Psychological assessments presented Jubillar as a feckless character with a rough childhood, who smoked marijuana every day, had difficulty holding down a job and thought of little but his personal gratification.
He was said to have shown little concern over the disappearance of Delphine – drawing money from her bank account a short time later, for example.
And there was crucial evidence from Cédric Jubillar’s mother, who recalled him telling her when he first heard that Delphine wanted a divorce: “I’ve had enough. I’m going to kill her and bury her, and they’ll never find her.”
Jubillar’s defence lawyer Emmanuelle Franck said none of this amounted to more than speculation – and that the accused’s habits and attitudes could not be taken as signs of criminal responsibility.
“Courts do not convict bad characters. They convict the guilty,” she said.
According to the defence, there were alternative explanations for all the circumstantial clues. They said witnesses had been coached by investigators, in order to corroborate the theory of guilt.
They argued that in any normal crime of passion, there were tell-tale signs left at the scene – blood, or evidence of a clean-up. But all this was absent from the Jubillar home.
His lawyers said that details told in court of Cédric Jubillar’s behaviour were all irrelevant: his use of pornography, a pair of panda pyjamas with ears and tail that he was wearing when police came, and making his son Louis sit on Lego bricks as a punishment.
“Either [Cédric] is a criminal genius, or he is a bit of an idiot – you have got to decide,” said Emmanuelle Franck.
The defence offered no alternative explanation for Delphine’s disappearance.
Convictions for murder without a body are rare because of the difficulty of proving the existence of a crime. But they do happen, with jurisdictions in many countries concluding that circumstantial evidence alone can constitute proof.
For a guilty verdict in France, jurors need to have an “intimate conviction” that a crime has been committed – a concept that is left vague in law. If more than two of the nine jurors dissent, then the accused is found not guilty.