CRIME HUNTER: The billionaire, rough sex and a bodacious dominatrix

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The dead man in the bedroom was dressed with a splash of elan.

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His ensemble was a flesh-coloured head-to-toe latex catsuit and as an added touch, there was a dildo inserted in him. He had been tied to a chair.

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This was not something cops saw on the regular, particularly not at one of the finer addresses in Geneva, Switzerland.

The corpse was that of billionaire Édouard Stern. On Feb. 28, 2005, someone parked four bullets in the French banking scion.

At first, detectives thought the fetish gear was a red herring to throw them off the killer’s trail. But a little digging determined that Stern had been engaged in a sadomasochistic bondage session as was his penchant.

The slaying of the 50-year-old banker sent shockwaves through European society and financial circles. It was, as Vanity Fair reported at the time, tantamount to a Rockefeller being murdered.

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Cops soon began working on theories. Was it, as things appeared, a BDSM session gone off the rails? Or was there veracity to the whispers that Stern was deeply involved with the Russian mafia?

Or was it something else?

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Stern grew up the child of privilege as the only son of one of France’s most prominent banking families. He had been married to New York socialite Béatrice David-Weill until 1998 and the couple had three children.

While she was beloved, he was described as an “arrogant prick.”

He would scream at underlings like the spoiled rich kid he was, calling some “f—ing morons” and starting fights at dinner parties.

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“People are just in shock,” writer William Cohan told Vanity Fair the day after the murder. “Look, a lot of people didn’t like this guy. Some feel, at a visceral level, you know, ‘I’m not going to shed tears for this guy.’ But when you get past that, it’s pretty damn shocking. I mean, people just don’t know what to think.”

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The Russian mafia theory went that Stern was owed money and wanted it repaid. The vodka-soaked mobsters said no, and instead whacked the banking mogul.

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Those grand political, financial and underworld conspiracies that filled the salons of Paris and Geneva quickly became something a little more earthy.

Stern’s sexual predilections were well-known.

Society columnist Taki reported in The Spectator that the banker, “in addition to having many girlfriends, was bisexual and had a boyfriend and that he was a ‘rough trade’ sex connoisseur.”

One society matron admitted she and Stern shared the same lover, a young woman described as “kinky who adored Edouard because he had the most beautiful c— in the world. But the girl was impressive as well because she had this large black dildo she was known to use on her lovers.”

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There was also Russian model Julia Lemigova, a former Miss Soviet Union now married to tennis great Martina Navratalova. They liked guns and sex and he had considered marrying her. She became pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy who died mysteriously of a brain injury.

His handlers later discovered that he was only one of three men concurrently having sex with the model.

Investigators began zeroing in on his longtime, much-married girlfriend, Cécile Brossard, who reportedly shared her beau’s penchant for rough sex. There is no safe word for a bullet.

An artist who made erotic sculptures and sometimes worked as a prostitute specializing in BDSM. She liked older men who were loaded as was befitting her luxe lifestyle.

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The leather-clad vixen used the nom du sex of “Alice.” At first, the encounters between Brossard and Stern began as pay-for-play but evolved into something more complicated.

“I never even knew she existed; he kept that part of his life completely separate,” friend Sandy Koifman told the magazine. “She was a lovely woman, pleasant, not beautiful, very plain-looking, I thought. Just a run-of-the-mill, basic woman.”

And it wasn’t Brossard who chased Stern, it was the other way around. He begged her to leave her husband but she demured because she feared the billionaire would tire of her leaving her with nothing.

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About two months before he was killed, Stern deposited $1 million into Brossard’s account to assuage her fears. But the mercurial rich kid turned around and took the cash back.

Moments before Brossard pulled the trigger, he taunted her: “A million dollars is a lot to pay for a whore.”

After sending her lover to the hereafter, Brossard, then 36, cleaned up the crime scene and ditched the gun in a nearby lake. She fled to Italy and then Australia.

“On the night it happened, I felt an explosion in my head and took a gun he kept in his bedside drawer,” she told the court.

“I pointed the weapon at his face and fired the first shot. The gun must have been six inches from his face. I think I hit him between the eyes. I fired another round at his head.”

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For good measure, she shot him two more times in the torso. Prosecutors described her as “sexually deviant” and “venomous.”

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Marc Bonnant said: “She stirred up the fantasies of a 50-year-old man, who became dependent on a sexually deviant little blonde from the suburbs.”

Brossard, then 40, was convicted and on June 18, 2009, was sentenced sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison – escaping the maximum 20-year term because of diminished responsibility.

In addition, she was ordered to pay Stern’s children one Swiss franc for “moral damage.”

Brossard was released in 2010 after serving five years locked up – four of those years while awaiting trial.

bhunter@postmedi.com

@HunterTOSun

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