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‘Le Grêlé’: Retired French cop’s DNA, suicide lead to his identity as serial killer after 35 years

PARIS — The sudden suicide of a retired French policeman and subsequent tests of his DNA have confirmed that he was the notorious “le Grêlé,” a serial killer and rapist responsible for at least four murders and six rapes in Paris in the 1980s and 1990s.

François Vérove, 59, of La Grande-Motte, was due to be questioned in the unsolved case the day he died, according to French authorities. His body was found Wednesday in a rental property in the resort of Le Grau-du-Roi, located about 485 miles from Paris on France’s Mediterranean coast.

Didier Seban, a lawyer representing the families of Vérove’s alleged victims, told the BBC that Vérove left a note suggesting he was the person behind the string of violent crimes, which included the 1986 rape and murder of 11-year-old Cécile Bloch.

“I admit being a great criminal who committed unforgivable acts until the end of the 1990s,” the note read, according to le Parisien.

Prior to last week, Cécile Bloch’s brutal killing was one of France’s oldest unsolved cases.

The Paris schoolgirl was reported missing after her parents realized she’d failed to show up for class the morning of May 5, 1986. She was found raped and stabbed to death under a piece of carpet in the basement of her family’s apartment building, located on Rue Petit in Paris’ 19th arrondissement, or district.

Neither Suzanne nor Jean-Pierre Bloch would live to see their daughter’s killer identified.

Cécile’s killer was responsible for the 1987 double homicide of Gilles Politi, 38, and his 20-year-old German au pair, Irmgard Müller, as well as the 1994 killing of Karine Leroy, 19, who, like Cécile, vanished on her way to school.

French newspaper La Depeche reported that in the Politi-Müller murders, the victims were found naked, bound and gagged and had been burned with cigarettes. One witness told police that Müller, the au pair, had dated a man with pockmarked skin.

The killer’s DNA profile additionally linked him to several rapes, including that of an 8-year-old girl sexually assaulted less than a month before Cécile’s murder.

The girl, identified only as Sarah, told investigators the man had identified himself as a police officer.

In three of the other rape cases, which involved a 26-year-old woman and two young girls ages 11 and 14, the rapist did the same.

“We had this conviction that he was either an officer or a gendarme (a French paramilitary officer), both from the violence he used against his victims and the tactics he adopted,” Seban told France public television.

Vérove reportedly wrote in his note that he’d gotten his “past impulses” under control and that he had committed no crimes after 1997.

Seban was skeptical.

“We won’t ever know all the crimes “Le Grêlé” committed,” the lawyer told the BBC.

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