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| Four years after the murder of Victorine Dartois, an 18-year-old student found dead in a stream in Isère, the trial of one of her neighbors opens Monday, November 25 in Grenoble. |
| Photo : AFP/VNA/CVN |
Ludovic Bertin, 29, faces life imprisonment in this case, which caused great emotion throughout France.
The debates begin Monday afternoon, November 25 before the Isère Assize Court with the hearing of a first personality witness. They are expected to extend until December 6.
Victorine Dartois, an 18-year-old BTS student, 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 creek less than 48 hours later, his pants removed. The autopsy established that she had been strangled and drowned.
Ludovic Bertin, a business manager aged 25 at the time, was arrested in Villefontaine twenty days later thanks to the report of a relative in whom he confided.
From stampede to murderous panic
This father of a young child had already been convicted ten times for common law offenses but without going to prison thanks to reduced sentences.
In police custody, he admitted the murder of the young woman but denied any attempted rape, claiming to have encountered the victim while jogging then, after an involuntary shove and an argument, to have “panicked” and “squeezed his neck ” from the student before hiding her body.
His defense should not vary during the trial even if he is “ready to say things” and intends to address the victim's family from the start, declared his lawyer, Maître Arnaud Adelise, on BFM in early November.
On the day of the events, his client had “used cocaine“, he argued. As for the sexual motive, it is “denied by the analyzes” of the young girl's body, he said.
Tried for murder preceded by an attempted rape of Victorine Dartois, Ludovic Bertin will also be tried for the violent rape of another young woman in September 2018 in the Rhône, when she was twenty years old.
AFP/VNA/CVN
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