French Court Sentences Émile Louis to Life Over Seven Young Women Who Vanished in the Yonne
Louis drove several of the women, most of them in state care, to a day center in Auxerre. Inquiries into their disappearances were shelved for years and files went missing.
Published
For a quarter of a century, the disappearances of seven young women in the Yonne went unpunished. On November 25, 2004, the bus driver who had taken several of them to a day center was sentenced to life in prison.
The Yonne assize court sentenced Émile Louis, a retired coach driver, to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 18 years. He had been tried for the abduction, confinement and premeditated murder of six young women and the murder of a seventh. Martine Renault, Françoise and Bernadette Lemoine, Christine Marlot, Jacqueline Weiss, Chantal Gras and Madeleine Dejust, aged 15 to 26, disappeared between 1975 and 1979. Many had learning difficulties and lived in care, and all knew Louis, who drove them from their hostels to a day center in Auxerre.
The disappearances were often recorded as runaways, and the inquiries were shelved or mishandled for years. A local gendarme, Christian Jambert, reported his suspicions about Louis to Auxerre prosecutors in 1984, but his report was set aside and later lost. Jambert was found dead in 1997; his death, first ruled a suicide, was reinvestigated in 2004 after new evidence emerged. Pressed by the victims' families, the courts opened a full inquiry in the late 1990s.
Louis was taken into custody in December 2000 and confessed to killing seven young women, leading police to two bodies that DNA tests identified as Madeleine Dejust and Jacqueline Weiss. In January 2001 he retracted, and he later claimed the women had been abused and killed by a ring of local men and that he was only the driver. In March 2004 he had been sentenced to 20 years in a separate case of rape with torture and acts of barbarity. A Paris appeals court confirmed his life sentence in 2006, and he died in 2013 at the age of 79.
Le Nouvel Observateur dated the appeal court's confirmation of the life sentence to June 2006, while Le Parisien said November 2006.
Sources
- Une chronologie de l'affaire des disparues de l'Yonne, Le Nouvel Observateur
- Murder trial likely to reveal cover-ups, The Guardian (Jon Henley)
- Le tueur en série Émile Louis est mort, Le Parisien (with AFP)