SHARE
COPY LINK

CRIME

French police arrest relatives over 1984 toddler murder mystery

French police investigating the 1984 killing of a four-year-old boy named Gregory arrested three of his relatives Wednesday, raising hopes of a breakthrough in one of the country's most high-profile unsolved murder cases.

French police arrest relatives over 1984 toddler murder mystery
Photo: AFP
Gregory Villemin was found, his hands and feet tied, drowned in the cold waters of the Vologne river in eastern France in October 1984, sparking a long and convoluted legal saga that transfixed France for years.
   
The death of “Little Gregory”, as he became known, led to one of France's most notorious post-war murder mysteries, as police sought to untangle a web of family hatred and local jealousies.
   
On Wednesday morning, nearly 33 years after the murder, police arrested Marcel Jacob, an uncle of Gregory's father, and Jacob's wife in the Vosges mountains.
 
Ginette Villemin, half-sister to Gregory's father Jean-Marie Villemin, was also detained in the same region, police sources told AFP.
   
READ ALSO: 

The river where Gregory was found drowned in October 1984. Photo: AFP 

Gregory's grandparents were also questioned but were later released.
   
The arrests “target people very close to the heart of this case and aim to clarify certain points and to provide answers to questions we have,” local prosecutor Jean-Jacques Bosc said in a statement.
   
“This is a giant step on the path to the truth,” said Thierry Moser, the lawyer acting for the dead boy's parents.
   
The case was reopened in 2010 to take advantage of new DNA techniques.
 
'Revenge' letter
 
The day after Gregory's body was found, a letter arrived at the home of the child's parents claiming responsibility for the murder and calling it “revenge”. The couple had been receiving anonymous hate mail since 1981.
   
Investigators took that letter seriously because it seemed to have been posted before the body was found.
   
Handwriting experts identified Jacob — the uncle of Gregory's father who was among those held on Wednesday — as possibly being the writer of the letter.
   
Bernard Laroche, a cousin of the child's father, was charged with the murder a month after the boy's death, based on evidence given by a teenage sister-in-law.
   
He was released after she withdrew her claims, only to be shot dead in March 1985 by Gregory's father Jean-Marie Villemin who spent two and a half years in prison for the crime.
 
The dead boy's mother, Christine Villemin, was herself charged with the murder in 1985. But she was finally cleared eight years later and all charges against her were dropped.
   
The arrests on Wednesday were on charges of being an accomplice to murder, failing to denounce a crime and failing to help someone in danger, said local newspaper l'Est Republicain, which broke the story.
   
In the course of this latest probe into the case, investigators questioned around a hundred witnesses, some for the first time, prosecutor Bosc said in his statement.
   
They also analysed more than 2,000 anonymous letters received by those involved in the affair, including some to magistrates working on the case.
 

CRIME

Detectives return to French village to solve missing toddler mystery

Investigators cordoned off a tiny village in the French Alps on Thursday to solve the mystery of a missing toddler whose disappearance last summer gripped the nation.

Detectives return to French village to solve missing toddler mystery

Emile, two-and-a-half, was staying with his grandparents for the first day of the summer holidays when he disappeared on July 8th last year.

Two neighbours last saw him in the late afternoon walking alone on a street in Haut-Vernet, a small settlement of 25 inhabitants at an altitude of around 1,200 metres.

The little boy, barely 90 cm (35 inches) tall, was wearing a yellow T-shirt, white shorts and tiny hiking shoes, according to a call for witnesses at the time.

A massive on-the-ground search involving dozens of police and soldiers, sniffer dogs, a helicopter and drones failed to find him in July.

It was called off after several days following a prosecutor saying it was unlikely such a young child would have survived in the summer heat.

An initial probe into a missing person soon became a criminal investigation into a possible abduction. But the options of an accident or a fall remain open.

French investigators have summoned 17 people, including family members, neighbours and witnesses, to re-enact the events of the day he disappeared.

They are to focus on the last few minutes during which Emile was seen by neighbours, trying to untangle their contradictory accounts.

The family’s “only hope is that the child is still alive, even if this hope fades from day to day,” the grandfather’s lawyer said.

To ensure no outside interference in the investigation, police cordoned off the village from the outside world on Wednesday morning. It will remain so until Friday morning.

Flights over the village are also forbidden.

Early on Wednesday morning, around 15 journalists huddled in the cold rain at the barrier cutting off access to the village, kept at bay by two police cars.

Some 20 investigators are to guide the re-enactment of events, with some flying drones above to film it all.

The boy’s grandfather was questioned in a 1990s case into alleged violence and sexual aggression at a private Catholic school, it has emerged.

But a source close to the case said his possible involvement in the disappearance had always been examined to “the same degree” as other hypotheses.

Emile had just arrived in Haut-Vernet to stay with his mother’s parents in their holiday home for the summer when he went missing.

His parents, devout Catholics living in the southern town of La Bouilladisse, were not present on that day.

His mother is the oldest of 10 children.

Emile was her first child and she also has a younger daughter.

Investigators received some 900 calls from members of the public in the case, all of which have been dismissed as unrelated.

They have also sifted through endless mobile data and call logs in the hope of finding a clue.

In late November, a day before Emile would have turned three, his parents published a call for answers in a Christian weekly.

“Tell us where he is,” they wrote.

SHOW COMMENTS