Switzerland - Stern lover on trial for sado-masochist murder
Stern lover on trial for sado-masochist murder
A murder trial in Switzerland this week will focus on the sado-masochist liaison between one of France's most influential bankers and his lover, who is accused of killing him.
Lurid details of the couple's relationship are set to unfurl during the trial, four years after banker Edouard Stern was found dead clad in a latex bodysuit, with two bullets in the head and two others in the body.
The case centres on whether Stern drove the woman to kill him by harassing her or whether she was after his money.
The affair has inspired two books and numerous theories.
Cecile Brossard, now 40, was arrested in March 2005, and according to the judge in the case at that time, has admitted shooting her lover.
Her lawyers, however, argue that it was a crime of passion.
Since the discovery of Stern's body in his luxury penthouse apartment in the centre of Geneva, speculation has been rife over the hidden life of the person who was once France's 38th richest man.
He counted Nicolas Sarkozy, now President of France, and former prime minister Laurent Fabius among his friends and was the son-in-law of Michel David-Weill, chairman of French merchant bank Lazard. He was David-Weill's heir apparent before he left Lazard in 1997 to run his own investment fund.
Stern family lawyers point to a simple motive that they say drove Ms Brossard to the killing.
One portrayed Ms Brossard as a greedy and cunning woman who murdered her lover out of spite and for money.
He accused her of "stirring up the fantasies of a 50-year-old man", who became dependant on a "sexually deviant little blonde from the suburbs".
For Stern's lawyers, at the heart of the case is a $US1 million ($1.25 million) which was transferred by the banker into his lover's account, but which he later blocked after changing his mind.
Ms Brossard's lawyers allege that Stern told her: "A million dollars is a lot of money to pay for a whore."
According to them, his words led Ms Brossard to grab the gun that was in the bedroom.
They have described the banker as an unscrupulous manipulator and sexual predator and that Ms Brossard was the toy of Stern who repeatedly humiliated and harassed her, subjecting her to "a moral degradation, to physical degradation".
According to Alec Reymond, another of her lawyers, "very seriously deviant images that Edouard Stern had downloaded on his computer" led to the conclusion that he is "not the poor victim who was manipulated by an uncontrollable sexual deviant".
