Couple ‘locked vulnerable woman in garage for five years’ and ‘forced her to eat porridge with dish soap’

A man and woman have been charged with kidnapping and torture after allegedly holding a 45-year-old woman prisoner in her own garage for five years.

The victim is said to have lost 50kg during the horrific ordeal, which reportedly involved her being bathed in bleach, forced to defecate in potties and plastic bags, and being made to eat porridge laced with dish soap.

Her bank account and social security benefits were also drained while she was held prisoner in a garage in a hamlet near Sanit-Molf in Loire-Atlantique in western France, according to FranceBleu.

She managed to escape on 14 October when she rang a neighbour’s doorbell for help at around 9.30pm, while one of her alleged captors was watching TV, prosecutors said.

Police have since arrested an 82-year-old man and a 60-year-old woman and charged them with “abduction with torture or acts of barbarism”. Authorities have not named the victim or the suspects.

The victim had been sharing a flat with another woman who worked as a nursing assistant at the nearby Guerande hospital. Her roommate met an elderly man, who subsequently moved into the property.

Nantes prosecutor, Antoine Leroy, said that at this point the victim was put in a tent in the garden and later made to live in the garage, where she slept on a deckchair.

Investigators discovered evidence that the garage door had been “blocked from the outside by concrete blocks,” Mr Leroy said. The woman was also allegedly kept outside for days in the rain or cold and was suffering from hypothermia when she was saved.

“She was washed with bleach, there was dish soap in her food, she was drugged with medication,” a source close to the investigation told FranceBleu.

The neighbour who opened the door to the woman said she had not seen her in years and thought she had left the area.

“You don’t leave someone in psychological and physical distress outside,” the neighbour said. “I brought her inside, covered her, gave her water. It was very complicated. She was someone in distress. I saved this woman, I provided assistance, that’s it.”

Mr Leroy said that the victim is a “particularly psychological fragile woman and therefore in a vulnerable state”, otherwise she could have “defended herself differently”. She left the house a few times but kept coming back, he added.

Authorities said the woman had “disappeared from the radar” since April 2022. Her bank accounts showed “a sudden break in her lifestyle” from this date.

“Her bank accounts were no longer active except when paying large sums of money” to the pair, prosecutors told Le Parisien.

The man and woman living in the property, who were arrested last week, have since been charged with “criminal acts of kidnapping with torture or acts of barbarism”, as well as “fraudulent abuse’ of a person’s state of psychological or physical subjection” and the “weakness of a vulnerable person.”

The woman has been remanded in custody, while the man is under judicial supervision.

An investigation is still under way.