Was gold dispute behind gruesome French family murder?

PONT- DE- BUIS- L SQUIMERCH, France: Investigators Thursday voiced caution over claims that a dispute over family gold led to the gruesome murder of a couple and their two children in western France.

So far ‘ there is no evidence' to support claims by the confessed killer and his 76-year- old mother that Pascal Troadec had helped himself to a trove of gold that his father had found while renovating an apartment, ‘robbing' his sister Lydie of her share.

“It's only an assertion for now,” a source close to the probe said.

The victim's mother told the daily Le Parisien that her late husband found a cache of gold coins and ingots — of an unspecified value — in 2006 in an apartment in the northwestern port of Brest.

He took the gold, “perhaps stolen from the Bank of France” during World War II, and hid it in the couple's garage, said the woman, who declined to give her first name.

It was the year after her husband died in 2009 that she said Troadec took the gold while she was in hospital, adding that he had ‘robbed his sister' Lydie.

Troadec later told the family he had invested the gold in Monaco and Andorra, tauntingly adding that they ‘couldn't touch it', his mother said.

Soon afterwards, Troadec and his wife Brigitte — whom Lydie's partner Hubert Caouissin has admitted killing along with their children Charlotte and Sebastien — began flaunting their new lifestyle, sending postcards from their holiday travels.

Eventually it was too much for Caouissin, who later told investigators of his anger over the gold, according to both the confessed killer and his mother.

But the lawyer of Brigitte Troadec's family, Cecile de Oliveira, charged that the gold coins and ingots were a figment of Caouissin's imagination and that he had begun ‘harassing' the Troadecs in 2014. — AFP