On January 9, 1993, Jean-Claude Romand killed his wife, his children, and his parents, then tried—without success—to kill himself. The investigation revealed that he was not a doctor as he claimed, and, even harder to believe, that he was nothing at all. He had been lying for eighteen years, and this lie covered nothing. Faced with the prospect of being exposed, he chose instead to eliminate those whose gaze he could no longer bear. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. I entered into contact with him and attended his trial. I tried to recount, as precisely as possible and day by day, this life of solitude, imposture, and absence. To imagine what went through his mind during the empty hours—without plans or witnesses—that he was supposed to spend at work but actually spent in highway rest areas or in the forests of the Jura. And finally, to understand what, in such an extreme human experience, touched me so deeply and, I believe, touches each one of us.
