The Guilty Party

For close to three-quarters of a century, hardbitten, weather-beaten Provenqal Peasant Gaston Dominici was virtually a law unto himself. Each year the world passed close to his farm along France's famed Route Napoleon, but the streams of tourists bound for the pleasure domes of the Riviera were as remote from him and his world as so many swallows in the sky. Dirt-poor as all his neighbors, Gaston lived like them close to the soil and the wind and the rain, a hard, dour patriarch who ruled his little family with an iron hand and neither asked nor granted favors. His justice, like his life, was simple, ruthless, but at least straightforward.

Then, in August 1952, three camping Britons—famed Food Expert Sir Jack Drummond. his wife and his ten-year-old daughter Elizabeth—were found brutally slain on the Dominici farm. The murder became a cause célébre (TIME, Aug. 18, 1952). Biochemist Sir Jack was renowned for his part in setting the nutritional minimums for Britain's wartime rations; the failure to find his killer was an international humiliation for the French police. After long and confused police investigations, Gaston Dominici was carted off to prison. Last week the mahogany-faced old peasant, now 77, stood in the dock in a courtroom at Digne to answer the charge of murder.

The eyes of all France watched as Gaston, his weathered features paler after a year in jail, faced his tribunal of seven jurors and three judges. The courtroom was packed with a crowd of 400 eager spectators for the most publicized French trial since those of Petain and Laval in 1945. Banks of reporters from Paris and London came down to tell the story for their readers. A U.S. movie producer dropped by to measure the film possibilities of Gaston's case. Famed French Author Jean Giono was on hand to get material for a book. By comparison with Gaston's trial, said one enthusiastic French crime reporter, "the theaters of Paris are dull."

Just Listen. There was nothing in all of Gaston Dominici's life to prepare him for the intricacies of the judicial procedure in which he suddenly found himself. "I don't make fun of anybody," grumbled old Gaston to the judge as the trial's snarls of conflicting evidence began to unfold, "and I don't like anyone to make fun of me." "I'll do the talking, Dominici," the chief judge shouted back at him. "You just listen!" Diverting as it was, the trial did little to shed light on Dominici's guilt or innocence. Long before it was done, Goncourt Academy Playwright Armand Salacrou voiced one verdict. "I know," he said, "who is the really guilty party. It is French justice."