The crime of a “pervert”: the North Assize Court on Friday sentenced David Ramault to life imprisonment with 25 years of security for the kidnapping, rape and murder of Angélique, 12, in 2018 in Wambrechies, near Lille. If the court did not go as far as the requisitions of the general counsel, who had requested a security period of 30 years, it provided that the former bus driver and father of two boys be the subject, at the end of his sentence, a re-examination of his situation “with a view to possible preventive detention”.
“A plan of rape that has been prepared”
The sentence pronounced must make it possible to enter “in a real and constant process of care, in particular concerning your perverse type of functioning which you did not want to depart from for a period of more than 20 years”, explained President Sylvie to him. Karas. In the front row of the courtroom, Angélique’s relatives had dressed for the verdict in a purple T-shirt bearing the photo of the smiling little girl.
Judged since Tuesday, David Ramault, 48, “has crossed a limit difficult to imagine, (…) The rape and murder of a child, kidnapped, kidnapped, beaten, soiled, strangled, transported in a suitcase, and abandoned in a wood”, launched in his indictment the Advocate General Carole Étienne, in a heavy silence.
“Today you have to judge a sexual crime, a sadistic crime, which consisted in looking for a fragile and vulnerable victim, in manipulating her, with the aim of reducing her to a sexual object (…) to achieve enjoyment” , she summarized to the jurors. Already convicted in 1996 of raping a child of the same age, but without history for almost twenty years, this “recidivist” had “a plan of rape which was prepared”, and of which the murder was the culmination, a-t she estimated.
David Ramault had admitted not having been treated
On the first day of his trial, asking forgiveness from Angélique’s parents, David Ramault had admitted that he had not taken steps to treat himself, out of “shame” to admit his true nature. “I wanted to say that I accepted to be treated, not for me but for society,” he said on Friday before the court retired. Wednesday, April 25, 2018, he is alone at home in Wambrechies, his family on vacation. As often, he masturbates, then goes to Lille to buy an aphrodisiac to solve, according to him, his “sexual breakdowns”.
At the second stamp, he is taken, according to him, by a “malaise” and “obsessive thoughts”, and goes out to “get some fresh air” near a park where his former neighbor, Angélique, plays. Seeing it, “I had a desire, an impulse”. He promises her a present for her parents, locks her up, rapes her and strangles her. “All these facts, which he reduced to a simple skid, a tripping of the cable”, are “not an impulse”, but a trap, which “had only one goal, to abuse its victim and ‘eliminate’, according to the Advocate General.
“A perverse and sadistic psychopath”
He immediately “concerned himself with covering his tracks, methodically”, she recalled. He put the body in a suitcase in his wife’s car before buying a shovel from a garden store. She also highlighted the “serious personality disorders” of the accused, a “sadistic sexual predator” according to experts. “If here, we try to deceive, deep in our humanity, we want it to disappear”, dropped in his argument the lawyer for the accused, Me Éric Demey, referring to the death penalty which must ” running through the minds of some”.
But “he is not built like us (…) He is a psychopath, perverse and sadistic”, he launched. “This perversity is what allows him to survive”, yet “for twenty years, he will succeed in repressing what he is”, “keep extinguishing the monster that slumbers in him”, and will be ” a good husband, a good father, invested”. Convicting him “to the maximum and final sentence will he make men better?”, he questioned, asking the jurors, “in the name of this hope to heal” to “leave ‘enclosure a little light’.