Hérault resident François Vérove, rapist and murderer, committed suicide three years ago to the day, aware that he was going to be betrayed by his DNA. He had fooled everyone, including his family, until then.
A letter, addressed to his wife on September 27, 2021, found next to his lifeless body after a drug overdose. “I love you more than anything in the world and hate this criminal that I was.”
He says he does not want to impose on her and their two children the “consequences“of a”trial“. François Vérove, 59, was discovered two days later, on September 29, three years ago to the day. He committed suicide on neutral ground: a rental apartment in Grau-du-Roi, a few a stone’s throw from his house in La Grande-Motte where he had moved in with his family a few months earlier, after having lived in Prades-le-Lez where he was a short-lived municipal councilor.
PATRICK IDELMAN
The noose closed on him. François Vérove is the Grêlé and he is the only one who knows it. This is the nickname that the media and investigators have given him since the 1980s, because of sketches showing pimple scars on his face.
A new investigating judge, Nathalie Turquey, was appointed to this case in 2014. Seven years later, she decided to launch what none of her predecessors considered useful to do: DNA samples from 750 gendarmes on duty in the Paris region between 1986 and 1992. Witnesses spoke of a man presenting himself as a police officer, but investigators were convinced that the attacker was just passing himself off as one of their own.
He has committed at least four murders and is suspected of around thirty sexual assaults in the Paris region. He went under the radar for… 35 years!
He covers his victims to escape their gaze
1986. Building blocks in Paris and its suburbs. Teenage girls attacked, or aborted attempts. Locations for jamming an elevator shaft with a pack of cigarettes. Cellars to commit his crimes, in which he has previously installed cardboard or carpet. Nooses. And a man who calls himself a police officer, but who nevertheless shows a gendarmerie card.
He covers his victims, as if to erase his crime, to escape their gaze. This is what François Vérove will do 35 years later: kill himself so as not to face the shame and the looks, those of his family, those of victims of attacks, those of families. “The justice system has caught up with me“, he explains in his letter.
If he is “unforgivable“, he says, perhaps he is partly excusable, he pleads in substance.
“Death instinct”
A violent father when he was a child, a small storage room as a bedroom to leave his own to his two half-sisters, we will understand. There “deliverance“and the”healing“would have come from psychotherapy in 1997,” writes François Vérove in his farewell letter. “It broke that death instinct, because by killing innocent people, it was my own childhood suffering that I unconsciously wanted to destroy.”
Should we take his word for it? And if so, what happened until 1997?
DR
The last DNA trace found dates from 1994. He left with his secrets, deleting files on his computer. He also asks, in his letter, not to be resuscitated. A final fear of having to ultimately answer for one’s actions.
“Kisses, goodbye darling” when leaving
The one who hid his damaged skin behind a short-cut beard wasn’t just hiding himself. He buried heavy secrets behind an apparent coldness.
The physical tortures he imposed echoed the psychiatric tortures and the demons that shook him. From victim, he had become executioner.
On September 24, 2021, the phone rang. His wife picks up. The Montpellier judicial police want to take a DNA sample. Her husband calls back immediately. He makes an appointment for September 29 at 5 p.m. Confirms to his wife that it is a “old business“. No more upset than that, apparently.
Before the investigating judge, Stéphanie will say that she saw nothing coming, felt nothing. She will talk about a loving husband and father who left her on Monday, September 27 with a “Kisses, goodbye darling“, under the pretext of leaving to take care of a rental.
We imagined
Vérove will have had time to erase traces. “They really missed the whole thing.“, insists Luc Bloch, the brother of Cécile, the first victim killed by the Hail. He has also decided to attack the State for gross negligence.
That said, it is difficult not to be open to criticism: if François Vérove, like 750 other law enforcement officers, had been arrested without telling him that it was a question of taking a DNA sample, it would still have been necessary release him, like the others, for the time of analysis. But five days between the phone call and the date of the summons, that in any case left time to get organized.
“The Grêlé is like an abyss, all those who lean into it are lost.”summarizes psychiatrist Daniel Zagury. Justice and the police have lost their way. And Vérove himself, feeling caught, surrounded, buried his crimes under the weight of silence. A suicide to cover his tracks. So as not to be seen, discovered. Cover its victims and its crimes at the same time. Leave only one letter. And so many dots. So many question marks.
DR
Irmgard Müller, tied up, crucified, throat slit
Cécile Bloch was eleven years old. She was raped and strangled on May 5, 1986 in a basement in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. This is the first known murder.
His brother, Luc, speaks of “35 years of judicial wandering“and regrets that we didn’t make any”tests” earlier on the police. His father, Jean-Pierre, died in 2011.
Forensic identification in the 90s is not what it is today. The investigators defend themselves: they only had one blood type.
It was not until 1996 that a true genetic profile of Grêlé was identified. But it will take more than twenty additional years, and the initiative of Judge Turquey, for Vérove to be found.
“At the time, we could never have achieved“, assures an investigator in the documentary series Unsuspected. “We missed out“, still recognizes another.
On April 29, 1987, Irmgard Müller, a 20-year-old German au pair, whose lover Vérove was said to have been, was tortured and killed, along with her employer, Gilles Politi. The terrifying scene was reported by inspector Alain Vasquez to the newspaper The Days.
The article, titled “The tortured people of the Marais”describes Irmgard Müller in her panties, “hanging by her arms from the posts of the bunk bed”, her legs spread. She is tied up, gagged, “crucified”.
Her long hair and “his head tilted forward” hide his throat. This is, we read, “enclosed by her bathrobe belt and sliced by a kitchen knife“. Nearby, Gilles Politi, 38 years old, completely naked, has his arms and legs tied behind his back. A fireplace poker is used as a tourniquet to strangle the man lying on his stomach.
Marianne, 14, was raped the same year. Karine Leroy, killed in 1994 at age 19, could be one of his victims… The same year as the rape of Audrey, 11 years old, who would be his last known victim. He arrested her, handcuffed her and dragged her to an abandoned factory. Before finally leaving her alive.
She testified on the show Great reportson TF1, thirty years later. “I had to destroy, dirty, kill”recognizes François Vérove in the letter he left.
But if the ex-police officer wrote to his wife, he did not leave a letter for the victims and their families. As if, while repentant of his faults that he said he was, of his abominations, their fate and the concern for truth did not matter enough.
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