A French investigator leading the probe into a man accused of recruiting dozens of strangers to rape his heavily sedated wife told a court Wednesday of painstaking efforts to identify the perpetrators via the husband's detailed records of the assaults.
Dominique P., a 71-year-old retiree, had abused his wife between 2011 and 2020, drugging her with sleeping pills and then inviting dozens of strangers to rape her.
He documented the decade-long abuse of his wife, Gisele P., with meticulous precision, allowing French police to track down 50 men suspected of raping her while she was drugged.
On the third day of the trial in the southern city of Avignon, the commissioner in charge of the inquiry said investigators sifted through numerous telephone bills, pictures and videos and used facial recognition software to identify the suspects, all of them men.
Jeremie Bosse Platiere, director of the Hautes-Alpes interdepartmental police force, said investigators had drawn up a list of 72 individuals suspected of abusing Gisele P., 72.
The investigators counted around 200 instances of rape, most of them by Dominique P., that took place between July 2011 and October 2020.
Given the sheer number of suspects, police had to carry out arrests in five waves between late 2020 and September 2021.
Only 50 suspects, aged between 26 and 74, have so far been identified and tracked down. Most of them face up to 20 years in jail for aggravated rape if convicted.
According to the investigators, Dominique P. put together a dossier containing thousands of pictures and videos of the assaults, which were stored on a hard disk in a folder named "abuse."
The folder contained sub-folders for each man who came to rape his wife.
"A list was then drawn up for each individual according to the name of the file," said Bosse Platiere, adding that his team worked to identify men behind nicknames such as "Chris the fireman", "Quentin", "Gaston" and "David the Black".
The police have also scrutinised countless telephone exchanges and online conversations between the husband and his wife's potential attackers.
Bosse Platiere said the police worked to see if there was a link between the calls and instances of rape by looking at Dominique P.'s phone bills and the recovered images.
Dominique P. had also blocked numerous contacts on his phones, arousing the suspicion of the investigators.
"It's unusual," Bosse Platiere said, adding that it had taken them nearly two years to identify the men behind the phone numbers.
The team also used facial recognition software.
"This would enable us to identify a third of the perpetrators," he said.
The trial is due to hear from civil parties in the case on Thursday, including Gisele P. herself.
