At the end of three weeks of trial, the Haute-Saône Assize Court delivered its verdict on Thursday December 21: judged on appeal, Nicolas Zepeda was sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison for the assassination of his former Japanese girlfriend, Narumi Kurosaki, then aged 21, in December 2016. When the verdict was announced, delivered after five hours of deliberation, the 33-year-old Chilean buried his head in his arms. “We are going to appeal to the Court of Cassation,” one of his lawyers, Renaud Portejoie, told Agence France-Presse.
Thus ends this appeal trial which experienced several moments of intense emotion, notably during the heartbreaking testimonies of the mother and two sisters of Narumi Kurosaki, who told the bar of their impossible mourning in the absence of the body of the young woman.
On April 12, 2022, he was convicted and sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison. On Wednesday, life imprisonment, without a security sentence, was requested against Nicolas Zepeda by the attorney general, Etienne Manteaux, who also requested a permanent ban on territory once the sentence has been served.
“Everything points to Nicolas Zepeda in the death of Narumi Kurosaki,” he insisted in his indictment. Although the body of the Japanese student was never found, the magistrate insisted on the “strength of the charges” against the accused.
“The credibility of his word is destroyed.”
Throughout this second trial, during which he spoke in excellent French, Nicolas Zepeda often appeared in difficulty, struggling to justify himself on numerous points of the case or on his reversals. “He lied so much in this case that the credibility of his words is destroyed,” said Etienne Manteaux, seeing in Nicolas Zepeda the “obvious author” of the crime, “devoured (…) by his delusion of possession”.
Nicolas Zepeda conceded “a few lies”, admitting for example to having gone to France to see Narumi Kurosaki and trying to reconnect with her, whereas until then he had claimed a chance meeting with his ex. But on the essential, namely his guilt, he remained adamant: he did not kill Narumi. “I’m definitely, definitely a long way from who I’d like to be. But I am not a murderer,” he told the court on Thursday morning, before it retired to deliberate.
In Narumi Kurosaki’s university room, on the night of December 4 to 5, 2016, the young woman undoubtedly refused to resume the thread of their relationship, he “choked” or “strangled” her before getting rid of the body in a wooded area where he had scouted, according to the scenario proposed to the jurors by Etienne Manteaux. “I don’t find any mitigating circumstances,” he said again, evoking, like the lawyer for the victim’s family, Sylvie Galley, the term “feminicide”.
In defense, Messrs Renaud Portejoie and Sylvain Cormier criticized the investigation and attempted to instill “doubt” in the minds of the jurors by pointing out the “abysmal gray areas” which, according to them, populate the case, as well as that the lack of evidence allowing them to find their client guilty. Me Cormier notably outlined the hypothesis of a possible voluntary disappearance of Narumi Kurosaki.
Me Portejoie urged the jurors to acquit Nicolas Zepeda, putting forward an alternative scenario, that of intentional violence leading to death without intention of causing it: during an argument, Narumi’s head would have hit a radiator in his room, causing him head trauma which could have led to rapid death. “Crimes without a body are the void” which “feeds the fantasy”, he said.
