In the first week of March 2000, in a house on the French Riviera, a troubled entertainer would be found dead in her bed, and although the cause very well may have been an accident or even suicide, rumors persist that she might have been the victim of a murder committed by someone very close to her.
Lolo Ferrari, as she became known later in her life, was actually born Eve Valois in the resort town of La Baule, France, and by her own account, her childhood was not a happy one. She reported that her father was never around, and that her mother actively hated her, physically abused her, and constantly belittled her appearance and other attributes.
Therefore, it is little surprise that she sought to get out of her family home as soon as she was able, and in 1988, when she was just seventeen years old, she married a former drug dealer and suspected pimp named Eric Vigne, who at the time was fifteen years older than she was. She worked as a prostitute and model, with Vigne serving as her manager, and shortly afterward, supposedly with Vigne’s avid encouragement, Eve underwent a decade-long process of surgical transformation, not only obtaining extensive work to her face and stomach, but most famously undergoing a series of breast enlargements that took her natural, thirty-seven-inch bustline to a record-breaking seventy-one inches. Indeed, the size of her breasts was so enormous that she appeared in the Guinness Book of World Records; further, the breasts themselves had allegedly been designed by a structural engineer who had worked on the Boeing 747, and Eve herself later claimed that there was so much silicone in her chest that she was afraid to fly in an airplane because of concerns that her breasts might explode. She also found it impossible to sleep on her stomach or her back, as the implants weighed so much that breathing was extremely difficult.
Eve changed her name to Lolo Ferrari—”lolo” being French slang for breasts, and Ferrari being her maternal grandfather’s surname. Under her new moniker and sporting her unmissable assets, she soon became something of a cult sensation around Europe, setting tongues wagging at the Cannes Film Festival in 1995, appearing in a handful of pornographic films, touring with a burlesque stage show, and acting as a co-presenter on the Channel 4 television program Eurotrash in the UK. She also attempted to get into pop music, releasing a couple of dance singles; and she endeavored to market a line of dolls in her likeness, as well as underwear bearing the Lolo Ferrari name, though her efforts were largely stymied by threats of lawsuits from the Ferrari automobile company.
Lolo had made no secret of her depression and self-loathing, however, and had been notably taking antidepressants, sleeping pills, and uppers, and perhaps abusing alcohol. At the beginning of March, moreover, she had also been suffering from a bad cold, and had been taking antibiotics to combat the symptoms. So, on the morning of March 5th, when Eric Vigne went upstairs and found his thirty-seven-year-old wife cold and lifeless on the bed, it was initially assumed that she had either overdosed accidentally, or had finally made good on her numerous offhand comments about dying and her hatred of life in general.
And at the start, it seemed that the coroner’s report confirmed these suspicions; it appeared for all the world as though Lolo Ferrari had simply taken a lethal number and combination of tranquilizers and antidepressants, either accidentally or on purpose.
Lolo’s estranged family, though, wasn’t so certain; they openly accused Eric Vigne of killing her, and pleaded with authorities to perform a second autopsy. Vigne staunchly protested the allegations, stating forthrightly that Lolo Ferrari had been his “goose that laid [the] golden eggs,” and that he would therefore have no motive to murder her.
However, articles published in The Guardian reported that Eric Vigne had seemingly already found suitable replacements for his well-endowed wife; authorities discovered that shortly before Lolo’s death, Vigne had paid for a series of breast augmentation surgeries for a pair of sisters he called The Silicone Girls, and that he had booked a club tour for them in Eastern Europe. It was also suspected that Lolo had been having an affair, and police speculated that this might have been further incentive for Vigne to get Lolo out of the way once and for all.
Additionally, even though Vigne stated from the outset that he did not believe Lolo had committed suicide, asserting instead that the overdose was accidental, he later came forward and told the media that Lolo had been picking out a coffin not long before her death, and had stipulated to him that she wished to be buried with her favorite teddy bear.
A second autopsy on Lolo Ferrari’s remains was undertaken in 2002, and while cause of death was again found to be a likely overdose, three separate coroners came to the conclusion that death by suffocation could not be ruled out. On the strength of this finding, Eric Vigne was arrested, and ended up spending more than a year in prison. He was eventually cleared of all charges in 2007.
In spite of this, some of Lolo’s family and friends still maintain that Eric Vigne might have played a part in her death, though Vigne himself has continued to insist he is innocent, and at this point, it would seem the courts agree. Whether her husband was involved in the death of Lolo Ferrari, or whether an unhappy woman decided to end it all after a life of pain and hardship, is still an unresolved mystery.
Crime Immemorial 