Thick, acidic smoke filled the air surrounding Wimbledon Park Road in the Southfields district in Wandsworth, London, the afternoon of Wednesday 20th September 2017. The area is crammed with rows upon rows of terraced houses, but for the majority of this southwest suburb, the exact location of the fire was indeterminate- the hot mass obscured from their view. The fire had been started on the back patio of a home belonging to a French-Algerian couple, fourty-year-old financial analyst Ouissem Medouni, and his wife, thirty-four-year-old Sabrina Kouider. The property sits on the outer corner of a row of houses, at the intersection of Wimbledon Park Road and Pulborough Road. Kouider and Medouni, along with Kouider’s two small children occupied the ground floor of the two-bedroom ground floor flat. The small garden is just set back from the road, the two separated by a tall brick wall. Just a couple of hundred metres away are railroad tracks. A few concerned neighbors had knocked on the couple’s door, but received no answer. The local fire department was called. By the time firefighters arrived at the address at 6.20pm, flames had been licking at the exterior brick wall and french double doors of the couple’s home for more than three hours.
When brigade members entered the rear of the property they were immediately confronted by the burning mound outside the back doors. Next to it, a tall, slender, and slightly balding Medouni stood, barbecuing chicken thighs. When the crew enquired as to what he was burning, Medouni told them it was a sheep. One member of the fire crew noticed a look of ‘resignation’ spread across Medouni’s face. This, combined with the strange story of burning a farm animal in the middle of suburban London, just didn’t add up. Amongst the charcoaled lump and glowing embers firefighters noticed a glint of jewellery, scorched clothing, and most shocking of all, what looked to be human appendages. The crew called into the local police station and asked officers to attend the scene. Upon their arrival, they too were alarmed by the scene before them. Medouni was taken to Wandsworth station for further questioning. Kouider, who had been absent at the time of the inspection by fire and police crews, returned to the property that evening and was also arrested and brought in for questioning. After further investigation of the burned mess in the back garden, police had reason to suspect the remnants could be those of a small child, but the identity, age and gender of the victim remained a mystery, for now.
At Wandsworth Station Medouni denied it was a child in the fire, but otherwise remained tight-lipped. This only fuelled detectives’ suspicions further. After two days Medouni and Kouider were charged with murder but no clear motive had been established and the victim was yet to be formally identified. With a homicide investigation in the throes of its most precious window of opportunity, it was imperative for police to build a picture of the couple’s history and their movements while post mortem results helped piece together an answer to the question, ‘what, or rather, who was burning in the fire?’
French newspapers would describe Algerian-born Medouni as “coming from a modest background, the son of a plumber, having grown up in the southern suburbs of Paris.” The story of how Medouni met Kouider starts like a Parisian novel, but fair warning, winds up a psychological horror. Their eyes first locked in the summer of 2001, when Kouider was 18-years-old and working on a sweets stall at a local fair. Like Medouni, she was born in northern Algeria, before moving to Paris with her mother. Six years her senior, Medouni, known as ‘Sam’, pursued Kouider, utterly beguiled by her beauty. Years later, neighbors of the pair would compare Kouider to a Kardashian, referencing her sleek black hair, high cheekbones and glamorous outfits. The couple moved in together in Paris in the suburb of Vigneux-Sur-Seine and then with Medouni’s father after Kouider lost her job. The relationship soon ended when Medouni discovered Kouider was sleeping with his friend.
As well as Medouni, Kouider had a brief relationship with a Frenchman named Anthony Francois, the father of her first child. This relationship also broke down. Kouider’s mental state appears to be, according to numerous media outlets, unsettled and rooted in alleged trauma she suffered as a child. On her 18th birthday she jumped from a fourth-floor balcony, suffering serious back injuries. Two years later, Kouider drank cleaning fluid after breaking up with her then fiance. She survived her ordeal and was soon back with Medouni. This was a pattern to be repeated over the next decade- Although they would often break-up they were always drawn back together. The Picture painted of the pair is that Medouni is a moth to a flame. There seems to be some dispute over who followed who to Britain’s capital city, but what is known is that by 2005, the pair lived in a flat in Queensway, London. He got a job in London with a French bank, she got a job with an international marketing company. They were married in a traditional Islamic ceremony- Medouni would later claim he was coerced into the marriage by Kouider. In 2011 the couple separated once again. Enter Mark Walton, one of the founding members of the popular 90s boy band, Boyzone. Kouider and Walton pair met in Notting Hill and Walton moved into her flat in Queensway in early 2012. The following year Kouider gave birth to her second child. According to ‘The Daily Mail’, Kouider hired several nannies throughout her time at the flat. None of them lasted long, all dismissed for some form of alleged wrongdoing, from stealing to flirting with Walton.
Walton, who was at the time newly managing boyband Blue, supported his beau as she tried to break into the fashion industry. Kouider returned the favour by making accusations against Walton such as allegations that he was sleeping with male sex workers. Walton denied the claims. Walton would later detail how Kouider’s temperament often flipped from being alluring to angry and it wasn’t behaviour she saved for just the privacy of her home life, she would create a scene in public without hesitation. The pair called it quits on their relationship after two years and Kouider returned to Medouni. After a seemingly tumultuous end to their relationship, Walton continued to support Koudier financially, gifting her thousands of pounds over a span of several months for her rent on the Southfields home, which she would share with Medouni, and where she would eventually be arrested.
Despite this, Kouider’s allegations against Walton continued to amp up- in 2014 she accused him of sexually abusing a cat, hiring helicopters to spy on her, trying to control her with black magic- each accusation more lurid than he last- all of them false and had zero truth to them. The final straw for Walton came when Kouider created a fake social media account in 2015 to accuse Walton of being a pedophile. Police found no basis for the claims and instead Kouider was cautioned to keep her distance from Walton.
Living in southwest London, Medouni and Kouider raised Kouider’s two children together. Medouni claimed that in January 2016, he returned home to London after a trip home in the aftermath of his father’s death, to find a young woman sleeping in his home. Her name was Sophie Lionnet, their new nanny.
Originally from the northern region of Troyes, in Aube, France, Sophie was born on 7th January 1996, the daughter of Catherine Devallonné and Patrick Lionnet, a municipal gardener from Saint-Julien-les-Villas, near Troyes in eastern France. According to ‘The Times’ newspaper, Sophie’s parents, who were unmarried, separated when she was young. Sophie moved with her mother to Paron, a small town on the edge of Burgundy. Her family recall times of great joy and laughter with Sophie but told reporters she was much more reserved and shy with others outside of her inner circle.
Sophie’s social media pales in comparison to lots of young people her age. Just twenty-one-years-old in 2016 when the couple first hired her, she shares news stories about local events, old photos of her and friends- she expresses love, sadness and ambition. She vocalises support for environmental causes and protecting animals. She tells the world she is a movie buff- so much so that her consumption of movies means she experiences her own life in “24 frames per second”. She hates horror films. “I may be a fighter but my lucky star is shooting,” she wrote the year before her arrival in London. In her pictures she is a slight young woman, her light complexion and dark curly hair give her a very classic look. In most photos she is wearing glasses, supporting a gentle and friendly smile.
‘The Times’ newspaper reports also that Sophie confided in friends her dream of doing movie studies at university but opted instead for a childminding diploma. Her father imagined this would lead to a job in a nursery. He said his daughter loved children and was good with them. He said it was a shock when Sophie told him she was going to London to work as an au-pair. Sophie had been introduced to Kouider the previous year by a friend of Kouider’s brother. According to Sophie’s mother, except for a trip to Auschwitz, her daughter’s passage to England was her only trip abroad. Sophie’s new live-in position would mean she was given room and board in the country’s capital along with a weekly fee in exchange for looking after children. Sophie told her family she would only go for a couple of months. Once in England, the mild mannered young woman integrated herself into the Medouni/Kouider household and was well-liked by the children she cared for. Two months turned into nineteen and although her family heard from her regularly, as time went on, communications became more and more sporadic.
It’s worth noting that in May 2017, Kouider was diagnosed with depression and borderline personality disorder. She refused to accept the diagnosis.
On 25th July 2017, Sophie reached out to her family. The message, which she starts off by apologising that it has been so long since she last spoke with them, is deeply troubling in hindsight, but at the time masked a myriad of red flags for the young au-pair- she tells her family that she no longer had access to the internet or enough credit to the phone abroad. The message goes on to read: “I have been very worried about what is happening here.” She goes on to say: “There are a lot of tensions and I’m being accused of things that I would NEVER dare to do . . . She (referring to Kouider) believes that it is true when it’s not. In short, suddenly I feel worried. But I’m coming back very soon, in July. And that’s for sure. Because due to the tensions that there are here and the hassle, it’s better for me to come back for everyone’s good.”
Sophie’s father Patrick, on reading the message from his daughter, took her talk of ‘tension’ in the home to be that of a normal husband and wife with two young children. The reality of what Sophie had been experiencing was far beyond what anyone in her family or circle of friends could imagine. Although she was only receiving fifty pounds a week for round-the-clock work, the couple had long since stopped paying her. When friends of Sophie’s asked her about her pay, she was private and reserved on the subject and shied away from the subject, choosing to discuss other topics. The lack of funds was just the start of Sophie’s problems.
In July a friend and neighbor of Kouider’s, entered the couple’s southwest London home where she found Sophie holding her head and crying and Kouider in a rage. Kouider was allegedly upset that Sophie had failed to prepare breakfast for the family. The innocent bystander claimed that she had to hold Sabrina back from attacking Sophie, managing to prevent her from kicking the young girl on the floor. Kouider instead grabbed a chair to throw, which the neighbor took from Kouider’s grasp before she could hurt Sophie. The following month, after another incident, the same neighbor took Sophie into her home. This time, she lied to the girl’s employer telling them she had got her a ticket to go back to France. After hearing this news, Kouider turned up on the woman’s doorstep “screaming like a mad woman” and stormed into the home “absolutely livid”. Unaware of just how bad Sophie’s situation was she could only look on in concern as Kouider dragged Sophie away with her. She did not call the police or raise the alarm, a decision she would later express great regret over.
At the start of August, Catherine Devallonné answered her phone to a call from her daughter, Sophie, who was calling from a neighbor’s phone asking her for forty euros to pay for her Eurostar ticket back to France. Her mother happily agreed and said that she would send the money as soon as she got her wages. But the next day Sophie’s mother received another telephone call, this time from Kouider saying that there had been a “misunderstanding and that Sophie would be staying a little longer”. In actual fact, Sophie wanted to leave and return home. A letter to her employer around this time pleads: “All of this, this is hard and I don’t really feel well, so please, I’m asking this for the last time, I want to go home.”
Local residents noticed Sophie becoming withdrawn and unhappy. Michael Croner, a local fish and chip shop owner, befriended her and often saw her crying. She confided that her mother was ill and she wished to return home, but later admitted that she was also being mistreated by her employer. She described being assaulted for dropping butter. Croner offered food, help finding a new job, and even a loan for a ticket home, but before she could accept, her employer angrily confronted him, accusing Sophie of manipulating people and having multiple affairs.
A text on Kouider’s phone indicated that by mid September Sophie was no longer working for them and had left for France. When she was arrested, Kouider pretended she couldn’t remember the surname of the nanny she had employed. She claimed to officers that Sophie had fled a few days beforehand after the couple confronted her with serious allegations of wrongdoing. In fact, Sophie had let her family know that she would finally be returning to them on 18th September, but days after the charred remains were found in the garden of the couple’s home, police knocked on the door of Sophie’s mother and father and explained that she wouldn’t be coming home.
Before the Old Bailey on 26th September, via a video link, Kouider and Medouni denied murder but admitted perverting the course of justice by burning a body. Although Sophie had been named by investigators as the victim, there was still the matter of a formal identification, which given the circumstances, could only be determined by forensics. A fortnight after the arrest, the DNA test results officially confirmed that the so-called ‘child’ in the fire, was actually the young au-pair. Her remains showed she had fractures to her sternum, four broken ribs and a shattered jaw.
With news of Sophie’s murder hitting headlines internationally, the reaction from other young au-pairs working in the UK was palpable. In London, a march Throughout France, news of Sophie’s demise raised huge concerns about the safety of au-pairs in foreign lands. Many young men and women in the industry have experienced exploitation and isolation by employers and have called for stricter policies to protect them. Those affected, often young and inexperienced, were warned to be vigilant when making casual arrangements without an agency involved. No one in Sophie’s immediate family or inner circle had a bad word to say about the young girl- she was shy and kind, she never caused trouble for herself so what possible explanation did the pair have for assaulting and killing Sophie?
The answer to that all important question lay in a shocking collection of videos on the couple’s phones. Police discovered at least eight hours of chilling footage showing Sophie over the course of months being brutally interrogated, accused by the couple of being in cahoots with Kouider’s ex, music mogul Walton, to harm the family in exchange for fame and money. Their recorded ramblings are repetitive, at times incoherent or devoid of an actual question and instead are just a barrage of abuse. The accusations from Kouider have returned to baseless and absurd events. The couple repeatedly shout at the twenty one-year-old au-pair, unleashing psychological warfare on her. At times, Kouider is ‘bad cop’ while Medouni is ‘good cop’. Kouider calls Sophie “a fool”, saying: “I would have protected you” in reference to Walton’s alleged attempts to charm and manipulate her. She tells Sophie she would have “eaten him raw” in front of her.
As the weeks draw on, Sophie can be seen on the video appearing more and more emaciated. She is terrified. Early on in the footage she tries to plead with the couple to believe her innocence, but as time wears on, she becomes so weak and tired from the abuse she simply sits in silence. She is waterboarded, whipped with cables, threatened with rape and jail. In one recording made just before midnight on 11th September, Medouni likens Sophie to a French person who gave up Jews to the Nazis. In Another she is labelled as “worse than a murderer”. Eventually Sophie can do nothing but comply with the accusations. She knows what Kouider is accusing her and Walton of is untrue and yet perhaps she feels the only way out is to just tell Kouider and Medouni what they want to hear. Hours before her death, a filmed so-called confession showed an emaciated Sophie admit she had drugged Medouni so Walton could sexually assault him.
With two individuals heading the docks at the Old Bailey, on trial for murder it would be the job of the prosecution to prove both were complicit in Sophie’s demise- a notoriously difficult element of a crime to prove as one defendant blames the other and vice versa. The trial was held at the Old Bailey on 19th March 2018. Sophie’s mother and father flew over to attend. Despite Kouider’s ludicrous accusations, her defence counsel did not apply for her to be deemed unfit for trial or plead an insanity defence.
At trial Prosecutor Richard Horwell QC outlined how Kouider had become obsessed over the idea that Sophie was in league with Walton against her. The court was told how the couple applied “pressure and relentless intimidation” to get Sophie to admit Walton had come to the house, and drugged and sexually abused the occupants. One such tactic used by the pair in their campaign of terror, was to confiscate her identity card and phone and stop paying her. Their hope was to isolate her and force her to confess. He also presented to jurors the interrogation videos and painted a vivid picture of Sophie’s final agonising and terrifying hours. A video, taken by the pair, two days before she died shows Sophie sat in front of a fireplace, her hair meekly braided at the nape of her neck. She is emaciated, terrified, her eyes cast downwards as she is interrogated.
Both Kouider and Medouni took the stand in their own defence. Each blamed the other for causing Sophie’s death and it became a classic case of ‘he said, she said’.
Accused of keeping Sophie a slave, Kouider bit back, and alleged it was the other way round and that she, the employer, was cooking, washing and, buying food, she said that Sophie lived the life of a princess not a prisoner. Although she admitted to being violent to Sophie on three occasions, she insisted she wasn’t the one to kill Sophie, nor had she made any false accusations against Walton. She insisted that Medouni was the one to kill Sophie, bashing the young woman’s head against the bath during an interrogation so hard that it killed her. She told the court how her husband told her to lie to police and even had sex with her after the murder, although she did not want to.
When it came to Medouni’s time to speak, he claimed Sophie died at the hands of his wife during an interrogation that she had continued alone after he had gone to bed. At around 1:30am on either the 18th or 19th of September, Kouider allegedly woke him up saying that Sophie was not breathing. Medouni claimed after finding the au pair in the bath in her pajamas and with her eyes open, he made an attempt to resuscitate her but she was already dead. Rather than alerting police, he put her body in a suitcase in a panic. He claimed it was his wife who suggested burning it in the garden. He admitted that Kouider had ruined his life and accepted that he could have tried to stop her. He acknowledged that with his intervention, Sophie would still be alive.
A slew of individuals were called to give evidence at the trial. Walton confirmed that the string of false allegations Kouider had made against him, the latest, concerning Sophie and his alleged attempts to drug and abuse her family, were categorically not true and he had not been in the country when all this occurred. In fact, he had never met Sophie.
Anthony Francois, Kouider’s French lover and father to her first child, made a statement to police on 23rd January 2018, which was read out in court. In his statement he described Kouider as “aggressive” and said she often targeted “weaker” people. He claimed she loved attention and was prone to attacking people over a simple look.
Bone specialist Professor David Mangham told the court the victim had four broken ribs and a broken sternum, which he estimated to have happened up to three days before death. He said that Sophie also suffered a fractured jaw “around two hours” before death. All the injuries were caused by “significant blunt impact trauma”.
After six days of deliberations, at the end of a trial that lasted three months, all twelve jurors, for Kouider, and ten of them, for Medouni, found them guilty of murder. They were also found guilty of obstructing justice and illegally disposing of a body. The presiding judge in the case noted the crime was a remarkably rare instance of “folie a deux” otherwise known as dual or shared psychosis. Kouider, it was said, having been diagnosed with depression and borderline personality disorder, had affected her lover with her own unhinged delusions. Kouider’s lawyer argued that a woman who, because of her illness, is subject to “an irrational and irrepressible fear” could not be held responsible. He read a letter written by his client expressing remorse for what happened to Sophie. He argued that Kouider’s actions were driven by her mental illness and a “desperate search to obtain proof of abuse.” However, the presiding judge argued: “Delusions do not constitute the basis of her guilt.” He added: “I do not believe that you thought for a single instant that what you were doing was legal.” He voiced his belief that both know torturing Sophie to be “terribly wrong”. The pair were jailed for life and ordered to serve at least 30 years. A challenge to their minimum terms was rejected at the Court of Appeal in 2019. Medouni also appealed against his conviction. The appeal was dismissed.
In the summer of 2018, after the trial had concluded, Sophie’s remains were flown back to France. Her funeral, held at the Saint-Etienne cathedral in Sens. Her mother read a quote directly from Sophie’s own messages, it read: “Do not take my silence for ignorance, my calm for acceptance or my kindness for weakness.”
This story was first released as episode 433 of the UK True Crime Podcast. The sources used in the story are below.
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