After pretending to be a successful doctor for 18 years, Jean-Claude Romand murdered his wife, children, and parents in January 1993.
Canal+Jean-Claude Romand killed his wife, their two young children, his parents, and their dog.
Jean-Claude Romand was a respected doctor with the World Health Organization. At least, that was what his family believed.
But he wasn’t a doctor at all. He hadn’t even taken his first year medical exam. He had been living a lie since 1975.
For nearly two decades, Romand would leave his house, drive to a café or a parking lot, and pretend to be at work. He lived off his wife, and took money from family and friends under the pretense that he was investing it for them.
But his story took an even darker turn in January 1993. At that point, the walls began to close in on Romand. His family — and his mistress — had begun to demand their money back. Someone at his children’s school had called the WHO to reach him, but no one in the building knew who he was. His secret was going to come out, and Romand’s life was about to fall apart.
So, he made a choice. Death.
Jean-Claude Romand killed his wife first, then their two young children. Afterward, he drove to his parents’ house and did the same to them and their dog. When he returned home, he took a large quantity of barbiturates and set the house on fire. But Romand survived. And the truth came out.
Romand was sentenced to life in prison. Today, however, he is a free man.
How One Lie Snowballed Into A Lifetime Of Deceit
It all started around Romand’s second year of medical school. Depressed over a breakup with his girlfriend Florence, Romand neglected to show up for his end-of-year exams, but when asked by his parents about it, he lied and said they went well. Even after the results were posted, his name appearing nowhere, he told his friends and family that he’d passed.
Surprisingly, no one noticed.
Unable to admit the truth, Romand kept the lie going. He kept enrolling in the second year over and over, for more than a decade, and pretended to graduate alongside his classmates. He never did, though. Nor did he ever get over Florence, his biographer Emmanuel Carrère, who wrote an account of the murders called L’Adversaire, or The Adversary told The Guardian.
France2Jean-Claude Romand and his wife Florence on their wedding day.
Instead, Romand invented another lie: that he had cancer. And this lie brought Florence back into his life.
No one — not his friends, nor his classmates, nor Florence, who earned a degree in pharmacology — questioned Romand’s story. Instead, Florence agreed to marry him. And Romand sank deeper into his made-up reality.
Jean-Claude Romand’s Double Life As A Successful Doctor
Jean-Claude Romand married Florence and had two children with her, Caroline and Antoine, who they raised in a quiet French town near the Swiss border. During this time, Romand claimed that he’d gotten a prestigious position as a doctor with the World Health Organization (WHO).
Romand drove to the WHO office every now and then, with a visitor’s pass, in order to take some leaflets and scatter them around his car. He gave his parents a photograph of the building, marking his “office” with an X. He made up business trips, booking a few nights at an airport hotel to read up on his destination, and gave his family “souvenirs” he purchased at the airport.
But never did Romand actually work for the WHO. Instead, he spent full days in coffee shops or sitting in a parking lot.
France2Florence, Jean-Claude, and their children Antoine and Caroline.
The lie was delicate — everything could have fallen apart much more quickly if anyone had asked more questions — but Jean-Claude Romand pushed it even further. He flaunted his success. He claimed to have met important figures in science and politics. His research, he told friends and family, was on developing a miracle cure for cancer.
When Florence’s uncle was diagnosed with cancer, Romand even offered to get him some doses of the “miracle cure” he was working on. They were 15,000 francs each, but he promised they would work.
The medication was all placebos. Her uncle died shortly after.
By then, Romand had already drained his parents’ bank account. He next told his family and friends that his status as a doctor meant he could invest their money in high-interest accounts — and they trusted him to do so. Why wouldn’t they? He seemed to be a successful person, with powerful connections.
Romand received 15,000 francs each from Florence’s brothers Emmanuel and Jean-Noël Crolet, and as 400,000 francs from her father Pierre. All of this went to fund Romand’s lifestyle — including an affair he’d begun having with a woman named by the press as “Corinne” (whose real name was Chantal Delalande) who had also given him another 900,000 francs.
Then, in 1988, Pierre Crolet asked for some of his money back. He wanted to buy a Mercedes. But while Romand was visiting with him that October, Pierre Crolet “fell” from a platform in his garage, hit his head, and died six days later. It seemed like a tragic accident. No one thought much of the fact that Romand netted $1.3 million francs from helping to sell Pierre’s estate.
But just five years later, Jean-Claude Romand would prove how far he was willing to go to hide the truth.
The Shocking Murder Of The Romand Family
Pierre Crolet’s death had given Jean-Claude Romand the financial safety net he needed to keep his lie going a bit longer. But not much longer. At the beginning of 1993, Delalande started asking for her money back, too.
For Romand, it was a twofold issue. He couldn’t pay his mistress back, nor could he risk her exposing their affair.
“I think he felt trapped, and that it would have been a great relief for him to be discovered,” his biographer Carrère reflected. “At each stage the consequences became greater. At the beginning it was a little lie, then his wife might have asked for a divorce; later, because of his dodgy financial dealings, he might have had a brief stint in prison. But nothing more than that. And it never happened. His luck was his terrible misfortune.”
Romand felt his back edging closer to the wall. Then, someone on the board of his children’s school tried to call Romand at the WHO office, only to find that no one by his name worked there. When the board member ran into Florence a short time later, he mentioned the odd occurance. Around the same time, a woman whose husband worked at the WHO also asked Florence about an office Christmas party — which, of course, Florence knew nothing about.
Back, meet wall.
Canal+Jean-Claude Romand eating with his family.
In Romand’s reality, his family was better off dead than knowing the truth of his lies. And so, Jean-Claude Romand put his murderous plan into action.
He purchased a silencer for his rifle on Jan. 6, 1993, and two jerry cans full of gasoline on January 8. The next day, January 9, he bludgeoned Florence to death with a rolling pin while she slept in bed. Then Romand woke his two children and spent the morning having breakfast and watching cartoons with them as if nothing had happened.
“I knew, after killing Florence, that I was going to kill Antoine and Caroline, too, and that this moment, in front of the television, would be the last one we spent together,” Romand said during his trial. “I cuddled them and said soft words to them, like ‘I love you.'”
He then sent the children back to bed. One at a time, he put pillows over their faces, and shot them to death.
But Jean-Claude Romand’s murder spree was not over. He next drove to meet his parents for lunch, during which he shot both of them and their dog several times. He then cleaned their home and changed into nicer clothes before driving more than 300 miles to meet Delalande in Paris. There, he sprayed tear gas in her eyes and shocked her with an electric device. He planned to kill her too — but Delalande begged for her life.
Romand spared it. He apologized and asked her not to say anything about his temporary “madness.”
He then drove home, doused his home in gasoline, took a handful of barbiturates, set fire to the house, and laid down beside his wife.
But Jean-Claude Romand did not perish in the fire. And not only did investigators soon realize that Florence, Caroline, and Antoine had died violent deaths, but Romand had also left a note in his car asking for forgiveness. He’d written: “A trivial accident and an injustice can cause madness.”
Jean-Claude Romand’s Trial And Release From Prison
The full extent of Romand’s lies came to light during his trial, which began in 1996 and became a media sensation. In the end, Romand was given a life sentence with the possibility of parole after 22 years.
Police PhotographJean-Claude Romand’s booking photo.
In that time, Carrère wrote and published his book, which inspired multiple feature films and television documentaries. Romand, meanwhile, seemed to become a model prisoner. He worked eight hours a day and obtained various qualifications on subjects ranging from technology and Japanese to meditation and Gregorian chant. But as the years passed by, the chance for Romand to be paroled inched ever closer.
The question was, could he be trusted?
In February 2019, magistrates at a court in Châteauroux, near the prison which housed Romand, rejected his request for release, citing concerns about his “pathological personality” and the “narcissistic and perverse elements that have developed only a little since his incarceration.” However, two months later, the court of appeal in Bourg-en-Bresse overruled their decision.
Jean-Claude Romand was released from prison in June of that year to a Benedictine monastery, where he was monitored by an electronic tag and required to spend his nights. He was also forbidden from returning to the scenes of his former crimes and is subject to various controls until at least 2029, though that offered little comfort to the Crolets or Delalande.
“I completely understand why Chantal Delalande is afraid,” Emmanuel Crolet, Florence’s brother, told The Times. “She is the only one to have met Romand’s gaze as he tried to kill her. That will undoubtedly have marked her… my main concern is for other people he could meet in future and how he could manipulate them.”
That said, Jean-Claude Romand has seemingly lived a quiet life since his release. But when it comes to him, it’s impossible to say with certainty if he truly has changed.
After reading the shocking story of Jean-Claude Romand, read the terrifyingly similar story of Christian Longo. Or, learn about how John List killed his family — and got away with it for 18 years.
