EMACIATED, pale and haunted – this is the last image of 21-year-old nanny Sophie Lionnet just hours before she was murdered by the couple who employed her.
Sophie had undergone weeks of interrogation and torture – including waterboarding – before she died at the hands of Sabrina Kouider and her partner Sam Medouni.
The sadistic pair then tried to cover up their crimes before burning her body on a bonfire in their garden – even cooking chicken on a nearby barbecue to try to disguise the smell of burning human flesh.
And they could have got away with murder if an eagle-eyed neighbour hadn’t called the fire brigade worried that the blaze was too near to the house.
As a fireman stamped on the ashes to put out the flames, he realised he was standing on body parts.
And detectives called to the house were to make a chilling discovery – hours of mobile phone recordings of Kouider and Medouni interrogating the terrified nanny and threatening her with her life.
Within 36 hours of Sophie’s body being discovered on the bonfire both Kouider and Medouni had been charged with murder.
Reporter Tristan Kirk, who sat through the harrowing footage at Kouider and Medouni’s trial, recalls: “What you were listening to was a quiet and unassuming girl being harangued, threatened, and intimidated. Sophie had been subjected to what can only be described as water-boarding.”
In a documentary airing tonight, Tortured To Death: Murdering the Nanny, his colleague Emily Pennink adds: “Sabrina Kouider beat her at least three times.
“She beat her with an electrical cord and she pushed and slapped her.
“You can hear on the recordings sounds that sound like slaps although Sabrina said they weren’t her slapping Sophie, but it did sound like she was being physically abused.
“I couldn’t sit through all of it because it was really too much.”
Glamorous mother-of-two Sabrina Kouider and her partner Ouissem Medouni, known as Sam, lived in a rented flat in Southfields, a well-to-do suburb of London close to Wimbledon, a safe place where people moved to bring up their families.
They appeared to be a successful young couple – Kouider was a fashion designer, Medouni a financial analyst.
But Kouider had a dark side – she was erratic, volatile and prone to mood swings and had a deluded obsession with her celebrity ex-boyfriend Mark Walton, founding member of the Irish boyband Boyzone.
Walton and Kouider had a passionate and turbulent relationship and when they separated in 2013 Kouider became fixated by him.
Sabrina Kouider got it into her head that he was stalking her, he was controlling her with black magic and all sorts of things
Emily Pennink
At the murder trial, it emerged that Mark Walton had helped Kouider financially by paying the first few months rent on the Southfields flat. But when he stopped supporting her, she became enraged.
Not long after the break-up, she began making serious allegations about Walton. A court heard she claimed he was stalking her, that he had harmed her family. All the allegations she made were totally untrue.
Emil Pennink explains: “Sabrina Kouider got it into her head that he was stalking her, he was controlling her with black magic and all sorts of things, so the background to the murder really goes back a long, long way, before they met Sophie Lionnet.”
The court heard that Kouider made more than 20 calls to police and social services about Mark Walton but in every case police concluded that the allegations were not true, that Kouider was a fantasist.
She even received a police caution for positing inflammatory information about him online.
In 2016 Kouider welcomed a naive young French nanny into her home.
Sophie Lionnet had grown up in a rural village a couple of hours South of Paris.
Her mother Catherine Devallonne says: “Sophie is a nice girl always smiling, full of 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 would speak with us.”
Sophie studied early years child education at college but struggled to get a 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.
Her plan was to gain experience, improve her English and then move back to find a job in France.
So in January 2016 she moved to London and started work for Kouider as a full time nanny.
Most of the local nannies used to socialise together, or meet in groups with the children they cared for.
But neighbours recalled that Sophie was always on her own with the children, so they assumed she was a family member rather than paid help.
In the summer of 2017 when Sophie had been with the family for 18 months, Kouider’s obsession with Mark Walton took a bizarre turn.
He was living in LA and out of reach, so Kouider turned some of her rage and frustration onto her young nanny.
She started to exert control over her, stopped her from eating and isolated her from the few acquaintances she had.
One of her few friends was local chip shop owner Michael Croner. He says: “Whenever she comes I offer her some food. She only has a portion of chips and a drink and she eats it so fast.
“The way she eats either she is not fed or she is rushing back to work. I used to see her with the same top, same jeans and she never brushes her hair.”
Kouider was now so broke she wasn’t paying Sophie’s wages. And not only was she starving and isolating Sophie, she was stopping her from returning to France to visit her mother.
Michael Croner says: “I had to ask Sophie a couple of times ‘How are you?’ And I can feel she had eyes very teary and suddenly she started to tell me, ‘My mum is not well, I need to go and see my mum.’
“I said ‘Why don’t you go to France? I can buy you the ticket and when you are paid you can pay me.’
“I offered that to her. She didn’t give me a positive answer, either yes or no. She was just nodding her head and I didn’t want to push her on things.”
Back in France Sophie’s mum had received texts and Facebook messages from her saying she was unhappy and wanted to come home.
“She sent me a message saying she needed a little bit of money to finance her return,” explains Catherine. “So I deposited the money in her account as soon as I got my pay.”
Sophie’s mum then got two expected phone calls from Kouider in which she made some strange allegations about her daughter.
“Sabrina told me 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 Kouider and Sophie was getting worse with Kouider making increasingly wild allegations against her, accusing her of stealing a diamond ring and plotting against the family.
Michael Croner recalls: “She actually started to cry and I had to ask her what happened. At that point she said Sabrina had beat her.
“I asked her why and she said, ‘The butter fell off and Sabrina beat me’. All this was raising alarms, something is not right.
“I said ‘Sophie, if you want I will find you a job.’
So I went and spoke to a friend of mine and he said send her immediately I will sort something out.”
A couple of days after Michael made his offer, Kouider stormed into the chip shop dragging Sophie with her, screaming at both of them.
Michael knew then that something was badly wrong – but he could never have suspected what Kouider was doing to Sophie behind closed doors, or what they were planning to do with her next.
In the weeks before her death, Sophie had been the victim of a series of brutal and violent interrogations. Unbelievably these sessions had been recorded by Kouider and Medouni on a mobile phone.
These interrogations were all centred around Kouider’s obsession with her ex-boyfriend Mark Walton.
She had got it into her head that Sophie was working for Mark Walton and spying on her to wreck her life.
In tapes played to the court, Kouider could be heard screaming at Sophie: “I will not leave you alone until you tell me the truth. Is this clear? Do you understand?”
“I am going to spoil your life as you have spoiled mine,” and “Imagine yourself every day in a cage like an animal.”
There were about eight and a half hours of interrogations in the weeks leading up to Sophie’s murder and they got progressively worse.
Emily Pennink said: “They said she’d be locked up for 40 years, she was like a murderer, all of this was to make her confess.”
The tapes contained evidence of not only verbal abuse, but violence which had become more and more extreme.
On September 18, Kouider and Medouni made a video recording of Sophie as they tried to make her confess to working with Mark Walton.
“They ground her down so much that in the hours before her death they filmed her actually confessing to colluding with Mark Walton,” says Emily Pennink. “It was clearly completely untrue. It was a figment of Sabrina Kouider’s imagination.
“The worst part was seeing 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 recovered, she had been so badly burned it was impossible to tell exactly how she had died, although she had been seriously assaulted.
Sophie had suffered four broken ribs and a cracked sternum three days before her death and on the night of her death she had a broken jaw.
Both Kouider and Medouni pleaded guilty to preventing the course of justice by burning Sophie’s body, but denied murder. They both had the same defence – that the other person did it.
Sabrina claimed she had been asleep when Sam had held Sophie in the bath and tortured her.
They destroyed a family, they destroyed a life, they hurt my daughter. There really are no words to express how I feel.
Catherine Devallonne
But there was a witness in the house who had heard both Sabrina and Sam in the bathroom with Sophie.
And rather than alert the police to Sophie’s death, the twisted pair decided to dispose of her body themselves.
They built a bonfire in the garden and put Sophie’s body in a suitcase on top of it and lit the fire.
Tristan Kirk says: “It is clear from the evidence we heard that if the neighbour had not alerted the authorities, Kouider and Medouni could have got away with murder.”
The couple were both found guilty of murder at the Old Bailey in June 2018.
Sentencing the pair to life in prison, Judge Nicholas Hilliard said: “You were both involved in torturing Sophie in the bath in the lead-up to her death in making her think she would drown unless you gave her information you wanted which was not in her power to give because it did not exist.
“The suffering and the torture you put her through before her death was prolonged and without pity.” He said their behaviour had its “origins in cruelty and a desire for revenge”.
But their sentence brought little comfort to Sophie’s mum Catherine who says: “There are no words. It is monstrous. It is moral harassment.
“What they did, I cannot stand it. They destroyed a family, they destroyed a life, they hurt my daughter. There really are no words to express how I feel.”
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