a shocking documentary on RMC Story

A beaten and humiliated woman who would have killed almost by accident? Or a Machiavellian murderess guilty of intentional homicide? Everyone will be able to form their own opinion by watching the documentary retracing the Edith Scaravetti affair, rebroadcast this Friday July 22, from 10:40 p.m., on RMC Story (1).

Left without a car or cell phone

On Wednesday August 6, 2014, around noon, the mother of Laurent Baca, a 37-year-old temporary worker, telephoned her son’s home, Saint-Simon district in Toulouse (Haute-Garonne), who lives a few kilometers from her home. The two are very close and call each other every day. His companion for ten years and mother of their three children, Edith Scaravetti, a 27-year-old carer, picks up. She assures him that her husband went out to help a friend and that he left without taking his car or his cell phone. But Laurent Baca does not return and gives no more news. The police are then alerted. His parents, brother and sister, worried sick, put up posters all over the place to find him. Curiously, Edith Scaravetti withdraws from research. She does not seem unduly affected by this disappearance and ensures that he will soon return. Then she swears that he would have been recruited by drug traffickers and that he would have left to do a ”go fast” in Spain. Her version changes several times, she contradicts herself…

On November 20, at 8 a.m., the investigators disembark to conduct a search of the home of the one who has become the main suspect. They enter the house and are immediately struck by the pestilential smell. In the attic, on his instructions, they discover the corpse of Laurent Baca, hidden under a shroud of concrete, immured in the floor of the attic.

Buried in the garden, under the pergola

The young woman breaks down and admits having killed him with a bullet in the head, having laid him on the sofa and covered him with a neon orange blanket, as if he were sleeping, then, in the morning, once the children had left , having buried it in the garden, under the pergola. But not deep enough. Three weeks later, following complaints from neighbors inconvenienced by an “unbearable” stench, she had to dig up the decomposing body, emptied of all its water and all its fat, transport it to the attic and sink it into the concrete, without his daughters and son noticing anything.

In police custody, she recounted having lived through hell for years with her partner, who denigrated her and became violent with her when he drank or took cocaine. That night, during yet another argument, she grabbed the rifle he was threatening her with and the shot fired. Is this really what happened? Or had she carefully planned her crime?

Indicted and placed in pre-trial detention, she appeared for the first time before the assizes, in March 2018. She was sentenced to three years in prison for manslaughter and was released, but the prosecution appealed. In May 2019, in Montauban, she was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for intentional homicide.

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An interview that cannot leave anyone indifferent

It is this last trial that will follow Géraldine Levasseur, former editor-in-chief of the magazine “Zone Interdite” on M6, and Nathalie Gillot, ex-chief of information of VSD. In addition to testimonies from the victim’s family, the journalists managed to obtain an exclusive interview with the accused, just before the verdict. An interview that cannot leave anyone indifferent. “The acts I have done, I find them horrible,” she explains. “I just wanted to take the gun away from him, I just wanted to be able to go to sleep, the shot went off. My first reaction, I went to take refuge in the bathroom. I was waiting for him to call me. He still ends up calling me. And it didn’t happen.” It also evokes the transport of the decomposing corpse using a strap, from the garden to the attic, by a ladder. “All that part is flashes. I know it’s me but I don’t know how I could do this, and why I did it”.

At the end of the appeal trial, Edith Scaravetti was found guilty of murder. She never confessed to killing her partner intentionally.

Thanks to the remission game, she was able to get out of prison in mid-September 2021. Almost a year ago.

(1) ”Woman’s crime: the Edith Scaravetti affair”, directed by Géraldine Levasseur and Nathalie Gillot, broadcast on October 3, 2019, July 15, 2022 and this Friday, July 22 from 10:40 p.m., on RMC Story.

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