The soap opera is therefore not over. Mamadou Diallo, 32, acquitted on April 4 by the Assize Court of Ain “benefit of the doubt” in the case of the murder of Catherine Burgod, postwoman, in 2008, will be retried. The general prosecutor’s office of the Lyon Court of Appeal appealed this decision.
“With this call, the public prosecutor’s office is making everyone live a nightmare, including the civil parties; I repeat: my client is innocent, he has nothing to do with this crime and he will have to support the debates again and explain himself again”, deplores the defendant’s lawyer, Sylvie Noachovitch. The lawyer for the civil parties, Séverine Debourg was not immediately reachable.
The body of Catherine Burgod, 41, was discovered on the morning of December 19, 2008 in the back room of the small post office in Montreal-la-Cluse, bathed in a pool of blood. Twenty-eight stab wounds were recorded on the body of this mother of two children, 5 months pregnant.
The villainous track was quickly followed by the investigators, a sum estimated at 2490 euros having been stolen. But the murder weapon remained untraceable and no convincing testimony had made it possible to advance the investigation.
The investigators had first oriented themselves towards the track of Gérald Thomassin, ex-hope of French cinema who had become marginal, who then lived opposite this Post Office and whose behavior after the murder had intrigued. The former actor, César for best male hope for the petty criminal of Jacques Doillon, disappeared in 2019, before benefiting from a dismissal. He has not given any sign of life since.
The investigation rebounded in 2017 when a match was established between the DNA taken from a coin mechanism and a bag found near the body of Catherine Burgod, and that of Mamadou Diallo. The young man admitted to having gone to this post on the morning of the murder and to having discovered the body of the mother of the family. “I panicked, I didn’t think, on my way out I took a wad of cash, I ran out” but “I am not a murderer”he said at the bar before the Assize Court, which sentenced him to two years in prison for this theft.