Grégory affair: Villemin, Laroche, Bolle… 40 years later, what has become of the main protagonists?

This is one of the great French detective mysteries. Forty years after the discovery, on October 16, 1984, of the body of Grégory Villemin, aged 4, in the Vologne valley, in the heart of the Vosges, this never-resolved case is still under investigation.

Last March, a request for additional expertise relaunched for the umpteenth time this cold case, considered one of the most spectacular legal and media disasters of the past century. The case also depicts an oppressive family story surrounded by numerous areas of mystery, several of its members having been suspected in turn of the murder of little Grégory. TF1info looks back on the current lives of the main protagonists in this affair.

Jean-Marie and Christine Villemin, parents of Grégory

The Villemin couple moved to the Paris region after the release of Jean-Marie, imprisoned after the assassination of his cousin Bernard Laroche, whom he believed to be Grégory’s murderer. They have not appeared in the media since a television appearance in 1994.

“They have other children, adults, teachers and with children,” one of their lawyers, François Saint-Pierre, told AFP. “They have worked, led their lives, but are extremely concerned about their anonymity.” Husband and wife “reconstructed” far from the Vosges and are “happy parents and grandparents”, specifies Laurent Beccaria, boss of the publishing house Les Arènes. “They are a normal family.”

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Christine Villemin, 64, still works in Paris. At the start of the case, she had been designated as possible “crow” by graphologists. She was indicted and briefly imprisoned in the summer of 1985, before being exonerated.

Jean-Marie Villemin, 66, is retired. In 1984, he was a foreman in the factory of an automobile subcontractor. At his trial in 1993, he presented himself as a laboratory technician. Upon his release from prison, his company agreed to employ him on another site, in the Paris suburbs, where the couple moved into an HLM, with, for all furniture, a mattress on the floor. Jean-Marie Villemin has just written the preface to a graphic novel, “Grégory” (Les Arènes), which evokes the affair through the prism of his trial in 1993. He tells how the couple “suffered from media coverage” of this “tragedy”.

Marie-Ange, wife of Bernard Laroche

“Marie-Ange Laroche is doing very badly. Since March 29, 1985, the date of the assassination of Bernard Laroche, she has never been able to mourn, since at regular intervals, there is a reopening (of the investigation ) supposedly decisive and who points the finger at her husband as the possible culprit”, his lawyer, Gérard Welzer, told AFP.

Aged 67, she still lives in the Vologne valley, where she worked in a public establishment. Marie-Ange Laroche declared in 2017 that her life was “damaged” after being “dragged through the mud, destroyed, soiled”. She has four children, including two from Bernard Laroche.

Murielle Bolle, little sister of Marie-Ange Laroche

Murielle Bolle played a central role in this affair, initially recounting having been at Bernard Laroche’s side during Grégory’s kidnapping, before retracting. Since then, she has continued to proclaim her brother-in-law’s innocence. According to a cousin, she recanted at the time of the events after having suffered a family lynching. Which she continues to deny.

She was indicted in 2017 for “kidnapping followed by death” and imprisoned for 38 days. But this indictment was invalidated for procedural defects the following year. Aged 55, she still lives in the Vosges. She had three boys and is a grandmother. She published “Breaking the Silence” in 2018, to tell her story.

Judge Jean-Michel Lambert

Nicknamed “the little judge”, Jean-Michel Lambert was 32 years old when he became the first magistrate responsible for investigating the case. he was the only investigating judge in Épinal, and it was his first position. Accused of botching the investigation, he committed suicide on July 11, 2017, at age 65. He wrote 11 books, including one called “How many injustices am I guilty of?”, in which he discussed “the complexity of the work of justice”.

Gendarmerie Captain Etienne Sesmat

The first investigator to intervene in the case, Captain Etienne Sesmat left the gendarmerie in 2006 “to be released” of its duty of reserve. The same year he published a book, “The two Grégory affairs”, republished in an expanded version to mark the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the affair. After 12 years as safety director of the Marseille Transport Authority, he retired in 2018.

At 70, he is currently a municipal councilor, in particular in charge of security, in Collioure (Pyrénées-Orientales), and regularly gives conferences on the Grégory affair.