Friday 1er July 2022, Dino Scala, 61, was found guilty by the Northern Assize Court of 54 sexual assaults and rapes between 1988 and 2018 – he is suspected of having committed more. Sentenced to twenty years in prison, the “rapist of the Sambre” appealed and a new trial is to be held in 2024.
In his masterful book Sambre, radioscopy of a news item (JC Lattès), Alice Géraud, former journalist for Release and the site Days, retraces this dizzying affair and delivers the result of four years of investigation into a mystery: how could this man attack and rape dozens of women for thirty years, along the same road, without being worried? How could he escape justice despite the dozens of complaints filed in the police stations and gendarmeries of this tiny territory of the Val de Sambre (North)?
His investigation (which will be adapted in series by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade) is overwhelming for the police and judicial institution, ineffective in the face of sexual violence, indifferent and sometimes cruel towards the victims. From this disaster emerge some luminous and heroic figures: relatives of victims, police officers and doctors. Among them, the former mayor of Louvroil (North) Annick Mattighello, now 72 years old.
An unbroken rage
This Lille native of modest origins worked from the age of 14. She entered as a worker at Thomson in Lesquin at 18, became a trade unionist, secretary of the CGT of steelworkers, elected PCF in Lille and climbed all the levels of her party to become the first secretary of the powerful communist federation of the North.
On February 8, 2002, this little blonde woman, then mayor of Louvroil for almost a year, received a panicked phone call from the concierge of the municipal gymnasium. Something bad happened to Monique (whose last name is not mentioned in the book), the housekeeper. When she arrives, the scene witnessed by Annick Mattighello is trying: the woman is prostrate, half-naked. She was sexually assaulted by a stranger. The chosen one takes Monique to the hospital herself and tells her that she must file a complaint right away.
“They threatened to prosecute me for obstructing the investigation: because of me, the rapist was going to run away. Annick Mattighello
It was twenty years ago and his anger is intact. The reading of Samber revived his ” rage “ of the time. A “great rage” when she learned that three other women had been assaulted, two of them in her commune. All described the same thing: at dawn, a man appeared behind them, grabbed their necks, threatened to plant them with his Opinel before raping them or attempting to do so.
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