Torturous Murder: The Couple Who Killed A Nanny I Real Crime

In September 2017, a young French nanny was tortured, murdered, and thrown on a garden bonfire. Fire Brigade turned up. One of them was putting the fire out and stamping it out. He realized that there was a body in the ashes. They cooked chicken on a barbecue nearby to try and hide the smell. Fingers, limbs, and part of a nose.
There are no words. It’s monstrous. She beat her with a an electrical cord, and she pushed and slapped her. I’m going to kill you, okay? Be quick. 21-year-old Sophie Lionnet had also been interrogated and tortured whilst being filmed by her killers, Sabrina Kouider and Ouissem Medouni. What you were listening to was a quiet and unassuming girl being harangued, threatened, and intimidated.
It was a torture video. Sophie had been subjected to what can only be described as waterboarding. She had four broken ribs and a broken jaw. I can’t really work that out, but she could have walked out. I don’t know why she was stuck there. She would have felt absolutely trapped both psychologically and physically.
How did we not notice? It’s unbelievable. This is one of the most tragic cases that I’ve ever covered. Southfields, a well-to-do suburb of London, just next door to Wimbledon. It’s a safe place where people move to bring up their families. We’ve lived here all our lives. It’s a very friendly place to live, very safe place to live.
People know each other because they stay here a long time. It’s a unique part of London. This feels like a village. We call it the South Fields Village. Basically, you cannot not know a person. How about you guys? You know, I was chatting with him. Good friends. Me being in there 14 years, I see the whole world passing by. So, we know each other.
Everybody knows moms, the nannies. This is what South Fields is, family-orientated. But in September 2017, a series of disturbing events unfolded in South Fields. They took place at the home of glamorous mother of two, Sabrina Quider, and her partner, Weisam or Sam Maduni. What happened was so gruesome, so disturbing, that it shocked residents to the core.
Her charred remains were discovered by firefighters. They cooked Shaking on a barbecue nearby to try and hide the smell. I saw the smoke coming from the garden. It was directly on the street, so you could not see it. My husband, he went to the corner shop, and as he passed the house, he noticed the smoke. And he thought it was very close to the end of the house.
So, he was alerted on a safety level. And he just sort of looked through the gate, and he noticed the gentleman standing there throwing sticks onto the fire, and thought someone’s there monitoring it. It’s There’s nothing more that he can do, so he carried on. The fire was in the garden of Quider and Maduni’s flat on the corner of Pulborough and Wimbledon Park Roads, directly opposite the news agent.
Couple of customers said that there’s a fire around on Pulborough Road, and somebody’s doing a barbecue, or it’s too close to the patio and there’s smoke billowing. One neighbor whose house backed onto the garden was so concerned about the fire, she rang 999. I disappeared at the back for a while and when I came out, it was carnage.
Nancy called me and said, “Oh, the fire brigade are here.” And I was passing by anyway, so I stopped and we were chatting and as we were chatting, the police turned up. The road’s been sealed off. There’s about at least five or six police cars, two fire engines. And they put up the white tent and they blocked off the road.
We were thinking, “Oh, what’s happening?” Then eventually another plain marked van came, men in white suits got out and that’s when I realized that something is quite serious here. We couldn’t understand what why there was the tent there, why the police were there over a fire. Didn’t make sense to us. And then we saw Sam being escorted out of the house with handcuffs.
The man who’d been arrested by the police was Sam Mudoni, partner of Sabrina Quider. As Mudoni was driven away for questioning, forensic officers arrived. It shocked the community who couldn’t understand why they were there. But then forensic investigators carried out what looked like a body. We saw a big red box, not coffin shape, but quite large coming out after the forensics had done their work.
There were lots of rumors going around and we heard that they’d found a body. Police later confirmed there were human remains in the fire. But the body was so badly burned, they couldn’t even identify the victim. I can’t remember. I think it was probably about a week later when they identified the body.
We We had worked it out by that point anyway. think most people knew quite quickly through the process of elimination who it was. Neighbors had guessed correctly. The charred remains in the bonfire were those of the 21-year-old nanny who worked for Sabrina Kouider and Sam Medouni. When I had a reporter coming in to me straight away and saying uh “Do you know so-and-so?” And I was like, “Yes, I know so-and-so.
” “And do you know she was murdered?” And I couldn’t speak. Not only had Sam Medouni been arrested, but so had his partner, Sabrina Kouider. Within 36 hours of the discovery of Sophie Lionnet’s body on the bonfire, both had been charged with murder. It’s It is It is definitely an astonishing thing to happen, especially in Southfield.
The whole community was very taken aback and shocked. Completely shocking. We couldn’t understand what was going on. It just seemed bizarre. Really weird. For months, Sophie had suffered appalling abuse at the hands of her glamorous employer. She actually started to cry, and then I had to ask her what happened.
At that point, she said “Sabrina beat her.” Abuse that would end in a murder trial, described by the judges “stranger than fiction.” I’d been a reporter for 20 years. This is the most bizarre case and also one of the most tragic cases. On 20th September 2017, fireman discovered a body on a bonfire in a suburban garden in South London.
A man and a woman have been arrested on suspicion of murder after a body was found in a garden in Southfields. It soon became clear that the remains were those of Sophie Lionnet, a 21-year-old nanny working for mother-of-two Sabrina Kouider and her partner Wissam or Sam Medouni. Kouider and Medouni had lived in the rented ground floor flat in Southfields since 2013.
They appeared to be a successful and glamorous young couple. Kouider was a fashion designer, Medouni a financial analyst. Local chip shop owner Michael Croner immediately liked them. Fish and chips they own? We call him Sam. That was the name he actually introduced himself saying I’m Sam. And then he introduced me to Sabrina.
She was very polite, soft-spoken. She was very glamorous. Every time I see her she’s well dressed. But Kouider had a dark side. She was erratic, volatile, and prone to mood swings, and had a delusional obsession with her celebrity ex-boyfriend Mark Walton, founding member of the Irish boy band Boyzone. Walton and Kouider had a passionate and turbulent relationship.
They separated in 2013, but Kouider became obsessed with and fixated by him. Goes back about 5 years when Sabrina Kouider stopped going out with Mark Walton. She appeared to him to be a volatile character and prone to mood swings, but she also had something of a hold over him. She was prone to outbursts, to shouting at random people in the street, and acting in a strange and volatile manner.
They had an acrimonious split. She left, and he didn’t know why. At the murder trial, it emerged that Mark Walton had helped Quedeja financially by paying the first few months’ rent on her Southfields flat. But when he stopped supporting her, Quedeja became enraged. When the relationship between Quedeja and Mark Walton broke down, I think that was the catalyst for all of the things that happened subsequently.
She didn’t take the breakdown well. She wouldn’t have taken the breakdown well. It’s the kind of person that she is, and she became fixated on either getting him back, getting control back over him, or if she couldn’t do that, getting revenge. Not long after the breakup, Quedeja started making serious allegations about Walton.
The court heard she claimed he was stalking her, that he’d harmed her family. All the allegations she made about him were totally untrue. Sabrina Quedeja got it into her head that um he was stalking her. She said that he was um controlling her with black magic and all sorts of things. So, the background to the murder really goes back a long, long way, well before they even met Sophie Lionnet.
It was heard in court that Quedeja made more than 20 calls to police and social services about Mark Walton. In every case, police concluded that the allegations were not true, that Quedeja was a fantasist. She even received a police caution for posting defamatory statements about him online. No one knows why Quedeja developed her obsession.
It would appear that QUIDE has certainly developed a range of delusional thinking. She certainly viewed the world in a in a different way. Her approach to relationships was very different. It could be very very impactful and significant life events for her that might have changed her approach to relationships, affected her self-identity.
And I think it’s much more useful to think of of QUIDE from from that trauma-informed perspective. QUIDE also had a dysfunctional relationship with Sam Medouni, whom she’d known since childhood. And although he lived at her flat, he would often disappear for months at a time. They did seem odd, the whole setup, working out who was related to whom.
It was all a bit strange. She was hardly ever there, very glamorous. He always wore a flat cap, looked very shabby. You wouldn’t put them together as a couple at all. No one really seemed to know them as far as I was aware. No. No, they didn’t come to street parties, they didn’t sort of chat or introduce themselves.
You know, they didn’t They didn’t want to be part of the community, which is quite an unusual thing around here. They didn’t want to partake in anything. Although the couple were thought somewhat strange by neighbors, it was QUIDE’s behavior in particular that stood out. Sunny Patel remembers her causing a scene in his shop following a disagreement over a mobile phone voucher.
She was quite volatile and vocal in her mannerisms with this dispute. It was always probably her way or no way. She called the police and two policewomen turned up. One of them took Sabrina outside because she hadn’t calmed down. Then the policewoman said to Sabrina, “Look, this gentleman hasn’t done anything wrong, but he’s making an effort to assist you and you’re not appreciating that.
By December 2016, a deluded and obsessive Quoirin was about to welcome a naive young nanny from France into her family. Sophie Lionnet grew up in the village of Paron in rural France. It’s a couple of hours drive south of Paris. She lived there with her mother and stepfather. Sophie is a nice girl, always smiling, who loves life, and had a joy of living.
She was shy, yes. We spoke very little. It was always necessary to tear the words from her mouth so that she could speak with us. Sometimes she chatted well with us, but she was a a very shy girl. Sophie studied early years child education at college. Because she loved children, and children always came to her.
So, she chose to do this job. Sophie found it difficult to get a child care job locally. So, when a friend showed her an advert for a French-speaking nanny to work with a family in London, she decided to apply. She had never left France. Her goal was not to go abroad to work, but this opportunity would open doors for her to find work.
So, she said to herself that since I cannot get work in France, I’m going to England because it would be temporary. It would give her experience, which would help her to find work in France. Plus, it would improve her English there. Then in January 2016, just after her 20th birthday, she came to London and started working for Quedair full-time as her nanny.
When Sophie first arrived, obviously I didn’t know who she was. I can remember when she first asked for cigarettes, uh I had to ask for ID because she looked quite, well, under 18. I think she was very, very shy, you know, and timid. She was quite petite. I don’t think she had a social life at all. I never seen Sophie with anyone.
There’s so many nannies around in Southfields. They’re very happy. You know, they meet up on weekends. They even come to my restaurant. They bring the kids. They’re all grouped up. They have a social life as well, but Sophie never had that. From day one I knew where she was by herself or with the family. We assumed that she was just a part of the family, just an aunt or a cousin, you know, a a relative because she was with children all the time.
The amount of hours, the time, the effort, the patience she had, you could not pay someone to do what she did. So, it was just a natural assumption that she was a member of the family, not the hired au pair. For the first year or so, no one outside the family took much notice of Sophie. As this home video filmed in the Southfields flat shows, she seemed happy.
She spoke to the children, she could speak to them easily, but with anyone else, she just seemed to be very withdrawn. But Sophie did open up to Quedair’s friend, Yolanta. It was my dream to learn French and she offered for me to to help me with that. I had a good chance to speak with Sophie. And she told me that she came to London to improve her English skills.
And she was planning September to come back to France and to study something related with cinema. It was her wish. In the summer of 2017, after Sophie had been with the family for 18 months, Kwede’s obsession with Mark Walton took another bizarre and twisted turn. By now, he was living in Los Angeles and totally out of reach.
So, Kwede transferred some of her rage and frustration onto her young nanny. She exerted more control over her, stopping her from eating. Whenever she comes, I offer her food. She only has a portion of chips and a drink. And she eats it so fast. The way she eats, either she’s not fed or she’s rushing back to work.
She was pulling down. You can see eyes to see her with the same top, same jeans, and she never brushes her hair. Kwede, who was now broke, didn’t pay Sophie’s wages. When Sophie was offered part-time work by Yolanda to help out, Kwede stopped all contact between them. I was just knocking to the door and Sam opened the door and I asked him, “Or Sabrina is at home?” And he told me, “Sabrina is not at home.
” And after that, I heard her voice and I said, “Why are you lying to me? She’s at home.” I think that Sophie was controlled by Sabrina. She couldn’t decide by herself where she can go. And I haven’t even noticed that he she had her own free time. Not only was Kwede starving and isolating Sophie, she was also stopping her from going home to France, even to visit her mother.
I had to ask Sophie a couple of times, “How are you?” and I can feel, you know, she had eyes very teary and suddenly she started to tell me, “You know, my mom is not well. I need to go and see my mom.” I said, “Well, if it is that, why don’t you fly to France and I can even buy you a ticket.
When you are paid, you can give me the money.” I offered that to her. She didn’t give me a positive answer, neither the yes or neither no. She was just nodding her head. And I didn’t want to push her on things. Back in France, Sophie’s mother had received texts and Facebook messages from her daughter saying she was unhappy and wanted to come home.
She sent me a message saying that she needed a little bit of money to finance her return. So, I deposited the money in her account as soon as I got my pay so that she could buy her ticket to return. Sophie’s mother then received two unexpected phone calls from Houdaire in which he made some strange allegations about her daughter.
Sabrina had told me she that she was keeping Sophie because there were disagreements and problems she wanted to solve. I said to Sabrina, “Listen, do your best to make her come home.” The situation between Houdaire and Sophie was getting worse. Houdaire was making increasingly wild allegations about Sophie accusing her of stealing a diamond ring and of plotting against the family.
She actually started to cry and then I had to ask her, you know, “What happened?” At that point she said Sabrina beat her. So, I asked, “Why?” Which I shouldn’t I didn’t want to, but I had to ask her why. And she said the way she said it, the butter fell off. And Sabrina beat me. All this was raising alarms, you know, something is not right.
Yeah, I said, “Sophie, if you want, I’ll I’ll find you a job.” So, I even spoke to a friend of mine, and he said, “Send her immediately. I can sort something out.” A couple of days after Michael made this offer of help, Ouidda stormed into the chip shop, dragging a terrified Sophie with her. I was just setting my table chairs outside, and she started to scream at me, very loud.
And she didn’t let Sophie speak, and she went screaming at Sophie in French, which I didn’t understand nothing. And then I knew this has got nothing to do with me. So, I said, “Sabrina, you’ve got to excuse me. I’ve got to go back and, you know, open my shop.” And I left them there, and I I walked away. Michael suspected something was wrong, but he could never, in his wildest dreams, imagine what Ouidda and Medouni were doing to Sophie behind closed doors.
Imagine yourself every day in a cage like an animal. Or what they were planning to do with her next. In September 2017, the body of French nanny Sophie Lionnet was found burning on a garden bonfire in South London. Mother of two, Sabrina Ouidda, and her partner, Weisam Medouni, were arrested immediately and taken into police custody.
Six months later, their trial began at the Old Bailey, with both defendants facing charges of murder. The first time I saw Sabrina Kouider, I thought she was very beautiful and very glamorous, but also quite troubled. She looked indignant. She looked at me. She shook her head at me. So, I think she almost enjoyed the interest in her.
And I just thought, “How dare you not be full of guilt or remorse for what you’ve done?” Saying, “Oh, tell them I didn’t do it. I didn’t murder anyone.” It was quite fraught. We knew right then that she was going to be a difficult defendant. My impression of Ouissem Medouni was that he was very much the quieter one.
Silent, brooding even, and a meek figure in the dock. It was the first time I saw them. It hurt me. Because they had taken my daughter. They had broken everyone’s heart. And all the hurt they had done to Sophie, I I could not accept. While both Kouider and Medouni admitted to perverting the course of justice by burning Sophie’s body, they both denied murder.
Both defendants had essentially the same defense, that the other person did it. They both argued that they were asleep whilst the other person had carried out the murder. While no one knew exactly what had happened to cause Sophie’s death, the prosecution was to reveal a key piece of evidence which clearly showed the extreme cruelty she’d been subjected to behind closed doors.
In the weeks before her death, Sophie had been the victim of a series of brutal and violent interrogations. Unbelievably, these sessions were recorded by Kweider Madani on a mobile phone. I will not leave you alone until you tell me the truth. Is this clear? Do you understand? These recorded interrogations were all centered around Kweider’s obsession with her ex-boyfriend, Mark Walton.
Kweider obviously couldn’t get to Mark Walton because by then he was living in Los Angeles. And she diverted all her anger and anxieties and obsession onto Sophie. And she got it into her head that Sophie Leonne was working with Mark Walton to spy on her and to wreck her life. She concocted uh in her head a a bizarre idea that there was a plot against her and Madani.
And so over time she began to question Sophie for many many hours on end about what exactly she thought had been going on. Extracts of these interrogation tapes were played to a shocked court. You will not go back to France until you’ve told me the truth. I’m going to spoil your life as you have spoiled mine. She started coming out with all these accusations about um Sophie meeting Mark Walton secretly and plotting against her.
What you were listening to was a quiet and unassuming girl being harangued, threatened, and intimidated. They said that she’d be locked up for 40 years. She was like a murderer. All of this was to make her confess. Whether you speak or you don’t speak at your trial, you will do so. You will be jailed. Quedae was the one really who was instigating this whole thing, and she was the one that was keeping control.
That’s very unusual. In 95% of cases, it will be a man, especially in this type of case. You better know that we will not let you go back until we know the whole whole whole truth, nothing but the truth. I think Madouni probably would have been willing to do anything for her. It’s not even a case really of whether he believed what she was saying, is that he believed he wanted to do something to please her.
The tapes contained evidence, not only of verbal abuse, but violence, which had now become more and more extreme. I think there were about 8 and 1/2 hours of interrogations in the weeks leading up to Sophie’s death. And they got progressively worse with evidence that Sabrina Quedae beat Sophie at least three times.
She beat her with a an electrical cord, and she pushed and slapped her. I’m going to kill you, okay? Be quick. You can hear on the recordings noises that sound like um slaps, although Sabrina said that they they they were they weren’t her slapping Sophie, but it did certainly sound like she was being physically abused.
Think carefully about 40 years in prison. Close your eyes for 1 minute, okay? Imagine yourself every day in a cage like an animal. I couldn’t sit through all of it because it was it was really it was really too much. Sophie’s mother uh particularly uh struggled to to uh contain her emotions, and at one point during this harrowing footage, she she broke down in tears and had to leave the room.
There are no words. It’s monstrous. It’s a moral harassment. What they did I cannot stand it. They destroyed the family. They destroyed her life. They hurt my daughter. There really are no words to express how I feel. On the 18th of September, after 5 weeks of interrogation, Sabrina Kouider Madani made a video recording of Sophie as they attempted to get her to confess to working with Mark Walton.
This is the last image of Sophie alive taken from that recording. In the end, they ground her down so much that um in the hours before her death, they filmed her actually confessing to colluding with Mark Walton. She was clearly completely untrue. It It was a figment of Sabrina Kouider’s imagination. The worst part was seeing the the image of Sophie Lionnet after everything that had been done to her.
She looked emaciated. She looked completely broken. When Sophie’s body was discovered, it was so badly burned, it was impossible to know exactly how she died. Although it was clear from the postmortem that she’d been seriously assaulted. Sabrina Kouider said that she accepted that she’d pushed Sophie around, but uh she denied being very violent towards her.
Um but Sophie had suffered uh uh four broken ribs and a cracked sternum three days before her death. And on the night of her death, she had a broken jaw. Queder and Maduni weren’t shying away from the fact that they had put this young girl through horrendous questioning for many, many hours. Their case was that uh each of them denied the murder that had taken place.
Sabrina said that um it was all Maduni and he’d become absolutely enraged that he got a pan of water and uh and a towel and was torturing her demanding to know the truth. Sophie had been held in the bath um and subjected to what can only be described as waterboarding. Sabrina woke up in the night to find Sophie dead and said, “What What have you done?” But Maduni said the complete opposite and he said that he was asleep when all this happened.
But crucially, the prosecution produced a witness who contradicted both these stories. One of the key pieces of evidence in the trial was from a third party, a witness in the house, who heard both Sabrina and Sam in the bathroom with Sophie saying, “Breathe, breathe.” That was a critical piece of evidence because neither one of the defendants was really telling the truth.
Also central to the prosecution’s case was the fact that the authorities weren’t alerted to Sophie’s death. We know at some point they decided rather than to call the police or an ambulance, to dispose of her body. They built a bonfire in the garden by their French doors, by the kitchen, and they put Sophie’s body into a suitcase and lit the fire.
One of the neighbors called 999 and and and alerted the fire brigade to a fire that was potentially out of control. When the firefighters arrived, they found Medouni was at the scene, apparently in control of the fire. They insisted on putting the fire out because they were concerned that it was a bit too close to the doors.
And as one of them was putting the fire out and stamping it out, he realized that there was a body in the ashes. And I think he described seeing fingers and limbs and part of a nose. It was very grizzly. He turned to his colleague and said, “There’s a body in the bonfire.” Medouni, still trying to get away with it at that stage, trying to explain away the body as as the carcass of a of a sheep that he’d bought at the market, but it it would have been obvious to the firefighters when they started looking through the grizzly remains that this
was not a sheep we were looking at. It’s clear from from the evidence that we heard that had the neighbor not alerted the authorities, Queder and Medouni could have got away with murder. The gruesome evidence about the broken and despairing nanny being beaten and tortured to death were difficult for anyone to sit through.
But for Sophie’s mother, it was unbearable. Je comprends I do not understand why they took to Sophie, she who is so sweet, so charming. I mean, she’s a young woman beginning her adult life. It is a dream of all the parents to see their children blossom in life. There are no words to understand what they did. Everybody has been saying that Sophie was very naive and it was easy to manipulate her and I think that that is true.
But if we think that the only people who get caught up in coercive control are those people who we see as easy to manipulate, we’d be making a big mistake. Sophie behaved actually in the way that many, many people behave when they are being controlled. At the Old Bailey, after a grueling 43-day trial, the jury retired to decide if there was enough evidence to convict Quedair and Medouni of murder.
But even now, neither defendant appear to show any remorse. Really, all that mattered to Medouni was Medouni and Quedair and no one else counted and I think Sabrina was so wrapped up in herself and her own world that Sophie really didn’t matter. And that even throughout all their evidence, even everything that they said to the jury, they never once expressed any regret or sadness that Sophie had lost her life.
21-year-old French nanny Sophie Lionnet was murdered after being beaten and tortured by mother of two, Sabrina Quedair and her partner, Ouissem Medouni. After a grueling murder trial where each defendant blamed the other for her death, the jury retired to consider the disturbing evidence. We’d all been waiting for days for the jury to come back with a verdict.
It was a full court. We were very conscious that Sophie’s family were very nearby. We were all rather on tenterhooks. After 30 hours of deliberations, the jury returned their verdict. When the verdict came in, Medouni just hung his head. Both Wessam Medouni and Sabrina Kherda were found guilty of murder. Sabrina I just started crying.
And Sophie’s mother, Catherine Davalonne, started crying as well. It’s inhuman. It’s inhuman. These acts of barbarism, they never said a single word of truth. It was all lies and contradictions. They never looked at me once or apologized for the harm they had done to Sophie. I do not understand what happened in their heads to get there.
Like Sophie’s mother, many struggle to understand what had driven Kherda and Medouni to such unbelievable cruelty. Mr. Deern and is a forensic psychologist specializing in understanding offender behavior. The intensity of the relationship between Medouni and Kherda is something of vital interest in this case.
Um it’s certainly the case that Kherda had this delusional belief about Mark Walton and Sophie’s involvement. Medouni has bought into this. Whether he’s bought into this as a as a form of delusional transfer or whether he did this as a result of dependency on his relationship with Kherda is in question. Quideye was the dominant person in the relationship, but Madueke was was equally there during most of the recordings and and chimed in occasionally to ask his own questions.
So, he was very much part and parcel of what Quideye was doing and what she believed Sophie had done to her. When they were interrogating Sophie, they were seeking to support their own delusional way of thinking. They were encouraging Sophie to confirm the delusions that they had. Sophie was quite vulnerable because she had no support network here.
She had nobody to go to. So, she was a perfect person for Quideye to manipulate. I think that Quideye was so convinced by her delusions and Madueke also buying into this was convinced that these these acts had occurred that there’s very little Sophie could have done to appease them. Now, whether she was murdered because the torture got out of hand or whether it was a deliberate premeditated act is really only something that Quideye and Madueke themselves would know.
Sophie was never kept under lock and key. With the full extent of the torture she’d suffered now revealed, one question remained. Why hadn’t she left? She could have walked out. I don’t know why she was stuck there. She can come out to the street and tell help. People would have helped her. People might often ask the question when they hear of a domestically abusive relationship, why hasn’t that person left? I’m sure some people might be asking that question of Sophie.
We have to understand she would have felt absolutely trapped both psychologically and physically. Her emotions would not have allowed her or permitted her to feel that she had the strength of character to leave that household. The things that Quideye had been threatening her with, Sophie probably thought would happen.
She’d been told that she was a thief, that she was um a sexual abuser, that she was working in cahoots with somebody else. She might have been terrified. But had she even got to the airport, she’d been arrested. Despite this, there’s a sense of collective guilt in Southfields. How did we not notice? It’s unbelievable. We would never believe that something like that could have happened.
It’s so incomprehensible to think that that happens, never mind so close to you. You just don’t expect it. We feel really guilty that, you know, we didn’t notice what was going on. She was such a lovely girl, and it’s just a horrible, horrible thing to have happened right in front of our eyes. I feel guilty because we just wish that they could have done something.
You wanted to go back to France, and she only needed 20 lb or 25 lb. You know, we would have given that to her. I feel bad. I should have gone to the next level. I either made a complaint, but that period was too short. When that happened, I think it’s a week I saw her after that. Never saw her. Nobody thinks that this kind of thing is going on on their doorstep.
And that is one of the things, really, that helps abusers and controlling people to do what they do. It’s cuz we all stand around on the outside thinking, “Well, it can’t be that bad.” It’s knocked our community. It really has. We’re completely devastated by it, and it won’t be forgotten. Yeah, but when you know you can’t help somebody, Sophie’s mother hopes that her daughter’s death will serve as a warning to other young nannies looking for work abroad.
I advise that parents go with their children to see the house and to meet the employers. If there’s a problem, bring your children home as soon as possible. As I’m a mother of two kids, um I think everyone have to be careful. She was a bright person. And it’s so sad that in such young age she needed to finish her life.
More than two years after arriving to work in the UK as a nanny, Sophie was finally returned home. On the 6th of June, 2018, she was laid to rest in France. The murder of Sophie destroyed everything around us. People don’t understand. The family is very shocked. Her daddy is shocked, her big sister, too. Her brother, who has just turned eight, he wanted to come with me to England to tell them that they had broken his heart and that they had broken Sophie’s life.
They must be locked up. These people have destroyed a whole family and all the people who loved Sophie.