2023-11-07 15:00:00
On October 25, 1981, France Alain, a 21-year-old electrical engineering student, was shot dead at point blank range a few steps from her apartment. The perpetrator of this sordid murder has never been identified. Marie-Claude Savard and Sébastien Trudel seek to shed light on this unresolved case.
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After taking an interest — with impressive results — in the murder of Michelle Perron, Marie-Claude Savard and Sébastien Trudel are back on the ground in the second season of Presumed Innocent. They seek to elucidate another assassination, that of France Alain. The Laval University student, who went out in the early evening to shop at the convenience store, died at the corner of Chapdeleine and Belmont streets, in Sainte-Foy, following she was shot in cold blood with a hunting rifle .
Willpower is not enough
As heinous as it was unique, this crime caused a lot of noise in Quebec at the time. Yet four decades later, it remains unsolved. “We didn’t see many gratuitous murders like that. When we had one, everyone wanted to investigate it, everyone wanted to find the culprit,” remembers André Fillion, who was at the time a police officer-ambulance officer in Sainte-Foy. How is it that with so much means and will the matter has never been elucidated? This is what the duo of hosts wonders regarding in this exciting series in four one-hour episodes.
Marie-Claude Savard remembers the death of France Alain very well. Then aged nine, she lived two blocks from the crime scene. His family even tightened the rules regarding his safety, for fear that something would happen to him. Benoît Proulx, a 35-year-old news reader and ex-boyfriend of the victim, was also near the scene, at the CHRC station. On the evening of the murder, he had broken up with France for three weeks. Because of the proximity of his workplace to the victim’s apartment, and because he used information that had not yet been made public to talk regarding the crime on the air, the communicator became the main suspect in the case, even though no evidence directly linked him to the murder.
André Arthur enters the scene
Although Benoît Proulx was cleared of suspicion following a coroner’s inquest in 1986, the public and police continued to doubt him, even following a polygraph exonerated him. The man — who, had he been guilty, would have committed his crime with the precision of a clock between his 7:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. newscasts — found himself in the hot seat once more in 1991 , following his colleague André Arthur reiterated barely veiled suspicions every day on the air. “Arthur is an outstanding communicator, but when he leaves with an idea, he doesn’t let it go,” recalls Claude Poirier.
André Arthur’s stubbornness and the arrival of a new witness led to the launch of a trial once morest Proulx 10 years following the murder. The accused was found guilty before the verdict was overturned by the appeals court. A civil suit subsequently allowed him to receive more than $2 million in compensation.
But if Proulx isn’t the culprit, who pulled the trigger? Marie-Claude Savard and Sébastien Trudel have the mechanic Richard Jobin in their sights. This now deceased man was linked to organized crime and had a sister who allegedly frequented Benoît Proulx.
A great loss
Beyond their exhaustive research of evidence and circumstances, the strength of Marie-Claude Savard and Sébastien Trudel in Presumed innocent: The France Alain affair is to make viewers understand what society lost on the evening of October 25, 1981. A rare electrical engineering student among the hundreds of boys in her cohort, France Alain would have been one of the first female engineers in the field. Former classmates praise not only his smile and energy, but also his great intelligence. “It’s a great loss for society, for everything it might have achieved,” said one of them.
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