Jean-Claude Romand, the story of a pathological liar

90's. A quiet town in the south of France, Prèvessin-Moëns, and a case so shocking and chilling that not even the specialists in charge of conducting the psychological evaluations could give an explanation. We talk about Jean-Claude Romand, better known as “the adversary”, the name under which the book inspired by your case.

Jean-Claude's life revolved around an intricate and complex system of lies. No one, not even his own family, knew who he really was, what he did or how he spent his day to day... and his family he would never know, since in order to avoid the suffering of knowing that he had lied to them he ended up killing them everyone.

Short biography of Jean-Claude Romand

Jean-Claude was born on February 11, 1954 in Lons-Le-Saunier, a small town near the Swiss border. In his infancy he was a lonely boy, with few friends and a withdrawn attitude.

An only child, from a very young age he lived with concern for the health of his mother, a sickly woman, from whom he was unaware of the disease he suffered, but who was concerned in excessive in the face of any unforeseen minimum, a fact that motivated him to hide his emotional states from him and to consider whether it was appropriate to tell the truth if doing so caused affliction.

Youth and admission to the Faculty of Medicine

In the academic field, he stood out as a diligent student, a boy who could be considered very formal and introverted, that he was not fond of sports and that he went through school without major drawbacks. After completing elementary education and high school, he decided to enroll in the University of Medicine, a career that he completed without problems until the second year, when he stated that on the day of the final exam Physiology, he did not hear the alarm clock and, for that reason, he did not come to perform the exam, which was qualifying. This event marked a turning point in his life and was the first of his great lies.

After this episode, which also coincided with the refusal of his then partner, Florence, to continue their romantic relationship, Jean-Claude locked himself in his room on campusHe stopped going to classes and started reading newspapers and watching television. He gained 20 kilos due to lack of activity and junk food.

Last years of career, a stage full of lies

The subsequent years between 1975 and 1986, she continued to enroll in the second year of the medical career, her presenting false medical certificates with which she justified the lack of attendance to classes and exams. She got Florence to resume her romantic relationship with him and established a daily routine in which she went to college every day without actually entering classes.

He changed his hours to avoid meeting acquaintances who could discover him and she studied the subjects of the race to be able to converse with her classmates without raising suspicionsShe even sometimes helped Florence study subjects that she, a pharmacy student, found difficult.

After this period he informed his family and friends that he had finished his medical degree and had received a scholarship to work at the WHO headquarters in Geneva, a few kilometers from the city where he lived. At that time, he was already married to Florence, they had married in 1984, and they had a daughter, Caroline, who had been born a year earlier in 1985. In 1987 the second child of the couple, Antoine, was born.

Work and sentimental life, a real scaffolding of falsehoods

The years after his supposed incorporation to the WHO passed within an apparent calm and normality, Jean-Claude attended every day to work, he claimed to travel constantly around the world for work reasons and when he returned home he did ostentatious displays of his research and lectures, although he was always careful to give few details, claiming that the information it was secret.

But what was he actually doing during the time he claimed to be working? The answer is that he used to wander through roads and bars, to walk through forests, to sleep in the car or read WHO pamphlets or books that he collected on a scientific day and, Above all, he studied the maps of the cities he supposedly traveled to, in order to keep his lie about him.

How did he earn money to support the family?

Another great question that arose after all his lies came to light is how he managed to financially support his family, since it maintained a gentrified lifestyle that was financed through scams to relatives and friends. Mainly he developed two forms of fraud, one consisted of offering his acquaintances an investment plan with a high profitability, taking advantage of his work in the WHO, in this way he got to scam his close friends up to two and a half million francs and the other was the sale of oncological drugs in the supposed experimental phase, worth 15,000 francs each tablet.

But no one doubted the good of Jean-Claude, who had clothed himself with a social image of success and prestige and lived devoted to his work and his family.

The beginning of the end

Florence's father died in strange circumstances, falling down the stairs of the family barn, while he had a conversation with Jean-Claude in which he asked for part of the money that she had given to her son-in-law to invest, but no one doubts the honesty of the supposed doctor who becomes the head of the family and in charge of looking after the welfare of everyone.

In this age, Jean-Claude meets Corinne, the wife of an acquaintance, for which he begins to feel a great attraction and which he sets out to conquer. She initially rejects him, to which Jean-Claude responds with a suicide attempt which is followed by another big lie. her to hide it and a period of isolation at home, in which she manifested depressive behaviors as in college. Finally, Corinne agrees to maintain a relationship with him. But having this new relationship and adding one more lie is getting harder and harder… Corinne, who has also been a victim of the mutual fund scam, tells him demands benefits, his wife, Florence, begins to suspect that something strange is happening... and, for this reason, cornered, on January 9, 1993, Jean Claude Romand decides to end his double life.

Crime and attempted suicide

That day, he made an appointment with Corinne, making her believe that they were going to dinner at the home of an important collaborator of WHO, and halfway he tried to kill her, unsuccessfully, since she managed to convince him not to did. After leaving her back at her house, Jean Claude went to her own house and once there, killed florence first, hitting him several times on the head with a pastry roller. The next morning, while his children were watching TV, he called them to come to her room and there he shot both of them, who died on the spot.

After having killed his wife and his children, Jean-Claude went to eat, as he did every week at the home of his parents and once there he also killed his father, who was shot twice in the back and his mother, with one in full chest. After these new deaths, he returned home, ingested a large amount of expired barbiturates, and he set fire to the house, with the idea of ​​dying himself along with his loved ones. Which did not happen.

Upon seeing the fire, neighbors and friends of the family called the fire brigade, who managed to extinguish the fire and remove all members of the family of the house, but unfortunately, only a dying Jean-Claude Romand was found alive, who was transferred to a hospital in a state of eat.

Police investigations

The first investigations did not take long to begin and the bullets were discovered in the bodies of the minors and the blows to the head of Florence. Likewise, they also found the bodies of Jean-Claude's parents, at which point everyone began to suspect a possible revenge against the Romand family... but soon the truth was uncovered.

Investigations confirmed that Jean-Claude Romand did not work for the WHO and a note in his own handwriting was found in his car where he confessed to the crimes perpetrated. In the end all his lies were discovered, no one from his circle of acquaintances could believe that the attentive and family member Jean-Claude would have been capable of committing such acts and lying about all aspects of his lifetime. But the evidence left no room for doubt. On her side, when the false doctor woke up from the coma, he confirmed the facts and stated that he had done so so that her family members would not suffer when they heard her lies.

Psychological profile of the pathological liar

What goes through someone's mind to commit such an act? The four specialist psychologists who evaluated Jean-Claude Romand had serious difficulties diagnosing it and the result was a Narcissistic Personality Disorder, based, above all, on the reasons given by himself for committing said crimes, but evaluating in depth of the facts and pattern of behavior exposed by Jean-Claude, this disorder is easily disposable.

What is most striking about Jean-Claude Romand's pattern of behavior is the fact that his life revolved around a great lie, that only he knew, which made him a lonely and withdrawn person, who was not comfortable in social situations or being the center of attention.

It is also true, that in his mythomania (pathological lie) Jean Claude had clothed himself with a certain prestige and authority, but it was not for the purpose of praising his person, rather he used this character as an instrumental means to avoid giving information to his relatives and friends about his work and his way of life.

After discarding the diagnosis made at that time by the professionals in charge of the case, it is up to the curiosity of each one to try to answer this curious case. I personally, after a passionate in-depth study of the facts and the behavioral pattern of Jean-Claude Romand, I am inclined to think that his profile could very well fit into a Schizoid personality Disorder concomitant with persistent depressive disorder.