A 60-year-old faces 25 years in prison for the murder of her stepmother who has become senile, and for having injured her demented husband.
This sentence was required this Wednesday, at the assizes of Bouches-du-Rhône, against Danièle Careddu.
The accused, aged 66, lived through a “more than difficult” situation, conceded the Advocate General in her submissions. However, she called on the jurors “not to get the wrong trial. This is not the trial of a system that would not have come to the aid of Danièle Careddu”.
Her mother-in-law, Paulette Dufossé (85), was stabbed to death forty times and had her throat slit in her sleep. Her husband, Marc Dufossé, injured, is 58 years old.
Acts justified by exhaustion
For the prosecution, they are both “the expiatory victims of Danièle Careddu’s stubborn choice to take care of them without any outside help which was however offered to her”.
Danièle Careddu claimed to have no memory of her actions. However, she justified them by the exhaustion of having had to take care of her mother-in-law and a husband suffering from Korsakoff syndrome following his alcoholism.
“I freaked out, it must have been general fatigue, I couldn’t sleep, I was just cleaning. This overflow of everything I have accumulated, it had to come out, ”explained the sixty-something.
The verdict was expected on Wednesday evening.