NANTERRE, France — Dominique Pelicot, the convicted rapist who horrified France by drugging his then wife so other men could rape her, is now caught up in other cases.
Pelicot is serving a 20-year prison term after he was found guilty in December for the horrific sexual abuse of his now ex-wife, Gisele Pelicot.
His lawyer told The Associated Press that he faces questioning by an investigating magistrate who specializes in so-called cold cases _ those that have proved particularly hard to resolve.
The rape and murder cases that Pelicot could be questioned about Thursday date back to the 1990s. One involves Sophie Narme, a property agent who was killed in Paris on Dec. 4, 1991.
The other is the attempted armed rape in the Paris suburb of Villeparisis on May 11, 1999, of another woman with a similar profile.
Dominique Pelicot has been under formal investigation for both of those crimes since October 2022 — a legal status meaning that investigators believe there is an accumulation of serious evidence against him.
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Lawyer Florence Rault, who represents Narme’s family and the woman subjected to the rape attempt, said an array of similarities between the 1991 and 1999 cases suggested the perpetrator might be the same in both.
“One has to remain cautious. Perhaps someone else committed the crime on Sophie Narme. But there are such similarities in the mode of operation, in the way the victims were approached — and the victims are so identical, too — that one can legitimately ask many questions,” Rault said on RTL radio.
The two cases were grouped together into one investigation in September 2022 that was taken over by the specialized unit for cold cases and serial crimes. It works out of the Paris suburb of Nanterre.
Dominique Pelicot’s lawyer, Beatrice Zavarro, confirmed to the AP that her client face questioning by an investigating magistrate at the Nanterre cold-case unit on Thursday afternoon.
The rape and murder cases occurred more than 10 years before the drugging and rapes of Gisele Pelicot for which Pelicot and 50 other men were convicted — a nearly decade-long stretch of sexual abuse from 2011. He knocked her unconscious by lacing her food and drink with drugs and invited other men he met online to rape her.
Gisele Pelicot became a hero to many in France and beyond for courageously demanding that the men’s trial be held in open court.
The evidence included stomach-churning homemade videos of the abuse that Dominique Pelicot filmed in the couple’s retirement home in the small Provence town of Mazan and elsewhere. Police subsequently found more than 20,000 photos and videos in all, stored on computer drives and catalogued in folders marked “abuse,” “her rapists,” “night alone” and other titles.