A police sketch of the "pockmarked killer". Photo / PhotoPQR / Le Parisien
A police sketch of the "pockmarked killer". Photo / PhotoPQR / Le Parisien
A 35-year hunt for a serial killer behind some of France's oldest unsolved cases has come to an end after a former police officer left a suicide note confessing to be "the pockmarked killer".
Francois Verove, 59, took his own life at his rented home in the south of France after receiving a summons for questioning, leaving a "written statement" and DNA evidence confirming his identity, the Paris prosecutor and sources said.
His body was found in the southern town of Grau-du-Roi near Montpellier on Wednesday.
He faced accusations of the rape of minors, murder, attempted murder, armed robbery and kidnapping of minors, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said in a statement late on Thursday.
"DNA tests which were immediately ordered by the investigating magistrate established a match between the genetic profile found at several crime scenes and that of the dead man," she added.
According to local media, Verove mentioned "past impulses" in a letter he left behind, which he had since brought "under control", and said he had committed no crimes after 1997. The murder confession contained no specifics, they said.
France has long been appalled by the killer dubbed "Le Grele", which translates as the pockmarked killer, accused of four murders and six rapes since 1986.
The alleged crimes include the murder of a child, 11-year-old Cecile Bloch, in Paris.
Cecile Bloch, who was raped and murdered in 1986 at age 11. Photo / Supplied
She was reported missing by her mother when she failed to return home for lunch on May 5, 1986. After a search, her partially naked body was found under an old carpet in a cellar and evidence suggested she had been raped.
That year, police published a police sketch based on witness statements that showed a man of around 25 years old, six feet tall with light-brown hair, and with visible traces of acne on his face.
He is also thought to have strangled a couple to death in the central Marais district of the capital in 1987.
Other suspected murder victims were Gilles Politi, 38, a 20-year-old German woman, Irmgard Müller, and Karine Leroy, who was 19.
Killer 'took his secrets with him'
Over the years, investigators became increasingly convinced the suspect was a gendarme at the time of the crimes, and established a DNA profile of him.
The fact that he had placed one victim in a special garrot that tightens if you struggle suggested he had military training, said one expert.
In recent months, an investigating magistrate had begun questioning around 750 gendarmes who had been deployed in the Paris region at the time.
One of them was Verove, who was sent a summons on September 24 for questioning on September 29.
But he was reported missing by his wife on September 27 and found dead two days later in Grau-du-Roi, a seaside resort on the Mediterranean coast, the Paris prosecutor said.
He was a former gendarme, who later became a police officer and then retired, she confirmed.
A lawyer for Cecile's family, Didier Seban, thanked police for their work but also told AFP that it was "painful to know that the criminal took his secrets with him".
