Transcription

In September 1999, French doctor Yves Godard, his wife and their two children mysteriously disappeared.

The father and his children were last seen on a sailboat off the coast of Brittany.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Learn French with News.

Today, we're going to talk about a mysterious French criminal case.

It's one of the biggest judicial enigmas of recent years.

An enigma means that we don't yet have all the keys to the story.

I know that many of you love to practice your French, and to learn new words and expressions through this type of story.

As usual, you can download the free vocabulary sheet which includes all the words we'll be looking at in this video.

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I put it on the screen.

Let's start with the facts.

In September 1999, Yves Godard turned 44.

He is a doctor and acupuncturist.

Acupuncturist means that he practices a Chinese medicine that involves placing needles on his patients' bodies to relieve them of pain.

On Monday August 30, 1999, he will be seeing patients for the last time at his practice in Caen.

The next day, he cancels all his appointments, all his consultations.

He'll do a few administrative tasks like sorting papers.

He then took his two children, Camille, a four-year-old girl, and Marius, his six-year-old son, fishing at the Planquery ponds, some 40 kilometers from Caen.

To fish is to catch fish in water, and a pond is a body of water.

On September 1ᵉʳ, two days later, he rented a sailboat in Saint-Malo.

Saint-Malo is a town in Brittany.

This boat is called the Nick.

So he'll be leaving the harbor, the place where all the boats are, on September 1ᵉʳ, with his two children on board.

His wife is not present, she's not part of the trip.

He tells the rental company, the person who rents him the Nick, the sailboat, that he's planning a short cruise along the coast for a few days, and that he's going to a town called Perros-Guirec.

He tells her that the return trip is scheduled for September 5.

On September 2, the following day, the boat will be inspected by customs between Cap d'Erquy and Cap Fréhel.

Customs is the State authority responsible for border control.

The customs officers are simply going to carry out a routine check, which means a classic inspection. They're not necessarily looking for anything.

Yves Godard's use of the boat's engine caught the attention of one of the customs officers.

He's going to start wondering, because there's enough wind to use the sails. So he calls the rental company to check.

The sailboat will then resume its journey at a leisurely pace, staying for a few days between Plouha and Plouézec, along the coast.

To be exact, he'll be in Brehec.

It is likely to remain in this area between September 2 and 5, according to eyewitness accounts.

So people testified, remembering seeing the sailboat.

In particular, there's the testimony of a port waffle seller (waffles are pastries that are usually bought hot) who remembers that the doctor came with his two children to buy her waffles.

We can say that she has formally identified the father and the children.

When we say formally, it means she's sure of herself.

On September 5, a trawler, a fishing boat, came across a Nick dinghy.

A dinghy is a small boat attached to the sailboat. And in this boat, we'll find two things: a jacket and a checkbook in the name of Yves Godard.

The gendarmes then opened an investigation into a disturbing disappearance.

A few days later, he had still not returned to Saint-Malo with his children to return the sailboat he had chartered.

Today is September 7.

The gendarmes then went to Saint-Malo to look at his car.

And in his car, they'll find traces of blood and doses of morphine.

Morphine is a very powerful painkiller.

Following this discovery, the investigators and gendarmes went to the family home, where they again found large quantities of blood in the couple's bedroom, bathroom and living room.

This blood is analyzed and found to belong to the mother of the family, Yves Godard's wife.

Yves Godard becomes the prime suspect in this case, and the prime suspect in the potential murder of his wife.

Interpol issued an APB for voluntary manslaughter.

As for his wife, no one had seen her since August 31, 1999, just a few days earlier.

In the days and months to come, items belonging to the family, to Yves Godard or linked to the Nick, the sailboat that had been chartered, would gradually reappear in different places.

On September 16, 15 days after setting sail, one of the Nick's life jackets was found off the coast of Cherbourg.

It's a town once again in Brittany.

On September 23, just a few days later, the rescue boat was found. It was an inflatable, pneumatic boat that was found, but here, in the south of England.

He was found half-deflated on a beach in Lyme Bay.

In relation to this raft, this little boat, there are two things that are going to be very surprising and that are going to challenge the investigators.

Firstly, the boat's canvas roof had been cut away.

Then the boat's inflator was ripped off.

It's a pretty important device, because without it, the boat can't last more than 72 hours without completely deflating.

Then, astonishingly, in these two discoveries, of both the lifejacket and the rescue boat, experts will intervene and say that it's impossible for these two objects to have ended up in the places where they were discovered naturally.

It's not possible that the currents have taken them to such opposite points.

The conclusion is that they must have been scattered by someone, so it must have been a deliberate act.

So it's going to sow a lot of doubt, as if it were staged.

In January 2000, four months after the disappearance at sea, a bag was recovered by fishermen.

Inside the bag, you'll find a variety of the family's personal belongings.

We'll find clothes, driving licenses for Yves Godard and his wife, vehicle registration documents, checkbooks and the entire contents of Marie-France Godard's handbag, the mother of the family.

We'll also find a hammer and binoculars.

Six months later, in June, almost a year after the affair began, some fishermen went fishing and found a skull.

The skull is analyzed and found to belong to Camille, the family's daughter.

As a reminder, at this stage, we've only found Camille.

There is still no trace of Marie-France, Yves Godard or Marius, the family son.

On February 11, 2001, Yves Godard's medical card was found by a walker on a beach in the Ébihens archipelago.

An archipelago is a group of islands.

A few days later, on the same beach, his bank card was found.

Two or three months later, again on the same beach, someone came across another bank card, a credit card, again in the name of Yves Godard.

That's a lot for the investigators to take in.

The gendarmes then launched a thorough search of the beach and surrounding sea, in an attempt to find the wreck of the yacht, which has still not turned up.

The wreck is the carcass, the remains.

On June 3, a new bank card in the name of Yves Godard was found, this time by a diver.

At this stage, the investigators are convinced.

Yves Godard must have stopped off at this beach to get rid of his wallet.

New excavations will be organized, but nothing will be found.

However, at the end of July of the same year, a fifth card bearing Yves Godard's name was found on the same beach.

Listen carefully to the rest, because this is where it gets really interesting.

These cards will be appraised and analyzed by a laboratory.

And according to these experts, these cards are in almost perfect condition.

So they had to stay in the sea for a very short time.

And so, as far as the experts are concerned, it's impossible for them to have been discarded in September 1999.

They wouldn't be in such good condition.

Above all, I'd like to remind you that we didn't find them all at the same time.

So some should have been a little more damaged than others.

A theory or hypothesis emerges.

Someone is dropping cards, one by one, behind the backs of the investigators and journalists working on the case.

But who could this person be?

Yves Godard himself?

An accomplice?

Or the family's murderer, someone other than Yves Godard.

We'll come back to this theory of a commissioned murder later in the video.

The aim of laying down the cards once in a while would be to make people believe in the theory of an accident, a shipwreck.

Even so, until 2006, the preferred theory was that the doctor had killed his wife and two children, then fled to escape justice, and was hiding somewhere in the world.

However, this assumption is about to be challenged.

Evidence was to prove this theory wrong, as in September 2006, sailors found bones, a tibia and a femur, in their net.

And after analysis, it turns out that the bones belong to Yves Godard.

At this stage, in September 2006, we know that the doctor is indeed dead.

From now on, investigators will be focusing on the theory that Yves Godard organized a mass suicide, killing his wife and children and then taking his own life.

However, the case is not completely closed at this stage, but it is stagnating and making no progress.

In 2008, on December 14, 2008, an intriguing new event is about to take place.

Almost 10 years after the mysterious disappearance, a new card is about to turn up, this time Yves Godard's health insurance card.

And let me tell you, once again, it's going to reappear on the same beach where all the previous cards reappeared.

And like the previous cards, it's going to be in very good condition.

And what's also very curious is that this card was discovered two days after a press conference given in Saint-Malo by the public prosecutor, who explained that the investigations were coming to an end and that the case was going to be closed.

It's quite intriguing.

So, as I was saying, it's the mass suicide disguised as a shipwreck that remains the most likely explanation, but another theory has also emerged.

However, nothing came of it.

It's that of a commissioned assassination of the family, naturally disguised as an accident.

But where exactly does this hypothesis come from?

In reality, it's linked to other deaths, including a rather suspicious assassination.

Yves Godard was a very active union member.

A union to defend retailers and craftsmen.

In particular, he criticized the weight of France's tax system and social security contributions.

Moreover, this syndicate had already been pinpointed in the past for offshore investments, i.e. tax evasion.

In 2001, two years after the disappearance of Yves Godard and his family, the head of this union was shot dead, seven times at close range.

This crime remains unsolved.

Another suspicious death, a few months earlier, of one of the union's leaders, also raises questions.

This time, it's a plane crash.

Although there is no proof between these three cases, other than the fact that these three people are indeed linked to the union, a journalist called Éric Lemasson is going to put forward a hypothesis of a financial, or even mafia-style, lead in the Godard affair, based on the link that could exist between these murders.

So, according to this journalist, there's this theory that it's linked to money, to investments made in foreign accounts.

But as I was saying, that lead came to nothing.

In September 2012, the case was finally dismissed for lack of evidence.

This means that the judge decides to abandon the procedure, since we don't have enough information to continue.

We simply don't have enough new information to continue investigating.

As I told you earlier, the bodies of the mother and son were never found, but despite everything, in 2015, they were declared dead by the French justice system.

The mystery of this case also remains completely unresolved.

What really happened? Despite the fact that the courts have dropped the case, the new statute of limitations allows the case to be reopened until 2032.

Of course, reopen the case only if there are new elements that are quite convincing, elements that provide new leads.

We still have a few years to go before we can unravel this mystery.

Thank you for listening to this story all the way through.

I hope you enjoyed it, and that it helped you learn some new French words and expressions.

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