An American woman and her son are on trial from Monday at the Paris Assizes for incredible assassination attempts on the young man’s French father, an “obsessive” project matured in a vacuum since 2012.
The trial, scheduled for a week, was to be held in January but had been postponed due to COVID.
Based on microphones placed and anonymous threats, June Hopkins, 60, and her son Brendan Walsh, 30, are suspected of having spied for months on the father of the latter, Grégoire L., against the background of business cases. inheritance and family money.
In 1990, it was on board an Orient-express that Grégoire L. and June Hopkins met. She quickly becomes pregnant but returns to the United States before the birth of Brendan, “to divorce” her American husband, she would have said.
June returns to Paris a year later and becomes pregnant with their second son. But she leaves again before the birth, this time for good: the American will not resume contact with Grégoire until fifteen years later, on the death of the latter’s father.
In 2009, she spent a month in France with her two sons, now teenagers. She would like them to take the name Grégoire L. The steps have been taken.
June Hopkins and her eldest are back in 2010 and housed in the father’s apartment. When the latter realizes that she took the opportunity to photocopy her wealth tax notice, documents from her father’s estate and a life insurance contract for 500,000 euros, an argument breaks out.
Sitting on the sofa, Grégoire L. feels a liquid running down his back and hears a repeated clicking sound. He turns around: his son has poured gasoline on him and is holding a lighter, he will tell the investigators.
Grégoire L.’s brother is present, he intervenes. Brendan pulls out “a small Japanese sword” – his uncle tackles him to the ground. June did not move, according to her ex-spouse.
Grégoire L. files a complaint for this first assassination attempt, but the Americans – who dispute it – have already left the country.
He changes the beneficiaries of his life insurance (his nieces rather than his sons) and plunges into a deep depression, which does not get better when he learns that the American husband of June Hopkins has smashed his skull in his garage, falling from a ladder onto a drilling tool. A “suspicious” death, according to American investigators, who however concluded that it was an accident.
A few months later, Grégoire L. and his relatives believe they see the mother and son prowling. In his building hall in Paris, posters are stuck: “Greg you are a murderer! “
In 2015, Grégoire L.’s sister returned home when a man and a woman, their faces hidden under motorcycle helmets, jumped on her and tried to strangle her. Neighbors intervene, scaring away the attackers. Grégoire L. leaves the pavilion and sees his sister on the ground, shocked. It’s “the Americans,” she moaned.
He goes after them. His ex-girlfriend sticks his fingers in his eyes, his son tries to strangle him with a cord. Again, neighbors put them to flight.
The investigation after their arrest will reveal a “criminal project” of “obsessive nature” according to the prosecution, to which the mother and son devoted their time since their installation “in a vacuum” and in secret in Paris, from 2012.
In addition to the microphones placed in front of Grégoire L., filmed locations, posters pushing him to suicide, we discover a letter, from a lawyer to the notary in charge of the grandfather’s estate, indicating that June Hopkins wishes to bring to his knowledge of the existence of his sons.
The investigators will also find under the bed of the American a large garden shovel in a cover. In the cellar, a saw, an axe, a machete, protective glasses, a roll of cord.
Mother and son have always denied, assuring on the contrary that Grégoire L. and his family had a plan to “eliminate them”, June Hopkins will tell the investigators.
“It is imperative that this trial serve to deconstruct the fantasies and caricatures on this file, to focus on the materiality of the facts”, estimates his lawyer Me Sophie Rey-Gascon.
According to a psychiatric report, Brendan Walsh was at the time under the influence of a “totalizing bond” with his mother which could have altered his discernment.
June Hopkins, who tried to escape from prison in 2016 by tying up the sheets in her cell before falling six meters, was finally placed under judicial supervision in 2018, like her son. They had fled to the United States where they were arrested in 2019, then extradited to France last February.
Reference-www.tvanouvelles.ca