The ex-lover of jailed murderer Jessica Davies breaks his silence to Henry Samuel in Paris and Neil Tweedie
Jessica Davies used the most curious of bookmarks; her then boyfriend, Laurent Couturier, called it "the dagger".
He had bought the black-handled kitchen knife with a six inch-blade to prepare food. "It cut the best," he remembered.
Davies, then 28, English-born but raised in France, would slip it between the pages of the book she was reading while at home in her Parisian flat.
The implement became the subject of increasing fascination as the summer of 2007 wore on. Dark thoughts , which would soon find tragic expression, were marshalling in the mind of Davies, now 30, sometime catwalk model, banker's daughter and niece of a British Government minister.
As she begins a 15-year prison sentence for killing a man she had brought home, she can still not explain what drove her to do it. The answer resides somewhere in a life that promised much but which degenerated into an aimless existence characterised by alcoholism, promiscuity, drug dependency and casual, terrifying violence.
It was in August 2007 that Davies used the knife on herself, slashing her wrists in the bath in a second attempt at suicide (the first was in 2004). She sliced right down to the tendons before attacking her thighs and legs, inflicting wounds that required 27 stitches.
"I need to see blood to wake myself up to life - or leave it," she said later, admitting to harbouring thoughts of suicide from the age of 11. Unfortunately, the blood did not have to be hers.
Three months later, on the night of November 11, the niece of Quentin Davies, the Conservative-turned-Labour MP and Minister for Defence Equipment and Support, used the knife again, sinking it five inches deep into the throat of Olivier Mugnier.
Mr Mugnier, 24, jobless and carefree, had made the mistake of accepting the offer of a one-night stand at Davies's flat, in the affluent suburb of St Germain-en-Laye, after meeting her in O'Sullivan's, an Irish bar five minutes from her home.
When the police arrived at the flat to find him dying in a pool of blood, Davies explained how she had initially used the knife to open a bottle of wine. Her victim had been too drunk to make love and was sitting up with his back to her.
"I just wanted to cut him a little but the knife went in by itself," she later explained. "I remember a strange sensation, which must have been the knife going in, but no image at all. It was profoundly shocking and must have been the jolt that snapped me out of the state I was in.
"I remember being on the phone to the emergency services, one hand on the receiver, the other pressed to his throat."
She told the paramedics: "I am a monster", before being ushered by a female police officer into the tiny bathroom. As the ambulancemen worked frantically to stem the tide of blood issuing from the victim's throat, Davies was examining herself in the mirror, grabbing a hairbrush and saying: "I look a state." How had she reached that point of near insanity?
Born in London in February 1979, she was educated in France. Hers should have been a starred life. Beautiful, intelligent and regarded by those who knew her as a kind and sensitive person, she also enjoyed the privileges of wealth - her father Richard, brother of Quentin, was successful in finance.
But there were shadows, too. During her childhood, her maternal grandmother made repeated attempts to kill herself. There was instability in her father's family, too. His brother Julian was a schizophrenic who tried to kill his mother over the alleged non-payment of a debt.
Davies's capacity for erratic behaviour was evident in her attempt to burn her school down, followed by her transfer to boarding school. Her parents' divorce and the departure of her father to Italy with his lover further undermined her increasingly fragile mental state.
When her mother, Monique, left Paris, Davies lived alone in an apartment provided by her father, who put pressure on her to find a job after a lacklustre university career at Toulouse.
A fledgling career in modelling - she worked for the French mail-order firm, La Redoute - failed to take off, and she worked intermittently in bars and offices, relying on money from her parents.
Hanging out in bars became her primary pastime, together with drugs, including ecstasy, cocaine and various kinds of antidepressant, and casual sex.
Her friend, Lubomira Ratzov, 29, said: "I thought they would tell me she had killed herself, not someone else. She has an inner anger that she takes out on herself, not others. She's a very generous person who wants to help people. She's a very intelligent, beautiful girl. The boys were all mad about her but didn't know where they stood with her. She wanted the life of a couple, but she was not shy and did not have problems going with a boy on the first night. She appeared very self-assured, but that was not the real Jessica. Jessica was a girl who was hurting inside.
"The way she treated men was a form of revenge on her father. She told me in a very light, detached way that she had tried to commit suicide."
Davies maintained regular contact with her uncle Quentin. "We write to each other," she said. "He's someone I admire, for his success, his convictions and his humanism. We discussed the French Revolution. He's very cultured."
She found a degree of stability with Mr Couturier, now 38, their often-tempestuous relationship lasting two years. When it finally dissolved in mid-2007, Davies tried to kill herself.
"We had recently split up," he explained. "I was worried not to have news, not to be able to reach her at work.
"I had the keys and let myself in to her flat. I found a letter to her mother.
"Then I went into the bathroom. There was blood everywhere, the bath was full of blood-coloured water.
"I thought she was dead, but discovered that she was in hospital.
"In her personality, she turned violence against herself.
"If we had a fight, her instinct was to leave. My explanation is that she was very much in love [with me] and this relationship failed and that was the spark for the killing.
"She drank huge amounts of alcohol, up to 15 pints of Guinness, much more than I could bear. And she was on medication."
Despite their split, the couple slept together the night before the murder.
"I never had feelings of guilt that it should have been me who was murdered. We spent two years together. I think if it was supposed to happen to me, it would have happened before."
He continues to visit her in jail.
"Even if we were together tomorrow, I wouldn't fear for my life. She still can't understand what happened."
His mother, Anie Erny Beaufils, remembered: "Never, never, never was she violent. She wouldn't hurt a fly. She was a very sensitive girl.
"She was very in love with Laurent, but couldn't leave him. They were like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton: two strong characters who kept splitting up and getting back together.
"He adored her; she was his doll. He was much older than her and very protective. He didn't want to leave her alone.
"Both of them were depressed and taking the same medication, Effexor. It's very strong and one should absolutely not drink with it.
"She was a highly intelligent girl with an extraordinary IQ. I was like a mother to Jessica, she would confide in me even more than her own mother. She had only good things to say about her own family, her mother, father and uncle.
"She had lots of lovers, as she needed someone to hold her, but you couldn't keep her down because she wasn't stable in her head, always on antidepressants.
"If I had known more about her childhood, I would have done more to help. Never did she speak about her suicidal grandmother and her uncle Julian's mental illness."
A psychiatric report on Davies pointed to her father's failure to exercise his authority during her adolesence and her mother's "invasive" presence.
Her father admitted in court that he had been "poorly placed" to assess his daughter's situation following his departure for Italy, but he denied that she had intended to kill Mr Mugnier.
She had, he said, been "traumatised" by some events in her life.
The psychiatric report stated: "She [Davies] had a tendency to seek refuge in a parallel world. Her amnesia over the facts appears genuine and she had serious narcissistic problems, she had a destructiveness and a borderline personality.
"Olivier was a means of separating from her partner. She had ambivalent feelings of desire and hatred towards men. He was a pure sexual object. Olivier failed to fill the void of Jessica Davies. And instead of taking it out on herself, Olivier freed her destructiveness."
Davies's mother has still not absorbed the fact that her daughter will be in prison for up to 15 years.
"I have tried to explain what happened to myself, but I cannot," she said. "This isn't at all like my daughter. She is a nice girl."
The Telegraph, ,London
* Support is available for anyone who may be distressed by calling SANE Helpline 1800 18 7263; Lifeline 131 114; Salvo Crisis Line 9331 2000; beyondblue 1300 22 46 36.
