A French woman nicknamed the “Black Widow of the Cote d’Azur” has been jailed for 22 years for the murder of two elderly men.
Patricia Dagorn was described as a “perverse narcissist” who was “venal and unscrupulous” in the Nice court where she was accused of killing two men she had seduced, and poisoning two others “with premeditation”.
Dagorn, 57, had denied the charge. Her legal team said there was a “cruel absence” of evidence to convict her.
Prosecutors told the court that Dagorn, a divorced law graduate, met at least 20 men in the Côte d’Azur in 2011 and 2012 mostly via a matchmaking agency, but also through small ads online and by approaching elderly men in the street.
Before the trial, Nice prosecutor Jean-Michel Prêtre said: “She would be full of empathy for these men, would gain their confidence, siphon off their money and end up by working out how to make them disappear.”
Dagorn was accused of murdering a man in his 60s found lying in a pool of blood in a Nice flat in 2011. While investigating the death, detectives linked her to the unexplained death of a second man whose badly decomposed body was discovered in the bath of his home near Cannes.
She was said to have put Valium into meals she prepared for her elderly, wealthy lovers, before persuading them to sign cheques and documents, giving her money or changing their wills in her favour.
The public prosecutor Annie Brunet-Fuster had requested a 30-year sentence saying the crimes merited a “severe punishment”.
“When she denies everything she’s not telling the truth,” Brunet-Fuster told the jury. “When she doesn’t want to go back on what she’s said she just invents something else,” she added, describing Dagorn as a “psychopath”.
During the four-day trial, Dagorn told the court she had been “very good friends” with the men who had died.
“I won’t say that it was love, but it was deep friendship,” she said.
After the verdict the court heard Dagorn had already been convicted four times for fraud and preying on weak victims.
