After forty years, 92 boxes, 17,765 P.-V. and procedural documents, seven investigating magistrates and the dozens of investigators who took turns, we still do not know where, when or how Grégory died.
Mainly responsible for the fiasco, Jean-Michel Lambert, the first judge who, out of sentimentality, attending the autopsy, forbade the pathologist to take samples, at least from the stomach, necessary for toxicological examinations.
It will result that while a first doctor leaned towards “cardiac arrest following prolonged immersion in an aqueous environment”, in other words drowning, the next one would favor a “death by asphyxiation”.
To arrive in 2017 at a third lead according to which Grégory, first injected and put to sleep using a syringe containing insulin, was first drowned in a bathtub and then only deposited in Vologne.
After ten years, the father of “little Grégory” comes out of silence: a comic strip to give his version of the story
In 2017, investigators used AnaCrim, French criminal analysis software which was based on the absence of diatoms in Grégory’s lungs.
Since there were no diatoms (microscopic algae foundAff.Gregory-Vattier/Gamma/Eyedea Presse/Photo News in all rivers but not in tap water), Grégory would not have died from drowning living in Vologne but in city water, therefore a bathtub, at least in private homes. Which changed everything.
As a result, suspicion, in 2017, suddenly fell on a couple who had never been really worried for three decades, Marcel Jacob, a paternal great-uncle of Grégory, and his wife Jacqueline. They were not suspected of having participated in the kidnapping.
Grégory would have been delivered to them by Bernard Laroche, a cousin of Jean-Marie Villemin, Grégory’s father, helped by his sister-in-law, Murielle who was 15 years old at the time. Still, between drowning, asphyxiation and insulin injection, we do not know today where, how or what Grégory died. Nor even the time of death, the experts having only been able to determine a range “going from 5 p.m. to 8:15 p.m.
40 years after the death of little Grégory, justice orders new expertise
The green car
Above all, we don’t know what happened. After forty years, we are left with hypotheses. The most likely being the following. It is October 16, 1984, a Tuesday.
Leaving the factory at 4:30 p.m., Christine, Grégory’s mother, goes to the nanny to pick up the child. Back home around 5 p.m., she lets him play outside and begins ironing while listening to “Les Grosses Têtes” on RTL. Which allows us to set the timing: it is 5:03 p.m.
The weather is nice. With the sun, Christine left the shutters closed while Grégory plays in front of the house, on a pile of sand.
The following results from testimonies which accredit the passage of a “green car” with a man – Bernard Laroche? – a young girl – Murielle, identifiable by her red hair -, and a child, Laroche’s disabled son.
Grégory Villemin affair: “We know who the murderer is but we can’t say anything,” reveals a former high-ranking gendarme
Very first time
Christine had never let Grégory play alone outside. Since it was the first time, those who removed it could not have known in advance. So it was not premeditated. Chance intervened. Grégory was outside, alone, vulnerable. And his mother, with the shutters down, wasn’t really watching.
It happened quickly.
Around 5:10 p.m., Christine, who had finished ironing the white, went out to call her son who was no longer there. She walks around the house then, her anxiety growing, runs to the neighbors upstairs and downstairs. Then, she takes the car and goes to the nanny’s house, imagining without believing that Grégory would have gone there alone. It is 5:23 p.m. Grégory has disappeared.
At 9:25 p.m., the tied up and submerged corpse was found in Vologne, 6.5 km from the home. There is testimony according to which the body floating in this location had already been seen around 5:30-35 p.m. by a passer-by who mistook it for a trash bag. Possible.
Several crows
What is certain, and more essential, is that while no one – apart from the assassin – was aware, the facts have already been claimed twice.
First, in an anonymous letter posted in Lépanges before 5:15 p.m. to 5:20 p.m., which Jean-Marie Villemin, the child’s father, will receive the next day: “My revenge is done. You can act proud now with your money and without your kid.”
Then, at 5:32 p.m., by a phone call to Michel Villemin, a brother of Jean-Marie: “I took revenge. I took the son of the “chief” (read: Jean-Marie) and I put it in Vologne”.
Nearly 40 years later, a new twist in the affair of little Grégory: one of the crows identified!
The Raven, as we will call him, then quickly hung up.
A Raven? More likely there were several of them. At least one man and one woman (who disguised her voice). During the three years preceding the crime, they wrote dozens of letters and telephoned the Villemins 800 times.
It was obvious that the main Raven and Gregory’s murderer were close or even one and the same. And that by looking for him, in particular the author of the letter posted before 5:15 p.m. which claimed responsibility for the crime which was known to no one, we would find the murderer.
We looked, obviously. In vain until 2017.
What happened, probable scenario
In 2017, it was also Artificial Intelligence and the AnaCrim software which would advance the case by concluding, in a 500-page report submitted on May 17 to the Dijon investigating judge, that Marcel and Jacqueline Jacob, grand- uncle and great-aunt of Grégory, “deserve special interest”.
Everything would have happened in two phases. Regarding the kidnapping: “We can affirm that Bernard Laroche is the author of the kidnapping of Grégory“,
Murielle having helped him without being aware of kidnapping and transporting the child. In reality, this is already what Murielle had declared at the start of the affair, on a Friday in November 1984. A Friday!
It would have been necessary to work on weekends, digging and concreting the declarations. But that weekend, Judge Lambert had planned to go hiking, and the weekend, at Lambert’s, was sacred. Everything was postponed until Monday.
And on Monday and Tuesday, Murielle, who had meanwhile returned to her family, recanted.
In the hypothesis, Laroche helped by Murielle would have delivered the child alive to Marcel and Jacqueline Jacob who were in a quarrel with the Villemins. A dark affair of jealousies and old resentments between the Villemin, Bolle, Laroche and Jacob families.
Definitely innocent
What happened next? Was Grégory conscious, asleep? Was he injected with insulin? Had he recognized one of his kidnappers? Did he die accidentally? Who called Jean-Marie’s brother at 5:32 p.m. to announce the child’s death?
We can elaborate endlessly, we will never be able to explain everything. The 500 pages of the report were given to the judge on May 17, 2017. Two months later, on July 11, Judge Lambert committed suicide. He had ruined the autopsy. He had not returned the weekend of Murielle’s declarations. And now this software, AnaCrim, was attacking him.
Little Grégory case: “We are reasonably optimistic about the possibility of a criminal trial in two or three years”
Where, when, how, what he died of and who killed him: we will never know. Except for this, this certainty: no offense to those who continue to believe her guilty, Christine, the mother, was innocent, definitively and entirely innocent.
Forty years later, what can we still expect from the Grégory affair? The indictments of Jacqueline and Marcel Jacob for kidnapping and sequestration followed by death were canceled for procedural defects.
Bernard Laroche, assassinated in 1985 by Jean-Marie Villemin, is no longer there to defend himself. And Murielle, who vehemently denies it, will never be considered anything other than innocent?
He would be 44 years old
Grégory would now be 44 years old. Christine, his mother, said that he “asked for love all the time. When he woke up, he would come into our bed and take our arms, one from each, and put them under his head.” The police and the courts had to get to the truth. Stuck from the start, they failed miserably.
