Simone Weber, nicknamed “the Diabolique de Nancy”, died Thursday April 11 at the age of 94 in Cannes (Alpes-Maritimes), her lawyer, Liliane Glock, announced to Agence France-Presse. On February 28, 1991, the courts found her guilty of the murder of her former lover Bernard Hettier. On the other hand, she acquitted him of the charge of poisoning against her second husband, Marcel Fixard. She never confessed and the body was never found. She had settled on the Côte d’Azur since her liberation in 1999.
Bernard Hettier, a chemical industry worker who disappeared at the age of 55 on June 22, 1985 in Nancy, had previously been harassed for months by Simone Weber, of whom he no longer wanted to hear. After months of searching, the police found the missing person’s car in a garage in Cannes (Alpes-Maritimes), rented by Simone Weber under the false name of “Mme Chevallier”. A human trunk, recovered on September 15, 1985 in the Marne in Poincy (Seine-et-Marne), was finally, after long, hesitant and contradictory expertise, attributed to the missing person.
According to the prosecution, Simone Weber had cut off the victim’s head and limbs with a concrete grinder, immediately after killing him – in circumstances never established – in his apartment in Nancy. The former philosophy professor distinguished herself with a vigorous defense, notably against her investigating judge, Gilbert Thiel. Dismissing her lawyers one by one, she maintained the same composure during an epic trial before the Meurthe-et-Moselle Assize Court lasting thirty-one days. The jurors did not find premeditation for the murder of Bernard Hettier.
On the other hand, they had acquitted her of the poisoning of her second husband, Marcel Fixard, 80 years old, met in a marriage agency and died suddenly, on May 14, 1980, in Rosières-aux-Salines (Meurthe-et-Moselle), of a heart attack.
In 2016, Simone Weber was outraged by the broadcast of a TV film, “La bonne dame de Nancy”, dedicated to her affair, “an unthinkable ignominy”, denouncing the one who explained that she had been living “a perpetual assassination” since her conviction. “I am the opposite of this woman with filthy manners that we see on the screen,” she protested, recognizing no physical resemblance to the actress Véronique Genest.
