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Sophie Narme was found dead with her Chanel belt around her neck on the floor of a Paris flat she had shown to a client that day.
Her hands were tied. She was face down. Her pants were around her ankles. The 23-year-old estate agent had been drugged, raped, strangled and stabbed with a knife on Rue Marin, on December 4, 1991.
Her supposed client’s identity – ‘Duboste’, who had demanded an urgent viewing the day before – turned out to be fake, as did his address. With no witnesses, the case went cold for decades.
Eight years later, an 18-year-old woman – also an estate agent, known by the pseudonym Marion- narrowly escaped a strikingly similar attack.
On May 11, 1999, a man going by the name ‘Rigot’ showed up at Marion’s agency asking to visit an apartment.
Inside the Seine-et-Marne flat, in Paris, the man pounced. When Marion bent down to take room measurements, she felt a knife against her neck while a piece of fabric soaked in ether – the same anaesthetic used on Sophie – was pressed over her mouth.
She kicked her attacker in the genitals and locked herself in a room. He fled.
But this time there was a trace – blood found on Marion’s shoes. She had seen his face and could help investigators draw a portrait of the suspect.
In August 2022, police found a DNA match. Two months later, Marion, now 43, identified the same man the DNA was pointing to – Dominique Pelicot.
Mr Pelicot is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for drugging his wife Gisèle, raping her and inviting 72 men to rape her while unconscious.
In total, 50 men were sentenced for raping, attempting to rape, and sexually assaulting Gisèle after a three-month trial last month.
Her ordeal continued for 10 years, from the time the family lived in Paris and after they had moved miles away to Mazan.
The abuse only came to light after Mr Pelicot was caught upskirting women at a supermarket in Carpentras in September 2020.
Police discovered thousands of pictures and videos of the rapes of Gisèle, stored on a computer folder named ‘abuse’.
It set in motion the events that exposed Mr Pelicot as the ‘Monster of Avignon’ and made Gisèle a hero when by foregoing her right to anonymity by opening the trial to the public, to confront her husband and the other men who abused her, and to show the world what ordinary men are capable of.
But it also opened new avenues of investigation in the cold cases of Sophie Narme and Marion.
After his 2020 arrest, Mr Pelicot’s DNA was run through the system and matched with the blood found on Marion’s shoes for the attack in 1999. He admitted it during last year’s trial for the offences against Gisèle.
Now behind bars, 72-year-old Mr Pelicot is being questioned over both the attempted rape of Marion and the rape and murder of Sophie Narme, which he said he has ‘nothing to do’ with.
Florence Rault, a lawyer representing both the Narme family and Marion, said: ‘This assault is an exact copy of the assault that Sophie Narme was the victim of.
‘I remain convinced that Marion would have suffered the same fate as Sophie if she had not been lucky enough to escape him.’
French investigators plan to compare Mr Pelicot’s DNA with traces found at the scenes of the rapes or sexual assaults of five other female estate agents, and the murder or one, between 1991 and 2004.
It raises questions over whether Pelicot could have been caught sooner, after the attack on Marion but before the rapes of Gisèle.
He had been caught upskirting in Seine-et-Marne in 2020, after which a public prosecutor was asked to compare his DNA with the evidence found in Marion’s case. But this never happened.
Rault said: ‘The prosecutor’s office did not do its job, perhaps also the investigating judges.’
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