Life imprisonment was requested Thursday in Grenoble against Ludovic Bertin, tried for having strangled and drowned the young Victorine Dartois in 2020.
The 29-year-old accused, who admits to the murder, did not kill the student on “a whim”, but according to a “carefully calculated scenario”, “acting in a predatory mode”, launched the attorney general by requesting that the sentence be accompanied by a security period of 25 years.
Ludovic Bertin was looking for a “prey to rape” and “it was because he wanted and started to rape her that he killed Victorine Dartois”, a “killing which he finished by drowning her alive”, a she clarified.
Victorine Dartois, 18, was just starting a BTS in communications when she disappeared on September 26, 2020 while walking back to her family home in Villefontaine, about thirty km southeast of Lyon, after an afternoon of shopping with friends. His body was found in a stream choked with branches less than 48 hours later, his jeans abandoned nearby. The autopsy established that she had been strangled and drowned.
-Ludovic Bertin, manager of a transport company aged 25 at the time, was arrested in Villefontaine twenty days later, thanks to the report of his best friend in whom he had confided and who had tried in vain to convince him to denounce himself.
In police custody, the accused claimed to have encountered the victim while jogging then, after an involuntary shove and an argument, to have “panicked” and “squeezed the neck” of the student before hiding her body. But he denied any attempted rape.
Despite inconsistencies in his story, he did not deviate from this line before the Isère Assize Court, without convincing his victim’s family.
