On the evening of December 12, 2000, at the gendarmerie in Draguignan, in the south of France, a sixty-six-year-old man named Émile Louis was questioned about seven young women who had vanished in the Yonne, in Burgundy, a quarter of a century earlier. The gendarme feigned that the disappearances were too old to prosecute and waved a paper showing that the time limit was ten years. Louis, persuaded he would walk out at the end of his custody, admitted killing all seven and burying them in a wood at Rouvray, north of Auxerre. Taken there, he pointed out seven places. Two days later he was charged with abduction and false imprisonment and jailed in Auxerre, and he retracted everything, saying he had talked nonsense because he believed the crimes were time-barred. On December 18 a body was found where he had indicated; DNA showed it was Jacqueline Weis, a girl in state care who had lived with his family as a foster child. On January 4, 2001, a second body was identified as Madeleine Dejust, one of his mistresses.
By one account he was born in Auxerre on January 26, 1934; another gives January 21. His mother abandoned him within days, and he was raised by a foster family in the public-assistance system, a mason and gravedigger and a cold, domineering foster mother; he learned only at fifteen that they were not his parents. As a teenager he was raped in a reform center in Saône-et-Loire. In 1952 he joined the Foreign Legion and served two years in the Indochina war, on the transports that brought back the dead and wounded, and came home with military medals. In 1954 he married and had four children. He worked at the military base at Varennes, was elected to the municipal council at Seignelay, and drove a school bus for the company Les Rapides de Bourgogne, which is how he met the young women who would disappear. He and his wife separated in 1978.
Between 1975 and 1979 seven young women with mild mental disabilities, girls of the state child welfare service, the DDASS, living in homes for the disabled around Auxerre, disappeared: Madeleine Dejust, twenty-one, in July 1977; Bernadette Lemoine, nineteen, in March 1978; Martine Renault, sixteen, in September 1979; Chantal Gras; Françoise Lemoine; Jacqueline Weis; and Christine Marlot, whose disappearance was not even reported at the time. They had no close relatives watching, and it was assumed they had run away. In 1981 Louis was convicted of indecent assault on minors in the care of the DDASS who had been placed with his partner, and that December he was charged with the murder of Sylviane Durand-Lesage, twenty-three, raised by his partner, whose body was found at Rouvray, where he went fishing. That case ended in a dismissal in February 1984. In March 1983 he was given five years for indecent assault on a girl under fifteen, cut to four on appeal, and he was released on March 29, 1984, and moved to the Var.
The gendarme on the Durand-Lesage case, Christian Jambert, himself a child of the DDASS, noticed the disappearances and sent the Auxerre prosecutor's office a report implicating Louis and local sadomasochistic procuring networks that exploited the girls. The dismissal in the Durand-Lesage case effectively closed the inquiry into the missing women too. Jambert kept at it. On August 4, 1997, forced into early retirement and long depressed, he was found dead with two bullet wounds in the head; an inquiry opened in 2004 on doubts about the suicide finding ended in a dismissal in 2011, when experts concluded his carbine, modified to fire in bursts, had fired both shots. In 1989 Pierre Charrier, founder and former director of the association that ran the home where the girls had lived, and a friend of Louis, was caught sexually assaulting a disabled woman of twenty-two and sentenced to six years. In November 1989 a court in Draguignan sentenced Louis to five years, one suspended, for violent indecent assault on the children of his neighbors at a campsite; he was released in April 1992 and married again that month.
In July 1996 an association for the defense of the disabled of the Yonne, founded by Pierre Monnoir and Jeannette Beaufumé, filed a complaint for abduction and false imprisonment. In February 1997 the Auxerre magistrates refused to reopen the case as time-barred. The families went to the television program Perdu de vue, whose host Jacques Pradel took up the story, and an administrative inquiry by the prosecutor general at the Paris appeal court, Jean-Louis Nadal, later confirmed that nearly all the Auxerre case files closed by dismissal between 1958 and 1982 had vanished from the courthouse. After his arrest Louis's second wife filed a complaint accusing him of drugging, raping and torturing her between 1992 and 1995 and of abusing her daughter. On March 26, 2004, the Var assize court sentenced him to twenty years for rape with torture and acts of barbarism on his wife and rape of his stepdaughter, raised on appeal in October 2005 to thirty.
On November 25, 2004, at seventy, he was convicted by the Yonne assize court of the rapes and murders of the seven disappeared and sentenced to life imprisonment with an eighteen-year minimum, and ordered to pay damages to the families, which the state's victim compensation commission paid in his place. The bodies of five of the seven have never been found. The Paris appeal court confirmed the sentence on June 27, 2006, and the Cour de cassation upheld it on September 13, 2007. His eldest daughter testified in 2005 that he had raped her and that as a child of about ten she had seen him kill a young woman in a wood at Saint-Florentin. Held at the central prison of Ensisheim, he was moved for neurological problems to a secure hospital unit in Nancy on October 14, 2013, and died there on October 20, at seventy-nine. No magistrate was ever sanctioned for the handling of the case.