France's oldest female detainee, 79, goes on trial for in-law's grisly murder

"No-one knows what happened. And in law if you don't know, you can't convict," she said.Her lawyer Najwa El Haïté argued: "The way [Di Dio] was killed – they were the methods of the underworld, of organised crime. No head, no hands – that's not the method of a Marie-Thérèse, a woman with no criminal record."The complicating factor is that Garcia and Di Dio were both very much connected to the criminal underworld.Back in the 1980s, Di Dio was the lover of Antonio Marquez-Gomez, a Spanish national known to police for his links to the drugs trade.They were parents of a child, Romain, now aged 41, who was often looked after by Garcia. She in turn had a relationship with Antonio's brother, Francisco.According to reports, their wider circle had included two well-known brothers from the criminal underworld: Jean-Jacques and Philippe Maurice. Philippe gained fame when he was the last person to be condemned to death in France, before being granted clemency by then-President François Mitterrand.During the three-week trial, the prosecution will argue that Garcia lured Di Dio to her home near Rambouillet, south-west of Paris, where in the sitting-room she was stabbed to death and dismembered.The motive prosecutors will try to establish was a pact between Garcia and Marquez-Gomez to get the boy Romain, then aged 10, away from his mother. The accused also allegedly bore a grudge against the victim because she had engaged in an affair with Francisco.