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Yvan Keller Dies in a Mulhouse Court Cell Hours After Confessing to Killing Elderly Women in Alsace

Keller, 46, told police he smothered elderly women living alone during night burglaries. Deaths once recorded as natural were now treated as murders.

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Illustration of a guard walking down a vaulted stone corridor toward a closed door in an old French courthouse basement. Not an actual scene from the case.

For years, elderly women in Alsace had been found dead at home, and their deaths were treated as natural. On September 22, 2006, Yvan Keller confessed to killing several of them, then died by suicide hours later.

Keller, 46, a repeat offender, was arrested in a police operation against a series of burglaries in which 17 people were detained. A co-suspect implicated him in killings committed during break-ins over the previous decade. Keller then told police he had picked out elderly people, mainly women living alone, entered their homes at night and smothered them before stealing from them, leaving nothing disturbed. On Friday, September 22, he repeated his admissions before investigating judge Matthieu Bonduelle. That afternoon, while waiting in a holding cell beneath the Mulhouse courthouse to appear before another judge, he took his own life.

Mulhouse prosecutor Régis Delorme said five of the confessed killings had been described precisely enough to be identified: three elderly women in the village of Burnhaupt-le-Haut between January and April 1994, and two in the Bas-Rhin department in 2000 or 2001. Investigators suspected Keller of about 30 killings in Alsace, Switzerland and Germany since his release from prison in August 1989, though he had retracted his confessions. Delorme said Keller had given police details that made his account credible and that it would be premature to dismiss him as a fantasist.

A judicial inquiry into involuntary homicide through negligence was opened over the death, aimed at the guarding of the court cells. Keller was never tried.

Le Parisien reported that Keller admitted eight killings before the judge, while La Dépêche du Midi reported that he confessed to killing about 30 elderly women.

Sources