BELGIUM: A Brussels court was due last night to sentence Genevieve Simenon, great-niece of the Belgian thriller writer, after she admitted killing her partner of six years.
In a case worthy of Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret, Genevieve Simenon bludgeoned her lover to death with a mallet and persuaded a doctor, with whom she once had an affair, to write a death certificate, saying the dead man had suffered a heart attack.
The murder might never have been discovered but for the fact that a funeral home employee discovered blows to the corpse's head and noticed that one ear had been almost beaten off.
Simenon, a 42 year-old rheumatologist, told the court that the 55-year-old victim, Georges Temperman, was a violent and abusive hypochondriac who routinely insulted her. On the night of the murder, she "saw red" when he demanded that one of her three daughters by a previous marriage should leave the house. She reached for a mallet that lay on a toolbox and struck her lover on the head 18 times.
"I don't know what happened," she said.
Simenon, who is overweight and suffers from bulimia, described her childhood as miserable and claimed that her father and great-uncle were Nazi collaborators. Challenged by prosecutors, she insisted she could prove that the mystery writer, who died in 1989 aged 86, had helped German occupation forces.
She claimed that Temperman taunted her by calling her a "Nazi child" and complained she had become too fat and was starting to look like her mother. Evidence presented at the trial portrayed the victim as an odious person who sponged off his wife while conducting a number of parallel affairs.
The judge expressed scepticism about Simenon's version of events, not least because she injected Temperman with a massive dose of valium hours before she killed him. After the murder, Simenon scrubbed the blood from the corpse and rearranged the crime scene.
The funeral home worker reported his discovery to his boss, a former detective, whose suspicions had already been aroused by the haste with which Simenon wanted her dead lover cremated. Simenon told police at first that Temperman had fallen against a dresser during his heart attack but after a night of questioning, she admitted that she had killed him.
The doctor who signed the death certificate and with whom Simenon had an affair in 1984, was arrested but released when he explained that the victim's head was covered while he conducted his examination.
Georges Simenon wrote more than 400 books, including 84 Maigret stories. His books have been out of print in English for 10 years but there are plans to reissue some Maigret stories later this year.
The writer was, by most accounts, a thoroughly unpleasant individual who boasted that he had slept with 10,000 women, most of them prostitutes.