But when we talk about crimes that happened here in Quebec, we are even more touched because it could have happened on our street, in our neighborhood.
Imagine if we talk about crimes against children.
So we leave with concern after watching Presumed Innocent: The Sébastien Métivier Affair, whose four hour-long episodes will be available on Crave starting Wednesday, November 29th.
After dealing with the cases of Michelle Perron and France Alain in the first two parts of “Presumed Innocent”, Marie-Claude Savard and Sébastien Trudel, directed by Philip Sabourin, are interested in the case of Sébastien Métivier, which opens on January 1. He disappeared in November 1984 in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district of Montreal and has never been found since.
You may remember that the child’s photo appeared on milk containers for a long time.
Almost 40 years later, Sébastien’s family still doesn’t know what really happened that day. No trace of the child, who would be almost 50 years old today, but several hypotheses about the identity of the murderer.
Sébastien Trudel admits that this new investigation is “the most difficult to carry out because it involves children”. And it’s not hard for us to believe it.
This third part also concerns two other important cases, since three boys from the same area were kidnapped that day: Maurice Viens, 4 years old, found dead in an abandoned house in Saint-Antoine-de-Richelieu, Wilton Lubin, 12 years old . , whose body was found on the banks of the Saint Lawrence River on Charron Island, then Sébastien Métivier, 8 years old, of whom no trace was ever found.
The latter two were together at the time of their disappearance.
Of all the testimonies heard in this series, the most shocking are those of Christiane Sirois, Sébastien’s mother, and those of his daughter Mélanie.
Today they are still trying to rebuild their lives after this almost insurmountable ordeal.
“I was seven years old, I’m still seven years old and I’ve never grown up since then,” admits Mélanie, who has tried unsuccessfully to obtain compensation for the families victimized by such trauma.
Christiane Sirois, who has dedicated her life to raising awareness and demanding that everything be done to find out the truth, is a fighter who never gave up.
She has every reason to be angry. Police initially viewed her son’s disappearance as a simple freak outburst. It wasn’t until the deaths of the other two boys more than a month later that the conclusion was reached that it was a kidnapping.
Viewed in one go, the four episodes list all of the suspects who may have committed these heinous crimes.
The most disturbing thing is that all of these suspects have similarities, lived close by – two were even roommates – and were all patients of the Philippe-Pinel Psychiatric Institute: Claude Quévillon, Marc Perron, Jean-Baptiste Duchesneau, who killed a 7-year-old – year old girl in Ste-Foy and Serge Gaul.
Two of them, Perron and Gaul, are still alive.
The series has all the ingredients of a thriller: a ransom letter that contained many details only the police knew; the advice of a medium under hypnosis by investigators; the discovery of one of the corpses in a gloomy house worthy of a horror film; the confession of a serial killer who commits suicide the day before a lie detector test…
The longer the series lasts, the more complicated it becomes.
The Presumed Innocent series has always aimed to reopen the investigation of unsolved crimes that continue to haunt the victims’ families and loved ones.
As is unfortunately often the case in true crime series and despite the enormous efforts of the production teams, after watching the four episodes we are left with no real answer.
Yes, some conclusions need to be drawn and many questions remain to be raised, but nothing will replace the work of the police.
We point to the deinstitutionalization of psychiatry in the 1960s, a sieve that allowed dangerous patients to return to the population.
The series interviews several speakers, including former police officer Stéphane Berthomet, who covers the case in the third season of his podcast “L’ombre du Doudou”. Then Jacques Duchesneau, the former police chief of the Montreal municipality, who dealt with the case and saw with his own eyes the body of little Maurice Viens.
These images still haunt him. “A journey to hell,” says the man, who had a son the same age.
Mr. Duchesneau is committed to the rehabilitation of sex offenders and believes that positively identifying these sex offenders after they are released from prison is tantamount to ostracism.
“The father of the family [que vous êtes] “Do you agree with that at all?” Marie-Claude Savard asks him.
His answer might surprise you.
What’s disturbing is that the stories told in this series represent only a tiny fraction of the astronomical number of potential suspects who could commit child abductions: in 1984, that number rose to 1,200 in the mid-south region of Montreal alone, the series shows. One thousand two hundred!
The big question: Could such a sordid affair happen again today, with more modern investigative methods and greater sensitivity to crimes against children?
In front of the camera, Marie-Claude Savard, a mother herself, has tears in her eyes just thinking about it.
“Let us provide extraordinary means to ensure that our children, for whom we are collectively responsible, are untouchable. Period,” she demands.
Chantal Guy, a columnist for La Presse, lived in the neighborhood at the time and can hardly imagine that the victims’ families will be left without answers:
“How can we live for so many years without knowing where our child’s body is? I think we need to talk about this until we have answers for the families. We owe it to them.”
Christiane Sirois, Sébastien’s mother, removed all of her son’s photos from the walls to reconnect with reality.
“It would be time to put an end to this, because it seems to me that I still have a few years to live. I would like to experience it myself.”
We wish him so much…
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