A former police officer suspected of being the serial killer behind some of France’s oldest unsolved cases has been found dead after 35 years of dodging arrest, just as police were closing in on his identity.
Francois Verove, 59, committed suicide at his home in the south of France after receiving a summons for questioning, leaving a “written statement,” prosecutors said.
DNA evidence confirmed his identity, they added.
The man — nicknamed “Le Grele,” French for “pockmarked” — had been wanted by police since the 1980s in connection with the killing and rape of young girls, but was never caught.
The list of crimes he allegedly committed in the 1980s and 90s includes rape of minors, murder, attempted murder, armed robbery and kidnapping of minors, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said in a statement late on Thursday.
“DNA tests which were immediately ordered by the investigating magistrate established a match between the genetic profile found at several crime scenes and that of the dead man,” she added.
In the most notorious case, he was suspected of raping and murdering an 11-year-old girl named Cecile who was found dead in the basement of the building where she lived in Paris.
Police believe that he grabbed her as she came out of the building’s lift on her way to school and dragged her into the basement.
He is also thought to have strangled a couple to death in the central Marais District of the capital in 1987.
Over the past few years, investigators came to believe that the suspect might have been part of the gendarmerie — police-like armed forces in charge of internal security — at the time of the crimes, and established a DNA profile of him.
In the past few months, an investigating magistrate had begun questioning about 750 members of the force who had been deployed in the Paris at the time.
One of them was Verove, who was sent a summons on Sept. 24 for questioning on Wednesday.
He was reported missing by his wife on Mondai and found dead two days later in Grau-du-Roi, a seaside resort on the Mediterranean coast, Beccuau said.
Local media reported that Verove mentioned “past impulses” in a letter he left behind, which he had since brought “under control,” and said he had committed no crimes after 1997. The murder confession contained no specifics, the reports said.
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