Emile Louis was sentenced to life for the murders of the disappeared from Yonne in 2004, more than thirty years after the start of his misdeeds. For years, he perpetrated the worst atrocities on mentally retarded young girls, but not only. His eldest daughter Maryline Vinet recounted in her autobiographical book her experience with the Boucher de l’Yonne and in particular the abuse she suffered throughout her childhood but also afterwards. If today she has been able to rebuild herself and manages to speak about it openly at the microphone of Christophe Hondelatte on Europe 1, it is not without ordeal. She also returns to the difficulty she had in revealing the dark side of her father to the authorities.
Married to Chantal Delagneau, Emile Louis ends up leaving her after four children and twenty years of married life. He then leaves home, the hope for his eldest daughter to truly get away from the demon? Not really, because the facts continue to remind him of his past. On July 5, 1981, the body of a woman was discovered, Sylviane Lesage. She was placed in her childhood with Germaine, the new concubine of Emile Louis. The investigators quickly go back to the man who ends up being imprisoned. The gendarmes discover her links with the other missing persons from the Auxerre region, they all have the same profile: young mentally deficient women and wards of the State, whom no one has ever looked for. His connection with them? He was the driver of the bus that took them from their host family to the IME (medico-educational institute).
Maryline Vinet is then questioned about her father. At the question “do you think your father is capable of killing“, she cannot give the answer, even if she knows her very well, for having suffered violence, rape from the age of 5, and for having seen her atrocities with her own eyes: “I know the answer, it was given to me in this little wood when I was 11, this unfortunate woman disembowelled before my eyes. But I pull myself together. I cling to the idea that my father is not capable of such monstrosity.“She then says she doesn’t think he could kill.”Deep down I know that’s wrong. He is very sick. (…) Why don’t I say what I think? Because I gave Mom my word and I keep it. ‘Cause she asked us to stick together, and I do.”
Impossible to make any judgment on this woman when you know who she grew up with and how she survived. Moreover, at the time of this interrogation, the one who was forcibly married at 17 and from whom her mother took the baby is not in a condition to face this investigation: “JI am unable to face this enormous responsibility of burdening my father. I am coming out of a fight to escape the grip of my family and to recover my daughter. I cannot bear the moral burden of an accusation against Emile. I’m coming out of hell, just starting to live a normal life. That would be asking too much of me. Too manyp.”