Le Grêlé committed suicide three years ago: the serial killer had spent fifteen years of quiet life in Hérault

François Vérove, a native of Gravelines, in the North, began his professional career in the Paris region. He married in 1985, at age 23. A date which probably corresponds to the first attacks. The beginning of a double life: loving husband, soon to be a father, soon enough a union representative esteemed by all. And serial killer the rest of the time, pedophile, demonic.

He had been a gendarme between 1983 and 1988, attached to the Republican Guard, then a motorcycle police officer. But Mr. Hyde needed Dr. Jekyll’s medicine. Depressed, François Vérove lived for a long time on antidepressants.

Transferred to Montpellier in 2007

After a stint in Bouches-du-Rhône in the early 2000s, he was transferred to the central police station in Montpellier in 2007, ten years after the psychotherapy he mentions (read previous page). He stopped his activity in 2011 after a motorcycle accident. He moved with a cane. He had officially retired since 2019.

He had a two-story house built in Prades-le-Lez then moved to La Grande-Motte, in the residential district of Goélands. In 2019, he paraded on the Nagui set, on France 2, in Everyone wants to take their place.

It was his past as a mounted policeman that amused the host: “I have rarely been controlled in a car by a horse.” “Because you don’t drive in the Bois de Boulogne or the Bois de Vincennes”retorted Vérove. “Thank you for saving my reputation”joked Nagui to the laughter of the public, while the ex-gendarme finished his sentence: “We ensure security […] the day. At night, it’s something else.” “It’s another stallion who arrives“, continued the host. A funny exchange, in hindsight. “Are you no longer a police officer?”questioned Nagui. “I moved on.“At all levels?

“It could have been anyone but him.”

The candidate, in any case, seemed at ease, quite happy to talk about his former jobs. Above all suspicion… Unsuspectedthis is the title of the documentary series offered by France 2 last week and this Tuesday, October 1.

“It could have been anyone but him“, summarized Jean-Luc, one of his Pradéan friends, two years ago in Free Midday. Vérove was a municipal councilor in Prades-le-Lez from 2019, after resigning, when he will leave the municipality. “He was always ready to help.“, assured a former elected official, who remembers the group of friends of the municipal majority, the pizzas gobbled up after the office meeting on Monday, the karaoke evenings.

Nicknamed Fernandel

A former elected official distanced herself: “We couldn’t blame him politically, we nicknamed him the “old Nazi” and with the girls at the town hall, we said to ourselves that we wouldn’t entrust our kids to him.“. Vérove was rigid, yes. But serial killer, never in life!

One question, though: why did he suddenly leave Prades-le-Lez for La Grande-Motte, when the municipal elections were approaching and he was involved in them? He reportedly explained at the time that he needed a single-story house because of his sore leg.

At the Montpellier police station, he was nicknamed Fernandel, “because of the teeth and the smile”. His own daughter became a police officer. “My mother didn’t know anything, out of respect for her, leave her alone“, she urged just after the announcement of her father’s suicide.

An “unprecedented” case in France

A serial killer integrated socially, familyly, professionally, is “unpublished” in France, assures psychiatrist Daniel Zagury. He believes in the hypothesis of two lives: murderous until the age of thirty, put away afterwards, “brave retiree who takes care of his grandchildren, who is a great neighbor”.

“I have the sky falling on my head“, his wife would have explained to the judge, reported at the time The Parisian. “I lived with a guy for 36 years, even the children said ‘Dad, he has two sides, he’s two individuals'”.

The day when the dark side, terrifyingly black, took on the light, it was its apocalypse. The shame, the discredit. Intolerable.