On January 8, 1993, Jean-Claude Romand, age 37, murdered his elderly parents in their home in Clairvaux-les-Lacs, France, by shooting them with a shotgun his father had given him as a youth. He also shot their dog. He then drove a little over an hour to his home in Prévessin, where he killed his wife by smashing in her skull with the rolling pin he had bought the day before. When his daughter and son, ages 7 and 5, woke up, he sat in front of the TV, where they all watched “The Three Little Pigs” and the children ate Cocoa Krispies. Knowing he could not put off the inevitable question of why Maman was sleeping so long, Romand told the children he thought they had fevers and that they should go to their beds and lie down; he was going to take their temperatures. He then shot and killed each child, after which he went to a newsstand and bought a newspaper. Soon after, he drove to Paris to pick up his mistress for a promised night with Bernard Kouchner, the French politician, doctor and co-founder of Médecins Sans Frontières, whom Romand said was a colleague and friend. Claiming to get lost on the way to Kouchner’s home, Romand had the mistress get out of the car, whereupon he sprayed her in the face with tear gas and shocked her with an electric prod. She was able to fight him off and convince him to drive her back to Paris. Romand cried on the drive and apologized, claiming his cancer made him act the way he had. After dropping her at home with her young daughters, Romand repeatedly phoned the mistress, once to say, “Promise me not to believe it was premeditated. If I’d wanted to kill you, I’d have done it in your apartment, and I’d have killed your girls too.” He then returned to his own home and watched television for some hours before setting fire to the house. Several minutes before the fire department arrived, Romand swallowed some decade-out barbiturates and positioned himself in front of a window, which he helpfully opened with a bang just as the fire department arrived and saved him.
That information from The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception, by Emmanuel Carrere, one of the most chilling true crime books I have read. It’s short, less than 200 pages, and I recently read it a third time in order to talk here about Romand and his sociopathic disorders, which include Narcissistic Personality Disorder as well as Mythomania, the pathological tendency to lie or exaggerate, which in Romand’s case led to his committing Instrumental Murder, a category I describe further in the audio, as well as encounters I have had with pathological liars and the lengths to which they have (so far) gone to keep the lies going.
