Title: The Adversary
Rating: 5 Stars
It’s a tragic tale. A man, Jean-Claude Romand, is a highly respected doctor working at the World Health Organization (WHO). He regularly attends international conferences. He confers with French government officials. He is developing cures for fatal diseases.
One night, his house catches on fire. His wife and two children die in the blaze. He is found alive, but unconscious. For days, he hovers between life and death. His best friend, Luc Ladmiral, thinks that it’d be best for him to die so that he wouldn’t have to experience the profound grief of losing his entire family.
And then the tale turns. His wife and two children had all been shot dead with a rifle before the first started. Romand had taken an overdose of barbiturates in a failed suicide attempt as the fire raged around him. Even worse, in a house in a completely different town, his parents and their dog had been found shot and killed with the same rifle. Romand is not just a highly respected doctor but apparently also a spree killer.
And then the tale turns again. There is no record of Romand working at the WHO. There is no record of him registering for any of the conferences that he claimed to attend. The high government officials that he claimed to consult had never heard of him. Even worse, there is no evidence that he ever even graduated from university, let only become accredited as a doctor. For the previous eighteen years, starting before he was even married, he was living a lie.
He did attend university for a while. At one point, during finals, he apparently just decided to skip them. From that point on, he deceived everyone. He pretended to go to classes. He was able to figure out how to continue to get student identification even though he was no longer attending. Upon pretending to graduate, he pretended to become a doctor. He then pretended to get a job at the WHO. In the early days, he would head to Geneva to the main WHO building. There were public spaces there in which he could hang out. He was able to get free WHO periodicals that he’d take home and read. He was able to get free WHO stationery to keep the lie alive. He claimed that his work was too critical to have a WHO phone extension. He had a phone service that his friends, even his wife, had to use if they wanted to get hold of him while allegedly at work.
Yes, he was able to fool his wife for eighteen years. They had two children together. Once, he drove them to the WHO building and pointed at the window of his alleged office. That was as close as they ever got to going inside.
How was he able to live? Well, he was able to convince his retired parents, his retired in-laws, his wife, and even his mistress, that WHO had a special investment fund that returned an average annual eighteen percent interest. Even though this was clearly too good to be true, all of these people trusted him enough to give them their hard earned retirement, proceeds from a house sale, or other investment money. Of course, he didn’t invest it. He used the funds to manufacture the lifestyle of a WHO medical doctor.
Again, I have to repeat it. He did it for eighteen years. To be able to keep up that ostentatious of a lie for so long beggars belief. There were so many times that even a simple check would have exposed him. Such was everyone’s faith in him that no such check was ever attempted.
It’s not absolutely clear what ultimately triggered him to violence. It could have been his mistress. She had an immediate financial need and so asked for her investment money back. Of course, that money was long gone. In fact, all of his accounts were on the verge of being overdrawn. It could have been his wife. Someone asked her if she was bringing her children to an WHO Christmas party. This could have triggered her to ask questions.
Whatever. While the children were asleep, he killed his wife. Later, the children woke up and he watched television with them, telling them that their mom was sleeping. Then, one by one, he killed them. He packed the gun up and went to his parent’s house. He lured his father upstairs and shot him in his childhood bedroom. He went downstairs and shot his mom in the sitting room. The dog came in whining and he shot it.
He then picked up his mistress on the ruse of going on a dinner date with an important person. He pretended to get lost. They got out and he tear gassed her, attempting to kill her. Somehow she managed to get him to stop, and amazingly, she promised not to tell anyone. They got back into the car and drove back.
The next day, he poured gas all around the house and on the corpses of his family and set it all on fire. He then took an overdose of barbiturates. They were years out of date, so they lacked potency. Romand was aware of this, so it might have been a feigned suicide attempt.
How do we know all of this? Romand did survive and he did recover. Despite getting away with it for so long, he was not exactly a criminal mastermind. There was a trial where his confession was heard. The author, Emmanuel Carrere, like Truman Capote In Cold Blood, established a relationship with Romand and was able to dive into his psyche.
It’s a fascinating, mysterious story. As I reading this, I kept going back to the Bernie Madoff story. In both cases, there’s no doubt how the story is going to end. Both of them are living a fraudulent life where their exposure is inevitable. There is no escape. The world will come collapsing around them. Obviously, the scale of Madoff’s fraud is colossal in comparison, but in Romand’s more contained world, the collapse is just as complete. They were both hamsters running furiously in a wheel with no way to get off.
This book was written in 2000. The events took place in 1993. Romand was still a fairly young man when all of this happened (in his 30s). France does not have the death penalty. I looked him up, and sure enough, after twenty-six years, he was paroled in 2019. He is still alive and apparently residing in a Benedictine monastery with an electronic bracelet to monitor his movements.
The sub title of this book was A True Story of Monstrous Deception. Indeed it was, and I found it fascinating.
dorkenstein 