The Ariège Assize Court sentenced, Friday, November 24, nurse Marie-José Montesinos and her ex-lover Jean-Paul Vidal to thirty years in prison for an assassination and a murder committed in 2017 in the department.
The court attached Ms. Montesinos’ sentence to a security period of twenty years, beyond the requisitions in this case where the prosecution had presented her as the instigator of the assassination of her former companion Christophe Orsaz and of the latter’s daughter.
“It is a verdict commensurate with the seriousness of what happened,” said Arnaud Lévy-Soussan, lawyer for twelve members of the victims’ families, noting in particular the length of the security period imposed on Ms. Montesinos. . The latter’s lawyers did not comment following the verdict, but Mathieu Montfort, for Mr. Vidal, indicated that there would be “no appeal” from his client. “Mr. Vidal’s approach was to explain himself to the civil parties, I want to say that for him the sentence was almost incidental,” he said.
Ms. Montesinos, 61, and Mr. Vidal, a 53-year-old stunt mechanic, are accused of having murdered Christophe Orsaz, a previous companion of the caregiver, on November 30, 2017, and of having killed his daughter Célia, present by chance during of the ambush they had set for the landscape gardener in Ariège. Their disappearance was only elucidated six months later and this affair of the “disappeared from Mirepoix”, named after the town where Mr. Orsaz lived, became in the press that of the “diabolical lovers” after the first confessions in custody. view of the two accused in June 2018.
