One of France’s most polarizing murders may get another look

PARIS — The wealthy socialite was found dead in the basement of her villa on the Côte d’Azur. The only door was locked from the outside but also barricaded from within. A message, scrawled in the victim’s own blood, seemed to accuse her gardener.

The brutal killing, in 1991, of Ghislaine Marchal and the subsequent conviction of her Moroccan gardener, Omar Raddad, became one of France’s most enduring murder mysteries.

Now, three decades later, new DNA technology may lead to a second trial that supporters hope will exonerate Raddad, who has always maintained his innocence, and reopen a case that, though seemingly settled legally, has long unsettled France.

It has done so not only because of the violence that was visited upon an enclave of proud homes just north of Cannes or because the protagonists were from diametrically opposed backgrounds. There was also the enigma of the locked room that was never satisfactorily unraveled. And there was the final message — which contained a grammatical error.

“Omar killed me,” Marchal appeared to have written in her dying moments. But a grammar mistake in the message raised very French questions about class and language, primarily whether a woman of her station would make such a trivial error or if instead the gardener was being framed and was easily convicted because he was of Arab descent.

In his original trial, Raddad was convicted and sentenced to 18 years in prison. But after a request from King Hassan II of Morocco and a partial pardon from France’s president at the time, Jacques Chirac, Raddad was freed after four years.

In 2015, new DNA technology led to a discovery at the scene of the traces of four unknown men.

Today, Raddad, 59, is waiting for a ruling on his request to rehear his trial, which was filed in June.

The victim’s family believes that Raddad is guilty and is opposed to a new trial.

Prosecutors and Marchal’s family argued that Raddad, who often played slot machines, assailed Marchal out of anger when she refused to give him an advance on his wages. After Raddad fled the basement and locked it from the outside, they said, Marchal survived long enough to identify her killer with a dying message. She barricaded the door out of fear that Raddad would return, they said. But Raddad has said he is innocent and had no reason to kill Marchal, who had treated him well.