Cécile Brossard confessed to shooting Edouard Stern during a sado-masochistic tryst, but claimed it was a crime of passion, writes LARA MARLOWE in Paris
CÉCILE BROSSARD’S guilt was never in doubt. The Frenchwoman confessed to shooting her lover dead during a sado-masochistic tryst on February 28th, 2005. The only outstanding question was how the court would classify the killing: cold-blooded murder or a crime of passion? A Swiss jury yesterday handed down a verdict of homicide. Brossard’s prison sentence, of up to 20 years, will be announced this evening.
Had the defence convinced the jury that the murder was a crime of passion, Brossard might have got off with as little as one year.
Edouard Stern, a scion of continental banking aristocracy, was 50 years old when Brossard, then 36, pumped four bullets into him. His personal fortune was estimated at €1 billion, making him the 38th richest man in France. Wire agencies noted that Stern was a friend of President Nicolas Sarkozy and the former prime minister Laurent Fabius.
The charge of premeditated murder was dropped in what was interpreted as an attempt to limit the scandal, for Brossard, a sort of modern-day courtesan, knows much about the sexual peccadillos of the rich and powerful in France.
A single phrase, uttered by Stern during the couple’s sex game, acted as a “trigger” that sent Brossard into a murderous rage, the defendant’s lawyers claimed. On February 28th, 2005, Brossard’s bank confirmed to her that Stern had blocked the $1 million deposit he’d promised as proof of love for her.
Brossard had initiated Stern to sado-masochistic sex. On the night of the murder, she took her black tights with the slit, boots and leather whip to Stern’s apartment. He donned a flesh-coloured latex jumpsuit and sat astride a chair, with ropes on his hands and feet, while Brossard whipped him.
“We were completely caught up in our game and the relation was very intense,” Brossard told police investigators. “Then he stared me in the eyes and said: ‘A million dollars is expensive for a whore’.”
Brossard described “an explosion in my head, as if lightning had struck my soul. I was dumbfounded, shaken. I understood what it meant, that I wasn’t going to marry him.”
Brossard went to the dresser that held the couple’s sex toys. “I’d seen handguns in the top drawer before. I pointed the gun at his face and opened fire for the first time. The gun must have been 10 centimetres from his face. I think I hit him between the eyes. He rose up, turned halfway around and fell on his side.” Stern was an avid hunter. During their four years together, one of the few gifts he gave Brossard was the skin of a bear he’d shot in Siberia.
In its coverage of the trial, Paris Match magazine published a full-page photograph of Stern and Brossard standing over an impala he’d just shot between the eyes. “I had an image of Edouard in Africa, hunting,” Brossard recounted. “I remembered that he didn’t like to finish animals off, because he liked to watch them suffer before they died. It flashed before me, and I didn’t want him to suffer. So I fired one or two shots into his body.”
Brossard fled the apartment, flew to Australia, then back to Geneva. For two weeks she denied the killing, telling friends the Mafia staged the murder to look like a sex crime.
“Half of Paris knew Edouard was into bizarre things,” she said in a wire-tap obtained by police.
The louche world of kept women from troubled backgrounds crashed into the propriety of the grande bourgeoisie at Brossard’s trial.
Stern’s ex-wife, Beatrice David-Weill, herself a banker’s daughter, and blue-blazered executives from the Lazard and HSBC banks and Chanel, testified how “cultivated”, “brilliant” and “charming” Stern was, an attentive father to his three children.
But testimony about Stern’s sexual perversions made a deeper impression. “Edouard made it clear he wanted me to bring him other women,” Brossard testified. Svetlana L, a tall, slender blond Russian, told the court she agreed to a threesome out of friendship for Brossard. The women dressed as schoolgirls, in pleated skirts and bobby socks. Afterwards, “Edouard sat on the balcony, reading a magazine about the 100 richest people in the world. He was very disappointed not to be in it,” Svetlana testified.
Stern took Brossard on his private jet to Africa and New York. But he often humiliated her. When she attempted to break off the relationship, he waited for hours outside her home, bombarded her with phone calls and text messages.
A friend testified to having found Brossard hiding in the cellar, “howling like a beast, with a black eye” after an encounter with Stern.
During more than four years in prison, Brossard has repeatedly been interned in the psychiatric ward, and attempted suicide at least once. Defence lawyers and psychiatrists emphasised her dreadful childhood: parents who separated when she was three, a father who flaunted his wild sex life and fondled his daughter.
Brossard’s mother and aunt confirmed she was raped by an uncle. When Brossard was a child, her mother attempted a triple suicide, putting her head and those of Cécile and her sister in a gas oven.
Brossard continues to profess love for Stern. “I killed him because I couldn’t break off. Killing isn’t breaking off. I broke off with life, but not with Edouard.” Brossard claims that Stern communicates with her in her prison cell.
Perhaps, as Oscar Wilde wrote, all men kill the thing they love.