This is the house in a respectable Paris suburb where the Monster of Avignon lived an apparently normal life, even though the demons that would drive him to commit his unspeakable crimes, were already secretly taking hold.
Former electrician Dominique Pélicot, 71, stands accused of routinely drugging his wife Gisele to be violated by dozens of strangers he met on the internet.
The depravity recounted in the court in Avignon this month all allegedly took place since 2013 after the couple retired and moved more than 400 miles away from the French capital to Provence.
But now it has emerged that while playing the part of a hard-working family man in this large detached house in Noisy-le-Grand, half an hour outside Paris, Pélicot was anything but.
Pictured: Dominique Pélicots old family home in Noisy-le-Grand, half an hour outside Paris
Dominique Pelicot is accused of recruiting men online to assault his wife repeatedly over a 10 year period
A general view of Dominique Pélicots old family home in Noisy-le-Grand, near Paris
Gisele Pelicot arrives at court in Avignon, France for week two of the trial
Officers from the Paris Criminal Brigade have continually visited Pélicot in his cell at Baumettes prison in Marseille, where he has been on remand since 2020.
They continually interrogate him about his life in the greater Paris area.
For not only has he admitted to the brutal sexual assault of a young woman estate agent in 1999, identified only as Estella B, 19, he has also been charged with the murder of Sophie Narme, 23, also an estate agent in 1991.
In chilling echoes of Britains infamous Suzy Lamplugh case, lured to her death by the mysterious Mr Kipper, (widely suspected to be serial rapist John Cannan) Sophie Narme had agreed to meet a man who gave his name as Monsieur Duboste for a flat viewing in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, to the north-west of the city.
Soon afterwards her naked body was found, face-down on the blood-soaked carpet, with a belt still fastened round her neck. In a frenzied onslaught, Sophie had been stabbed, raped, and strangled.
Her killer was never identified, but May 1999 saw a second shockingly similar attack on an estate agent - again lured to meet a supposed potential client alone.
The apartment where Estella B. was attacked was in Villeparisis, only a 25-minute drive from Noisy-le-Grand, where Pelicot lived with his wife and three children.
Estella, who survived the brutal encounter, told police that soon after entering the flat, her assailant began choking her, then he placed a knife to her neck, and forced her to the floor, rendering her unconscious with an ether-soaked rag.
A street sign outside Dominique Pélicots old family home in Noisy-le-Grand
Sophie Narme (pictured) was an estate agent who was murdered after she agreed to meet a man for a flat viewing in the 19th arrondissement of Paris in 1999
Pelicot lived in the family home with his wife and three children
The Pelicots daughter Caroline gave evidence in a harrowing testimony last week
However, the young woman somehow came round and managed to fend him off, whereupon he panicked and fled.
And in a shocking twist to the story of Pélicots appalling crimes, it has emerged that the bureaucratic French legal system missed a golden opportunity to stop him in his tracks more than 14 years ago.
But for the legal red tape, he might well have been prevented from becoming what his own daughter described as one of the worst sexual predators of the last 20 years.
In 2010, it was at a Carrefour supermarket in Collégien, a town in Seine-et-Marne, only five miles from Noisy, that Pélicot was caught by security guards filming up customers skirts.
He escaped with a derisory €100 fine as part of a plea bargain – an alternative procedure to prosecution, allowing a perpetrator who acknowledges his guilt to be tried quickly.
But that year, the national automated genetic fingerprint database matched Pélicots DNA with a trace of sperm found on Estella B.s shoe eleven years earlier.
Yet because the Estella B. case was closed in 2001, the DNA match was not used.
There was a mess at the time, said a judicial source close to the case. The information remained in a blind spot of justice, and Pélicot remained free. He was arrested ten years later, after raping and inviting dozens of men to rape his wife.
It was during police interviews with Pélicot on remand in October 2022 that interrogators raised the Estella B. and Sophie Narme cases following requests from the newly-formed cold case unit in Nanterre, north-west of Paris.
Gisele Pelicot, 72, arrives at court in Avignon, France
A general view of the area around Dominique Pélicots old family home in Noisy-le-Grand
Madame Pelicot, 72, relived the trauma that she experienced when police investigator showed her graphic films of her being raped repeatedly by her husband Dominique
This is when the DNA match to the 1999 Estella B case was finally made.
When confronted by the DNA evidence, during a third interrogation on the subject, Pélicot told officers in his interview statement: Im going to tell you the truth. About this young woman who had to grow up and who is questioning herself. Its me.
Pélicot, who was 46 at the time, said he had an uncontrollable urge to approach her at the time, yet still denied he was intent on rape.
What would have happened if she hadnt pulled away he was asked.
I dont know.
You were still well on your way to raping her.
I cant tell you.
Later he insisted to the investigating judge that he had no plan to rape her, claiming he just intended to immobilize her (…), maybe to look at her.
Hardly surprisingly, given the enormity of the case building against Pélicot, his protestations did not prevent him being charged with attempted rape with a weapon.
Investigators soon linked the case with the Sophie Narme one from December 4, 1991 in Paris, because of the disturbing similarities with the Estella B case.
Due to yet another unforgivable lapse in the machinery of justice, there is no DNA from Pélicot - nor any other attacker - in the Narme case.
Béatrice Zavarro, Pélicots lawyer, said: The DNA in the case was lost by the sealed service, there is no evidence to link it.
The judicial investigation into these two cases is nearing completion, according to the Nanterre prosecutors office, meaning trials are likely in 2025.
The imposing £1.3m, five-bedroom former Pélicot family home in Noisy-le-Grand stands on a large corner plot and is largely shrouded from view by many trees and green privacy netting attached to the high fence with its overgrown hedgerow.
One neighbour vaguely recalls the Pélicots, but adds, glancing with a shudder at the horrifying newspaper reports from the Avignon court: we did not know them – they were a private family.
David and Florian Pelicot enter the courtroom on the morning of Monday, September 9
The Pelicots old house has five bedrooms and is worth £1.3million
The house was rented, and according to the Pélicots daughter Caroline Payronnet, it was provided by the company for which her mother Gisele worked in a well-paid management job in Paris.
But her fathers employment history as an electrician and a sometime estate agent, was more patchy.
Caroline recalled in her candid and heart-rending 2022 book And I Stopped Calling You Papa how their brittle façade of middle-class respectability came tumbling down when the bailiffs called.
I was almost fifteen when one day, coming home from school to have lunch at home, a police officer accompanied by a bailiff and a horde of removal men burst into our house to take away all the furniture in our living room. My father had been preparing for this for a few days.
He had put away certain equipment that he considered essential, such as the stereo and the living room television. I can see myself insulting these poor movers in their truck.
That day, I was very angry with my father. My mother was going to come home later, to a nearly empty house. I can still see him, his face ashen, walking back and forth in the living room, crying like a little boy.
I wanted to cry too, I thought of the chest of drawers, made of marble and fine wood, that my maternal grandfather had passed on to his daughter. This piece of furniture had stood in our living room since I was born, it was the only trace for me of this late grandfather… and ended up at auction, like a cheap trinket.
A few months later, at Christmas, Christmas Eve was held in our living room, with plastic garden furniture. That didnt stop my father from giving my mother a gold ring set with semi-precious stones. It was a kind of compensation.
He was acting like a teenager caught doing something wrong. My mother then asked him to return the ring and get his money back.
It would be many years later that Caroline, by now only too aware of the horrors perpetrated on her mother by her father and his accomplices, would discover, that she too may have been drugged as a teenager while living in Noisy-le-Grand.
She told the court how she had been called by a detective and told that the officer had something to show me.
He tells me to sit down and he says he has two photos to show me. The first photo is of a woman who is apparently sleeping lying on her side with the light on. We can see her backside.
The second photo, the same position, same panties, same staging.
I still dont recognise myself and then the policeman says to me; but its definitely you with that brown spot on your cheek.
I discover that my father photographed me without my knowledge. I understood immediately that it was me in those photos. I do not sleep like that. So I strongly believe that he drugged me.
Recalling the moment in her gruelling autobiography, she said: How could he take a picture of me in the middle of the night without waking me up?
Madame Pelicot, 72, last week faced down the 51 men – including her husband – accused of her rape
The sexual fantasies were played out at their picturesque chalet home in the Provence village of Mazan (pictured)
The light is too bright not to have woken me up. I dont sleep dressed like that, nor in this position, which is exactly the same in both photos. And this lingerie?
Its the same in both shots.
How is this possible? The photos were taken in two different places and at two very distinct times.
Where did these panties come from that I wear in the photo? Worse, did he abuse me, apart from his two photos? When I come to my senses, I look at the officer and nodded: Yes, it is me in the photos. I have a lot of trouble dating them. But I know that they go back a few years.
In the book she also recalled as a young child, seeing her father being violent towards her mother.
My parents did not really succeed in protecting me from their relationship problems, nor from those related to their financial situation, which was regularly unstable.
I learned very early on what it meant to be faced with a major problem. I was not yet nine years old when I witnessed a scene of domestic violence. I saw my father lift my mother up with both hands by the collar of her shirt.
She was pinned against the bathroom wall, both feet a few inches off the ground. At that time, I think my mother wanted to leave him.
She recalled how her father rarely succeeded at anything he tried, and how she felt more like the adult in their relationship, with him the child.
She wrote: My father very often circumvented the system to give us the illusion that he was getting by.
I often saw him out of step, or even fail, when he tried to retrain in sectors other than his own, he who was an electrician by trade.
Or when he improvised as a business manager with our help, that of my brothers and mine. We had lent him funds to set up an SARL (limited company) in the service sector.
Finally, he filed for bankruptcy and ended up in an even more critical situation. His ambitions and decisions often put us in difficulty. Fortunately, my mother had a stable position as an executive, in a company where she worked for more than twenty years.