigators, her psychological profile is also refined over the course of the hearings: they understand for example, on the basis of her own statements as well as those of Mr. Vidal, that she manipulated the latter, having made him believe by example, by false anonymous letters, which she had in fact written herself, that Mr. Orsaz was dangerous and that he might attack them.
But she now intends to take on
At the start of the assize trial, her lawyer Mr. Laurent de Caunes did not wish to speak, but a few months ago, in a procedure annexed to the case, he confided that, before the court, she would assume “what she had done”.
“A lot has been said regarding the personality of Ms. Montesinos,” he argued, regretting the term “diabolical” attached to his client’s name. “She is a person full of angles, fractures, roughness, in permanent depression,” he preferred to say to define her.
“Legitimate” anger
“He is responsible for his actions, he does not intend to give up, but for him the interest of this trial is to explain how he, who we would never have seen in a box, is arrived there, in light of the acts accomplished by Ms. Montesinos to lead him on this path,” explained Me Montfort, describing his client as “the tool”, the “armed arm” of his co-accused.
Great impatience
On the side of the civil parties, finally, following six years of waiting, impatience is great, explained one of their representatives, Me Arnaud Lévy-Soussan.
For them, “the interest of this hearing is that everything is put back on the table, that everything that has been done in several years of judicial information can be synthesized and above all, their request is to the extent as possible, to try to understand what these two unfortunate victims did to deserve what happened to them.”
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