Passion Turns Deadly for American Abroad

Barrie Taylor’s eyes brim, and she clutches a tissue to dab the tears as she tells her story.

She wants to talk about spending four years and eight months in a French prison without a trial. She wants to talk about being assaulted by prison inmates and about anti-American prejudice. She wants to talk about her post-traumatic stress disorder.

What she doesn’t want to talk about are the circumstances that landed her in prison: a dead body, a freshly dug hole and Taylor holding a shovel. That’s what French police found when they went to her house in Versailles looking for a missing woman.

Her tale is as much a descent-into-hell nightmare as it is a murder mystery. Is she the killer and lying opportunist that French authorities allege? Or is she a victim of a jealous woman and a prejudiced government?

It’s been nearly seven years since the police discovered the body of Roxanne Pavageau, the estranged wife of Taylor’s French boyfriend.

Taylor told police she couldn’t remember killing Pavageau. She could only remember Pavageau coming at her, brandishing a hammer. Taylor was charged with murder, and her arrest became fodder for the French press. “American Attorney Assassinates Her Rival” trumpeted one headline. In fact, she’s not an attorney, although she has said she’s worked as one.

But that’s part of the problem with her, police say. She lies.

Nearly two years ago, a French judge released Taylor, who was still awaiting trial, on medical grounds. She was ordered to stay in the country, and she did for several months. Then she fled to Southern California, back to her family and her friends.

Taylor explained her defense in a letter to the French court after she left: “Ms. Pavageau lost her life after she broke into my home in a state of rage and tried to kill me. There was no murder. I defended my life.”

The French courts have never believed her. On June 23, a court in Versailles found Taylor guilty in absentia of voluntary homicide and sentenced her to 30 years in prison.

In fact, the mantle of guilt should cloak France, not her, Taylor says, and months ago she decided to sue France.

Aided by a Northwestern University law professor, Taylor has filed an application to sue in the European Commission on Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, alleging that France violated her human rights in several ways including: She was jailed for nearly five years without a trial, her lawyers were refused access to her court file for two years, and she was presumed guilty.

“The people who know me know that I’m innocent,” Taylor says.

Born in Orange and educated at UCLA, Taylor has spent the last year and a half since she left France moving among homes of friends in Orange County and Northern California. She sees two psychotherapists--to help with her memory and her post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I don’t get on with my life,” says Taylor, who turned 50 in March. “Thoughts do not come out clearly. I tend to get excitable. At any given moment, I will see someone who looks like a prison guard or Roxanne or one of the women who was mean to me in prison, and I’ll start to cry.”

Her life wasn’t always this dark. For most of it, she roamed from one pleasant life experience to the next, trying different jobs, traveling to different places.

“The person I was before the tragedy I will never be again,” she says.

Searching for the Eiffel Tower

This part of her story begins in Paris in 1991, on a street near the Seine. Taylor stood in the rain, poring over a little red map book, searching for the quickest route back to the place where she was staying near the Eiffel Tower.

“Est-ce que vous cherchez quelque chose?” asked a stranger. Are you looking for something?

“La Tour Eiffel,” she answered.

“It’s right over there,” he responded in perfect English, pointing out the landmark in the distance. She laughed. He offered her a ride, and later they had a drink.

Taylor was more than a lost tourist. She had been so captivated by Paris that she had moved there in 1989, a 39-year-old divorcee. Like generations of Americans before her, she was drawn to the romance and history of the capital. Taylor rented a room and studied French.

She and Philippe Pavageau, an international marketing consultant, soon found their way into each other’s lives. They started dating a month after their meeting near the Eiffel Tower. Less than a year later, in April 1992, she moved into his townhouse in Versailles, a 20-minute drive from Paris.

Pavageau, now 57, mostly spoke English with Taylor. He found her warm, easy to talk to and sophisticated. “She’s a very good-looking woman,” he adds in a phone interview from his Versailles home.

The slender, blond, hazel-eyed woman who would be his lover for more than a year had been a mild adventurer in the two decades since earning her bachelor’s degree from UCLA in 1972.

She had owned a plant store in Boulder Creek, Calif., in the Santa Cruz Mountains, run an art house movie theater and worked at a women’s shelter. She had met her husband, Leland Hewitt--who was 30 years older--when he was building homes in Stinson Beach, north of San Francisco. They married in 1982. She attended Monterey College of Law for 2 1/2 years before she dropped out.

Hewitt and Taylor divorced in the late 1980s, she says, only so that she could separate herself from his tangled real estate dealings. But they continued to live together and travel together until his health declined.

Initially, she rented a room in Paris in 1989, dividing her time between France and the Topanga Canyon home where Hewitt was living. Hewitt, suffering from heart problems, died alone in 1991 while Taylor was in France.

“The fact that I wasn’t there was something I will never, ever forgive myself for,” she says. “I don’t think I can find a man that I loved as much.”

He left her a trust fund that has supported her for years. She declines to specify how much it’s worth but says it’s not extravagantly large.

“I didn’t even know about it until he died,” she says.

Hewitt had died by the time Taylor met Pavageau that day in Paris. Her relationship with Pavageau would begin a new phase in her life. But Pavageau was not as free of his own past.

In the late 1960s, Pavageau was earning his master’s degree in business from the University of Chicago when he met Roxanne Foley, who was working on a master’s in education. They married in 1968 in her hometown of Washington, D.C. The couple raised three children--Marc, 25, Elisabeth, 28, and Laurent, 30--in France.

Roxanne Pavageau, who was 52 when she died, worked at a school, Lycee International de Saint-Germain-en-Laye in France, and counted several American women among her circle of friends in Paris and Versailles.

But she and Barrie Taylor would never be friends.

Taylor says she didn’t break up their marriage. Pavageau and his wife had been separated a year before he met Taylor. And Roxanne Pavageau had a boyfriend, according to Taylor.

Tension Grows Between Women

But Taylor says that once she moved in with Pavageau, his estranged wife began to act like a rival. According to police interviews with Roxanne Pavageau’s friends, the woman resented Taylor’s influence over her estranged husband and their three children, and she became obsessed with Taylor.

The Pavageaus were squabbling over the proposed divorce settlement. Philippe Pavageau says he filed a complaint with the Versailles police against his wife for breaking into his house in May 1993.

The occasional meetings between the two women were frosty. Once, in 1993, they found their cars next to one another in traffic. Philippe Pavageau had recently taken some family silverware that his wife wanted. Taylor, sitting in the driver’s seat of her car, looked over at Roxanne Pavageau and recalled saying, “We’re enjoying the silverware immensely.”

The next time Taylor saw the woman was the day she died.

Although Taylor can barely discuss that time during a first interview with a reporter, she telephones several days later. Her voice is calmer and steadier. In numerous phone calls over the next two months, she revisits Pavageau’s death, gradually revealing more details.

“I’ve been told by my therapist that, with trauma, the more one talks, the easier it is with time,” she says. “This is not the sort of thing you can meet with one over a drink and say, ‘Would you like to hear what happened to me?’ ” She chuckles. “I’m using humor as a defense,” she explains.

The day of the killing, Sept. 28, 1993, Taylor says she was home in Versailles alone. Pavageau was in New York on business. Taylor speculates that Roxanne Pavageau broke into the basement and grabbed a hammer as she came up the stairs leading to the house. Taylor says she heard screaming and walked toward the basement door. As Taylor neared the door, she claims she saw Pavageau brandishing the hammer.

“I saw hate in those eyes,” she says.

Then, Taylor says, her memory goes blank. She considered seeing a hypnotist but decided against it.

“My therapist decided we need to bring it out slowly,” she says. “To remember it under hypnosis might be a jarring thing. Whatever has to be remembered has to be remembered in a slow way--otherwise, I might go into a fetal position and never come out.”

Most perplexing is how Barrie Taylor, 5-foot-4 and 115 pounds, could wrest a hammer from a larger woman charging at her and could inflict such terrible blows.

“She didn’t just kill the lady, she butchered her,” says Anthony d’Amato, the Northwestern University law professor who is handling her human rights suit. “She struck her many times.”

Although D’Amato believes Taylor killed in self-defense, he says she is innocent of murder. He compared her state of mind at the time of the slaying to that of battered women who kill their husbands.

“You kill the person, but you want to make sure they’re really dead,” he says. “ . . . Barrie was totally appropriate in trying to defend herself. But then she went into overkill.”

Her French lawyer, Francis Triboulet, who defended her against the murder charge, won’t discuss details of the case.

Taylor says she ran out of the house and started to call authorities from a nearby pay phone but hung up, afraid Roxanne Pavageau would pursue her. Instead, she drove to the home of a friend, whom she declines to identify, and persuaded him to come to the house.

“I said, ‘Check and see if she’s there, if she’s hiding in the closets,’ ” Taylor recalls. “I stayed in the car. I finally went in and as you go up the steps, I saw her lying on the floor. I just started crying.”

Taylor says she covered Roxanne’s face with a silk scarf.

“It was awful,” she says. Her friend, mindful of his reputation, said he had to leave and drove away, she recalls.

There was one more tragedy that day, Taylor says. She was in the early months of a pregnancy. It was Pavageau’s child. Suddenly, standing there in the house, Taylor realized she was miscarrying and rushed to the bathroom.

The next day she ran errands.

“I was in a state of shock,” Taylor says. “I went into Paris to drop off photos.”

Two days after the killing, police arrived. Roxanne’s son, Marc, had reported her missing to police, according to French news reports.

Taylor says she can’t exactly remember her behavior when the police arrived at her doorstep, but--based on what she was told later--it was surreal: The police asked if they could come in. “Je vous en prie,” she answered politely. “Please do.”

“Apparently, I had a shovel in my hand, and I motioned to the back door, and there’s a hole there [in the yard] and Roxanne’s there,” says Taylor. “My doctors have told me this was my call for help.” The police asked her who dug the hole. “I said, ‘I don’t know, I guess I did,’ ” says Taylor. Now, she says, she is mystified how she could have been strong enough either to dig the hole or move the body.

A Simple Case for French Police

For the French police, the case was simple: “She was found in the house, the body was in the cellar and there was a hole in the garden,” says one source close to the investigation. In fact, French news reports at the time placed the body on the steps behind the house leading to a basement door. In either case, the body was on the premises, near the freshly dug grave. Several days later, Taylor was charged with murder.

“There was intent,” said one French court official who asked not to be named, “but not premeditation.”

Taylor admits she should have called the authorities right away but says she was in a state of shock. “No matter what happened,” she says, “you can’t have the charge for which I’m tried--the ‘m’ word.”

Murder?

“Yes, I’m still having trouble with that,” she says. “I’m still in denial.”

Won’t Reveal Friend’s Identity

Taylor has never named the friend she turned to that day. “This is going to make me seem like not a nice person,” she says, then reveals that the man was married and that they were having an affair. She says she had no interest in identifying him and hurting his reputation, even if he could aid in her defense.

For four days after her arrest, Taylor was questioned at a Versailles police station. She was finally taken to the office of a magistrate, a powerful French judge who also investigates cases. She thought she would find a sympathetic listener when she reached to shake his hand.

“I do not shake hands with assassins, and certainly not an American,” Taylor recalls that he said to her.

A French source close to the investigation said that exchange never happened.

“She says so many things,” said the man, who talked on the condition he not be identified.

Indeed, Taylor adjusts the facts of her story. She says she has worked as a lawyer when she is not a lawyer. Besides attending the Monterey College of Law, she has taken law courses in England and done some legal research, but she’s never taken a bar exam.

“I don’t represent myself out to be a lawyer,” she insists. “But I know how to do legal work.”

She also has lied about her age--implying she’s 45, not 50. The age discrepancy was discovered on a routine check of her college records. A UCLA spokesperson confirmed Taylor’s statement that she graduated from the university. The school’s records say she earned her bachelor’s degree in 1972. That would have made her 17 at the time of graduation. Confronted with that information, Taylor admitted that she was shaving some years off her age. She characterized it as a mistake that got repeated in official documents--a fiction that she was content to let continue.

The French media said that police believed Taylor worked as a prostitute, something she denies, and a French source said the investigating magistrate has a list of her alleged clients. But police interviews at hotels frequented by prostitutes failed to turn up anyone who knew Taylor or recognized her picture.

One point in Taylor’s human rights complaint is that she was “defamed and slandered” by French investigators who told the press, her family, the American Embassy and the FBI that she was “an assassin . . . a thief, a prostitute, the ‘mistress’ of Mr. Pavageau.”

Taylor’s human rights application lists numerous allegations against the investigating magistrate, including that he did not question her for a year--and then didn’t call her again for more than two years. Her pleas for certain witnesses to be interviewed also were ignored.

France has no limit on jail time while a trial is pending, and officials admit the process can be slow. “There is no such thing as a speedy trial,” explains one court official.

A French source says Taylor’s case took so long because she refused to make a statement to the magistrate. Taylor, however, says she did ask for a different interpreter--which slowed the process--but says otherwise she answered all questions.

Taylor’s lawyer says the rocky relationship between his client and Judge Jean-Marie Charpier, the first magistrate on her case, did not help.

“The communication was so impossible between the two,” says Triboulet, her French lawyer. “I’m not saying it was Barrie’s fault or the judge’s fault. But as an American, I guess she would have expected things to be different.”

Taylor spent 15 months in a Versailles jail before being transferred to a prison in Fresnes, France, described as “the San Quentin of France” by lawyers preparing her human rights case.

During showers, she says, she was “raped--with things--by other women. I remember when it was happening, I thought, ‘[the guards] aren’t coming to the door. And they can see what’s happening.’ ”

She sobs while describing the attacks. “I’m not a fighter--and they knew that.”

In September 1997--four years after Roxanne Pavageau’s death--Taylor’s lawyers successfully petitioned the Chambre d’Accusation, a higher court, to take over the case.

On May 20, 1998, a new judge released Taylor from prison for medical reasons but ordered her to remain in France. She says she weighed 86 pounds. Taylor now says her release on medical grounds was a face-saving excuse for the court.

“I think they showed that they thought I was innocent,” she says. “They don’t let you out because detention is incompatible with your health.”

Passport Is Confiscated

To ensure that she remain in the country, authorities confiscated her passport. But getting a replacement from the American Embassy turned out to be easy.

“When [the embassy] said, ‘What happened to your passport--lost or stolen?’ I said, ‘It was taken by the police.’ When it said what have you done to get the passport back, I said, ‘I’m suing France.’ ” She got a new passport that day.

She fled France, she says, not to escape punishment but “to finish an investigation that could not be finished there.” Taylor says she hoped she could interview character witnesses who were ignored by French authorities.

The court completed its investigation in December 1998.

The French government has not requested her extradition, said John Russell of the U.S. Justice Department. But if France asks for Taylor’s return, Russell says, “We would make every effort to extradite her.”

Taylor can’t return to France without facing the possibility of prison. According to her attorney, D’Amato, she could go back, contest the in absentia ruling and submit to a new trial.

“I know I’m a Californian and California is my home, but I would like to be able to travel to France,” Taylor said the week after the court’s criminal decision against her. “I think I can’t even travel into other European Union countries, and that hurts.”

The European human rights court has yet to decide whether it will hear Taylor’s case.

“It’s going through the preliminary stages,” D’Amato says. The French have answered allegations in Taylor’s application, and D’Amato plans a response.

Philippe Pavageau, meanwhile, thinks everyone--himself, his three grown children and Taylor--have suffered enough. “The very fact that seven years after the tragedy we’re still talking about it is, in fact, a tragedy,” he says.

Yet he is haunted by two questions.

“Number one is why did Roxanne come by [his house] again after having left that house two years before?” Pavageau asks. And, finally, “what happened when Barrie and Roxanne were together to trigger such a tragedy?”

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Staff writer John-Thor Dahlburg in Paris contributed to this report.