“Omar m’a tuer”

On Monday, 24 June 1991, 65-year-old Ghislaine Marchal had plans to meet up with a friend for lunch in the French town of Mougins. When she failed to respond to any phone calls or attempts to rouse her inside of her home, friends contacted law enforcement. Police arrived at the property later that evening, and there, behind a barricaded door, they'd find Ghislaine's body, along with a message written in blood...

A wealthy widow, murdered, with a message written in blood supposedly naming her killer found next to her body. Out of context, this sounds like something out of a detective novel - but it’s in fact a description of a case out of Cote d’Azur, one that has gripped France since the early 90’s and raised questions of class, language, and prejudice in the court system.

But first, let’s start from the beginning. Ghislaine Marchal, the eventual victim of this case, was born in 1926. After divorcing her first husband, she married Jean-Pierre Marchal, owner of a well-known automobile equipment company. Jean-Pierre’s death left Ghislaine very wealthy, and by 1991, the 65-year old Ghislaine divided her time between Switzerland and her residence in Côte d’Azur region of France, in the town of Mougins.

On Monday, June 24th, 1991, Ghislaine had made plans to have lunch at her home in Mougins with her friend, Erika. However, when Erika arrived at 11:30am as planned, no one answered the doorbell. She called the house, and still, no response. Getting understandably concerned, she began contacting Ghislaine’s other friends, one of whom contacted Ghislaine’s security company, who in turn sent an employee to the house to check up on her.

Searching the house revealed no trace of a break-in - but it also revealed that Ghislaine was nowhere to be found. The security alarm wasn’t activated, and the door was not locked; the blinds in the bedroom were drawn, the bed was unmade, and a breakfast tray was out in the kitchen. It almost appeared as though Ghislaine Marchal had just woken up, started to get ready for her day, and then disappeared into thin air.

Later that evening, when it became clear that Ghislaine wasn’t coming back, police were alerted of her disappearance. During their search, police became interested in an annex to the house with stairs leading down to a cellar. When they went down to investigate this cellar, they found the door couldn’t be opened more than around 2 centimeters, or a little less than an inch. Eventually, they were able to open it enough for an officer to stick his arm through and discovered that the door had been barricaded by a folding bed and a metal pipe. Once they managed to remove these blockages and get the door open, they were met with a grisly sight.

Ghislaine Marchal was found dead in the back of this cellar, lying on her front, wearing only a blood-stained bathrobe. Her injuries were severe - the autopsy would reveal that her throat had been slit, her skull broken, and that she had been stabbed 10 times. It was judged that she had lived about 15-30 minutes after these injuries were inflicted.

The most bizarre part of this entire scene, however, was that on two different doors - the door to the wine cellar and the door to the boiler room - there was a message written in blood. “Omar m’a tuer” on the wine cellar door, and “Omar m’a t” (the rest of the sentence was incomplete) on the boiler room door. Like something out of an Agatha Christie novel, it seemed that Ghislaine had identified her killer through a message written in her own blood before she died of her injuries - but had she truly left these messages, or was it the work of a killer trying to frame someone else?

The ‘Omar’ in the message was almost immediately identified as Omar Raddad, Ghislaine’s Moroccan gardener, 29 years old at the time. Omar Raddad was arrested, and subsequently charged with Ghislaine’s murder - however, the evidence for him being the culprit essentially amounted to him being the gardener (and thus having increased access to the house/grounds) and the message supposedly left by Ghislaine. So, the question of the hour is - was that message truly Ghislaine identifying her killer, or was it a red herring left by the true killer to throw investigators off the case?

And now, we’ve come to one of the main issues around this case - and unusually enough for a murder case, this particular issue is a question of grammar. Brush off your high school French, because it’s time for a little language lesson.

You see, the message written in blood next to Ghislaine Marchal’s body ‘Omar m’a tuer’ is actually grammatically incorrect. The last word - tuer, spelt T-U-E-R - is the infinitive form of the verb ‘to kill.’ However, in the sentence ‘Omar m’a tuer’ that verb should have been conjugated to ‘tuée’ - spelt T-U-E (with an accent)-E. While these two different verb forms are pronounced exactly the same, the difference is pretty notable - saying ‘Omar m’a tuer’ T-U-E-R, would translate to something like ‘Omar to killed me’ instead of the grammatically correct ‘Omar killed me.’

So, the question here is - would Ghislaine Marchal, a high-class, native French speaker, have made this type of error? The French are well-known for hammering grammar rules pretty thoroughly into the minds of their children, after all. Immediately, those defending Omar latched onto this error as proof that the message couldn’t possibly have been written by Ghislaine Marchal, but was instead written by a killer who was trying to frame Omar. Omar was himself illiterate, and spoke very little French at the time, so it seems highly unlikely that he would have been able to write those messages himself - and even if he conceivably could have, it doesn’t seem at all likely that he would have framed himself in an attempt to reverse-psychology the investigators into thinking he wasn’t guilty.

Still, the immediate assumption that Ghislaine couldn’t have possibly written this grammatically incorrect message due to her high-class station doesn’t entirely hold up under scrutiny. While France certainly pushes for proper usage of the French language, especially among the elite - the very existence of l’Academie Francaise, an institution dedicating to determining proper usage, vocabulary and grammar of the French language, is proof enough of that - that doesn’t mean that native speakers don’t occasionally make errors. Think of the common ‘your’ vs ‘you’re’ mistake made amongst English-speaking children, and even many native English speaking adults - just because you’re a native speaker doesn’t mean that you use perfect grammar and spelling 100% of the time.

Although implicit biases may have caused many to assume that a woman of Ghislaine’s class wouldn’t have made such an error, Ghislaine’s niece pointed out in an interview that like many women of her age and class, Ghislaine hadn’t been to college, so her education level wasn’t as high as many might have presumed - and in addition, investigators found other examples of Ghislaine’s writing that contained this same error. And of course, whoever wrote this message - whether it be Ghislaine herself, or some other person trying to frame Omar - would have been under high stress, bleeding out in Ghislaine’s case. It’s not exactly surprising then, that issues of correct grammar may have fallen to the wayside and an error could have been made. However, given the circumstances, charging Omar based purely off of this one piece of evidence seems flimsy at best, since it couldn’t conclusively be proven who wrote that message. Handwriting experts have disagreed over the years as to whether or not Ghislaine wrote the message, and Omar’s DNA was not found at the crime scene.

During Omar’s trial, the prosecution and Ghislaine’s family argued that Mr. Raddad was a gambler, who often played slot machines. Their proposed motivation for Omar killing Ghislaine was that Omar wanted an advance on his wages so that he could go gamble, but Ghislaine refused him, driving him to attack her out of anger. Ghislaine then left her dying message written in blood, and barricaded the door out of fear that Omar would return. They pointed out that money appeared to have been taken from her handbag, which had been found empty on her bed, but there was little else in the way of solid evidence beyond the dubious message left in blood.

Omar’s defense on the other hand argued that he did not have a motivation to kill Ghislaine Marchal, who he said had always treated him well. An empty handbag didn’t prove that there had in fact been anything in the handbag to steal, and other valuables like jewelry had been left untouched - unlikely, if the killer was a man with a gambling addiction whose motivation was theft. The defense’s proposed series of events was that the true killer wrote the messages in order to frame Omar, and propped the bed up against the door while they were leaving. It’s also highly questionable that a 65 year old woman who had been stabbed 16 times could drag herself from one end of the room to the other to write this message, or why she would have done that even if she had been physically capable of doing so.

Another point of contention was the time that the crime had taken place. There was some debate as to whether the murder took place on the night of June 23rd, or early in the morning on the 24th, right before Ghislaine’s friend had arrived and found that she was missing. Originally, the pathology report had listed the day and time of death as being on the 24th - and Omar had an alibi for this time. However, this was later said to be an error, and the official day of the murder was changed to the 23rd, a day that Omar did not have an alibi for. Omar’s defense obviously argued that the murder did in fact take place on the 24th, and the later changing of the date was merely an attempt to make Omar’s alibi invalid, whereas the prosecution argued that the 24th was indeed the correct date. Regardless of whether or not the investigators did actually make an error initially, it does raise some eyebrows that the date was changed from a date where Omar did have an alibi, to one where he didn’t.

Looking at this case objectively, even if you believe Omar did it, the evidence against him is relatively minimal. It couldn’t be confirmed that Ghislaine Marchal wrote the ‘Omar m’a tuer’ message, and no DNA or fingerprints from Omar were found at the scene of the crime. Plus, if the murder did indeed take place on the 24th as was originally stated, then Omar had an alibi. Despite this, however, Omar Raddad was convicted of Ghislaine Marchal’s murder in 1994, and sentenced to 18 years in prison.

Omar’s conviction set off a tidal wave of controversy, to say the least. Omar, being from Morocco, was a North African immigrant, a group that faces discrimination in non-Arabic countries including France to this day. Omar’s ethnic background was a bit of an elephant in the room during his trial - many, including Omar himself, likely felt as though he was being framed, and that the case against him was being taken seriously despite the relative lack of evidence in large part due to his race. As a result, Omar’s conviction likely would have been side-eyed for this reason regardless - but these flames were very very heavily fanned by Omar’s lawyer, a man by the name of Jacques Verges.

Jacques Verges was a famous French lawyer, known by the nickname the “Devil’s advocate” and was a controversial figure due to his apparent willingness to “defend anyone.” He had a habit of provocation, both in and out of the courtroom, and would do whatever he deemed necessary to maximize the publicity around his client’s case. Throughout his career, Jacques defended some incredibly controversial clients, from terrorists to Nazi war criminals, and caused quite the ruckus when he claimed in 2008 that he would have defended Hitler. In comparison to some of Jacques’s clients, Omar Raddad’s case was quite mild - but Jacques brought his signature flair for the dramatic to Omar’s case all the same.

Following Omar’s conviction, Jacques brought the political tensions of the case to the surface, explicitly comparing Omar’s conviction to the Dreyfus case of the early 1900s - a case where a Jewish officer had been falsely imprisoned for supposedly communicating French military secrets to the Germans. “100 years ago, we condemned an officer for the crime of being Jewish, and today we condemn a gardener for the crimes of being North African,” he told the press.

With Jacques’s remarks bringing the bubbling undertones of this case out into the open, the public discourse around Omar’s case grew and grew. Some questionable remarks made by the presiding judge also came to light, which painted Omar’s conviction in an even worse light - for example, he apparently told the illiterate Omar at one point during the trial that “anyone who cannot read or write should hide themselves away in a hole,” and when Omar’s wife took the stand to defend him, saying that Omar wasn’t capable of hurting a fly, the judge replied “Yes, but that does not prevent him from knowing how to slaughter a sheep,” “Slaughtering a sheep” is in reference to the halal method of animal slaughter, and was taken by many to imply that the judge believed that Omar being Muslim made him inherently capable of murdering a human being in cold blood. Understandably, many in the Muslim community did not respond well to this implication - many French Muslims felt that the way Omar Raddad was treated during his trial was a mirror of the discrimination they faced on a day-to-day basis.

Omar’s supporters didn’t just come from the French Muslim community, however. Omar’s case attracted the attention of French writer and academic, Jean-Marie Rouart, who vehemently defends Omar’s innocence to this day. In response to Omar’s conviction, he formed a group to support Omar’s cause, and wrote a book entitled “Omar, la construction d’un coupable” (or, “Omar, the Making/Construction of a Culprit”). In this book, he lays out many of the more prominent points discussed by Omar’s defenders - namely, that Ghislaine Marchal’s physical condition after her attack would not have allowed her to crawl across the room and write those two messages, the fact that Omar’s DNA wasn’t found at the scene of the crime, and the highly questionable if not outright racist remarks made by the judge. “The dying woman who points at her own killer - it was like a bad novel by Agatha Christie,” he wrote. His conclusion is the same as that of Jacques Verges - that Omar Raddad was framed and sentenced in large part due to his race.

As the public backlash against Omar’s conviction continued to grow, an unexpected party stepped in - the King of Morocco at the time, Hassan II. Seeing as Omar was Moroccan, it made sense that the conviction of a potentially innocent Moroccan living abroad (especially a conviction in which prejudice very much seemed to have played a role, whether Omar was actually innocent or not), drew the attention of the Moroccan public. This attention quickly trickled up to the royal family, namely King Hassan II and his nephew Moulay Hicham.

International relations between France and Morocco in recent history are generally quite good, despite the discrimination often faced by Moroccan immigrants in France. King Hassan and Moulay Hicham leveraged these relations to put pressure on the French president at the time, Jacques Chirac, to reduce Omar’s sentence or pardon him entirely. Jacques Chirac conceded, and in 1996 he announced that Omar Raddad’s sentence would be reduced to four years and 8 months, meaning that Omar was released from prison in 1998.

Though he was freed from prison, his conviction had not been overturned - meaning that Omar was still seen as guilty in the eyes of the law, even if some saw this partial pardon as an admittance that imprisoning him had been an error. Still adamantly claiming that he was innocent, once he was freed from prison Omar Raddad began what would become a years-long campaign to get his conviction officially overturned.

At first, Omar didn’t have much luck. French law regarding reviews and retrials of criminal convictions were pretty strict, and Omar was having difficulties clearing those hurdles - for context, since 1945, only about 10 defendants have managed to get acquitted of previous convictions. He attempted to file for a retrial in 2002, but was rejected due to not providing sufficient enough reason to believe that a new trial would provide any new facts that would raise doubts about his original conviction.

However, in the mid-2010’s, a few coinciding events would clear the path for Omar to pursue a retrial - first, in 2014, a law was passed relaxing the strict conditions for a criminal review & retrial. Next, in 2015, the DNA evidence gathered at the scene of Ghislaine Marchal’s murder was re-examined with better technology than what was available in the 90’s, and traces of DNA from 4 unknown males was found.

Omar Raddad officially made his second request for a retrial in June 2021, almost thirty years to the day after the crime had taken place. His request was mainly rooted in these traces of DNA found at the crime scene that belonged to neither himself nor Ghislaine - perhaps these DNA traces would be enough to point towards another perpetrator. Naturally, this request for a retrial reopened the old wounds that had never quite healed from the original trial, and once again a wave of debate over Omar’s innocence and the role that prejudice had played in his conviction swept the country.

Ghislaine Marchal’s family reacted to the news of Omar requesting a retrial by stating that they believed that the DNA traces had simply been contaminated by an unrelated source after the crime took place.

The family never wavered from their belief that Omar Raddad was indeed guilty of her murder. Sabine du Granrut, Ghislaine’s niece, stated in a New York Times interview that the unidentified DNA samples likely come from cross-contamination, as “evidence was handled with less care” in the early 90s, when this case took place. The family firmly believes that Ghislaine did in fact write the famous “Omar m’a tuer” message, writing off the grammar mistake as an error made due to the stress of the situation. “I’m not sure that in the moment she was writing, she bore in mind all her grammar and French syntax,” Ms. du Granrut stated.

The family does acknowledge, however, that public opinion is not on their side - which Ms. du Granrut believes to be a result of the family choosing to remain silent in the immediate aftermath of the case, whereas Omar’s defenders were always very public with their denouncement of the conviction. “And because we didn’t speak, it became more and more difficult to speak,” Ms. du Granrut said in her NYT interview. “I think it was too late.” The family also detests that the case has taken on what they call a “political” dimension, stating that “if the murderer had been French with a French name” the case never would have become as well-known as it is.

However, although judges did order further analysis of the new evidence, Omar’s request was ultimately denied just a few months ago, in October 2022. The court’s ruling was that the new DNA did not provide sufficient grounds for a new trial, as there was too much uncertainty about where and when it came from - in essence, that it seemed possible that the DNA was in fact, simply trace DNA stemming from the evidence being tainted after it had been collected.

While those on Ghislaine Marchal’s family’s side were, of course, relieved by this result, Omar Raddad and his lawyers and other supporters were naturally not at all happy. Omar’s lawyer, Sylvie Noachovitch, claimed that it was her belief that the judges had not taken into account the new 2014 laws that had lowered the criteria required to declare a retrial, and that new DNA evidence should have been enough for them to initiate a retrial even if the DNA evidence couldn’t be precisely dated. She also claimed that she intended to appeal the decision before the European Commission of Human Rights, so it’s entirely possible that, more than 30 years later, the ‘Omar m’a tuer’ case may still have more twists and turns yet to come.

Regardless of whether or not you personally believe that Omar Raddad killed Ghislaine Marchal, what is without a doubt is that in France, the ‘Omar m’a tuer’ case has taken on a life of its own. It is an unfortunate reality that people from minority groups and/or more disadvantaged situations are more likely to be seen as guilty when facing the justice system. Omar Raddad may or may not have killed Ghislaine Marchal, but the court of public opinion has very much judged that he is one of those unfortunate victims of a discriminatory justice system that decided he was guilty simply due to prejudice - and in France, he and the phrase ‘Omar m’a tuer’ have become somewhat symbolic of this systemic issue.

“Today, when you’re asked to give an example of wrongful conviction, people right away mention Omar Raddad,” said Henri Leclerc, the lawyer who represented the Ghislaine Marchal’s family in the 1994 trial that convicted the gardener. “There’s very little we can do today to change public opinion.”

Beyond the various books written about the case, it also inspired a 2011 French/Moroccan film named what else but ‘Omar m’a tuer.’ Based on Omar’s own autobiography, the film depicts a fictionalized version of the events of the case, and very much portrays Omar as an innocent man who was a victim of a corrupt system. The film was quite successful, having been nominated for several César Awards (the national film award of France), and was the Moroccan entry for the 84th Academy Awards Best Foreign Language Film category, though it ultimately wasn’t nominated.

The film is just one example of how the ‘Omar m’a tuer’ case and the phrase itself has entered the public lexicon in France. Like the “if it doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” quote from the OJ Simpson trial in the United States, “Omar m’a tuer” or rather “____ m’a tuer” is an very recognizable phrase for most French speakers, one that has grown beyond its original context to become shorthand for a direct accusation from a victim - for example, a French Slate article about people whose personal reputations are at stake due to what comes up when you Google their name entitled “Google m’a tuer,” or a French star protesting against rumors circulating on Twitter with a magazine article called “Twitter m’a tuer,” all featuring the signature grammatical error.

Though the ‘Omar m’a tuer’ case has shined a light on the discrimination that so often stands in the way of real justice, it is a shame that the real issue of this case is so often lost - that being, determining the true identity of Ghislaine Marchal’s murderer. It does seem that, one way or another, the ‘Omar m’a tuer’ case would have benefitted from a retrial - perhaps that could have helped uncover the truth behind this infamous case. If Omar Raddad is in fact innocent of this crime, his name should of course be cleared on the official record for once and for all - and Ghislaine Marchal’s killer, whoever they may be, should have to face consequences for their actions. While the door has been shut on the possibility of a retrial for now, we can only hope that the notoriety of this case will one day help true justice to prevail.