Life imprisonment was requested Thursday in Grenoble against Ludovic B., tried for having strangled and drowned young Victorine Dartois in 2020, after trying to rape her, a murder which caused a lot of emotion in the region.
The 29-year-old accused, who admits 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 mode of predator,” launched the attorney general, asking that the sentence be accompanied by a safety period of 25 years. Ludovic B. was looking for a “prey to rape” and “it is because he wanted and began to rape her that Ludovic B. killed Victorine Dartois”, a “killing which he ends by drowning her alive” , 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 B., 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.
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