Cédric Jubillar will be tried by an assize court for the murder of his wife Delphine, a 33-year-old nurse from a clinic in Albi, who disappeared in Tarn in 2020, the Toulouse public prosecutor’s office announced on Tuesday November 21 .
“The charging order has been issued. It is impossible at this time to indicate when this case will be set. We must wait to know whether this order will be appealed,” declared the public prosecutor of the Toulouse Court of Appeal, Franck Rastoul. The trial will take place before the Tarn Assize Court in Albi, where specific arrangements will be required to accommodate such a trial.
In this case without a body, no confession, no witness, no crime scene, the house painter, now aged 36 and incarcerated since June 2021, denies any responsibility. The file was opened following the disappearance of Delphine Jubillar, on the night of December 15 to 16, 2020, in the middle of a curfew linked to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Sufficient charges” according to the prosecution
In the final indictment delivered at the beginning of November, the Toulouse public prosecutor’s office noted “sufficient charges against Cédric Jubillar of having committed the murder of his wife”.
At the time, the couple, who have two children, were in the process of separating, the husband “extensively spied” on Delphine Jubillar’s phone and “it is established that he did not accept the divorce decision taken by his wife”, we can read in the indictment. He had also just discovered that she had a lover with whom she planned to start a new life.
Lawyer for the civil party, Philippe Pressecq welcomed “an indictment of high quality and a demonstration without any harshness of the guilt of Cédric Jubillar”. Conversely, Jean-Baptiste Alary, one of Cédric Jubillar’s three lawyers, sees it as an unfounded accusation. “In this case, there is nothing serious or compromising for Cédric Jubillar,” he denounces.
New means deployed to find the missing
For the gendarmes of the Toulouse research section, Cédric Jubillar showed “suspicious behavior” immediately after his disappearance. They discovered inconsistencies in his statements, contradicting elements of the investigation. The investigators are particularly surprised that Cédric Jubillar reported the disappearance of his wife only seventeen minutes after the wake-up time he declared, without really looking for her, according to the low number of steps recorded by the pedometer on his phone. .
The disappearance of the nurse caused a significant stir in France, shortly after the conviction of Jonathann Daval for the murder of his wife, Alexia, in Haute-Saône, a crime that he had long denied while playing the role of the grieving husband.
To find the body of the missing woman, unprecedented means were deployed, in vain, in a large area around Cagnac-les-Mines, a former mining village. Divers probed lakes and rivers, rock cavities were explored, specialized army units were even mobilized.