On the morning of May 5, 1986, an eleven-year-old girl named Cécile Bloch left her family's flat at 116 rue Petit, in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, to go to school. She never got there. That afternoon the building's caretaker found her body in a basement room. Witnesses, among them her half-brother, remembered a tall young man with acne-scarred skin who had been in the building that morning. The police sketch made from their descriptions gave the case its name. Investigators and then the press called the unknown man "le Grêlé," the pockmarked one.
For thirty-five years the Paris criminal brigade looked for him. DNA tied the Bloch case to a double murder in the Marais in 1987 and to a string of rapes of girls and young women, but the profile matched no one on file. In the spring of 2021 an investigating judge, Nathalie Turquey, ordered DNA samples from some 750 former gendarmes who had served in the Paris region in the 1980s. One of them, a retired police officer living near Montpellier named François Vérove, was told on September 24, 2021, to come in on September 29. On September 27 his wife reported him missing. On September 29 he was found dead in a rented flat in Le Grau-du-Roi, on the Mediterranean coast, beside a letter. Within a day, the Paris prosecutor announced that his DNA matched the profile found at several crime scenes.
Vérove was never questioned, charged or tried. What connects him to these crimes is the DNA match the prosecutor announced, the letter in which he confessed in general terms to serious crimes, and, for a later-examined 1990 case, ballistic and handwriting reports. No court has ruled on any of it.
According to a March 2026 account in L'Essentiel de l'Éco, François Vérove was born on January 22, 1962, in Gravelines, a port town in the Nord. His father, a merchant seaman, was often away. His mother died after a long illness in September 1972, when he was ten, and that account says he was then raised by his maternal grandparents. (Other published accounts of his childhood differ; see the notes on disputed points below.)
He did his military service as an auxiliary gendarme in 1982 and joined the gendarmerie in February 1983. In August 1983 he was posted to the Garde républicaine in Paris, the gendarmerie unit that provides ceremonial and security duties in the capital, where, according to Anadolu Agency, he served as a motorcyclist until 1988. He married in June 1985. When the crimes attributed to le Grêlé began in 1986, he was a 24-year-old gendarme stationed in Paris.
In 1988 he left the gendarmerie and joined the national police. Anadolu Agency reported that he served in motorcycle units in the Bouches-du-Rhône and in Montpellier. Former colleagues interviewed by Objectif Gard remembered him as a brigadier-chef in Port-Saint-Louis-du-Rhône, near Arles. USA Today reported that he had at some point served in a unit protecting the presidential palace and in a unit investigating paedophilia, though it did not give dates.
Cécile Bloch lived with her parents in the building on rue Petit. Her mother was Suzanne Bloch; her half-brother, Luc Richard, was older and lived with the family. On May 5, 1986, shortly after her parents had left, she took the lift to go down to school, according to the account CNEWS published after Vérove was identified.
A man followed her into the lift. Several people had noticed a man hanging about in the entrance hall that morning. Luc Richard later said he had seen the man in the lift: tall, about 25 to 30, with skin marked by acne scars. "His behavior surprised me because he was too polite, obsequious even," he told the online outlet Les Jours, as quoted by CNEWS. In a 2015 interview with Sud Ouest, quoted by the BBC and by Cox Media Group, he said the man "seemed very sure of himself." Investigators later concluded that the attacker spent close to an hour between the lift and the basement, and passed Cécile's parents in the building without drawing their attention.
When Cécile did not answer the telephone, her mother called the school and learned she had never arrived. Her parents hurried home and searched for hours. At around 3 p.m., the caretaker found her under a piece of carpet in a technical room on the third basement level. The forensic examination established that she had been sexually assaulted, strangled and stabbed.
Luc Richard's description was used for the composite sketch: a man of about 25, around six feet tall, with light-brown hair and visible acne scars. For years, the BBC's Spanish-language service reported, that sketch hung at the headquarters of the Paris criminal brigade.
Investigators did not know at first that the man had already attacked at least once. L'Essentiel de l'Éco reports that on April 7, 1986, an eight-year-old girl, identified in the French press as Sarah A., was raped and left for dead in an underground car park in the 13th arrondissement. Oxygen, citing La Dépêche, reported that DNA from the Bloch scene was later connected to the rape of an eight-year-old girl in 1986. That summer, the same account says, another eight-year-old girl, identified as Marlène K., was attacked in the stairwell of her building, also in the 13th arrondissement.
The pattern that investigators would come to recognize emerged from these cases: a man who waited in the entrances of apartment buildings, presented himself as someone with authority, and in some cases showed a card identifying him as a gendarme or police officer.
On April 29, 1987, Gilles Politi, 38, and Irmgard Müller, 20, were killed in Politi's flat in the Marais, in central Paris. Politi worked for Air France. Müller was a young German woman who worked for the family as an au pair; the BBC described her as Politi's nanny. Cox Media Group, citing La Dépêche, reported that both had been bound and gagged and burned with cigarettes before they were strangled. The age of Irmgard Müller is given as 20 by most outlets; Oxygen gave 21.
Investigators collected a cigarette butt and a tampon from the scene. Both were preserved. At the time they yielded a blood group, A positive. Fourteen years later they would yield something more useful.
The press accounts published after 2021 describe several more assaults in 1987. L'Essentiel de l'Éco lists attacks on a 26-year-old German student, a 34-year-old teacher and a 14-year-old girl, and an April 1, 1987, incident in which a man posing as a police officer took a 13-year-old boy aside at a teenage party and raped the boy's 11-year-old girlfriend. Oxygen, citing La Dépêche, reported that in the 1987 rape of a teenage girl the attacker posed as a police officer, and that DNA from the Bloch case was later connected to it. The BBC's Spanish-language service listed rapes of a 26-year-old German woman and two girls aged 11 and 14 in which the attacker claimed to be a police officer.
The survivors' accounts gave investigators the most important clue of all. According to The Connexion, investigators took note of the attacker's methods, his use of police handcuffs and his command of police vocabulary. The criminal brigade concluded early that it was looking for someone who knew how law enforcement worked from the inside.
Karine Leroy was nineteen, a high school student who lived in the Beauval estate in Meaux, east of Paris. On June 9, 1994, she left for school and disappeared. Her twin sister, Nathalie, watched her go, according to L'Essentiel de l'Éco. Her body was found 33 days later in a wood at Montceaux-lès-Meaux. That account says a ligature made from a strap and electrical wire was found with her, and compares it with the method used in the Marais in 1987.
Her murder has long been attributed to le Grêlé. When Vérove was identified, Le Parisien, as relayed by AFP, reported that he was also a suspect in her killing. That link was not part of the prosecutor's statement on the DNA match, and none of the sources consulted for this page report that DNA tied Vérove to her death. It is treated here as a suspicion.
The Objectif Gard editorial of March 2024 also refers to the kidnapping and rape of a child in Seine-et-Marne in 1994, after which, it says, the attacker's trace was lost. Wikipedia's article on the case, used only as a lead, identifies this survivor as an eleven-year-old girl from Mitry-Mory; that detail was not confirmed in a source fetched for this page.
The case was closed in 1992 without an arrest, according to Cox Media Group, and reopened in 1996 by a new judge, who ordered testing of the biological evidence. Objectif Gard reports that by 1996 investigators had a genetic profile of the attacker.
In 2001, according to L'Essentiel de l'Éco, advances in forensic genetics allowed a full DNA profile to be extracted from the cigarette butt and the tampon recovered in the Marais in 1987. The profile linked several crime scenes. A trace on a tissue from a 1994 case was added later. The scenes were now connected to one man. The man remained unknown, because his profile matched no one in France's national DNA database.
Eight investigating judges handled the file in succession, that account says. For thirteen years after 2001, the investigation produced no name. Didier Seban, the lawyer for the Bloch family, later said the families and their lawyers had long had "this conviction that he was either an officer or a gendarme," as he told France Info television, quoted by Cox Media Group and Oxygen. The leads that pointed to an insider were known. What was missing was a way to test them.
In December 2014, Nathalie Turquey, an investigating judge (juge d'instruction) in Paris, took over the file, the ninth magistrate to do so, according to L'Essentiel de l'Éco. The Connexion described her as the magistrate who reopened the investigation and focused it on gendarmes who had worked in the Paris area at the time. In 2024 Les Jours described her as the judge "who unmasked le Grêlé in Paris in 2021."
Turquey is a magistrate, not a police investigator. Under the French system, an investigating judge directs a serious criminal investigation and gives the police their instructions, through orders known as letters rogatory. The detectives who did the work on the ground were from the Paris criminal brigade.
According to L'Essentiel de l'Éco, Turquey rebuilt the file and concentrated on the military lead: the attacker had used a law enforcement card and had claimed to be a gendarme. The gendarmerie is part of France's armed forces, and the 1980s staffing records of units such as the Garde républicaine could be searched.
In the months before September 2021, Turquey summoned about 750 gendarmes who had served in the Paris region at the time of the crimes, either to appear before her or to be questioned by police acting on her orders. L'Essentiel de l'Éco dates the order to May 2021 and says the scale of the exercise was without precedent in France and caused unrest within the security forces. The Paris prosecutor's later statement confirmed the figure: "the investigating magistrate summoned for questioning, or on letters rogatory, about 750 gendarmes," as reported by Objectif Gard. The Connexion gave the number as about 800.
The aim was to compare each man's DNA with the profile from the crime scenes. According to Le Point, as relayed by PureBreak, Vérove was among those asked to give a sample. Objectif Gard reported that he was due to give it at the judicial police offices in Montpellier.
The prosecutor's statement set out the dates. Vérove, 59, who lived in the south of France, was summoned on September 24, 2021, to appear on September 29. On Monday, September 27, his wife reported him missing. Le Parisien reported, as cited by Anadolu Agency and PureBreak, that he had emptied his bank accounts in the days before and had rented a holiday flat through Airbnb in Le Grau-du-Roi, a resort town next to La Grande-Motte, where he lived with his family.
On September 29, the day he was due to appear, he was found dead in that flat. AP, as cited by Cox Media Group, reported that he died of a drug overdose; AFP's source described a suicide. L'Essentiel de l'Éco reports that Judge Turquey travelled to the Hérault herself once suspicion focused on him.
Vérove left a letter, addressed to his wife and family. Its full text has not been published, and French authorities did not confirm its contents when the press first reported them, as Al Jazeera noted. What is known about it comes from Le Parisien, from RTL, and from the lawyers who had access to the file.
According to Le Parisien, quoted by Cox Media Group, he wrote: "I admit being a great criminal who committed unforgivable acts until the end of the 1990s." He wrote of past "impulses" which, he said, he had since brought under control. He said he had not been well in himself at the time and had since taken himself in hand and had himself treated, according to PureBreak's account of the Le Parisien report. He said he had done nothing since 1997. RTL, as quoted by Objectif Gard, reported a line from the letter: "Il me fallait détruire, salir, tuer" ("I had to destroy, defile, kill"). L'Essentiel de l'Éco reports that he wrote that by killing innocent people he had unconsciously been trying to destroy the suffering of his own childhood.
He named no victims. He described no crime. AFP reported that the confession contained no specifics. Didier Seban told AFP it was "painful to know that the criminal took his secrets with him." He told the BBC: "We won't ever know all the crimes Le Grêlé committed."
The date of 1997 in the letter has its own weight. The last crime the press attributes to le Grêlé dates from 1994. If the letter is accurate, Seban and later investigators noted, there may be crimes between 1994 and 1997 that no one has connected to him.
DNA was taken from Vérove's body and compared that night. On the evening of Thursday, September 30, 2021, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau issued a statement. The DNA comparison, "immediately ordered by the investigating magistrate," had "established a match between the genetic profile found at several crime scenes and that of the dead man," she said, as reported by AFP and Anadolu Agency.
Her statement described a judicial investigation covering five crimes committed between 1986 and 1994, on charges of rape of minors under 15, murder, attempted murder, armed robbery, use of a false identity, and kidnapping and unlawful detention of a minor under 15, as reported by Objectif Gard and PureBreak. It said the evidence had pointed the criminal brigade toward an unidentified suspect who may have been a gendarme at the time, and had allowed investigators to isolate a DNA profile likely to belong to the perpetrator.
Press tallies of the crimes linked to him varied from the start. Cox Media Group, Al Jazeera and USA Today reported four murders and six rapes. Oxygen wrote that DNA linked the attacker to six rapes and two murder cases. The BBC's Spanish-language service reported that his DNA matched samples from crime scenes between 1986 and 1994. The difference between the prosecutor's five crimes and the press figure of ten is not explained in the sources consulted. The cases most consistently described as linked by DNA are the murder of Cécile Bloch, the double murder of Gilles Politi and Irmgard Müller, and several of the rapes.
The investigators' long-held theory had been right. The man in the sketch had been a serving gendarme in Paris throughout the first years of the crimes and had then spent more than two decades as a police officer.
His colleagues in the south, interviewed by Objectif Gard in 2022, described a strict officer who "let nothing slide, especially during traffic checks," and who was quick to anger. One recalled that Vérove smashed a car's dashboard after an argument about issuing more tickets. Another said he was "completely transformed" when he put on his uniform and took up his weapon. A tattoo on his hand read "Mort aux vaches," an old slang insult for the police, which one colleague found odd in a police officer. The colleagues said he refused to talk about his past; one learned only after his death that he had been a gendarme. They also described a family man and a grandfather. He had two children, according to Al Jazeera.
He retired from the police; Anadolu Agency gives 2011, after a leg injury, and The Connexion gives 2013. He served on the municipal council of Prades-le-Lez, a town of about 5,000 people north of Montpellier, and later moved to La Grande-Motte. Jean-Marc Lussert, a former mayor of Prades-le-Lez, told France 3 that the news was "very destabilizing," as quoted by Cox Media Group.
On May 13, 2019, he appeared on the France 2 game show "Tout le monde veut prendre sa place," hosted by Nagui, introduced as a retired police officer from La Grande-Motte. He was eliminated in the first round. Nobody noticed any resemblance to the 1986 sketch. The appearance was first mentioned by the journalist Patricia Tourancheau in her 2022 book on the case and became widely known in March 2024, when the magazine Marianne found the footage, Europe 1 and L'Essentiel de l'Éco report. Asked about it on France Inter, Nagui said: "It's not every day that you come across a serial killer, even if you don't know it," as quoted by Paris Match Belgique.
According to Tourancheau's book, as reported by Europe 1, his wife told investigators that she had known nothing of what the book calls her husband's double identity.
The families of Cécile Bloch and Karine Leroy, and a rape survivor whose case is attributed to le Grêlé, were represented by Didier Seban, The Connexion reported. His reaction combined relief and frustration. "It seems incredible," he said. "The investigators, the justice system and the families have been looking for so long." He spoke of "a kind of satisfaction" alongside bitterness, telling franceinfo, as quoted by Anadolu Agency, that "not to know is to imagine that one can meet him again at any time." He thanked the police for their work.
Seban also asked that investigators look for possible accomplices and other victims, and that unsolved cases in the Bouches-du-Rhône, where Vérove had served as a police officer, be reviewed. He pointed out that DNA analysis was not in use when the first crimes were committed and that Vérove, as a police officer, would have known about it, which raised the question of crimes that left no DNA, The Connexion reported. The BBC's Spanish-language service reported that Seban believed Vérove had tried hard to avoid leaving genetic traces.
Cécile Bloch's family had kept the case before the public for years. Her half-brother, the witness whose description produced the sketch, gave interviews long before the case was solved, including to Sud Ouest in 2015. The Objectif Gard editorial in 2024 argued that the case remained an injustice because Vérove could never be tried, and wrote of the families who were still trying to grieve. In 2026, Florence Rault, a lawyer for the civil parties, welcomed the opening of a full review of Vérove's life in Nanterre but said she was surprised it had not come much sooner, according to L'Essentiel de l'Éco.
In 2022 France created a national unit for serial and unsolved crimes, based at the court in Nanterre. Judge Turquey moved to that unit. According to Les Jours in August 2024, she was leading two other 1987 cases there and examining a hypothesis that pointed to Vérove.
In November 2024 the Nanterre unit took up the 1990 murder of Gilbert Gaudry, 43, Brut (AFP) and L'Essentiel de l'Éco report. Gaudry was found on June 5, 1990, tied to a tree in a wood at Saint-Aubin, in the Essonne, south of Paris. He had been shot. His chequebook had been taken, and cheques in his name were used after his death, Le Tribunal du Net reported. The case had never been solved. In January 2025 the Nanterre prosecutor's office confirmed that it was examining "various acts attributable to François Vérove," Objectif Gard reported, citing Paris Match.
A pistol that had belonged to Vérove was examined. According to the AFP report carried by Brut, the Nanterre prosecutor's office said a ballistic report found the weapon "compatible" with the bullet recovered from the victim, but stressed that this "does not mean that the bullet was fired from le Grêlé's gun." A direct comparison was impossible, because the bullet that killed Gaudry had been destroyed. A handwriting report concluded that Vérove "would be the author" of the forgeries on the stolen cheques, the prosecutor's office said, confirming a report in Le Parisien. L'Essentiel de l'Éco dates the handwriting report to January 2026 and says final confirmation was still pending.
On January 12, 2026, according to L'Essentiel de l'Éco, the Nanterre prosecutor's office opened a "parcours criminel" procedure, a review of an offender's whole life matched against unsolved cases, for Vérove. It was the fifteenth such review handled in Nanterre; others have concerned Michel Fourniret, Francis Heaulme and Nordahl Lelandais.
Les Jours reported in August 2024 that Judge Turquey had re-interviewed, or had police re-interview, the family of Virginie Delmas and several witnesses. Virginie, ten, was abducted on May 9, 1987, in Neuilly-sur-Marne (Seine-Saint-Denis). Her body was found on October 9, 1987, in an orchard at Mareuil-lès-Meaux. Perrine Vigneron, seven, was abducted on June 3, 1987, in Bouleurs (Seine-et-Marne), and found three weeks later in a field at Chelles. From the 2000s investigators had connected the two cases with each other. Whether either is connected to Vérove is a question the investigation was examining, not a finding. No source consulted reports DNA or other physical evidence linking him to them.
No court has found François Vérove guilty of anything. He died before he could be questioned, and French law does not allow a trial of a dead person. The record is made of four kinds of material, and they should be kept apart.
Linked by DNA: the Paris prosecutor announced on September 30, 2021, that his genetic profile matched the profile found at several crime scenes from 1986 to 1994. The cases reported as part of that match include the murder of Cécile Bloch, the murders of Gilles Politi and Irmgard Müller, and several rapes of girls and women.
Confessed in a letter: he confessed in a letter to being "a great criminal" who had committed "unforgivable acts" until the late 1990s. The letter named no victims and described no crimes. It cannot by itself attach him to any particular case.
Examined by experts: for the 1990 murder of Gilbert Gaudry, a ballistic report found his pistol compatible with the bullet but could not compare them directly, and a handwriting report concluded he was probably the author of the forged cheques. These are expert findings in an investigation, not a judgment.
Suspected: the 1994 murder of Karine Leroy has long been attributed to le Grêlé, and he was named as a suspect when he was identified, but the sources consulted do not report a DNA link to him. The 1987 murders of Virginie Delmas and Perrine Vigneron were being examined as possible cases. Other suggestions in the press, including a 1991 murder in Paris raised by a criminologist, rest on hypotheses rather than evidence.
The letter's claim that he committed no crimes after 1997 cannot be checked. Its implication that some crimes before then remain unknown is the reason the Nanterre review was opened.
As of the AFP report carried by Brut, dated September 14, 2026, the Nanterre prosecutor's office was treating the lead that Vérove killed Gilbert Gaudry as confirmed by the handwriting analysis, while stating that the ballistic result showed only compatibility. The "parcours criminel" review opened in January 2026 was continuing, as of L'Essentiel de l'Éco's report of March 18, 2026. Because Vérove is dead, no charge can be brought; the work aims at establishing his full record and identifying any other victims.
Patricia Tourancheau published a book on the case, "Le Grêlé: le tueur était un flic" (Seuil, 2022). In September 2024, France 2 broadcast "Insoupçonnable," a series directed by Élie Wajeman, in which the forensic psychiatrist Daniel Zagury and investigators including Bernard Pasqualini, a former group chief at the criminal brigade, revisited the case. Pasqualini acknowledged that "cases may have slipped through their fingers," according to L'Essentiel de l'Éco.
January 22, 1962: François Vérove born in Gravelines (Nord).
1982-1983: Military service as an auxiliary gendarme; joins the gendarmerie (February 1983) and the Garde républicaine in Paris (August 1983).
April 7, 1986: An eight-year-old girl is raped and left for dead in the 13th arrondissement (later attributed to le Grêlé).
May 5, 1986: Cécile Bloch, 11, is killed in the basement of her building on rue Petit, 19th arrondissement.
April 29, 1987: Gilles Politi, 38, and Irmgard Müller, 20, are killed in the Marais.
1987: Further rapes of girls and women in Paris attributed to the same man, some by a man posing as a police officer.
1988: Vérove leaves the gendarmerie and joins the national police.
June 5, 1990: Gilbert Gaudry, 43, found shot and tied to a tree at Saint-Aubin (Essonne).
1992: The le Grêlé investigation is closed without an arrest (Cox Media Group).
June 9, 1994: Karine Leroy, 19, disappears in Meaux; her body is found 33 days later.
1996: A new judge reopens the case; a genetic profile is established.
2001: A full DNA profile from the 1987 Marais evidence links several crime scenes.
December 2014: Judge Nathalie Turquey takes over the file.
May 13, 2019: Vérove appears on France 2's "Tout le monde veut prendre sa place."
2021 (from about May): About 750 former gendarmes who served in the Paris region are summoned for questioning and DNA samples.
September 24, 2021: Vérove is summoned to appear on September 29.
September 27, 2021: His wife reports him missing.
September 29, 2021: He is found dead in a rented flat in Le Grau-du-Roi, with a letter.
September 30, 2021: Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau announces the DNA match.
March 2024: Marianne publishes the 2019 game show footage.
August 2024: Les Jours reports that Turquey, now in the Nanterre unit, is examining the 1987 Delmas and Vigneron cases.
November 2024: The Nanterre unit takes up the Gaudry murder.
January 12, 2026: Nanterre opens a "parcours criminel" review of Vérove's life (L'Essentiel de l'Éco).
As of the September 14, 2026, Brut (AFP) page: handwriting report attributes the forged Gaudry cheques to Vérove; ballistics "compatible" only.