-Caveat Lector- >From http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,11882,764904,00.html
Spy theory revives French murder mystery British family's fatal holiday in 1952 'was not all it seemed' Jon Henley in Paris Monday July 29, 2002 The Guardian Fifty years ago next weekend a Hillman saloon pulled off the N96 near the village of Lurs, about 75 miles from Aix. It was a stifling Proven�al afternoon and the car's occupants, the distinguished British scientist Sir Jack Drummond, his wife Ann, and their 10-year-old daughter Elizabeth, decided to camp out for the night by the banks of the river Durance. Within hours they became the centre of one of France's most troubling criminal puzzles, variously shot and clubbed to death. The tragic demise of the Drummonds is a murder mystery that has fired the public imagination for half a century. It was not just the victims' renown and the consequent fuss across the Channel: Sir Jack, a 61-year-old former professor of biochemistry at London University, had been knighted for his exceptional work in nutrition during the second world war and was a senior researcher at the Boots laboratory in Nottingham. Nor was it the unlikely and altogether too handy perpetrator fingered by the police and convicted 18 months later: Gaston Dominici, a 75-year-old peasant farmer whose smallholding was the nearest property to the scene of the crime, was a pillar of the local community. No, it was the many key questions that remained unanswered. What was Dominici's motive? Where did the murder weapon, a battered US army Rock-Ola carbine, come from? What of the unidentified men seen on the road? And was Sir Jack, as Fleet Street soon began claiming, rather more than just an eminent scientist? Now, after more than a dozen books and thousands of newspaper articles on l'affaire Dominici, an amateur historian has uncovered startling evidence neglected during the original investigation. Raymond Badin may not have found the Drummonds' killer, but he has opened up some intriguing new lines of inquiry. "I don't think Gaston was the author of the triple murder of Lurs," he said. "I think the family was a pawn among others, caught up unwittingly on the chess board of a secret battle fought between east and west over each bloc's leading scientists. Jack Drummond, we are almost certain, was a spy." First, though, the facts that led to Gaston Dominici's conviction. It was his son Gustave who alerted the local gendarmes, hailing a passing cyclist at 6am on August 5 to say he had found a body. Elizabeth Drummond was lying near the river, her skull stoved in with a rifle butt. Lady Drummond's body was found near the car, and Sir Jack's just across the road. Both had been shot from behind. The broken stock of the Rock-Ola was found floating in the Durance, and the barrel was found later on the riverbed. At first Gustave told police that he had heard shots at about 1am and thought poachers were out. He had found Elizabeth's body at 5.30am. Gaston confirmed the story, adding that he had seen the Drummonds the night before while he was tending his goats. Gradually, however, the family's story began to reveal inconsistencies: a neighbour, Paul Maillet, told the police that Gustave had said he found Elizabeth alive. Then Gaston's nephew came forward to say he had seen Lady Drummond and Elizabeth call at the farm with a bucket, asking for water - when the Dominicis had sworn they had no direct contact with the Drummonds at any time. Eventually Gustave and his elder brother Clovis broke down. They told the police that their father had admitted having "killed the English". Old Gaston confessed in his turn, only to withdraw his statement soon afterwards, saying he had admitted the crime "to protect my family". Gustave then also retracted. None the less, in November 1954 Gaston was found guilty and sentenced to the guillotine. The evidence clearly did not satisfy two successive presidents of the Republic: in 1957 Ren� Coty commuted his sentence to life imprisonment, and in 1960 Charles de Gaulle freed him. "Gaston had no motive," says William Reymond, who has published a book on the case. "His initial explanation that Sir Jack had caught him in a compromising situation with Lady Ann is laughable. But there is lots more: the rifle clearly wasn't his, and he didn't know how to use it." According to Mr Badin's examination of the case, recounted in the magazine Historia, the bizarre and unrelated arrest in Germany some time later of William Bartkowski, a sinister figure who confessed spontaneously to having been one of four contract hit men involved in the Drummond murders, has never been explained. The postmortems on Sir Jack and Lady Ann show different-sized entry wounds, indicating that two weapons had been used. And at least four local passers-by said in evidence that they saw strangers, meeting the description of neither the Drummonds nor the Dominicis, close to the car that night. But the most interesting line appears to be Sir Jack's real purpose in visiting the area. Mr Badin has discovered that he had been to Lurs at least three times before, in 1947, 1948 and 1951. Six miles from the village is a chemicals factory that had begun producing advanced crop insecticides, widely feared during the cold war for their military potential. Was he on an espionage mission? His camera, certainly, was never found. Even more intriguingly, Mr Badin has unearthed the fact that Sir Jack had a lengthy meeting with a certain Father Lorenzi in Lurs two days before his death. The priest, who died in 1959, was a celebrated second world war resistance hero. Why would an eminent British scientist seek out a former maquisard ? And what did Fr Lorenzi tell Paul Maillet, a fellow resistance fighter, a close friend of Gustave Dominici's and, Mr Badin is sure, the true owner of the Rock-Ola rifle? "There is a lot more work to be done," Mr Badin said. "The Dominicis' strange behaviour indicates they knew a lot more about the crime than they ever let on. But they were not guilty of the murders. I think they plainly got caught up in something far bigger than themselves." 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