The mother of Jonathann Daval, sentenced to 25 years in prison for the murder of his wife Alexia, expresses her love for her son, “murderer but who remains his son”.
“I had to free myself from a weight.” When Martine Henry decides to put her version of the Daval affair on paper, in the book* Me, mum of Jonathann co-written with the journalist from Sunday newspaper Plana Radenovic, it’s almost a “therapy”. The mother of Jonathann Daval, sentenced to 25 years in prison for the murder of his wife Alexia, almost never spoke, either at the start of the case or even during the trial where she appeared in a wheelchair. , the fault of a herniated disc which gradually disappeared on its own once the conviction was pronounced.
“I admitted what happened at the trial, confides Martine Henry to BFMTV.com. I couldn’t get used to it. My subconscious refused to admit it. We can’t imagine that his child could do such a thing.”
“My son will remain my son”
Once or twice a month, with her husband, Martine Henry travels the two and a half hours between her home and the central house in Ensisheim to visit her son Jonathann. “We don’t learn to live in a prison environment, she explains. We don’t learn to hear the doors closing, the keys. We don’t learn, we have to go there for the love of our children, our husbands, our brothers. We adapt to all that.” Adapt to stand up to see her son one day get out of prison, because at no time did Martine Henry imagine denying her son, “the murderer”.
“Never, never, never, she insists. I’m his mom, she’s my child, you can’t bring children into the world and turn your back on them. I don’t condone what he did. I know I’m the mother of a murderer but my son will remain my son.”
Alexia Fouillot was killed on the night of October 27 to 28, 2018 in the pavilion she shared with her husband in Gray-la-Ville. His body was discovered two days later. Jonathann Daval admitted the facts in January 2019, before changing the version six months later. In December 2019, confronted with his in-laws in the office of the examining magistrate, he finally broke down and admitted that he killed his wife before attempting to set her body on fire.
“My son is not a monster, but he did something wrong”, breathes Martine Henry.
“No one turned their back on us”
“She too is perceived as a culprit,” writes Me Randall Schwerdorffer in the afterword to the book. However, Martine Henry, with a strong character and frank language, does not feel responsible in this affair. “I never had a feeling of shame, I did nothing, I have nothing to reproach myself with,” she sweeps. The proof, according to her: the reaction of those around her to her, childminder, and her six other children.
“We lived through that period in a very hard way, it was not easy, recognizes Martine Henry. It was very difficult but we overcame. No one turned their back on us, even in our village, everyone talk to us.”
No sense of responsibility but strong guilt. “If I had listened to him, if I had tried to understand what he was telling me, yes I could have changed things, breathes Martine Henry. He often told me ‘you know mom, it’s always the husband the murderer, one day they will come for me’ and that I refused to hear. I regret not having looked further. It would have avoided all the lies.”
Martine Henry no longer wants to come back to this story. “I said everything in my book,” she tells us. She agrees to talk about the couple that her son formed with Alexia. “They were very good, we could never have known what was going on. I found out everything at the trial, the couple problems, the baby, the miscarriage… He couldn’t confide in me, in because of Alexia. If she had known, it would have gone wrong, “she says, describing the young woman” nice at first “, then who ” changed “. “We weren’t good enough anymore.”
“He’s starting to ask questions”
At the trial, Martine Henry heard the debates on the problems of impotence of Jonathann Daval or his possible repressed homosexuality. “Too many things have been said, she regrets. We survived, we survived everything we heard, I survived, that’s all.” If she supports him, Martine Henry says she tried to understand her acting out.
“We talked about it, we talk about it less but we talked about it, she confides to us. It’s still complicated for him. He still can’t explain it to himself. He’s starting to ask himself questions , how he did it, why he did it. It will take time, there was a before, during and there is an after.”
Afterwards, Jonathann Daval saw him in prison. He works there, does bodybuilding and mixes with the other prisoners. Morale “is better”, like that of her mother, freed from this “weight” she has been carrying for five years. A single shadow in her book project, her statements a few weeks ago when questioned by RTLMartine Henry said that he “gets along very well with Guy Georges”, sentenced to life imprisonment for seven murders.
“With hindsight, I think it may shock people, she admits. But at first, Guy Georges, I didn’t know what he did because I’m not interested in all that. (.. .) Jonathann is not going to spend his life talking to walls, he talks to Guy Georges as he talks to other people. I thought of Guy Georges because he comes to talk to us. I could have said another nobody. It’s the prison environment. They’re not there for a bunch of marbles, but everyone can talk to each other.”
*I, mum of Jonathann, by Martine Henry co-written with journalist Plana Radenovic. Published by Michalon.
