For decades the crimes of a notorious serial killer have haunted the Paris crime squad.
But now a former military police officer is said to have confessed to being the murderer known as Le Grêlé – the pockmarked man – before his death.
Named locally as François Verove, his DNA has been matched to several crime scenes linked to Le Grêlé.
His murders and rapes shocked Paris between 1986 and 1994 but until now were never solved.
Among the shocking crimes attributed to him was the murder of 11-year-old Cécile Bloch. She was reported missing after failing to show up to school in the town of Fontainebleau in 1986.
Killer’s body found in rental flat
A picture of Le Grêlé has hung for decades on the walls of the criminal brigade of the Paris judicial police.
This cold case was finally cracked when an investigating magistrate recently decided to send letters to 750 gendarmes (military police) stationed in the Paris region at the time.
The 59-year-old man found dead had been a gendarme before becoming a police officer and later retiring, He was summoned by police on 24 September to give a DNA sample five days later. His wife reported him missing on 27 September.
His body was discovered in a rented flat in Grau-du-Roi on the Mediterranean coast, along with a suicide note. Prosecutors says his DNA matched evidence found at several crime scenes.
The contents of the letter have not been confirmed but French reports say he confessed to experiencing “previous impulses” while saying he had since “got himself together”. He apparently admitted murders without detailing the victims or circumstances.
‘Very sure of himself’
Le Grêlé’s nickname dates back to evidence given at the time of Cécile Bloch’s murder.
Residents, including the victim’s half-brother Luc Richard, recalled seeing a man with an acne-scarred face in the elevator on the day of the crime.
Bloch’s body was later found under a piece of old carpet in the basement of the apartment building she lived in. Officials said she had been raped, strangled and stabbed, and the case sent shockwaves across France.
Her brother, who helped police draw a sketch of the suspect, described the man as seeming “very sure of himself”.
“He said something to me like, ‘Have a very, very good day,'” he recalled in an interview with the Sud Ouest newspaper in 2015. Mr Richard has previously spoken about how the case has haunted him, saying he has lived with a “great feeling of injustice”.
DNA evidence linked Ms Bloch’s killer to other murders and rapes.
This included the 1987 killing of 38-year-old Gilles Politi and his German au pair Irmgard Müller.
Local reports say he was linked to the 1994 murder of 19-year-old Karine Leroy, who was found dead on the edge of a wood more than a month after disappearing while on her way to school.
In rapes committed against a 26-year-old German woman and two girls, aged 14 and 11, the suspect is reported to have identified himself as a policeman.
Source: BBC
