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DNA Links Le Grêlé, Hunted Since 1986, to a Retired Gendarme Found Dead After a Summons

Paris prosecutors said François Vérove's DNA matched several crime scenes. He killed himself before he could be questioned, leaving a letter.

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Illustration: bound newspaper volumes in a library archive

For thirty-five years, the Paris criminal brigade hunted a man it knew only from a police sketch: about 25, six feet tall, light-brown hair, the visible scars of acne on his face. They called him Le Grêlé, the pockmarked man. In May 1986 he was suspected of raping and murdering 11-year-old Cécile Bloch, found dead in the basement of her building in the 19th arrondissement. In April 1987 he was believed to have strangled Gilles Politi, 38, and Irmgard Müller, 20, in the Marais. A list of rapes followed. DNA had been taken from the crime scenes. It had never matched anyone.

On the evening of Thursday, September 30, 2021, it did. The Paris prosecutor, Laure Beccuau, announced that DNA tests "established a match between the genetic profile found at several crime scenes and that of the dead man." The dead man was François Vérove, 59, a former gendarme who had later become a police officer and then retired.

Investigators had long suspected the attacker might have been a gendarme at the time of the crimes. In recent months an investigating magistrate had begun summoning some 750 gendarmes who had served in the Paris region in those years. Vérove, who lived in the south of France, was sent a summons on September 24 to be questioned on September 29. On September 27 his wife reported him missing. Two days later he was found dead in a rented flat in Le Grau-du-Roi, a resort on the Mediterranean coast. He had taken his own life.

He left a letter. According to Le Parisien, he wrote that he felt hunted by the police, that he had not been well in himself at the time of the crimes before taking himself in hand, and that he had done nothing since 1997. He admitted to murders but named no victims and described no circumstances.

"It is painful to know that the criminal took his secrets with him," said Didier Seban, the lawyer for Cécile Bloch's family, who thanked the police for their work.

Vérove was never questioned, charged or tried. What links him to the crimes is the DNA match the prosecutor announced and the letter he left; no court ever ruled on his guilt.

What the record does and does not say. The prosecutor listed the crimes attributed to Le Grêlé as including the rape of minors, murder, attempted murder, armed robbery and the kidnapping of minors in the 1980s and 1990s. Reports at the time differed on the total: Le Parisien listed three murders in Paris and six rapes between 1986 and 1994, and also reported him as the suspect in the 1994 killing of Karine Leroy, 19, in Meaux, a link that was not confirmed in the prosecutor's statement. Irmgard Müller's age is given here as Le Parisien reported it; some English-language reports gave a different age.

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