Visiting Switzerland

The experienced tourist of Switzerland will have spent the past week in Geneva. And, despite the hot sunny weather beckoning him to a lakeside stroll, would have spent a few hours of each weekday attending at the courthouse, a spectator at the trial of the one of the most sordid crimes in Geneva’s illustrious history.

On February 28, 2005, one of the richest men of France (#38) was shot to death in his Geneva apartment. When word spread the following day, speculation ran rampant that the well-known financier, who had no shortage of enemies—was executed in a contract killing by Russian Mafiosi. An owner of numerous companies, a private jet, and several residences, investigators looked first for vengeful business associates.

Within a week however the news took quite a different direction. It turned out that the murdered financier – Edouard Stern – was a well-known libertine and had been seeing a particular mistress for several years. The mistress – Cécile Brossard—was one of seven people who had a key to the dead billionaire’s apartment. She was also seen on surveillance videotape leaving the building the night of the murder.

Interrogated two weeks after the crime, she confessed after 13 hours of questioning, and then all the sordid details began filtering out in drips through leaks to the press.

The two had been involved in a sadomasochistic relationship in which he dominated her intellectually and financially and she dominated him sexually. The victim was in fact shot four times by his mistress while on his knees in a latex suit.

Cécile Brossard grew up in a small town, the daughter of a depressive mother and hippie father who divorced when she was eight. The defense has been making much of this, as well as her abuse by a maternal uncle when she was 10 or 11. A poor and disinterested student, she spent most of her adult life living off of men, and the prosecution is making much of the financial aspect of her interest in Stern.

Central elements in the defense’s case are the contention that Miss Brossard lost her wits and shot him in a fit of passion, and that she was beside herself in love with him and not after his money. She claims to have ‘lost it’ when the two were arguing over a ‘symbolic’ million dollars which Stern apparently transferred to her account, with the understanding that she would return it (supposedly a proof of his love for her, since he had been continually luring her back to him with spurious promises of marriage) and when she didn’t, he had his lawyers block the money with a phony pretext –the kind of manoeuvre you have to rich and powerful to do. So the two were arguing over the money, Stern on his knees in latex S&M suit, and he says to her, ‘a million dollars is expensive for a whore.’ At which point she took his Smith & Wesson and shot him in the forehead. (He apparently managed to get up and she shot him two more times in the chest, then when he fell, a final time in the temple.) (Rather meticulous for a ‘passion’ killing.)

Miss Brossard had been living with her husband, a Vaudois chiropractor, who paid all her bills and with whom she hadn’t had sexual relations since 2000. Her husband is twenty-one years older and said to police interrogators, “I have never been one to be jealous.”
Stern, on the other hand, with whom she took up in 2001, turned out to be highly possessive and jealous. Tapes and testimony show him to have stalked Ms Brossard on numerous occasions each time she attempted or pretended to put an end to their relationship.

While Miss Brossard appears a woman with a less than savory history, Stern – (despite the apparent gentlemen’s agreement of the plaintiff’s and defendant’s lawyers to avoid open discussion of the deceased’s private life) presents a seediness of his own. Aside from the ruthlessness for which he was known in his professional life and the libertinage for which he was known in his personal life, it is the anecdotes –such as his trips to Africa in his private jet for safaris to shoot 60 or 70 animals, or his coercion of Ms. Brossard to procure other women for ménages-a-trois—which paint a less than sympathetic picture of a manipulative, cynical, and less than scrupulous character.

Since Ms. Brossard has already been in custody for 4 years, even if the prosecution obtains the 11 years prison sentence it is seeking, the defendant can be released (at 2/3 of sentence) shortly in semi-liberty.

Crime scene tourists can visit first the courthouse – Palais de Justicce- in the old town on the rue Chaudronniers and Bourg-du-Four, where criminal trials take place (there are only 150 seats for the public, so go early). To visit the murder scene, go to rue Adrian Lachenal number 17. There’s a door code, so you can’t go in and wander up to the top floor unless you send us an email and ask for the code.