Latest / DEADBUG SAYS / Murder By Design | The Dominici Affair

Transcript

Murder By Design | The Dominici Affair · DEADBUG SAYS

• 0:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the following podcast dialogue has been condensed from trial transcripts.
• 0:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: The story is a recreation of an actual criminal case in France, and has been adapted to a podcast from one of my films.
• 0:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this is a deadbuck podcast and may not be suitable for those of a a sensitive nature.
• 0:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you said it.
• 0:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Pursies.
• 0:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: So please,
• 1:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: They say that blood is thicker than water, but family just isn't about blood, families about faith, loyalty, and who you love, and if you don't have those things, I don't care what the blood says, you ain't got nothing.
• 2:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: This episode, the Dominacy affair.
• 2:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: With a touch of 30 meters.
• 2:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: A star of three seconds.
• 2:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, at night.
• 2:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: By 1952, the Cold War had well and truly started, along with the nuclear race.
• 2:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: with the Soviet Union explode in their first nuclear bomb.
• 2:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the US responded with a hydrogen bomb.
• 2:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: Letnikami's know that their filthy ideals won't welcome.
• 2:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: Although I'd like to say personally, this doesn't include their vodka or this tripus, but the cultural impact in the 1950s of the Cold War cannot be understated.
• 2:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: But it was also a new era in Great Britain.
• 2:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: When 25-year-old Princess Elizabeth left for a visit to Kenya at Princess, but returned to Queen with the unexpected death of a father King George.
• 3:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: But her reign would also bring about the gradual decline of England's once great empire.
• 3:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the UK wasn't the only country to realize that the party was over.
• 3:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: The French were hesitant to release their Stranglehold on their captured territories as well, fight the Gooks in Indochina, which would eventually escalate into the Vietnam War.
• 3:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: As well as still trying to recover from their pathetic showing in WW2, which earned them a well-deserved reputation as a nation of cowards.
• 3:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: But then being a nation of yellow bellies didn't hurt that tourists trade any, because it seemed like in the early 1950s that all of Europe was flocking to their beaches.
• 3:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the South of France became the number one playground, if you were filthy rich, and in the end crowd.
• 3:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And although many of the well-heeled like to take planes for the short flight to that destination, it was the more adventurous who chose to take a ferry and explore the country by automobile.
• 4:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the journey wasn't the polished post-card version we might have imagined today.
• 4:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Miss Lowea, we're up for around the edges, and in many ways more, I just really don't want to put about a word.
• 4:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: The journey itself was part of the experience, you were in a small car, maybe something modest to practical, act-tight with luggage, windows rolled down because the Wempo had a conditioning.
• 4:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: The roads weren't fast, but always we know now.
• 4:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: Instead, you were driving along winding national roads that cut directly through villages, pass peels, bombs, where the farmers tended to their cows.
• 4:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: And through long stretches of countryside that felt almost untouched, every few hours you'd stop, not only for convenience, but necessary because you need a patrol.
• 4:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: And stations with fuel, the fob of the clean,
• 5:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the heat, while it could be relentless, but those stops became bought at the rhythm of the journey.
• 5:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: Quick train, stretch your legs, maybe a piece of bread or fruit, bought from a roadside stall, and with the limited branch you may know, you try to find out from the locals that y'all totally lost.
• 5:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: And when you finally arrive somewhere along the coast, don't be burned to the province, you're not checking for a luxury hotel.
• 5:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: You'll likely find a small family run guest house or rent a room where you'd stay.
• 5:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: The kind of place, the simple furniture, shattered windows to keep out the sun, with the faint smell of local farms being carried on the wind.
• 5:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: And what's there?
• 5:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's nothing to do but relax.
• 5:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: Family stroll through the village streets, cafes fill up and there's a sense the time has slowed down.
• 6:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's really the key to it, traveling through the South of France in the 1950s, wasn't about luxury or escape in the way we think holidays now.
• 6:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was about movement, the discovery, and the small lot was the south of insects in the evening.
• 6:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: The days to something fresh, we've never had before, the feeling of being somewhere different, but not yet shaped for the rest.
• 6:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: and the drumants were one of those well-heeled families who decided to pack up their bags and leave the busy city life of London and had for the quiet life for the South of France.
• 6:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: To enjoy rural life where they'd imagined a bottle of wine waiting for them at every corner along with stinky cheeses and baskets of freshly baked bread.
• 6:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Hell, kids hadn't even been infested yet, and I guess as they climbed into that car, they figured they were riding a gravy train with biscuit wheels, but nothing in this life is facet life.
• 7:12
  [UNKNOWN]: My thanks.
• 7:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: Besides Jack Drummond, he wasn't your run-of-the-mill tourist.
• 7:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: A distinguished biochemist known for his nutrition work with the British government during World War II, creating recipes for the food-strapped population.
• 7:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: People of Great Britain and the government, Otama, that of gratitude, but their room as the Jack Drummond wasn't just cooking up tasty treats and a pix-nouts and cows' assholes.
• 7:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: and that there was extra curricular activity spying for the English government.
• 7:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there were also rumors that his visit, the France, was an all-pleasure.
• 7:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because conveniently, where he'd planned to go camping, there was a chemical's factory, that had begun producing advanced crop insecticides, wildly feared during the cold war for their military potential.
• 7:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the drumman wasn't just taken pictures of the country's sun.
• 8:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: But either way, any information or jacked drumman's movements during this period are then on the ground,
• 8:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was a summer in 1952, and the official story was that the drummers were traveling to the south of France, to stay with friends, and a small town near Via Frange.
• 8:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: But it appears that before they reached that destination, they wanted to explore and see what the country had to offer.
• 8:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that included going to a small town on the 4th of August called Danyon, to enjoy a local tradition called Ashalatad, essentially a bullfight where the creature is an injured, while locals run from the bull and being that the French are renowned for running from danger.
• 8:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: My guess is that they'd be good at this, and I could add to this by referencing French and bullshit, but I don't want to come across as a bigot.
• 9:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now do that miscalculation in the travel schedule.
• 9:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: They will force to set up camp between a railway line and a road.
• 9:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: A local farmer, by the name of Gaston Dominici, who had been bringing in his flock, said he'd seen the drummers that night by the side of the road.
• 9:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this is collaborated on by the farmers on Gustav, who'd also see the family preparing to retire for the evening.
• 9:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Both said in that statement that in 1115 that night, a motorcycle is to driven up to their farmhouse and called out in a foreign language, and when they didn't answer, he left.
• 9:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: foreign language, eh?
• 9:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: I guess that narrows it down a bit.
• 9:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Let's call 5-0 out on this one, Chuck.
• 9:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was the very next morning at about 15 on August 5th, when it was unseasonably humid.
• 9:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: The police would call it out to an area just outside of Lure.
• 9:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Where shots have been heard.
• 10:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Body's been found.
• 10:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: The village was near Dania, her mode area, the countryside, of old Provence, and if that means fuck all to you, guess what?
• 10:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: And means fuck all to me too.
• 10:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: While cops arrived, they were led to three bodies, two adults, and a child.
• 10:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: All laying, covered in flies, and a pool of blood, and different locations.
• 10:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: When they checked papers in a nearby automobile, they found out that the steps had been British tourists.
• 10:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: The operative word.
• 10:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: had been tourists, because 61-year-old Jack Drummond is 44-year-old wife Anne and the 10-year-old daughter Elizabeth were now past tense.
• 10:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: The farmer signed Gustav Dominicine, said he'd heard gunshots at about 1 a.m. but it'd been too scared to investigate.
• 10:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: A Frenchman, too scared?
• 10:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: Go figure.
• 10:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: believing they were poachers, he went back to bed, got up at 5am, and went to investigate a landslide near the railway line from some irrigation that the family had been doing.
• 11:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: The journey from the family farmhouse to the landslide took him nearby the car, but surprisingly the frog farmer didn't check the family.
• 11:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: Only when he near the railway bridge did he see the tenor old daughter Elizabeth.
• 11:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was about 20 minutes later that he found the body of the parents, and that he flagged down a passing motorist and asked them to go to the nearby town and contact the police to tell them they'd found bodies.
• 11:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: The nearest major crime unit to D'Ania was in Nisse, but understaffed, they passed on their request to Marseille, about half a day's drive away, and that's if you were rushing, and it's almost unfathomable to consider.
• 11:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: that detectives didn't arrive at the crime scene until about 5 p.m. And when they did arrive, he had to wonder what the point was.
• 12:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because the crime scene had been compromised so badly, it wasn't even a crime scene.
• 12:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was a goddamn tourist attraction.
• 12:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: Both the bodies and the family car had been liberated of anything valuable.
• 12:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: Looters will literally stick in their hands in the pockets of the bodies, taking anything of value that they could find.
• 12:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Even one of Jack Drummond's gold teeth.
• 12:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: A local physician at the scene had examined 10-year-old Elizabeth Drummond's body.
• 12:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: She'd been found 200 yards away from the family station wagon and her parents' bodies.
• 12:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: He pointed out that although barefooted, a feet were clean, and without any cuts, which seems strange, ever-on-two legs had carried her there.
• 12:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: A face had been bashed to a pulp by a heavy-blunt object, and even stranger, Riga Mordes had yet to set in.
• 12:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: The French quack figured that the young girl had died, three whole hours after her parents.
• 13:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: The mother had been lying face down on a blanket near the car, with a paper back by her side.
• 13:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like she was having a goddamn picnic, shot three times in the heart, and a face bash to a pulp by what appeared a rifle but her husband on the other hand, nah, so much for shivery, because as she was being sent to the abyss, he appeared to be running like a bitch, but he only made it to the other side of the road.
• 13:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: I need to look three bullets to the heart and what appeared to be a defensive fool on his hand.
• 13:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: He would have had just about enough time to pray to his God.
• 13:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: And as French police and what seemed like half the town that a little poking around, the stock of a gun was found in the river near the Dada's body and a yard away, the rest of it.
• 13:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was a U.S. Army Rekola Carvine, almost certainly pillaged from a dead American soldier during the war, and by the time investigators arrived, the weapon had been passed around by half of France, meaning that any hopes of fingerprints were gone.
• 14:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: When the tactics interviewed the Dominacy family, they see the face of, like they'll hide something, and investigate as we're wondering why Gustav had heard shots in night before.
• 14:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: And didn't even check on the family in the morning.
• 14:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now while attempts to find out who owned the gun fell flat,
• 14:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: There were pretty certain there was someone local, I guess it's French.
• 14:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: To make matters worse, the detectors weren't local, and didn't speak the dialect, and they were met by a wall of peasant silence.
• 14:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: After all, it's not unheard of in a village like this for them to all be related, but if the Dominicis were playing Hallenkella, and Vestigate is one short outside us who saw something going on that night, and they weren't afraid this quark.
• 15:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: A truck driver's in a tall, heavy-set man loitering around the Drummond's car, just after midnight.
• 15:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: About 90 minutes later, two other drivers had seen shadowy figures loitering around the makeshift campsite.
• 15:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: As well as several others who claim they saw a motorcycle, driving back and forth in the area.
• 15:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there were two newspapers, one English, and one French, that offered a combined reward of a million francs, hoping greed, or flesh of the killer.
• 15:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: And although that's lots of snails, no one took the bait, meaning they didn't know, or they just didn't like snails.
• 15:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: But soon there were complaints in the local press that the Dominicis were being victimized because of their left-wing leanings.
• 16:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: The area around Lurf, where the murders took place, had been a stronghold in communist resistance during the war, and the farmer's son Gustav Dominicis had been a member of one of those Carmy Friendship clubs, the area which it seemed better fighting during the Nazi retreat.
• 16:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: and the execution of many Nazi collaborators, but also infighting between the resistance groups and weapons were kept after the war to settle local grudges and feuds.
• 16:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it seemed that although the French may have been afraid to use the order, they weren't afraid to use the procured weapons.
• 16:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was about a month later, the police finally got a break when they received an anonymous tip to the neighbor.
• 16:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: Paul Mayet had owned the gun like the Metaweapon.
• 16:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: And when they checked his home, it was gold and they found two illegal World War II machine guns.
• 17:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: One question, it didn't take long for him to spill the beans and he told cops that the farmers signed good stuff, had admitted to him that when he found the girl, she'd still been alive.
• 17:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that he panicked, and he ran back to the farmhouse, but still no one formed a doctor.
• 17:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: And when he returned an hour later, she was dead.
• 17:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: He said the reason he didn't tell anyone was because he didn't want to get pinned with the murders.
• 17:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: God's now figured what the girl's injuries and the doctor's saying that she couldn't live more than an hour, that she must have been killed around 4am.
• 17:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Gustav Dominici was then charged with failing to aid an individual in peril of death.
• 17:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: And a judge gave him two months in jail, but he made it clear that all the Gustav was a coward and hadn't even attempted to save the young girl's life, as well as tampering with her body, there was no proof that he killed anyone.
• 18:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: But snail eaten cops that different, and they figured it was only a matter of time before someone in the family would break, and spill the beans.
• 18:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: And they weren't half wrong.
• 18:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because it was a few months later in March in 1953, with the cops constantly grilling the family, that the nephew led slip, that Anne Drummond, and the daughter had visited the farmhouse that night of the murder, looking for water.
• 18:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Police weren't sure to believe the teen statement because he had a reputation as a liar.
• 18:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: And was it odds with his family?
• 18:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: But it still answered a few questions.
• 18:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like why was Elizabeth Drummond running away from the farmhouse?
• 18:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: There was only a short distance from where her parents had been murdered.
• 18:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe she knew where her killer came from.
• 18:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was a few months later, after going through witness statements and the power of the nephew's statement that investigators brought the Dominacy family into the cops shop to have their nipples twisted and it was after two days of intense question and the Gustav Dominacy admitted to the cops that his father had told them that he had killed the family after getting into an argument with Jack Drummond.
• 19:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: First, the 76-year-old peasant farmer denied it, but then I guess given some incentives, he can't clean.
• 19:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's saying that he'd been out that night with his car barn.
• 19:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: To shoot ferman, I need to happen to pawn Anne Drummond, getting undressed.
• 19:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: He liked what he saw, and went to tell her as much.
• 19:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: And Jack Drummond, he took a fence, and they started Rosslin.
• 19:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And his gun went off, injured Jack Drummond's head, and then I guess the old fucker figured he'd finish what he started.
• 19:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he shot Drummond twice, and hard.
• 19:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: Then he killed Andrewman with a single shot.
• 19:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: Then chased the daughter, she ran off, and clubbed it to death with the butt of the gun.
• 20:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: But investigate his warning press by the confession, because many of the details were just wrong.
• 20:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: including a timeline in the number of gunshots.
• 20:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, sure, to have gassed on Sun said that he did it, but the murder didn't seem to be the moment.
• 20:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: It seemed planned.
• 20:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Cops figured that the farmer was playing the party, but for whom?
• 20:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: But at this point, Gaston was all the snail-eaten cops had.
• 20:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: And when they took him out to do a crime reenactment, he bolted, and the silly fucker tried to jump off or bridge it kill himself, and authorities figured that was enough when he was guilty.
• 20:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in 1954, he went on trial for the murder of the drum and family, but it was well and custody that gased on Dominicy withdrew his confession.
• 20:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And without it, the case against him became a whole lot harder.
• 20:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because that couldn't even prove he'd on the rifle much less fired it.
• 21:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: And every time they'd interviewed the family, their stories changed.
• 21:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: The judge elect the two friends and seven people from the surrounding area to be used as a jury.
• 21:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: But spectators realized early that the case had been poorly investigated and there were many unanswered questions.
• 21:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: The biggest question being that if Elizabeth Drummond was running for her life over gravel and road and grass, why would her feet clean and without cuts?
• 21:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: It made less than sense, it was almost like she was carried there.
• 21:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: And to add to it gased on Dominicy told the jury of his peers and friends that the cops had beaten the confession out of him.
• 21:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then the 76 year old went back to his original statement that he got up at 4am to take his sheep out, and he'd only heard about the murders when he returned later for breakfast.
• 21:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Easy, easy, easy, just, sweetseed.
• 22:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Prosecutors couldn't account for these discrepancies, and that the fence said it was just family members trying to settle old scores.
• 22:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: and they now realized that the case relied heavily on the jury believing the family members who said the gas don't did it.
• 22:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was in November 1953, a month after the trial it started, that the jury, along with the three judges, who, by French law, were entitled to vote, retired to make their decision.
• 22:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: And after two hours, they returned.
• 22:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: And gased on Dominicine was guilty, sentenced to death
• 22:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Send in his filthy, French soul to hell.
• 22:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: No, I don't!
• 22:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: But almost immediately after the verdict, there were protests.
• 22:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: The peasant population believed that he was tried because of his calming leanings.
• 23:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: Police had no real evidence against Gaston.
• 23:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: While also the local dialect he spoke wasn't properly understood by the judges.
• 23:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Not long after the sentencing, it was commuted from the death penalty to life in prison.
• 23:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in 1957, the police launched a new investigation, feeling that the sun had to be more involved.
• 23:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the family members constantly changing their witness statements, the original Bosch investigation, no fingerprints, have made it impossible to make sense of the case.
• 23:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Gaston Dominisi was eventually given a pardon by the president, released in 1960, he died five years later, but the French public always believed that he was a patsy, and it was more to the case.
• 23:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like where was Sir Jack's camera?
• 23:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: And what was he taking pictures of?
• 23:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: And why were they never investigated the fact that were more people seen around the bodies that night by witnesses?
• 24:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: To this very day, many people believe that Sir Jack Drummond was a British spy.
• 24:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that he'd been taken photographs of a nearby top-secret chemical lab, and he'd his family paid for with their lives.
• 24:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: Taken down by a hired foreign government assassin, and that the farmer was just a convenient fall guy.
• 24:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: And although many felt it possible that Gaston could have been involved, it's hard to take seriously his alcohol fueled confession that he later recanted, aims the truth will always be muddied in a cesspool of lies and petty feuds of a peasant family.
• 24:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: And to this day, it remains one of the post-war's most mysterious murders.
• 24:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: The drum and family will lay to rest outside of a small village in the French Alps.
• 24:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: And like the family, it seems unlikely that their secrets will ever be unearthed.
• 25:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: You typed out a question I slipped in between I'm a glitch in the chassis in the code for the lines on digital look in the cloud Harding around the stream and you are so real-time Face in the frame just to curse the globe But the worst I did not like it all the time
• 26:32
  [UNKNOWN]: Yeah.