Couple charged with murder of French boy 33 years ago

HOPES were raised yesterday that one of France’s highest-profile murder cases of modern times could be solved after the great aunt and uncle of a fouryear-old boy killed almost 33 years ago were charged with his kidnapping.

Gregory Villemin was found, his hands and feet bound, drowned in the Vologne river in the Vosges mountains of eastern France in October 1984, in a case that appalled the nation.

The murder investigation, in which family jealousy in a small village is often cited as the most likely motive, has since been through many twists, but without any convictions.

The case burst back into the headlines when Jacqueline Jacob, 72, and her 71-year-old husband, Marcel, were arrested on Wednesday.

The couple were charged with kidnapping and an additional charge of confinement when they appeared in court in the eastern city of Dijon yesterday. They both denied involvement and have been remanded in custody.

Their arrests resulted from new analysis techniques of anonymous letters and voice calls, which led detectives to conclude that the authors were “a man and a woman”, said Jeanjacques Bosc, the Dijon prosecutor.

Progress, he said, had also been made thanks to artificial intelligence in a programme called Analyst’s Notebook, or ANB, which places all the suspects “in time and space” and unearths inconsistencies and potentially incriminating evidence. It requires specially trained criminal analysts to run it.

The data reportedly includes 2,000 anonymous letters over three decades.

Stéphane Giuranna, Mr Jacob’s lawyer, said there was “no scientific proof ” that his client was involved.