Ginette Naime, a 42-year-old care worker, was found dead in April 2000 in Ollioules, in the Var. 25 years later, the murder suspect was found and confessed to the crime. A hope “that is priceless” is now reborn for the victim’s family.
“I didn’t believe it much, if at all, and I’m happy to have been wrong,” admits Me Bertrand Pin. The lawyer has been defending for 25 years the family of Ginette Naime, a forty-year-old who was brutally killed in the Toulouse region in 2000 and whose murderer has remained untraceable ever since. On Tuesday January 14, he learned that a suspect, a 61-year-old man, had been arrested as part of investigations into this “cold case”. The latter is then placed in pre-trial detention, indicted and ends up confessing in police custody.
“The fact that the accused admitted the facts is already a real relief for the family,” shared the lawyer on the set of BFMTV this Sunday, January 19.
“This hope of finally having answers to the questions they have been asking for 25 years, that is priceless,” he explained to our microphone.
25 years unknown
The body of Ginette Naime, 46, was found stabbed in Oullioules on April 13, 2000. Presumably, she would have been trapped in her car by a man earlier in the day.
At the beginning of the afternoon, an employee of the municipal social action center (CCAS) of La Seyne-sur-Mer, where the victim worked as a carer, heard a woman screaming. From his window, he saw this woman, on the front passenger side of a car, knocking on the window. The car then left.
A little later on the day of the events, it was in the Gros-Cerveau mountain range that hikers discovered the body of Ginette Naime. They also see a man covered in blood who flees and rushes into the same vehicle seen earlier: the victim’s car. Investigators were then never able to get their hands on the suspect.
Ginette Naime: a suspect confesses 25 years later – 01/19
-The Nanterre serial or unsolved crimes center, known as the “cold case center”, took up the case in the summer of 2022 and opened a preliminary investigation in May 2023 to restart the investigations. A decision which gave “a little bit of hope” to the family, according to their lawyer, “but we are obliged to remain measured towards our clients”.
In June 2024, this cluster launched a call for witnesses to “collect new testimonies (…) from the general public to advance the investigations”, then indicated the public prosecutor of Nanterre in a press release.
It was finally by presenting several portraits of suspects to the CCAS employee that he managed to identify the person he thought he had seen in 2000. It was a 61-year-old former drug addict already known to the police services. police. He was arrested on Tuesday in Toulon: it was his DNA which was found under the victim’s nails and on the steering wheel of his car.
A family that also “plunges” back into “pain”
News that shook Ginette Naime’s family. Their lawyer Bertand Pin evokes a “mixture of feelings” when he was able to speak for the first time to the children and the husband of the deceased who had been notified of the progress of the case by the Toulon public prosecutor’s office: “You have first a feeling of amazement, the family doesn’t believe it” accompanied by “also the joy of saying maybe we’re finally going to have someone, put a face: it’s no longer Mr.
Bertrand Pin explains, however, that the family’s feelings have evolved since his announcements and that they are currently “in the backlash: it plunges the members of Ms. Naime’s family back into this pain. We never forget it but we put it under little aside and then we say to ourselves that we are going to have to go back because now we have to face the legal process.”
Concerning the investigations carried out after the murder, “it is too early to imagine whether there were failings or whether there were no failings. It is the new instruction which will make it possible to say so”, according to the lawyer. He believes that the victim’s relatives “are not, currently, in this state of mind. It is more relief than the feeling of waste” which predominates.
Now, Ginette Naime’s family will focus on trying to “obtain answers” from investigators. Bertrand Pin has received confirmation from the judicial authorities that the facts are not prescribed and that the investigation will therefore be able to continue its course, with a potential trial at stake.
