The voice taken by sobs, Louis François came to the bar of the Annecy court to tell the unthinkable and the atrocious during the trial of Albert B.: the death of his wife Morgane Nauwelaers, 33-year-old psychologist and mother of an 18 month old child. She was killed on August 26, 2020 by a pensioner’s gunshot, 53 cm from her face, as she was about to report this man for sexual assault on his granddaughter. Indeed, the daughter of the latter was the patient of the psychologist and had confided to her his actions on her child, but also on her when she was younger. The Parisian reported the harrowing speech of the victim’s husband, broken for life. Louis François witnessed the death of his wife live because he worked in the same firm as her. He was the one who disarmed the crazed gunman.
They had both met in the school of psychologists. “For me, she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Even with her face ripped off and in agony… She had a very deep gaze. We had known each other at the school of psychologists. When she was killed, we were living in a small house that we had fixed up together. We often went to the theater“, says Louis François of his wife, the psychologist Morgane Nauwelaers with whom he lived in Annecy. Despite the violence of the facts, he manages to address the assassin: “You killed my wife. The mother of my child. My best friend. My colleague. My soulmate. She is irreplaceable.“
How to survive such a tragedy? The inconsolable husband confides in a very precise way: “It is a physical, psychic pain. It hurts in every fucking inch of his skin. Attacks of intense, unbearable pain. I felt dead several times a day. I could no longer bear to see the others with living faces while Morgane left with a bruised face.” Whether “nothing can fix such a tragedy“, he had to keep moving forward for their son Stanislas, whose experience will long haunt those who attended the hearing: “I saw my son looking for his mother. It’s horrible to see your child suffer like this. When I give him a present, he asks: Is it from mum? He needs to bring it to life.”
On June 23, 2022, the Haute-Savoie Assize Court sentenced Albert B. to 30 years in prison for “murder”, approving the opinion of Advocate General Line Bonnet-Mathis, for whom premeditation does not matter. doubt.