The French serial killer known as “Le Grêlé” was confirmed to be former police officer François Verove after DNA testing was done on his body shortly after his death.
Between 1986 and 1994, a series of murders and rapes took place in Paris, including that of 11-year-old Cécile Bloch in 1986. On May 5, Bloch was attacked in the elevator of his apartment building on his way to school, and was forced to descend into the basement, where he was sexually assaulted and murdered, before the murderer threw the body in a rolled-up carpet in the basement.
During the investigation, several witnesses said that before Cécile went to school, a man aged 25-30 hid in the building for about an hour. Cécile’s half-brother, Luc, described a man she saw in an elevator as tall and covered with acne or smallpox scars, which led to his nickname “Le Grêlé” or “pox-marked man.”
Although “Le Grêlé” was considered a suspect in a number of crimes, he was extremely difficult to catch and the case went cold over the decades. However, in September of this year, an investigating magistrate decided to focus the investigation on one area: During several rapes, including a 14-year-old and a 16-year-old girl, the man told the victims that he was a police officer. The judge sent a letter to 750 police officers working in Paris at the time of the crimes, asking them to participate in DNA testing in the hope of finding a match.
François Verove, 59, who served as a gendarme for years before becoming a policeman, received one of the letters on September 24, but did not show up for his appointment to give a sample. Three days later his wife reported him missing.
His body was found dead from a suspicious suicide in an apartment near Montpellier last Wednesday. Next to his body was a note confessing to Le Grêlé’s crimes. After DNA samples taken from him, it could be determined that he was linked to four murders and six rapes, although the actual numbers are likely to be higher.
“We will never know all the crimes Le Grêlé committed,” Didier Saban, a lawyer representing the victims’ families, told BBC News. DNA from Verove’s body matched several cases, including the 1994 murder of 19-year-old Karine Leroy, the torture and murder of 38-year-old Gilles Politi and 21-year-old babysitter Müeller Irmgard.
Investigators believe that while Verove used his position as a police officer to lure victims, he probably used restraint techniques during the attacks, which he learned from military or police training.
The exact content of the confession was not made public. . .
26735
