The suicide of a serial killer clarifies the crimes of 35 years ago “Diario La Capital de Mar del Plata

French justice has clarified a series of murders and rapes that had not been elucidated for up to 35 years after the suicide earlier this week of a former gendarme to whom DNA and a confession written before committing suicide ended up betraying.

“It seems incredible”, was the reaction on Friday of Didier Seban, lawyer for the families of three victims of François Vérove, on whom now weigh more than serious suspicions that he could be involved in four murders and six rapes between 1986 and 1994 in the Paris region.

From the outset, the prosecution explained in a press release that in several investigations his genetic fingerprint matches that found at crime scenes.

Vérove, who was 59 years old and lived in the south of France, received a summons for questioning on September 24 last Wednesday.

The investigators favored the index that the author of five crimes could have been a gendarme at the time of the facts, they had managed to identify a DNA that they were trying to name and decided to track 750 potential suspects.

But Vérove did not show up. On Monday, his wife said she had not heard from him and on Wednesday they found him dead in Grau-du-Roi, near Montpellier. He had committed suicide and left a letter confessing his crimes.

“We are going to ask Justice to continue the investigation to find out if it could have accomplices and determine the number of victims it could have caused,” he said in an interview with France Info Seban radio station. who insisted that “families must have answers”.

Before being identified, investigators nicknamed him “the hackneyed one”, in reference to the face pricked by acne scars that some of his victims had seen and which appeared in the portrait of the robot which has been hung for years. in many police stations across the country.

François Vérove had been a motorcycle gendarme in the Republican Guard between 1983 and 1988 and subsequently became a police officer, also in a motorcycle brigade in Marseille and then in Montpellier. He had been a member of a police union but had already retired several years ago.

In recent years, he had been involved in the municipal management of the city of Prades-le-Lez, near Montpellier, where he had been elected municipal councilor.

According to extracts disclosed by the press, in the letter he left when he committed suicide, he claims to have abandoned his criminal activity “since 1997”, which raises doubts since the last act attributed to him dates from 1994.

In fact, he recounts this turning point in his life when he met his wife, with whom he had two children, to whom he addressed his letter.