After a podcast show and a book, former investigator Stéphane Berthomet offers an in-depth documentary about the strange death of Louis-Georges Dupont, a Trois-Rivières police officer found dead in 1969. The Dupont affair: the fight of a family raises a number of disturbing questions that shake up the official theory of suicide.
The case is old, so it is better to recall the main points: on November 10, 1969, police officer Louis-Georges Dupont was found dead in his car in Trois-Rivières. He had been missing for five days. Dupont, considered a man of integrity, was suspected of having collaborated in an investigation into the Trois-Rivières police and of having denounced colleagues involved in prostitution, linked in this trade to the Cotroni clan of Montreal.
The authorities quickly concluded that it was suicide: the police officer, under pressure after putting himself between the tree and the bark, would have broken down. Her family never subscribed to this version of the story. For decades, his sons Jacques – who died last July – and Robert fought against the police, against the City of Trois-Rivières and against justice, denouncing what, in their eyes, is nonsense and raising troubling questions over the years about the investigation conducted at the time.
The Dupont affair is complex, says Stéphane Berthomet, a former French police investigator, who has been digging into this story for almost 10 years. He first focused on it out of pure documentary interest, he says, with the desire to fairly analyze the elements converging towards the theory of suicide and those pointing more towards a murder. He had warned the Dupont brothers that his conclusions might not please them. In an interview, he even admits that he was skeptical about the assassination theory at the start of his research.
His long investigation, which gave birth to a podcast show called The Shadow of Doubt and a book published last January under the title Dupont, the Incorruptible, led him to change his mind.
“My belief is that the family deserves, at the very least, justice on these points and perhaps even on the fact that the father was murdered. »
His two-part documentary directed by Sébastien Trahan and presented Thursday on ICI Télé engages in a slow and patient reconstruction of the facts. Doubts about the official version were raised very early on, making the rest of the investigation breathtaking. Tongues are loosened, information deemed proven by the courts is contradicted by photos and witnesses. Journalists who also investigated this story (Pierre Marceau, then at Radio-Canada, and Mylène Moisan, from the daily Le Soleil) add grist to the mill while the suicide theory takes on water…
Stéphane Berthomet clarifies: he does not believe that the Dupont family is the victim of a vast conspiracy. “I have learned over time that a case of this type or a miscarriage of justice is not the result of a grand conspiracy organized and knowingly maintained by the authorities for decades,” he assures. he. Similar cases are more of a mixture of poorly done work, unconscious bias (notably the refusal to believe that the system can be wrong), incompetence, context and of course lies accepted as truth.
His documentary collates the flaws in the investigation, highlights the inconsistencies, recalls that the police officer in charge of the investigation into the death of Louis-Georges Dupont appears at the top of the list of suspects of other people familiar with the case… There is no shortage of strange facts in this affair. Does this mean that the police officer found dead did not commit suicide, but was allegedly shot by colleagues?
“It is clear that today, I consider it to be an assassination,” says Stéphane Berthomet. This is also the conclusion he draws in his recent book. However, the documentary is less affirmative. The ex-investigator pleads the necessary balance in a production intended for a network like Radio-Canada. Which does not mean that his point is watered down: following his logic, it is difficult to conclude anything other than murder.
Will the case be revisited once again? Stéphane Berthomet hopes so and he makes no secret of it. The coming months will tell whether the new information contained in his documentary and its addition to the known story will be enough to provoke movement among the police, judicial and municipal authorities in Trois-Rivières.
