Boy’s killer hunted 34 years later
The unsolved murder of a toddler has haunted France for more than 30 years. As new investigations aim at last to identify who killed four-year-old Grégory Villemin, Mark Edmonds looks at the twists of a vendetta that’s appalled and riveted people for deca
IT WAS the last time Grégory Villemin would pose for a school photograph. There he is, in the autumn of 1984: a bright, handsome four-year-old, looking straight into the camera and smiling. Le Petit Grégory (“Little Grégory”) – that’s how he’s still known more than 30 years on because, sadly, he never had the chance to grow up. Within a month of this photo being taken, he was dead – almost certainly murdered by a member of his extended family.
The circumstances of his death have never been properly explained, more than 30 years after his near-frozen body was found floating in the Vologne River in a desolate part of the Vosges region in eastern France.
The case, perhaps more than any unsolved murder in modern France, has both fascinated and appalled the public. It’s inspired books, films, a sixpart TV drama and thousands of newspaper articles. There’s also a Netflix documentary series in the works.
Despite all the investigations no one’s ever been convicted. Three people, all relatives of Grégory, are currently under scrutiny for their part in his kidnapping.
The case took a further twist last year with the shocking suicide of the original judge assigned to investigate the case. In a letter to a French newspaper, magistrate Jean-Michel Lambert suggested the new evidence thrown up by the case would totally discredit his own findings.
“I decided to kill myself because I know I won’t have the strength to fight now in the last test that awaits me,” he wrote.
The flurry of legal manoeuvres and Lambert’s death prompted renewed interest in the case. Journalists headed off to Dijon en masse, but they were disappointed when the new lines of inquiry that had promised so much appeared to come to nothing.
Soon after Grégory’s death his parents, Christine and Jean-Marie, left the Vosges region for good. Although they had three more children, who are now adults, they never forgot their first little boy.
Christine no longer gives interviews but her long- time lawyer, Marie-Christine Chastant-Morand, met me at her chambers in Paris. “They were two honest young people who found themselves in the middle of a terrible judicial spiral,” she said. “They need to finally know what happened. For them, for their children and for Grégory.”
Long before Grégory’s abduction all hadn’t been well in Lépanges-sur-Vologne, the small village where the family lived. It’s a remote and insular place with little to offer; work is badly paid and hard to come by.
Two main clans, the Villemins and the Laroches, dominate, with the men in the families competing for unskilled jobs at factories and textile firms. Christine Villemin herself worked long hours as a seamstress. The Laroches generally have been seen as the poorer branch of a poor family.
Jean-Marie Villemin married Christine Blaise in 1979. She was an outsider, an interloper, from a town 60km to the
north. Jean-Marie was at the centre of the Villemin clan. The young couple were considered to be ambitious, hardworking and upwardly mobile, at least by the sleepy standards of Lépanges.
Jean-Marie had been promoted to foreman in a factory making car parts, and within a few months of their marriage they were able to move into the house they’d built on the slopes above the village.
Jean-Marie, sporty, good-looking and charismatic, had always been known within the family as “le chef” – the chief. Inevitably, this wasn’t appreciated by all those within the clan.
In villages like Lépanges, any success – even on the modest scale Jean-Marie was enjoying – will always stoke resentment. It didn’t take long for that bitterness to declare itself.
The first indication that someone in the village had taken against the couple came in 1981, when they began to receive anonymous phone calls. A rasping, muffled voice identifiable neither as male nor female would make threats and reveal intimate details of their home life.
Then letters began to arrive. In rural France there’s a long tradition of poisonpen letters: someone who sends them is known as “le corbeau” – the crow or raven.
The Lépanges corbeau clearly had an intimate knowledge of what was going on in the lives of those in the village. In one letter to Jean-Marie’s parents the corbeau asked his dad to leave his Jean-Marie “out in the cold . . . It’s the chief ’s turn to be treated like a bastard.”
Over time the phone calls and letters became more threatening. But still neither police nor private detectives were able to identify the corbeau.
In 1982, Jean-Marie received a chilling phone call at work, made in that familiar rasping voice. This time the corbeau was specific: “I’ll stick a bullet between your shoulders. Then again, maybe I won’t. I’ll get your kid instead. Don’t leave him outside. You’ll find him below.”
This could only mean the river at the valley floor. After that, the phone calls stopped.
CHRISTINE last saw her little boy alive on the Tuesday afternoon of 16 October 1984. She’d picked him up from a friend’s house after school. They returned home in her Renault, and he went to play at the front of the house.
The radio played loudly as Christine did the ironing. As usual, the shutters were down – the couple always felt the corbeau was watching them. About 5.30pm she went out to check on Grégory, but he wasn’t there.
The next few hours became a blur for Christine and Jean-Marie. They looked everywhere, contacting everyone they knew, but there was no trace of their son. As they searched, Jean-Marie’s brother, Michel, took a call at his home in Aumontzey, 10km away. It was the corbeau’s mocking voice at the end of the line: “I’ve taken the chief ’s son and put him in the Vologne.”
The corbeau proved to be as good as his word. About 9pm, a fireman fished Grégory’s body out of the river in Docelles, about 6km downstream from the family home. His hands and feet had been bound with a thin cord; his woollen hat pulled over his face. The fireman who lifted him out of the river was crying.
The autopsy revealed no marks on the child’s body that might have been consistent with a struggle. He was probably alive when he was thrown into the river. His death was caused not by drowning
but by sudden exposure to the cold.
He was a good boy, and perhaps he’d gone on that last journey obligingly. Christine had heard nothing at the house. All the evidence pointed to the probability that he knew the person or people who abducted him.
The police noticed footprints and tyre tracks close to where Grégory had been found. One pair of footprints probably belonged to a man; another set had been made by a pair of ladies’ high heels. It was later revealed a syringe and an empty insulin phial had been found near the riverbank – it’s thought the insulin was used as a sedative.
The day after Grégory’s body was pulled from the Vologne his father received another letter from the corbeau. “I hope you die of grief, chief,” it read. “Your money won’t bring your son back. This is my revenge, you bastard.”
Grégory’s funeral was a shambolic affair, riven with emotion. Six hundred mourners and about 200 journalists turned up. The police investigation was in full swing but many lines of inquiry were ignored and vital forensic evidence was compromised. The officers were locals and rather incompetent. And JeanMichel Lambert, the naive and inexperienced young judge, wasn’t much better.
In France the examining magistrate has the most significant role in any murder inquiry. They direct the police operation and interview witnesses before a trial. As the investigation unfolded, it became clear Lambert wasn’t up to the job: he made basic procedural errors, was indiscreet with witnesses and the press, and revelled in the media attention.
He made his greatest mistake, however, about a month after the murder when a suspect emerged – and he let him slip away. Bernard Laroche, a cousin of Jean-Marie, was arrested and charged in November 1984: handwriting experts linked him to two of the letters and there appeared to be a motive.
Bernard had always resented Jean-Marie’s success and was jealous of his family. Grégory was clever, charming and poised. Bernard’s own son, Sébastien, had been born with learning difficulties.
Most damningly, Bernard’s 15-year-old sister-in-law, Murielle Bolle, told police he’d picked her up from school in his car and driven to the Villemins’ home to pick up Grégory. She claimed they’d driven to a location nearby and she’d stayed in the car as Bernard had walked off with the boy. He’d returned unaccompanied.
Bernard was arrested but Murielle retracted her statement days later. She said she’d felt intimidated by police and alleged she’d been threatened by family members including her sister (and Bernard’s wife), Marie-Ange.
It was this retraction that allowed Bernard to be released three months later, with Lambert’s permission. The police continued their inquiries but Bernard never came to trial. On 29 March 1985, Grégory’s father drove to his house with a hunting rifle and fired a single bullet into Bernard, killing him. He’d finally avenged the death of his son.
But with no trial it couldn’t be proved whether Bernard had acted alone or been part of a wider conspiracy.
Jean-Marie was convicted of Bernard’s murder but served only four years in prison. Murielle, arrested in June last year, is now the central figure in the new inquiry. Her whereabouts on the evening Grégory was killed are crucial to the investigation. Was she with Bernard in the car? Had they kidnapped the boy?
Soon after Bernard’s murder the police began to focus on Christine Villemin. They were unconvinced by her account of the afternoon of Grégory’s abduction. Why were the shutters closed? Why had she let Grégory play unattended? Was she the corbeau?
Various pieces of evidence seemed to incriminate her, including cord found at her home that matched the ligature used to restrain Grégory. There were also suggestions she may have been having an affair with Bernard, but neither the police nor the examining magistrate who eventually replaced the incompetent Lambert could find any evidence of a motive. Why would a mother want to kill the son she adored?
She was charged with Grégory’s murder in July 1985, but was eventually cleared in February 1993. She’d spent nearly eight years under judicial supervision: not only had she lost her son, she’d lost her reputation and a large chunk of her life.
IN THE three decades since Grégory’s death Lépanges has become poorer still. Work is even more scarce and people have moved away: only about 900 now live in the village. Its church can no longer sustain regular Sunday mass, but its single remaining bar is always open on the mornings when the church is closed.
Christine and Jean-Marie moved long ago to Evry, a town to the south of Paris, yet the village is still home to many members of the clan. Grégory’s remains have been moved from the cemetery – his tomb attracted too much attention.
Christine’s lawyer, Marie-Christine, told me that at his mother’s request Grégory’s body had been cremated and his ashes returned to the family. His granite tomb is still at Lépanges, now unmarked but unmistakeable.
Bernard Laroche, the person most likely to have killed him, is buried nearby at Jussarupt. His grave is marked by an inscription that describes him as an “innocent victim of blind hatred”. It’s always decorated with fresh flowers – a sign the clan will neither forgive nor forget.
It’s difficult in Lépanges for anyone to speak openly – even now the shadow of the corbeau looms large. The fear still seems to be there. I met one man, now in his fifties, who went to the same school as Murielle Bolle, the alleged accomplice. He was happy to talk but wouldn’t be photographed or named.
“From what I remember, Murielle didn’t seem to be very bright. But she wasn’t retarded,” he said. “She didn’t seem to be a bad person. She was really no different to so many of the people in the village.”
He says residents felt insulted by how they’d been portrayed in the media.
“We were made out to be inbred idiots, stupid. We haven’t really had a chance to say anything publicly, for fear of implicating ourselves. The story in some quarters has become hysterical and our only option has been silence. It wasn’t the case that we wouldn’t talk – we just couldn’t.”
We drive up to Aumontzey, where Jean- Marie’s mother and father still live. Monique, the matriarch of the clan, has been accused of writing anonymous threatening letters to the judge who took over the case after Lambert’s dismissal. She was questioned by the inquiry last year and released, but her role in the affair has never been fully explained.
Her husband, Albert, saw us from an upstairs window and came to the door. I introduced myself and without a word he slammed the door shut again. In Lépanges nobody really wants to talk.
Grégory’s great aunt and uncle, Marcel and Jacqueline Jacob, were arrested along with Murielle in June last year and brought in for questioning by the new judge.
The proceedings, at the court of appeal in Dijon were held in camera but it’s understood new evidence has emerged linking them to the kidnap of Grégory.
Although it appears the authorities are generally satisfied that Bernard was the principal architect of the murder, they’re not convinced he was the corbeau.
The suggestion is that he was working as part of a team from the Laroche branch of the family, which may have included two or three other people, possibly more, among them Murielle, Marcel and Jacqueline.
In November, Jacqueline returned to the court of appeal in Dijon. Her lawyer claimed she had a cast-iron alibi for the night of the murder, and he persuaded the judge to lift her judicial supervision order.
She’s now been allowed to return to her home, and in December her husband, Marcel, followed her.
In April, Murielle was also allowed to return to her home after her lawyers had exploited a legal technicality. Witnesses say she was spotted with Bernard in his car on the night of the murder after taking a school bus to meet him.
She also had ready access to insulin, which her mother used for diabetes. The three are still under suspicion.
Meanwhile another corbeau has been busy: Jean-Jacques Bosc, the prosecutorgeneral overseeing the case in Dijon, has received an anonymous death threat.
But with the new evidence the authorities are optimistic that justice will finally be done. The prosecutor-general says a murder trial may yet take place once the examining magistrate has finished his work.
For Grégory’s immediate family, after 33 years, closure is at last a possibility.