Her name was Claire Reynier, she was 39 years old and she was killed for nothing. Literally. His murder, gratuitous, mind-blowing, will be judged from Monday in Nîmes, before the Assize Court of Gard.
The accused who will appear in the box is a young man of barely 26 years old. Mathieu Danel has never denied being the author of this crime. He even came to report himself to the police before the victim’s body was found. On June 21, 2018, he went to the Montélimar police station to say he had killed a woman two days earlier. He didn’t know her. But he wanted to kill, to know what it felt like. And it fell on her.
According to the incredible statements they made in police custody and then during the investigation, Mathieu Danel was in his car when he picked up Claire Reynier hitchhiking in Montélimar. She wanted to go to Sommières, a small town located between Nîmes and Montpellier. He led her there and the current obviously went well between them since they walked together in the streets of the city, before having dinner in a pizzeria and continuing the evening in a field, talking until around midnight.
They spent five hours together and according to his story, he offered her a sexual relationship, but she refused.
On leaving, Mathieu Danel returned to his car, where he kept a dagger waiting to realize his desires for murder. He grabbed it, approached Claire Reynier, and hit her on the neck, head and chest. The medical examiner will count 17 wounds.
“I didn’t get what I thought I would get. In fact, it didn’t make me happy, I found it very neutral. So it wasn’t worth starting over. But as it was done and that she was going to be discovered, I preferred to take the lead.”
Mathieu Danel, while in police custody
She or someone else, “it was the same”
It was on leaving the pizzeria that the young man decided to “take action”. Mathieu Danel assures that he targeted the vital areas of the body so that “death happens as quickly as possible”. Before that, Claire Reynier would have told her that she did not want to die. But he replied that it was “nothing personal”. Whether it was her or someone else, “it was the same”…
Mathieu Danel then went to bed. The next day, he “went for a walk” and spent “a quiet day”, wrote the investigating judge in her order for dismissal. But the young man was disappointed. He did not feel the pleasure he thought in killing. No adrenaline rush, no pride. So he surrendered. Otherwise, he would have started again, he explains.
A young man with no history, a good student with a baccalaureate with “fairly good” honors, Mathieu Danel lived with his parents and scraped by with a few temporary assignments. A conviction for spousal violence with a weapon in 2016, however, betrays a potentially violent nature.
For several years, he had “murderous desires”. He had even told his parents about it, and on online forums. He had also watched videos of Daesh executions. But to know what sensations it gave, no choice: you had to kill. “You can’t know if you like a dish before you’ve tasted it,” he told the examining magistrate.
In police custody, a police officer is surprised to see this young man who accuses himself of murder remaining “linearly calm”. “He does not express any feelings of regret, remorse or pain,” notes the investigator.
“He didn’t kill for nothing. He had a reason: to know what it feels like.
Me Anthony Chabert, lawyer for the victim’s family
“It’s more complicated than that, says Me Jérôme Arnal. He is a boy who was failing at school, emotionally and professionally. It could have worked too. The defense lawyer sees in the trial the possibility of shedding light on the springs of a crime which, according to him, is less simple than it appears.
“I think he will assume until the end”, predicts for his part Me Anthony Chabert. The council of parents and Claire Reynier’s sister explains that her clients “do not know how they will react to such coldness”. “That it happened to this victim, who had a psychiatric illness, makes it all the more painful,” he said.
The victim’s parents have “no hatred” and they “expect nothing” from this trial, adds the Montpellier lawyer, who rejects the term gratuitous crime: “He did not kill for nothing. He had a reason: to know what it feels like.
“Lack of empathy”
Several psychiatric experts looked into the case of Mathieu Danel during the investigation.
The first concluded to a “psychic disorder having slightly altered his discernment”. No mental or psychiatric pathology, no depressive or bipolar disorder: “its dangerousness is not psychiatric but criminological”, writes the expert.
The second detects “no disturbance”. The dynamic of Mathieu Danel “is that found in serial killers”, describes Dr. Coutanceau. The murder of Claire Reynier is in his eyes “a mark of singularity constituting an achievement, even a work. For him, daring this act is more important than the fate he inflicted on the victim and his family, with an absence of empathy. »
The last college of experts also concludes that there is no mental disorder. “There is a potential for recurrence,” say the two psychiatrists.
Returned to the assizes for murder, Mathieu Danel faces life imprisonment. His lawyer, however, hopes to bring down the premeditation: “That he thought about the question of killing is one thing. But he did not form a specific plan for it to be that person, in that place since it was the unfortunate victim herself who took him there, ”says Me Arnal.
The verdict is expected on Wednesday.