BLUE-EYED, curly-haired Cyril Jacquet was the perfect reality show participant. Young, attractive, outgoing and ambitious, he and his girlfriend, Paola Alberdi, were determined to win a new Spanish reality TV show called Around the World.
The show, on Antena 3 channel, involves couples racing each other around the globe for a €200,000 prize and, inevitably, fame.
Jacquet did not realise, however, that fans of the show would start putting his name into their internet search engines and find out a little bit more about him.
So it was that, on Sunday night, he returned from Venice and abandoned the show after programme-makers questioned him about internet rumours that as a 15-year-old he had murdered his mother and father.
“I will always hold my head high,” Jacquet said, before he and Alberdi waved a tear-filled goodbye. “People change,” he added. Antena 3 said it had no idea that one of its contestants was a parricide. “The programme did not know,” a presenter told viewers. “After we checked the facts of the case we brought them back to Spain to protect them from media attention.”
In 1994 Jacquet killed his mother with three shots from his father’s automatic pistol after she entered the family home. A few hours later, he used the remaining seven bullets for his father.
He eventually confessed to the double killing and served three years in a youth detention centre.
Under Spanish law he has no criminal record since he was a minor at the time of the killings.
Jacquet, an airline cabin crew worker, blamed the media and “undesirable” people for his decision to abandon the show.
"They don't let you leave the past behind," he said. "I don't want to keep giving them the excuse to lynch me." Alberdi, who said she already knew about her boyfriend's past, said: "It bothers me a lot that we have to go because someone wants to pour s**t on someone else's life. I know he is strong. If he has got to where he has, it is because he can handle anything." – ( Guardianservice)