Verdict on surviving French rebel without a cause today

She sits in the dock in the Paris assize court, small and frail, hunched over between two gendarmes. The face of 23-year-old Florence Rey is infinitely sad and lonely. From time to time, she wipes tears from her cheeks. When she is asked to speak, she stammers and cannot complete her sentences.

The jury has had two weeks to assess the 25-minute killing spree which left five people dead on the night of October 4th, 1994, including three policemen and Rey's lover and evil demon, Audry Maupin. Rey is charged with armed robbery, murder and attempted murder, and the verdict will be handed down tonight.

The couple's gratuitously violent flight through Paris provoked demands for the death penalty following the murders. Killing policemen is not a crime taken lightly, and Rey's lawyers would consider her fortunate to receive less than 20 years - she could get life imprisonment. Whatever the outcome, Florence Rey, who as a timid girl of 19 committed un crime d'amour fou, and her charismatic, stubborn, angry boyfriend will go down in popular legend as France's rebels without a cause.

At her trial, Rey's mother Anne-Marie, a school teacher, insisted the family was "normal". Neither she nor Florence could bring themselves to speak of the mental illness of their husband and father, Jean. While Florence was growing up, her father talked about swords, witchcraft and skeletons. Her depressed brother stayed in his bedroom, while Florence and her mother moved as little as possible and did not turn on the television so as not to provoke Jean's hallucinations.

When she was 18, Florence Rey fell in love with her best friend Lysiane's brother Audry, four years her senior. The couple became squatters in Nanterre, a university suburb near Paris where Audry studied philosophy and Florence tried medicine, then literature. Maupin's friends shared his interest in extreme left-wing anarchist ideology. "Audry told me once that he wanted to destroy everything," his mother, Chantal Wattelet, testified. "He didn't want to work for a boss. For him, it meant selling oneself, being exploited."

Florence Rey tried to prove herself by reading books on crime and revolution. "I tried to read what Audry read," she explained, "to have things to say to him." On September 30th, 1994, she went to the Samaritaine department store and purchased a pump action shotgun, to please Audry.

Four nights later, Maupin hatched a scheme to rob weapons from policemen guarding towed cars at the Porte de Pantin in north-east Paris. From now on, he decided, he and Florence would live from the proceeds of hold-ups. After taking the policemen's revolvers, Maupin and Rey intended to take the metro back to their squat in Nanterre. But the couple panicked because they had planned to handcuff the policemen, but then found the police had no handcuffs.

So they hijacked a taxi and took a hostage, Dr Georges Monnier. "My impression was that they were two young anarchists, very committed," Dr Monnier testified. "One of these mythical couples who remind you of Bonnie and Clyde . . . Two youths who had broken with society." Dr Monnier tried to ease the tension by talking. "No psychology, Dr Freud," Florence Rey snapped at him.

Amadou Diallo, the African taxi-driver, deliberately crashed his car into a police vehicle at the Place de la Nation, shouting, "They are bandits. They want to kill me!" Audry Maupin shot Diallo dead, then opened fire on the police car, less than a metre away, killing two policemen and wounding a third as he tried to run away. Dr Monnier recalls Florence Rey placing one knee on the ground and "calmly, with sang-froid and professionalism, systematically recharging her shotgun."

The couple hijacked a second car, a Renault 5 driven by Jacky Bensimon. Still traumatised by the ensuing shoot-out, Bensimon asked police to remove the pump action shotguns on display in the courtroom. Police cars and motorcycles pursued them. "Florence Rey put the shotgun in my ribs," he recalled. "She said, `If you stop, I'll shoot you'. I was scared. I braked. I threw myself out of the car. Bullets crackled in every direction." A third policeman and Audry Maupin were shot dead in the Bois de Vincennes. As Maupin collapsed dying on the dashboard, a policeman saw Rey throw her arms around him and kiss him.

Ballistic experts concluded that the fatal shots were fired by Maupin, not Rey, although one of her bullets wounded Guy Jacob, a policeman killed by her lover. "He killed everyone," Chantal Wattelet told the courtroom of her son. "I think no one could have stopped him that night. Only a bullet could stop him." Her daughter Lysiane pleaded for clemency. "Audry paid for what he did," she said. "Florence shouldn't have to take the punishment he can't take."

In the weeks following her arrest, Rey uttered only one sentence: "I didn't kill anyone." But tonight, jurors must also weigh the suffering of the couple's victims. Brigitte Jacob, herself a policewoman, lived with Guy and had a son with him. As they had promised one another, and according to police tradition, she married Guy after he was murdered. "I had to go to the town hall for the ceremony," Brigitte Jacob said. "And the chair next to me was empty . . . I want one thing: that Florence Rey not be paroled early. Some day she will get out of prison. When Guy died, I died with him. My life is over."