In December, a court sentenced Dominique Pelicot to 20 years in prison for drugging his wife Gisèle and inviting dozens of men to their bedroom to rape her between 2011 and 2020.

The trial stunned France and turned Pelicot into France’s most infamous sexual predator. His wife, Gisèle, became a feminist icon.

But the police and prosecutors suspect that she was not his first victim. “Gisèle Pelicot fears that she herself is only the tip of the iceberg,” one of Gisèle Pelicot’s lawyers, Antoine Camus, said in an interview.

While Pelicot was in prison awaiting his trial, the police confronted him with DNA evidence linking him to the attempted rape of a 19-year-old woman in the Paris region in 1999. After hours of questioning, he admitted to drugging her, telling the police, “It is me.”

He is also being investigated for the rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman in 1991. Pelicot has denied any involvement in the murder. But prosecutors indicted him in 2022 for both crimes, which are so similar they have been folded into one case.

Both victims were young real estate agents in the Paris area. Both were violently assaulted with a blade, tied up, drugged with ether and the lower part of their bodies undressed. In both crime scenes, the victim’s shoes were found neatly placed in the room.

No trial date has been set.

Today Pelicot, 72, is jailed in southern France, not far from the village where he and his wife, now divorced, had retired. But in 1991, Pelicot was working as a real estate agent in Paris, and by 1999 had taken a job as a salesman for fire alarms and telephone syste

The woman who was murdered, Sophie Narme, had been working for a month in her first job as a real estate agent when she was killed.

On the evening of December 4, 1991, her employer discovered her lifeless, partly undressed body in a top-floor flat she had shown to a client earlier that morning in the 19th Arrondissement of Paris. The police suspect the client was Pelicot using a false name.

They detected a strong smell of ether at the crime scene and during the autopsy. She had been beaten, drugged, stabbed, strangled with her own belt and raped, according to investigation documents read in court during his trial last year.

Though the crime scene showed traces of violence, with the content of Narme’s purse scattered across the room, her high-heeled shoes were found carefully placed next to the corpse.

New York Times News Service