Twenty-four years have passed since Jeanette O’Keefe’s body was discovered. “But I remember it very well,” breathes Jean-Marc Bloch, the former boss of the Versailles judicial police. “This is a landmark case, as homicide cases often are. » It was January 2, 2001. That morning, two kids of around twelve years old, living in the Cité des Musiciens in Les Mureaux (Yvelines), went to walk the dog. Strangely, the animal heads towards a small abandoned parking lot, strewn with trash. He rushes towards a sleeping bag in which there appears to be a body.
The boys panic. They ran to warn the father of one of them, who alerted the emergency services. On site, the firefighters cut the cord of the sleeping bag which was tied around the victim’s neck. They can only note the death of this woman aged around twenty.
The prosecution seized the criminal brigade of the PJ of Versailles. The investigations promise to be complicated. “We had nothing,” says the former police officer. Investigators found neither identity papers nor personal effects belonging to the young woman. They consult the file of wanted persons, the FPR, but establish no link with another recent disappearance case. They show her photo to the neighborhood residents, no one recognizes her. The five surveillance cameras installed in the city did not film it.
Unknown DNA found
His face marked with blows, the victim is dressed in a T-shirt, an oversized checkered shirt and tracksuit bottoms. The autopsy revealed that she had been strangled twice, once with a cord. On the other hand, the young woman, who was menstruating, does not seem to have had sexual intercourse before her death. She had not consumed any alcohol or drugs. She has a burst liver. Under her nails, skin cells are discovered. They undoubtedly belong to her attacker, just like the hairs found in the sleeping bag. But the DNA extracted from it does not match any of those in the police databases.
Who is she? And what was she doing here? The only certainty for investigators is that the victim was not killed where she was discovered. The police did not see any signs of a struggle nearby. And the down is dry even though it rained the previous days. Conclusion: the corpse was probably left in this discreet place, on the night of January 1st to 2nd, by a murderer who seems to know the place well.
At the same time, on the other side of the world, Kevin and Susan O’Keefe are in turmoil. Their daughter Jeanette, 28, has not heard from them for three days. This Australian student, passionate about French culture, spent two months in Paris. On January 2, she was supposed to fly to New York where a friend and her sister, Denise, were waiting for her. But the young woman never got on the plane. Her mother tried to contact her at the home where she lived, in Savigny-sur-Orge. But Jeanette had left him with all his things. On January 9, she reported her disappearance to the Australian police, who passed the information on to their French counterparts.
“Completely lost in Paris”
The body discovered in Mureaux now has a name: Jeanette O’Keefe. Jean-Marc Bloch receives the victim’s sister, his brother-in-law and the Australian consul in his office. “I promised them that we would do everything we could to try to find out what happened. » The police are trying to trace the last days of the young Australian in France. The task is complicated. Shy and not much of a party girl, the young woman made very few contacts with other students.
They learn that she was giving English lessons to Elise, a young girl who offered to spend New Year’s Eve with her and some friends, and to stay with her parents until she left for the United States. On December 31, the same Elise arranged to meet him at the Mairie de Clichy station. She waits for him for an hour. But Jeanette doesn’t come. The young Australian probably got lost along the way. “She was completely lost in Paris,” explains Jean-Marc Bloch.
The police learned that Jeanette then contacted Anthony, a 40-year-old New Zealander who, like her, was taking French lessons in the 19th arrondissement. On the phone, she asks him if he can host her for two nights. The forty-year-old, who doesn’t really want it, doesn’t dare refuse. He then deliberately arrives very late for the meeting he has set for him on the Champs-Elysées, which is packed with people. Not seeing him coming, Jeanette calls Elise’s parents and asks them how to get to their house, in Herblay, in Val-d’Oise, by train. His trail ends here.
“He was on our list of guys we were targeting”
What if, to get there, Jeanette hadn’t finally taken the RER? “We didn’t know how this woman got here. We didn’t understand what she was doing there, there was no connection, continues Jean-Marc Bloch. At one point, we wondered if the murderer could not have been a taxi driver. » A lead all the more interesting given that at the time, another affair was making headlines. That of the death of Susanna Zetterberg, a 19-year-old Swedish student kidnapped in April 2008 leaving a nightclub on rue de Rivoli. She got into the fake taxi driven by her murderer, Bruno Cholet. But this repeat criminal was already behind bars at the time of Jeanette’s murder.
The more their investigation progresses, the more the police become convinced that Jeanette had no connection with her killer. “In a murder investigation, we always start by working on the victim, their relationships. You can scratch all you want, you won’t find anything if she came across her murderer by chance,” analyzes the former police officer. The investigators will have the idea of summoning all the single people in the Cité des Musiciens, in Les Mureaux, to take their DNA in order to compare it with that of the criminal found under the victim’s nails. Of the 120 men targeted, six did not respond to the summons. Without knowing it, the police are on the right track.
A road check, then DNA
In February 2008, Adriano Araujo da Silva refused to submit to a traffic stop. Living in the City of Musicians, this father of three children, who drives without a license, is arrested and sentenced to one month in prison. On this occasion, his DNA is taken and added to the Fnaeg, the automated national genetic fingerprint file. It is compared to unknown DNA collected from different crime scenes. “And it worked,” recalls Jean-Marc Bloch.
Now suspected of having killed Jeanette, Adriano Araujo da Silva is not unknown to investigators: he is one of six single men who did not respond to summons. “He was on our list of guys we were targeting in the city, we had him on hand,” underlines the former commissioner. It was a matter that took us a while to resolve even though we were very close to the goal quite quickly. »
Strangled with an extension cord
The man, a Frenchman originally from Brazil, was arrested in February 2009. After denying the facts, he learned from the police that his DNA had been discovered on the victim. He then explains to them that he saw the young woman being attacked by young people in the street. He would have approached her to help her, but she would have panicked and scratched him. Cornered, he ends up confessing. He says he met and flirted with the victim on the Champs-Elysées on New Year’s Eve. After approaching her, he allegedly offered to take her to his house, where they had sex. But the Australian student would have refused to have another. Then he allegedly hit her on the head with an iron bar. And to silence her, he allegedly strangled her with an extension cord.
Not knowing what to do with her body, he allegedly dressed her in his clothes before putting her in this sleeping bag that he threw off the balcony on the 4th floor. “We understood better why, at the autopsy, we saw that the body was broken but with very little bleeding,” confides the former boss of the Versailles PJ. He then dumped the body in the parking lot where it was discovered.
Adriano Araujo da Silva reiterated his confession before the investigating judge before retracting his confession two months later. At his trial in January 2012, he continued to proclaim his innocence, explaining that Jeanette had left his home with his sleeping bag because they had argued. According to him, she probably then had a bad encounter. He also accuses the police of having manipulated him to extract his confession. His explanations struggled to convince the Yvelines Assize Court, which sentenced him to thirty years of criminal imprisonment with a two-thirds security sentence. A sentence confirmed on appeal, in April 2013, by the Hauts-de-Seine Assize Court.
