THRILLER IN THE CREUSE : THE BREEDER WAS A CROOK | M6 | 66 minutes

A crook, a recluse and two injured gendarmes. An intervention by the welfare services in a dog breeding farm in Vidaillat, a small village in the Creuse, took on the aspects of a TV series. Just as the gendarmes were asking one of the breeders to come to the station, the man raced off in his car, colliding with two of the policemen accompanying the officials. The man is now on the run. Having arrived in the village with his partner in 2015, he’s no stranger. In fact, this British man is the hero of a documentary: “The Puppet Master: lessons in manipulation”, available on Netflix since the beginning of the year. In 2005 he was sentenced for having stolen from students and women, from whom he scammed a sum totalling over one million pounds. To trick his victims, this former car salesman passed himself off as an MI5 spy, a British secret service agent. Even though he’s on the run, his village neighbours are still scared of him and only agree to speak with their faces concealed. They talk of a “bad guy”, a man who kept his partner under his control for several years. In fact, it was these neighbours who identified him after seeing the Netflix documentary about him and who alerted his partner’s children. They had had no news of their mother for several years. We discovered that it was their arrival in the village, a few days earlier, that triggered the whole episode.