Jean-Claude Romand: A Cautionary Tale of Deceit, Illness, and Spree Murder

I’d like to introduce to you a man who made a life out of the simple lie, and whose existence has haunted me since I learned who he was last year. His name is Jean-Claude Romand.

There’s general information out there about this man and his crazy case, but the best report I could find was a book called The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception by Emmanuel Carrére. It features a comprehensive look at his life and an unbiased look at his motivations, and it even includes letters between Romand and the author. Highly recommended!

Jean-Claude was born to a stubbornly masculine and emotionally stifled timber manager, Aimé Romand, and his amorphously sickly wife, Anne-Marie Romand, and spent part of his childhood on a farm in Clairveaux-les-Lacs. After some time running the farm and managing the timber company, the Romands built a house in Clairveaux and moved when he was still in grade school.

Old neighbors, teachers, and classmates interviewed after Jean-Claude was arrested said they remembered him as being a well-behaved kid, sweet and mild mannered. By all accounts, everyone who remembered him remembered an eager-to-please young boy who almost never found himself in trouble with authority figures. Suspicious.

Romand himself said that he wished to emulate his father in all things - his father who routinely kept his emotions out of the sight of others. To his family, Aimé Romand was an endlessly strong working man and little else. Jean-Claude recalled wanting to emulate that stoicism for both himself and his mother, who he was convinced would die if he troubled her with the small things he saw his classmates bother their own parents with. He sensed his family’s private sufferings and internalized them, and began following conflicting rules for his own life.

First, he knew from his family’s values that he must never lie. But he also learned that sometimes it was better to leave the truth unsaid to protect the feelings of others. Tell the truth, but don’t say anything that would upset others. 

During his trial, he said that he only told his dog about his childhood sadnesses and trials. That he knew his family and loved ones may have listened, but that he simply couldn’t speak. “when you get caught in that endless effort not to disappoint people, the first lie leads to another, and then it’s your whole life.”

He finished his baccalaureate program in 1971 with an essay titled “Does truth exist?” which everyone thinks is indicative of something. Maybe, but most likely it was just the one he saw first on the list of prompts. In a preparatory class he took shortly after to join the Forestry Commission, there was a bullying incident to which he reacted by “developing a series of sinus infections” that allegedly forced him to spend the remainder of his school year living in his parents’ home. He rarely left the house, and the biography characterizes this part of his life as a child in the body of a man, living in his childhood room. He decided, without telling anyone, that he would not return to the preparatory program and abandoned his future in the forestry commission.

This is where the novel takes a bit of liberty in deciphering the decision making. Jean-Claude then decides to pursue the medical field and begins studying to be a doctor. Though it appears on its face that this is the beginning of him growing a spine and pursuing his own dreams despite his parents’ wishes, it’s a bit more complicated than that. He said himself during his trial that he actually loved the forest and was excited at the prospect of working in his father’s business. He also admitted in court that he hated the idea of touching sick patients and had no draw to the medical field, but that it was a last resort to get him the life he wanted.

But Carrére hypothesizes that his time in prep school exposed him to a level of high society he hadn’t known existed before, and it was a life that he was drawn to. Suddenly the grime and calloused hands of the timber business didn’t appeal as much as tailored suits and social clout.

He enrolled in medical school for this, but also because a distant cousin with whom he was vaguely familiar was also studying there. By his own words, he had considered himself “engaged” to Florence as early as age fourteen, and before their first year in med school was over he had ingratiated himself to her friend group and convinced her to date him.

The first time he ever said he loved Florence and, subsequently, had sex with her, she initiated a period of separation between the two of them. Her reasoning was that she should really be studying for her exams, she was so busy, etc., but her friends at the time maintain that she wasn’t really into Jean-Claude. He fell into a deep depression, but didn’t tell any of his family members or new friends. Instead, he mirrored his behavior from prep school and shut himself away from the world. 

During this period, he ended up missing one of his final exams for the end of his second year. Now, let’s be clear - this would have been fine. He rescheduled the exam and was set to take it in September instead, but he claimed in court that he was further prevented from taking the make up exam when he fell down the stairs and broke his wrist - though he subsequently said that this shouldn’t have fully prevented him from taking the test, as the questions could have been verbally dictated to him.

Whatever the reason, Jean-Claude spent the morning and afternoon of the test lying in bed. When his parents called to ask how the exam had gone, he said it went well. And that was that.

This wasn’t the first time Jean-Claude Romand had needlessly lied about something relatively inane. During his trial, he recounted an outing during his first year in medical school where he went to a bar with Florence’s friends. At one point, he vanished, and then returned with a torn shirt and blood on his clothes and face, and told the group that he had been mercilessly beaten, kidnapped, taken to the middle of nowhere in the trunk of his own car, beaten again, and then left in his car. When his friends asked why someone would do that, he simply said he didn’t know. They thought it was weird and that the story didn’t make much sense, but they felt they had no choice to accept it - after all, why would someone lie about something so strange? Jean-Claude himself said that, after the fact, he didn’t really know that it was a lie. Yes, he didn’t remember being beaten and kidnapped, but he also didn’t remember ripping his own shirt and bloodying himself. It was a haze to him.

And later, after he missed his exams and told everyone he had passed, one of his friends arrived at his door and chewed him out for disappearing. During their conversation, Romand says he was terrified to tell the truth because he knew he didn’t have a good answer for why he’d lied, so instead he told his friend that he had cancer. 

He had apparently toyed with the idea of spreading this rumor for a while, because it was as good a cover as he could get. If he had lymphoma, it would excuse his disappearance and depression. So he returned to the University and his friends, allowing them to believe he had lymphoma, and now he was juggling two lies about his life.

He was told by the university that he, predictably, cannot take his third year entrance exam - seeing as he never completed his second year. But the school technically didn’t have provisions preventing him from retaking his second year - so he did. For eleven years, he continued to enroll in second year courses while telling his friends that he was progressing in his medical degree. To keep up the charade, he went to lectures for the courses he was SUPPOSED to be taking, took notes, helped others in the classes, and studied for exams. By all accounts, he did all the work it would take to become a doctor except actually take the exams and do clinical practice. He even made appearances before and after exams so the other students wouldn’t wonder where he was.

He later married Florence after their rough start. She had received a degree in pharmacology and began working at a pharmacy part time, and they had two children, Caroline and Antoine, shortly after. As far as Florence was aware, Jean-Claude passed the medical board exam in Paris and became a research assistant at INSERM (the National Institute of Health and Medical Research), after which he graduated to research scientist at the World Health Organization in Geneva. He claimed to his family that he was involved in inventing new medications for clinical trials, and since his peers and family didn’t know any better, they accepted that without question. After all, he was traveling to Geneva all the time and bringing back souvenirs from his trips, and his coworkers were sending gifts on the childrens’ birthdays. What was there to question?

He kept up the charade by feigning strict privacy, never allowing coworkers to his home and never allowing his family to his office. This went so far as him forbidding anyone to know his work phone number. Instead, his friends and family would reach him by calling an answering service through a telephone company, leaving a message, and then waiting for Jean-Claude to be paged and call back. No one thought that was weird.

In reality, Jean-Claude was, indeed, driving to Geneva. But instead of developing groundbreaking medical treatments, he would park in the WHO parking lot with a visitors badge and wander the public areas of the building, more often than not grabbing any printed materials that were free to take. He also used all the public services offered at the WHO office - he sent his mail through their post office, made withdrawals from their bank, even planned trips through their travel agency.

In the beginning of his “career,” he would do this every day. But as time wore on, he began spending his time elsewhere - the way you or I would spend our weekends. He’d travel around, read, visit cafes, sightsee, even visit his parents. And for the supposed business trips, he would simply drive his car to a hotel near the airport and study the guidebooks for the country he was supposed to be visiting. Every day he’d call his family and tell them what he had allegedly done that day, what the weather was like in the new country, etc. 

So this begs the question: how were they surviving? How did they make money? This has a somewhat multifaceted answer, but the short version is: he got lucky. While he had been studying, his parents had purchased an apartment for him in Lyon. He sold that, pocketing the 300,000 francs it sold for. He also still technically had legal access to his parents’ bank accounts, which he had used while he was in school. He continued to dip into their savings regularly, which his parents weren’t worried about.

In addition to that, he began telling family members and friends that his connections at WHO allowed him to make investments on their behalf at a guaranteed 18% return - which, if you’re not familiar with investing, is AN INSANE AMOUNT. He did this to many extended relatives, who had tens of thousands of francs to invest.

So, at the beginning of his marriage to Florence, they lived on that money plus Florence’s part time salary at the pharmacy. As far as taxes were concerned, he claimed to his family that he didn’t need to pay French taxes because he worked in Switzerland, and when it came time to file his taxes he simply marked his status as a student and sent a copy of his student ID.

Later, when the money began to run dry, his father-in-law came into an early retirement that provided a 400,000 franc bonus - which Jean-Claude immediately “invested.” But eventually his father-in-law asked to withdraw some of it to enjoy himself. A couple weeks later his father-in-law fell down the stairs while he was alone with Jean-Claude and died before paramedics arrived. He claims he absolutely did not kill his father-in-law, but his track record indicates… otherwise. We’ll get to that.

A testimony at his trial proved that he also exploited a distant family member’s husband’s cancer diagnosis to his own advantage by citing his research at WHO. He claimed that they were working on an experimental cure for cancer, and that he could sneak some capsules away but that it would be costly. In total, that family paid 60,000 francs for what amounted to capsules filled with nothing but sugar. The man died the following year. During  the trial he attempted to alleviate his guilt by claiming that he hadn’t presented it as a cure, but as a placebo that couldn’t do any harm to try. He also said that he’d never claimed to be involved with the development, but rather was a go-between who gave money to a researcher who actually worked at WHO in exchange for the capsules. When asked who the researcher was, Romand said he couldn’t recall, and that the notebooks where the name would be had been burned in a house fire that I’ll talk about later. Convenient.

After his father-in-law’s death, his mother-in-law sold the house, as it was far too big for just one person, and gave the proceeds to Jean-Claude - another 1.3 million francs in his pocket. He decided to upgrade his family’s home, so they moved to a farmhouse near Ferney. 

And thus enters Corinne Hourtin, a recently-divorced friend of the family with a reputation as a homewrecker and, shall we say, a “loose” woman. You get it. 

Three weeks after her divorce and subsequent moving to Ferney with her kids, she received a bouquet of flowers from Jean-Claude and an invitation to dinner. He took her out twice, then abruptly confessed that he was in love with her. 

This came as a surprise to Corinne, because she a) had no interest and b) hadn’t thought he had any interest either. She rebuffed his affections, but continued to see him for dinner every week. Their relationship was messy, to say the least, and was characterized by periods of distance to which Jean-Claude responded poorly. But eventually the romancing would begin again, as Corinne would get tired of being treated poorly by other lovers, and they would reconnect again. 

Eventually it puttered out for good, and she began seeing someone else. But when her old apartment sold for 900,000 francs, she remembered that Jean-Claude had investment hookups and gave him a call. He accepted her offer, but her contingencies were that she should be able to withdraw the money at any time. He agreed.

But Jean-Claude was running out of money. The lavish lifestyle to which he had become accustomed was costing him hundreds of thousands of francs a month. The 1.3 million francs from his mother in law’s house was gone. He deposited Corinne’s money into his own bank accounts, but he was fully aware that touching that money would be disastrous for him.

The dominos started to fall. He spent it quickly, saying in his testimony that his spending was almost worse as though fueled by his panic. 

He then brought attention to himself in his small town during a small upset concerning the principal of a catholic school who had entangled himself in an affair with a teacher. While the school board wanted to remove him and replace him with someone more respectable, Jean-Claude claimed he voted against removing the principal. In reality, Jean Claude did vote for removing him, and then went home and told his wife that he voted against removing him. His wife helped him campaign for keeping the supposedly slandered principal, and the town became enraged with his strange behavior and perceived betrayal.

Eventually things calmed down, but the damage was done. People knew his name, hated him for his apparent support for the principal, and his friends were confused by his sudden change of heart about the vote. Florence at one point spoke to these friends about it, and was visibly disturbed when she found out that her husband had lied to her about his vote. She allegedly was also approached by someone who had looked up her husband’s name in the WHO directory and couldn’t find his name listed anywhere. The witness said she responded mildly. Carrére implies that this was the moment that Florence’s trust in Jean-Claude broke for good, and all the inconsistencies in his life began to come together for her.

And finally, Corinne set a hard line. She needed her money back, and there wasn’t any room to wiggle out of it this time. He set a date to meet her for dinner to hand over the money he no longer had. His accounts and his mother’s account were overdrafted. Jean-Claude then decided that he would kill himself before their meeting.

This is where the testimony gets fuzzy. He recounts an elaborate plan to call Corinne while he drank a toxic cocktail of drugs and alcohol and forcing her to listen to him die in real time under the knowledge that, if she hung up to call an ambulance for him, he would use a lethal injection to kill himself instantly. 

This never happened, but in the ensuing days, he purchased a gun, a silencer, and bullets with cash, followed by a bottle of barbiturates, two jerry cans, and what the court theorizes was a rolling pin a few days later. He filled the cans with gasoline before returning home.

On the morning of Saturday, January 9, 1993, something happened between Jean-Claude and his wife, though what it was has been lost to time. Romand maintains that he has no memory of what happened after his wife got off the phone with her mother the evening before - that he only remembers waking up holding a rolling pin covered in her blood. He doesn’t remember bashing her skull in while she was in bed, but he does remember washing the rolling pin in the sink and putting it back in the kitchen. He then got back into bed and slept through the night as normal and spent the following morning watching television on the sofa with his children, who he had already decided to kill as well.

He claims that he tried to get his children to drink water with the barbiturates he purchased in it, but it’s unclear as to whether they drank it. What we do know is that he told his children to get back in bed because they felt feverish, and while his daughter laid on her stomach he shot her in the back. He covered her with the blanket so his son wouldn’t suspect anything, then he called his son into the room and did the same to him.

He then drove to his parents’ house with the gun wrapped in a newspaper. He found his father first, shot him twice in the back, and covered him with a comforter. He then found his mother, brought her to the sitting room, and shot her as well. He says in his testimony that her false teeth fell out when she fell, and that he put them back in before covering her with a bedspread as well. He also recalls that their dog became inconsolable, running back and forth between the bodies, and that he shot the dog as well, covering it with a blanket.

He then cleaned the gun in the sink, called Corinne, and planned to meet her later that day for a fancy dinner party with some INSERM big whigs. She was excited to rub elbows with the scientific elite, and agreed to go.

The collection of testimonies paints a picture of a poorly put together ruse. The map to where they were going was nondescript, and Romand struggled to find their way. When they became hopelessly lost on forest roads, they pulled into a rest stop while he claimed to be searching his trunk for the party host’s phone number. At this point they were outrageously late for the supposed party, and Corinne was more than a little upset when Jean-Claude returned to the front seat to say that he hadn’t found the number. Instead, he had found a necklace he had been looking forward to giving her.

She was angry, but eventually was convinced to put the necklace on. He told her to get out of the car and close her eyes so he could put it on her, and then immediately sprayed her with tear gas foam and jabbed the end of a taser rod into her stomach. She fought him as hard as she could and screamed that she didn’t want to die, telling him to think of her children. 

Carrére’s interpretation of events is that, when Corinne looked into Jean-Claude’s eyes, she saved her own life. Regardless of why he did it, he almost instantly stopped spraying and shocking her and began attempting to console her as though she were having an unprompted meltdown.

When they got back into the car, he attempted to convince her that she was the one who had instigated the fight and that he had simply been defending himself. In her testimony, Corinne says she almost allowed herself to be convinced, but that she insisted that he had been the one to start the attack. He just shook his head as he drove them both home. She also said that at no time did she see a necklace, but she had seen a black cord dropped in the leaves at her feet, the kind that would be useful for strangling someone.

He dropped her off at home after blaming his apparent madness on his returned cancer, and she told him she could recommend some good psychotherapists. Five minutes after he dropped her off, he called her home and is quoted as saying, “Promise me not to believe it was premeditated. If I’d wanted to kill you, I’d have done it in your apartment, and I’d have killed your girls, too.”

He arrived back at his own house early in the morning on Sunday. He left his car in the parking lot of a shopping center so no one would think he was home and drop by, and then spent the time between 1pm and 4pm mindlessly fiddling with the remote control on what was later found to be a garbled home video - no one knows what was originally on it.

Between roughly 4pm and 7pm, he called Corinne nine times. He listened to the answering machine the first eight, but on the last they spoke briefly about him getting help and returning her money. He agreed.

In his testimony, he claims that this was the moment that he decided he needed to die. He took the cans of gasoline and spread the gas in the attic, on Florence, on his children, and on the stairwell and then started fires in each except his own bedroom. He pointedly did not take the barbiturates, but rather took a ten-years expired bottle of sedative and changed into pajamas. As smoke filled their room, he tried to seal the bottom of the door with clothing before laying down in bed. When he heard firefighters outside, he got out of bed, slammed open the window, and lost consciousness.

When firefighters and paramedics got the fire under control and extracted the bodies, they found two charred children’s bodies with gunshot wounds, one badly burned female body with blunt force trauma to the back of the skull, and a comatose, badly burned man who was still alive but only barely.

The firefighters theorized that the head wound had been caused by a beam falling from the attic onto Florence. Then, after an initial investigation found that all victims had died before the fire and Jean-Claude’s parents and dog had been shot in their home, police began to suspect that the Romands had been involved in high-level crime or had enemies who wanted them dead.

They needed answers, so they turned to friends of the Romands who informed them that Jean-Claude worked for WHO in Geneva. A quick phone call revealed that there was, in fact, no Dr. Romand at WHO in Geneva. He wasn’t listed in the national registry of physicians, had never worked with any of the hospitals he’d claimed to, and - as a surprise to his doctor friends - had never finished medical school at all. A search of his car later revealed a letter he’d written and discarded that essentially admitted to the entirety of the crime. And a call from Corinne corroborated that Jean-Claude had attempted to murder her later that same day. The police called the host of the party he claimed they were to attend - he had never heard of Jean-Claude Romand. The case was essentially closed - Jean-Claude had fabricated his entire life, murdered his entire family, and then set his house on fire to cover it up.

By the time Jean-Claude was stirring from his coma three days later, the world knew he was guilty. When he became fully conscious, still recovering from smoke inhalation, burns, and the sedatives he had taken, he immediately began denying everything.

He claimed first that he saw men come into their house and shoot his children before setting the house on fire. He also vehemently denied killing his parents. And every time the magistrate presented new evidence that unraveled his entire life story, he backtracked and made up something new. This interrogation went on for seven hours before he finally broke down and confessed to the whole thing.

Psychiatrist testimony says that their interviews with him were disturbing and extremely telling. Rather than show any emotion for what he had done, he resumed the character of Dr. Romand and seemed extremely concerned with what the doctors thought of him and making a good impression. He conducted himself with perfect control and a sort of collected ease that unintentionally helped them build a picture of the kind of pathological pretending he’d done his whole life.

Later, he claimed he’d tried to kill himself but decided not to when another inmate committed suicide that same day. Then, after speaking with a chaplain, he put the idea away altogether and “condemned himself to live” with the memories of his family. He became obsessed with the idea that the truth had set him free and talked at length about how he had never felt so emotionally at peace than when he was in prison.

At the end of it all, several teams of psychiatrists diagnosed him as a narcissistic personality saying that he was unable to remove himself as the protagonist of life even after admitting to the murder of his own family. They didn’t recommend forcing severe psychotherapy upon him because he didn’t want it, but rather hoped that time away from the lies would help him become more authentic.

When his trial was over, the jury took five hours for deliberation before sentencing Jean-Claude Romand to life in prison with no possibility for parole for 22 years, which would have been 2015. In the final moments of his trial, Romand read the following statement to the court, which I’m going to read verbatim:

“It’s true that silence must be my lot. I understand that my words and even my still being alive make the scandal of my actions worse. I wished to take upon myself both judgment and punishment and I believe that this is the last time I will be able to speak to those who suffer because of me. I know that my words are pathetically inadequate, but I must speak. I must tell them their anguish is with me day and night. I know they refuse to forgive me, but in memory of Florence I want to ask their forgiveness. It will perhaps come to me only after my death. I want to tell Florence’s mother and brothers that her father died as a result of his fall. I don’t ask them to believe me, because I have no proof, but I say it before Florence and before God because I know that an unconfessed crime will not be forgiven. I ask them all to forgive me. 

Now it is to you, my Flo, to you, my Caro, my Titou, my Papa, my Mama, that I would like to speak. You are here in my heart and it is this invisible presence that gives me the strength to speak to you. You know everything, and if anyone can forgive me, it is you. I ask your forgiveness. Forgiveness for having destroyed your lives, forgiveness for having never told the truth. And yet, my Flo, I am sure that with your intelligence, your goodness, your mercy, you could have found it in your heart to pardon me. Forgive me for not having been able to bear the thought of causing causing you pain. I knew that I couldn’t live without you, but I am still alive today and I promise you I will try to live as long as God wishes me to, unless those who suffer because of me ask me to die to relieve their torment. I know that you will help me to find the path of truth, of life. There was a great, great deal of love between us. I will still love you in truth. I ask forgiveness of those who can forgive. I ask forgiveness as well of those who can never forgive.”

In prison, Jean-Claude claims to have found religion and salvation in Christ. Though he was up for parole in 2015, it was not granted until April 25, 2019 - 26 years after he was sent to prison. He was released into a monastery and will be under electronic surveillance for two years.