Did a KGB death squad or locals butcher a British man in Provence? (2024)

On a hillside in Provence, in a cemetery lined by yew trees, a child's grave lies beside that of her parents.

Locals who remember the horrific way she died still tend the place as a shrine, leaving soft toys and tying ribbons to the wooden cross. The little girl's name was Elizabeth and her father, Sir Jack Drummond, was a celebrated British government scientist. Her mother Anne, 16 years younger, was a highly regarded civil servant.

But the family were killed so far from home that even their names are misspelled, as 'Drumond' with a single 'M'. All three were murdered in an apparently motiveless attack during a holiday in the South of France. Sir Jack and his wife were shot repeatedly with a hunting rifle.

Ten-year-old Elizabeth was chased barefoot down a track and across a railway line as she tried to escape, but was battered to death with the butt of the gun. The blows that shattered her skull were so heavy that a piece of wood splintered off the rifle. Yet she did not die immediately, and was still alive, struggling to speak and move, when her parents' bodies were discovered next morning.

More than 70 years on, the killings remain the subject of controversy and conspiracy theories. Many people believe the wrong man was convicted. There are whispers of international assassins, Communist plots and simmering grudges rooted in the wartime French Resistance.

Films, books and even a documentary by Hollywood director Orson Welles have failed to uncover the whole truth. Yet in Britain, the tragedy is long forgotten – doubly strange, since Jack Drummond deserves to be remembered as one of the most brilliant Britons of the 20th century.

It was in the early hours of August 5, 1952, that people in the isolated houses around the village of Lurs were woken by screaming. A series of sharp gunshots cut the shrieks short, and then there was silence. Several locals later said they assumed the sounds were made by animals, and that poachers were out. It was better, they said, not to get involved.

But shortly after 6am, a factory worker on his motorbike, heading home from a night shift at the nearby chemical factory, was flagged down by a farmer's son named Gustave Dominici. Breathlessly, Gustave said he'd found a body on the slope beside the road, Route Nationale N96, and told the motorcyclist to go to the police station in the nearest town, Oraison, three miles away.

By the time the gendarmes arrived, a little over an hour later, a crowd was gathering. The first pair of officers on the scene came by motorcycle and sidecar, expecting to find the aftermath of a fatal road accident.

But by now, three bodies had been discovered. Beside the family car, a Hillman Minx estate with British plates, a small woman with brown hair lay on her front. She had been shot at least twice.

On the other side of the road, a balding man of slight physique also lay dead, with an overturned camp bed covering him. He too had been shot more than once. But the most distressing find was the couple's daughter, Elizabeth, more than 100ft away. When the police arrived, she was dead. As well as brutal head injuries, she had lacerations to her bare feet, apparently sustained as she tried to flee.

Once the British consulate at Marseilles was informed of the murders, the news caused a sensation in Whitehall. As chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Food during the Second World War, Sir Jack was the architect of the weekly food ration – an austere but carefully calibrated diet that was calculated to provide all the right ingredients and vitamins for good health.

It included just two ounces of cheese, two ounces of butter, four ounces of bacon or ham, one fresh egg and one packet of dried egg.

Sir Jack also oversaw the regulation of food imports, and was the driving force behind the switch to canned food, a method of preserving vitamins and other nutrients in tinned meat, fish and pulses. In fact, he was the man who, earlier in his career, had coined the word 'vitamin' – a contraction of 'vital amino acids'.

He was also author of a bestselling book, The Englishman's Food, published in 1939 and written with the assistance of his secretary, a rising young woman in the Civil Service.

Her name was Anne Wilbraham, she was 16 years his junior and, after Jack divorced his wife of 24 years, Mabel, she became the second Mrs Drummond in 1940.

Their only child, Elizabeth, was born two years later. Jack was knighted in 1944 in recognition of his major contribution to the war effort. After the war, he worked at Belsen concentration camp, supplying advice on nutrition for the starving survivors of that terrible place. He was a man of formidable achievements.

Local police handed the case over to senior officers in the elite Tiger Brigade unit in Marseilles, where Commissioner Edmond Sébeille was assigned as the chief investigator. By the time he and his team arrived in a pair of black Citroens, the bodies had already been removed and the ground was heavily trampled, littered with the discarded cigarette butts of Press and sightseers.

But Sébeille and his men found spent ammunition and, in the nearby river Durance, the murder weapon – an American-issue Rock-Ola M1 carbine rifle. Such weapons were in plentiful though illegal supply, left over from the war.

Gustave Dominici and his family, including brother Clovis and father Gaston, were enjoying the attention from journalists, happy to give interviews in the local bars. They lived in the house closest to the scene of the murders, a ramshackle place called La Grand Terre. But their attitude to the police was less friendly. Their testimonies were inconsistent and contradictory, as their stories chopped and changed.

Sébeille quickly discovered the family had strong Communist leanings and an ingrained antipathy to the authorities. His attempts to question them were hampered by Left-wing sympathisers who refused to co-operate with the investigation.

At first, police assumed violent theft was the motive. The Hillman had been ransacked and a camera was missing. But Sébeille found 5,000 francs in the car, worth about £12,000 today. This was no robbery.

Unexpectedly, the leader of the local Communists, Paul Maillet, incriminated the man who found the bodies, Gustave Dominici – accusing him not of the murders themselves but of leaving Elizabeth to die.

Maillet told police that Gustave admitted to him that, when the child was found, she was still able to groan and move her arm. Gustave was charged with 'failing to give assistance to a person in danger', and jailed for two months, but he was not suspected of the actual murders.

Maillet presented himself as a law-abiding citizen, one who could not remain silent where the death of an innocent family was concerned. It was only much later that people began to ask whether he had an ulterior motive.

Meanwhile, lurid theories were beginning to circulate. The first was that a prowler, spying on the family, had attempted to rape Anne at gunpoint. When she tried to fight him off, he killed her and her husband before bludgeoning the child.

Though it seemed plausible, this didn't explain what the Drummonds were doing, parked by the roadside in this remote place. It was an odd place to choose for a campsite, especially since they had no tent. Nevertheless, they appeared to have decided to spend the night here, and had set up a bed.

One persistent rumour claimed that this family holiday was a cover for espionage and that Sir Jack, working for the secret services, was expecting to rendezvous with a fellow agent. Instead, he and his family were ambushed by a KGB death squad.

But this scene of carnage had none of the hallmarks of a USSR-backed execution. Three clean shots to the head would have been more typical of the Soviets' ruthless efficiency. This was more of a bloodbath than a hit job. Another theory proved popular. According to this unfounded rumour, Sir Jack had been a Commando during the war, one of 'les parachutistes' who were dropped into France in 1943. They took supplies, weapons and gold to the Maquis, the resistance fighters.

Many of the local farmers had fought alongside the Maquis, including the Dominici brothers. What if Sir Jack had been sent to retrieve some of the gold – and, instead of handing over the money, one of the ex-guerrillas had killed him and his family in cold blood?

That at least would explain why the murder weapon might be a former Resistance weapon. But the idea that Sir Jack, who was 50 years old in 1943, had been on active service was ridiculous.

Less ridiculous was the suggestion that the war had left a legacy of savage feuds in this little rural community. The Maquis had funded their activities through organised crime, including protection rackets. When farmers refused to pay, they were sometimes executed. This then was the atmosphere that surrounded the Drummond case. Inspector Sébeille was regarded as an outsider and, in this valley, it was wise for outsiders to keep their noses out of other people's business.

That didn't stop gossip about the Dominicis, who were said to have connections to an arms smuggling ring supplying Communist insurgents in Algeria.

Gaston Dominici, the patriarch — married to a woman named Marie — was known as a heavy drinker with a savage temper.

Gaston's son Gustave and his wife lived with them at La Grand Terre. But it was the behaviour of the other son, Clovis, who did not share the farmhouse, that first raised Inspector Sébeille's suspicions. When he was shown the murder weapon, Clovis broke down, fell to his knees and started pleading that he'd never seen the gun before.

Gustave then took to his bed, pleading nervous exhaustion. The inspector arrested both brothers and, with the examining magistrate, questioned them repeatedly. At last, Gustave broke down and stated that at 4am on the night of the murders, their father had confessed to killing the Drummonds after stumbling across the family while out hunting.

Clovis confirmed the story. Gaston and his wife Marie, he said, were having a row when the old man threatened her: 'I've already killed three and I could kill another – I killed the English.'

Gaston was arrested and taken to the police station where he ate a bowl of soup and smoked a pipe before making his statement: both his sons were liars. Gustave was the killer, he said.

But the following day, he made a confession. After meeting the family and exchanging a few words, he hid and watched Anne undress. Then, while her husband's back was turned, he assaulted her: 'I touched her on several places on her body,' he said, claiming, 'She did not object.'

When Sir Jack intervened, Gaston shot them both, then chased and killed the little girl.

With journalists and ghoulish locals watching, Gaston was taken to the scene to map out events. At the bridge over the railway, he tried to break away from police in an apparent suicide attempt.

In the dock, Gaston presented a calm figure, chewing sugar lumps as he announced his confession was meaningless – police obtained it, he said, by drugging his coffee. He insisted his son Clovis was the murderer. Then he switched, blaming his other son, Gustave.

With such a mass of contradictions and lies, there seemed to be real doubt as to Gaston's guilt. But the prosecution produced a star witness – Paul Maillet, the Communist leader who had sent Gustave to jail for two months.

Now he claimed Gustave had admitted to witnessing the murders. 'I don't know what to do,' Gustave had told him, during a visit to the Maillet farm. 'If you had seen it, if you had heard those terrible screams ...'

The jury took just two hours to find Gaston Dominici guilty of all three murders. He was condemned to death by the guillotine.

But after a Belgian newspaper paid him an advance for his life story, Gaston was able to mount an appeal. The death sentence was commuted to life in prison – and in 1960, President Charles de Gaulle ordered his release, on the grounds of failing health.

Gaston Dominici, by then in his 80s, returned to Provence and moved in with one of his daughters. He died five years later.

For more than 70 years, the French media has been fascinated by the Drummond murders. One of the strangest theories followed the arrest in 1952 of a German who claimed he was the getaway driver for an assassination squad sent by an East European government for unknown reasons.

His descriptions of jewellery taken from Anne's body, which had not been released to the Press, appeared to corroborate his claim. Many other details failed to match the facts, though, and he was dismissed as a fantasist.

But locals still suspect that the Dominicis were framed. And if Gaston or his sons didn't commit this awful crime, who did?

Another name is sometimes whispered. Could the real murderer have been the man whose evidence helped 'solve' the case – the village's Communist leader Paul Maillet? The mystery remains.

• The Drummond Affair: Murder and Mystery in Provence, by Stephanie Matthews and Daniel Smith, is published by Icon.