British defense secretary's niece sentenced to 15 years in French prison for murdering man she met at bar

Lizzy Davies in Versailles
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 12 January 2010 20.52 GMT

The niece of a British minister who admitted stabbing to death a man she had picked up in a bar and taken back to her apartment for sex was last night sentenced to 15 years in jail for his murder.

Jessica Davies, a niece of Quentin Davies and a model whom prosecutors described as possessing "the devil's beauty", remained impassive as she was told she had been found guilty of murdering Olivier Mugnier, a 24-year-old French graduate, in November 2007.

Mugnier, who had met Davies in a pub in the chic Parisian suburb of St-German-en-Laye, was found by police with a fatal wound to his chest caused by a kitchen knife which Davies, 30, had previously used to try to kill herself.

The pair had tried to have sex but stopped after Mugnier failed to perform, the Versailles criminal court heard. The young woman, whom prosecutors characterised as a psychologically disturbed seductress, claimed to have no memory of what happened next.

When she opened the door of her flat to police, having called the emergency services herself at around 2.30am, the court heard that she told them: "It's me who did that, I'm a monster. I wanted to cut him a bit and it went right in."

When making her plea for the court to jail Davies for 12 years – a sentence lighter than that subsequently handed down – prosecutor Myriam Quemener argued yesterday that the troubled woman had a habit of using men as "pure sex objects" on which to inflict her distress.

"She had ambivalent feelings of desire and hatred towards men," the court was told in a citation from a psychiatrist's report. "Olivier failed to fill the void in [her]. Instead of taking it out on herself, Olivier freed her destructiveness."

Davies, whose father, Richard, is the younger brother of Labour MP Quentin Davies, told the court that she was "horrified" by her actions – even if she could not explain them. "What I did terrifies me. I don't even dare ask Olivier's family for forgiveness," she told the jury. "I want to express the extent of my remorse. I assume the responsibility and consequences of what I did."

Minutes after the verdict was read out, Davies, who had shown no emotion for the duration of the two-day trial, was laughing and joking with police officers guarding her. As well as 15 years in prison, she was sentenced to 10 years' probation and psychological monitoring. Her family was ordered to pay €105,000 in damages to Mugnier's parents and twin brother, Benjamin. Her lawyers have 10 days to appeal the ruling.

Ever since she was placed in detention after the events of 11 November 2007, Davies had insisted she had experienced a blackout that had left her unable to explain why she had plunged a knife 12cm deep into her lover's chest. She was said to be high on drink and drugs.
The prosecution argued Davies was benefiting from a convenient selective memory. "She calculates. She erases from her memory incriminating evidence in a way that has escaped no one in this court," said Quemener.

However, her lawyers, who had recommended a sentence of 10 years in prison, rejected any idea that she was faking her amnesia as "totally erroneous". In a plea which compared her fragile mental state to the "atrocious anguish" evoked by the poet Charles Baudelaire, Daniel Soulez-Larivière said the murder should be interpreted as a manifestation of the violence the young woman had previously turned against herself in two previous suicide attempts.

"This is not a crime of a thief or a pervert, or a sexual crime, but a suicidal act," he said.

Davies had a turbulent family background in which her father was largely absent, having moved to Italy to be with his mistress, he added. "There is a certain English tendency to say 'touch nothing, say nothing'. Everything is smooth on the surface but underneath a lot is going on and … it can lead to tragedy," he said.

Psychiatrists who examined Davies concluded that she suffered from a borderline personality disorder which could have led her to suffer an "alteration of personality" at the time of the killing. Although harsher than expected, the sentence of 15 years was still less than the maximum of 30 years allowed under French law for voluntary but unpremeditated murder.

She said yesterday she would "never touch another drop" of alcohol and would continue with her medical treatment. "I can assure you that it will never happen again," she said.