The Omar Raddad Affair was a highly publicised criminal trial in Mougins, France. After the murder of wealthy widow Ghislaine Marchal in 1991, her gardener Omar Raddad, a Moroccan immigrant, was arrested. Raddad was convicted in 1994 and sentenced to 18 years in prison. He has maintained his innocence, and received a partial pardon from French President Jacques Chirac in 1996 at the request of Moroccan King Hassan II, which reduced his sentence to four years and eight months. He was released from prison in 1998, and in 2021 received permission to reopen the case after the discovery of new DNA evidence.
The misspelled sentence "Omar m'a tuer" ("Omar killed me"), found written in blood at the crime scene, became a widely used phrase in French society during the 1990s. The last word of the sentence is not properly conjugated; it should read: "Omar m'a tuée". Skeptics contended that this is an odd mistake for a native French speaker to make. The case was the subject of the 2011 film Omar m'a tuer by Roschdy Zem.
Murder and discovery
Background
Born Ghislaine de Renty, Ghislaine Marchal was the daughter of an industrialist who participated in the Resistance during the Second World War and died after being deported. Divorced from her first husband, with whom she had a son, in 1991 she was the wealthy widow of Jean-Pierre Marchal, owner of a company that supplied equipment for automobiles. She divided her time between a primary residence in Switzerland and her villa La Chamade, which she had built in the hills of Mougins, near Cannes, and where she was killed.
Disappearance of Ghislaine Marchal
On Sunday 23 June 1991 at 11:50am, Ghislaine Marchal finished a brief phone conversation with her friend Erika S. She said she had just showered and was in a hurry because she was having lunch with her friends Collette K. and her husband at 1pm.
Erika S. arrived at La Chamade on Monday 24 June at 11:30 for lunch as planned. She rang the doorbell twice and called, but there was no answer. Alerted by her and Colette K., a third friend, Francine P., sent an employee of the security company to the house in the early afternoon. The house, dark and silent, showed no trace of a break in. The blinds had only been drawn in the bedroom; glasses and a newspaper were on the unmade bed; a breakfast tray was in the kitchen. The door was not bolted and the keys were in the lock; the alarm was not activated. It seemed as though Ghislaine Marchal had just woken up, but she was not in the house. The security company employee returned with Francine P. and her attendant. They were quickly joined by Mrs Marchal's doctor. Searching the house, they found jewellery and an open handbag that contained no money.
Cellar door
The police were alerted in the evening. After searching the main house, they became interested in an annexe with stairs down to a cellar. The metal door to the cellar was found locked, and would not open more than 2cm after it was unlocked. While one officer pushed against it, another was able to insert his arm and identify a folding bed placed against the door on the inside. He managed to push it away, but the door remained blocked by a metal pipe wedged against the cement floor. Eventually, by bending the door and kicking the pipe, the officers were able to open the door. In January 1992, investigators noted that a semi-circular imprint was left on the cement.
Discovery of the body
At the back of the cellar, Ghislaine Marchal was found lying face down, her legs pointing to the back wall, her arms stretched out in front of her on the ground, dressed in only a blood-stained bath robe pulled up to above her waist.
The doctor's first observations on the evening of the 24th, and the autopsy of 28 June revealed severe injuries: "her skull [had been] broken, her throat cut, one finger sliced off and her body pierced 10 times by a sharp blade". Scrapes on the arms and legs, in particular on the soles of her feet and the back of the knees, as well as traces of dust and cement on the robe, suggested that the victim had been dragged.
Forensic experts noted that it was impossible to determine the order in which the blows were delivered. None were immediately fatal; she was judged to have lived for approximately 15 to 30 minutes. Police captain Georges Cenci noted that the assassin seemed "determined, but also clumsy in his movements".