An announcement eagerly awaited by the victim's relatives, after several days of a grueling trial. Life imprisonment was requested Thursday before the Isère Assize Court, in Grenoble, against Ludovic Bertin, tried for having strangled and drowned the young Victorine Dartois in 2020, after trying to rape her . At the time, the young woman's death triggered a wave of emotion in the region.
The 29-year-old accused, who admits to the murder but not the attempted rape, did not kill the student on a “whim”, but according to a “carefully calculated scenario”, “acting in a predatory manner », Launched the attorney general, asking that the sentence be accompanied by a safety period of 25 years, as part of this trial which opened on November 25.
Ludovic Bertin was looking for a “prey to rape” and “it was because he wanted and started to rape her that Monsieur Bertin killed Victorine Dartois”, a “killing which he finished by drowning her alive”, a she clarified.
Inconsistencies in the accused's account
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 father 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 the victim's family, who experienced their first face-to-face with him. She, for her part, expressed her immense pain, calling on the accused to “tell the truth” about the murder.
During the trial, a case within the case was also mentioned: a complaint for rape against Ludovic Bertin filed by another woman with the same first name, Victorine Carmona, a case in which he was also referred to the Assize Court. The young woman had decided to launch legal proceedings for these facts which, according to her, date back to 2018, after recognizing her attacker during the media coverage of the murder of Victorine Dartois.
