“I fell out of my chair”: what if Alain Champy, the man who died twice, had grown up in Narbonne ?

The fake Alain Champy, photographed here in 1993 in Hérault. Who was he really ? Midi Libre Document

FREE MIDI INFO. After the revelation on February 25 in Midi Libre of the incredible story of this Montpellier who spent most of his life under the identity of another man, who died two years before him, Maryse, a Hérault resident who had a romantic relationship in the 90s with this very chic and very elegant trifecta player, in turn questions herself about her own past. ;

"When I opened Midi Libre, I fell out of my chair. And now it hurts my heart. But who was this man?" Since she discovered the incredible story in our edition of February 25 of Alain Champy, this Montpellier resident who lived a large part of his life under the name of another, Maryse, a 65-year-old Héraultaise looks at her own past under a new day. "I didn't sleep for two nights", she says. Because between 1990 and 1993, she experienced a great love story with this character who hid a mysterious secret from her, and whose true identity remains an enigma.

Died in La Grande Motte in 2019, and in Saint-Germain en Laye in 2017

 In 2019, the Montpellier judicial police investigated this man, who died on July 24, 2019 in La Grande-Motte, when it appeared that another septuagenarian having exactly this identity had died two years earlier in Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the Paris region: the deceased Hérault resident had usurped his name, probably since the 80s.

Why ? The investigation did not really allow us to unravel the mystery, even if shortly before his death, the fake Alain Champy would have admitted to relatives to be born in Spain, went to Paris in the 1970s to join his family, before fleeing the capital to hide out in Hérault. Why ? Perhaps to avoid problems with burglar accomplices, who would have been arrested while he escaped the dragnet, according to the PJ investigation, now closed without further action.

At the expense of Mireille, an extremely wealthy pharmacist

In Hérault, the fake Alain Champy met and seduced Mireille, a rich pharmacist, in the early 1980s and lived off her until ;#39;on the death of the latter, then until his own death in 2019.

"I met Alain in the summer of 1990 at the Copacabana, a nightclub in Grande-Motte, and he met me&# 39;said straight away that he was living with a very rich person. says Maryse. "We hung out a little and in October he left Mireille. He had his own apartment in Hauts de Saint-Priest, in Montpellier. We had a romantic relationship for three years, without living together. For me, he was my man, we had plans, he wanted us to get married. And then finally, he went back to live with Mireille, who harassed him a lot. She was depressed, often hospitalized, he took care of her. And then of course, there was the money."

Roleix, Cartier and vacation under the coconut trees

An argument that Alain has difficulty resisting."They lived in Rivoli, near the Place de la Comédie. She had given him a Rolex for €20,000, the three-gold Cartier ring, he only had designer clothes, he drove a BMW and a Mercedes. They went to Saint-Barthélémy and Saint-Martin every winter, to skiing in Megève…" 

Alain had well-regulated habits: "Every morning he went to buy Paris Turf at 8 a.m., he did files on all the jockeys and horses and played for astronomical sums, but he was a real pro." 

Passionate about trifecta and crosswords

But Maryse is convinced of it: "He honestly wasn't anything like a thug, he didn't have the attitude of a mafia boss. He was very discreet, calm, he didn't drink. I'm sure he wasn't Spanish either, I never heard him say a word in that language, and he had the accent ;a guy from the South, from here. And then he went to school, he wrote without making mistakes: apart from trifecta and poker, his passion was crosswords."

Working in a town hall, Maryse, surprised that he never talks about his family, one day asks for his birth certificate. "So I received the one from the real one, whose father was a police officer. When I talked to him about it, he told me never to talk about it in front of his friends: I don't want anyone to know that I'm the son of a cop! Another time I asked him if he looked more like his father or his mother, and he started crying, I remember his tears falling.  quot;

A childhood memory with René Coll

For Maryse, Alain had grown up in Narbonne. "One evening, we were watching Sacrée Soirée, with René Coll's orchestra, and he said to me, you see, when I was When I was little, this guy washed my head in Narbonne, and then he went into the back room to play the xylophone. I met René Coll years later, who confirmed to me that his father was a hairdresser, and that on Thursdays, when he was 16, he helped him in the salon."

So, Spanish or Narbonnais ? "Now, I doubt a lot of things. I can't say that I feel betrayed, because I am sure of his feelings towards me, we had a real love story. But I wonder. Who was he? What happened in his life ? For me, it's more of a family story, even if it looks like a detective film. "

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