“JI left a prison to enter another, much worse. In detention, Rose told the story of her life. For a year, in her cell, she wrote. Over the pages that will be seized in February 2021 – and which Rose said she did not know the judge could ask for – she describes her husband Michel sometimes as a manipulator, sometimes as a torturer. He was “alcoholic”, “limited” and “proud”, she puts on the paper. Rose was eighteen when she married Michel Zirafa. He had fifteen and a half. We are in 1990 and the two young people, whose love is then described as “fusional”, obtained a derogation to be able to marry. Twenty-eight years later, she will execute it with a bullet to the head.
Beyond the facts, it is over these twenty-eight years that the Rhône Assize Court will have to look, where Rose Filippazzo is to appear from Wednesday for “spouse murder”. On this union that has withered, where small and big lies seem to have constantly collided, to the point that it is for the moment impossible to know where the truth lies on the path of these broken lives.
This certainty remains: Michel Zirafa was shot in the head one night in September 2018. And it took seven months before his wife Rose admitted to being the author of the fatal blow. Is it this “morbid jealousy”, which many witnesses have described, which consumed the couple to the point that Rose committed the irreparable? Was the motive more trivially financial? Was it years of physical and moral violence that finally pushed her to kill her husband? Or is it all of these at once? Before concluding the story of her life written in prison, Rose had written: “Now I am awaiting my trial, I will be condemned, but what difference, finally? I have always been punished. »
“My husband is dead! »
It is noon on September 21, 2018, when the gendarmes arrive at a place called Rochet in Thurins, a town in the suburbs of Lyon. They were warned by a neighbor who, a little earlier, heard Rose shout: “My husband is dead! Go see if he breathes anyway! But Michel Zirafa is no longer breathing. His body is even in an advanced state of putrefaction. The two forensic doctors in charge of autopsying his body found a tearing of the scalp and a hole with a diameter of two millimeters at the level of the head. A scanner can detect the presence of a metallic foreign body compatible with a firearm projectile: a single bullet took his life.
These two, they love each other as much as they hate each other.
Rose Filippazzo is heard the same day as a witness. She tells investigators of a “complicated” couple life, but their inability to separate. Michel had discovered in January 2017 that she was dating another man. This had triggered a black anger in him. The day he found out, he would also have come to the pizzeria belonging to the couple and would have broken everything before physically attacking Rose. He had then liquidated his masonry company and the couple had moved. From that day on, Rose and Michel will never really live together again. He moved into the house in Thurins, Rose rented a cottage in Charlieu, a few kilometers away. They live together “on an interim basis”, as Rose will tell the gendarmes. She continues to see her lover, there is also a rumor that Michel has mistresses, which greatly displeases Rose. She will also contact one of them in the summer of 2018 to make him understand that she does not intend to divorce. Two of these women will later confide to the investigators that they never had an intimate relationship with Michel, who had nevertheless done everything possible to seduce them – and to make the idylls credible. “These two, they love each other as much as they hate each other”, had summarized a relative.
From the union between Rose and Michel were born two daughters, Sandrine and Lisa. The first, the eldest, indicates that according to her, her parents still live together. The youngest affirms that her mother has already told her that she was beaten by her father. If she has never witnessed violence, she confirms that the couple argued frequently. She reports “significant” and “reciprocal” jealousy in both parents. On the Michel side, we describe a man who is “neither aggressive nor threatening”, his father and his brother know of no enemy. So we’re interested in the couple’s criminal history. Little by little, another reality is taking shape. The investigators discover that a procedure for suspicion of violence against a minor was initiated in 2011 by the Roanne prosecutor’s office concerning Sandrine. The latter, aged 17, had confided to having suffered humiliating punishments inflicted by her mother. At the time, Rose retorted that her daughter was “jealous” and disputed the charges. We also discover a procedure of open violence against Michel, initiated by his wife after the violent crisis that occurred at the pizzeria. He had then been the subject of a reminder to the law.
Two opposing versions
In July 2017, Rose will launch another procedure, for harassment this time. The latter explains that since the episode of the pizzeria, her husband no longer wants her to work. She says she is the target of insults, humiliations and incessant calls from him and also denounces physical violence committed in July 2017, during which she was seized by the arm and thrown to the ground by her husband. It was his daughter Lisa who would have intervened to stop her father. Placed in police custody in the process, Michel Zirafa had recognized the violence in the pizzeria but denies the others and explains on the contrary that he had to seize his wife to prevent her from injuring herself. Heard, Lisa remembers the scene and confirms that her father was not violent but that he had to intervene to prevent her mother from biting herself.
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The couple’s finances are also scrutinized. The study of bank accounts reveals that Michel used to balance his various accounts by transfers. As for Rose, she makes numerous transfers for her benefit from the joint accounts. She also owns 50% of her husband’s masonry company, and had, at the time of the pizzeria, the majority of the shares. The investigators also discovered that in the period following Michel’s death, the couple’s joint account was in debt for a sum of more than 5,600 euros. Online shopping, especially for clothes and shoes. It also appears that Rose is the main beneficiary of the insurance contracts taken out by her husband in the event of his death. To better understand this couple, the gendarmes continue to hear many witnesses. Mirror statements. While those close to Michel spoke of a calm man, those of Rose describe a man capable of getting very angry. Many, on the other hand, agree to speak of a man with mythomaniac tendencies and quick to manipulate.
” Black Widow “
By studying the couple’s telephony, the gendarmes end up determining with some precision the date of Michel’s death. They notice that Rose and Michel have daily contact until September 16, 2018. From that day, only three calls and one SMS are recorded over a period of three days, all from Rose’s cell phone. Michel, he will never issue a communication again. The military also note these text messages, where Rose’s lover calls her a “black widow”. “It was joking”, he will justify later, swearing also to be completely foreign to the murder of Michel Zirafa.
In April 2019, Rose was arrested and placed in police custody. It was at the fourth audition that she confessed to having killed her husband. To the investigators, she recounts the evening of September 15. The dinner at the restaurant with Michel, the mutual reproaches about extramarital affairs, Thurins’ return home, a new argument, Michel going for a drive to calm down. Everything she had already said so far. Except that this time, she no longer pretends to have calmly returned home. She talks about going to bed, Michel falling asleep on the sofa in the living room in front of the television and the laughter she thinks she hears and which would have chilled her. She says that she then grabbed her husband’s revolver, stood behind him, closed her eyes and then fired.
Control or influence?
At the examining magistrate, Rose will recount her life with Michel, all the physical violence she says she has suffered, although no one has witnessed it directly – in terms of physical manifestations, at the very least. She will thus explain having been, for years, raped by her husband every Sunday afternoon. Her daughters, who visit her regularly in the visiting room, have for their part adopted a discourse quite close to that of Rose. After saying that she had never seen her father being violent towards her mother, Lisa finally reports scenes quite similar to those described by Rose. She recounts, for example, an episode during which her father allegedly punched her mother in the stomach, which she places in 2017. Do these developments mark the end of Michel’s hold on his daughter? Or should we see the words of a young girl under the influence? It will be up to the Assize Court to disentangle the true from the false, or rather the true from the less true. To dissipate the gray areas.
An underlying desire for independence.
By way of hope for understanding, perhaps it will be necessary to rely on psychiatric experts, often considered the last springs capable of unraveling the mysteries that the mind tends to hide. At the end of an expertise carried out in June 2019, a psychiatrist had noted in Rose a psychological suffering in connection with the parental couple which put her “in dependency”, leaving her little autonomy. The expert explains that as an adult, Rose reproduced in her own couple a “situation of influence”. Another will note that the dependent traits observed counterbalance “an underlying desire for independence”, which will take shape with the extramarital relationship. The latter also insists on a “psychic fragility” associated with a “moral pain” which he considers linked to a life of “repeated” abuse, verbal and sexual violence.
During this trial, Rose will be defended by Mr.e Janine Bonaggiunta, who was the lawyer for Jacqueline Sauvage and Valérie Bacot, two women victims of domestic violence who killed their husband. The first had been sentenced to ten years in prison, then pardoned by President Hollande. A political choice that had been controversial at the time. She died in July 2020. The second, raped, prostituted and beaten daily by her husband, was released at the end of her trial in June 2021. What give some clues about the defense that Rose Flippazzo intends to adopt at the hearing which opens this Wednesday, and which promises rich debates. The trial is expected to last three days.