Murder Hits Monaco's First Family of Real Estate
Hélène Pastor, Monaco’s richest woman, was shot in her car
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On the evening of May 6, a man carrying a shotgun approached a black Lancia Voyager pulling out of a hospital parking lot in Nice, France. Raising the weapon, he fired through the front passenger window and hit a woman in the chest, neck, and jaw. Another shot hit her driver in the heart and abdomen. The victims were rushed to Nice’s Saint-Roch hospital, where the driver, Mohamed Darwich, died four days later. His passenger, who died on May 21, was Hélène Pastor, 77, the richest woman in Monaco. “There was real astonishment,” says Frederic Laurent, a Monaco historian. “She was an extremely discreet individual, and the Pastor family aspired to be completely normal businesspeople.”