Nicknamed Le Grêlé, or 'the pockmarked man', a French serial killer evaded police for decades. In his suicide note, he finally confessed.
On a spit of land jutting out into the Mediterranean, just east of Montpellier, lies La Grande-Motte, a purpose-built holiday resort dating back to the 1970s. It was here in 2019 that François Vérove, a retired gendarme and devoted grandfather, settled with his wife, Isabelle, buying a house in an upmarket district and doing it up.
Friendly and popular with his neighbours, Vérove, who sported a neat beard, was often in pain following a road accident in 2011. He sometimes walked with a stick, but this had not prevented him from serving as a local councillor for a couple of years in a nearby village or from playing with his young grandchildren, whom he used to take to the beach in a cart he towed behind his electric bike.
On Monday, September 27, Vérove, 59, set off from home on the bike, telling his wife he had chores to do. He did not come back that evening, which worried her. By Wednesday she was desperate and called their daughter, a police officer in her early thirties. Using the geolocation system in his phone, the pair tracked Vérove down to a one-storey house 8km along the coast that he had apparently rented on Airbnb. Seeing his bike outside, they called the fire brigade, who broke in and found his lifeless body stretched out on the floor. Beside him was a bottle of alcohol and an empty packet of the painkillers he had been taking since his accident.
This was no ordinary suicide, however: in a note addressed to his stunned wife, the former gendarme confessed to having been a "great criminal who committed unpardonable acts", adding "I have hurt people, I have killed innocent people". He gave no details of his crimes and claimed to have acted under the influence of "impulses" as a result of a difficult childhood. Marriage and the birth of their two children had changed him, he said, and as a result he had "done nothing since 1997". Beside it was a second note that simply read: "Do not resuscitate."
For all his outwardly respectable retirement, the net had been closing in on Vérove — and he knew it. Three days before his disappearance he had received a call from the police in Montpellier asking him to come in and answer questions relating to a case in Paris from the 1980s, a time when he had been based in the city. The appointment, set for the following Wednesday, would include taking a sample of his DNA.
The police were to get their sample anyway — from his corpse. It confirmed their suspicions: Vérove was none other than Le Grêlé — the pockmarked one — one of France's most notorious and elusive serial killers, believed to have been responsible for at least four murders and six rapes, mostly of young girls, between 1986 and 1994.
When French media descended en masse on La Grande-Motte they found Vérove's neighbours in a state of shock, unable to believe this mild-mannered grandfather and pillar of the community could have been capable of such evil. No one was more stunned than Jean-Marc Lussert, the former mayor of the village of Prades-le-Lez, who had helped secure Vérove a seat on the local council.
"It was incredible, unthinkable," Lussert tells me over a glass of pastis in a café in the village. "I would never have associated him with violence of any sort."
For the police, this is not the end of the investigation: since the discovery of Vérove's body they have been poring over every detail of his life to try to understand how, despite one of the longest police operations in recent French history, he managed to hide in plain sight for 35 years. Most intriguing was the date he gave for his last crime, which implied he had been active for three more years than they had previously thought. Which other victims, they want to establish, could he have raped and murdered between 1994 and 1997?
Vérove is believed to have killed for the first time on May 5, 1986. At eight o'clock on that Monday morning, Jean-Pierre Bloch and his wife, Suzanne, both social security inspectors, left their flat on the third floor at 116 rue Petit in northeast Paris. Twenty or so minutes later they were followed out of the building by Luc Richard-Bloch, 24, Suzanne's son from her first marriage. The couple's daughter, Cécile, 11, stayed behind, waiting until 8.45 before she set off to walk the half a mile to her school in the rue du Noyer-Durand.
Cécile used to return to the flat to eat lunch on her own, but when her mother made her usual call to check she was all right, she was surprised that her daughter did not answer the phone. Her surprise turned to alarm when she called the school and was told Cécile had not been in that day. Suzanne Bloch and her husband rushed home but found no trace of their daughter. Her schoolbag was also missing. They retraced her walk to school, but none of the shopkeepers along her route remembered having seen her. Could she instead be somewhere in their block of flats?
Without waiting for the police, the concierge began to search the building, starting at the top. An hour later, when he reached the lowest of three basements, used to store odds and ends, he came across the girl's lifeless body covered by a piece of old carpet, one hand poking out. Her face was covered with sand and grit from the floor. The autopsy revealed she had been raped, stabbed in the chest and strangled.
One of the first officers called to the scene was Bernard Pasqualini, a group leader in the Brigade criminelle based at 36 Quai des Orfèvres — France's answer to Scotland Yard. Pasqualini spoke to the Blochs and searched their flat but found nothing untoward. "The Blochs were a family without problems and they lived in a building without problems," he tells me.
There was only one faint clue to the murderer: Luc Richard-Bloch described having seen a stranger in the lift as he was leaving the building that morning. When they parted, the man had wished him a "very, very good day", which seemed overly effusive for someone he had never met before. His mother and stepfather also remembered seeing the stranger, as did half a dozen other residents of 116 rue Petit.
The police drew up an identikit picture of a man aged 25-30. Particular attention was paid to what appeared to be acne covering his jaws, which all of those who saw him had commented on. A journalist at France-Soir newspaper immediately nicknamed him Le Grêlé and it stuck.
Pasqualini, now retired and living in the south of France, says it will never be known why, of all the girls in Paris, it was Cécile who fell victim to Vérove. Had the killer been staking out the building or did he merely seize the opportunity when he saw her come down from the flat on her own? "There are so many questions to which unfortunately we will never get an answer," he says. "We were stunned when we learnt his identity. It completely threw us."
Cécile was the first person Vérove had killed, but it was not the first time he had struck. A month earlier, on April 7, 1986, an eight-year-old named Sarah described having been attacked by a man claiming to be a police officer, who had approached her in the staircase of her block of flats in southeast Paris. He had forced her into the basement, where he had raped and strangled her, leaving her for dead. Somehow she survived.
When Cécile Bloch's body was found, such were the similarities between the two attacks that police believed they had been carried out by the same man. Then in October the following year the rapist struck again, not far from the assault on Sarah. Another girl, Marianne, 14, was surprised in her block of flats by a man claiming to be a police officer involved in a drug operation. He then demanded she let him into the empty family home for an identity check, tied her up at gunpoint, raped her and left her for dead. The description she gave of her assailant matched that used to draw up the identikit picture of Le Grêlé, and this time police found traces of the assailant's semen and blood, and even a cigarette end. Yet they still didn't crack the case.
"This was 1987," says Jean-Louis Huesca, a former inspector in the Brigade criminelle. "CCTV was still virtually non-existent; DNA [testing] too."
The case went cold and Le Grêlé seemed to lie low. It wasn't until 1994 that he resurfaced, this time in Seine-et-Marne, east of Paris. On June 29 an 11-year-old girl called Ingrid was out cycling on a country road when she was stopped by a man who identified himself as a police officer. He handcuffed her and ordered her into his car — a white Volvo that she described in some detail — and drove her to a farm in Saclay, about 65km away on the other side of Paris, where he first chained her to a radiator and showed her pornographic cartoons, then made her lie down on an old bed and raped her. Later, when he went out to get food, she made her escape and flagged down a passing driving instructor, who took her to a police station. Two years later, thanks to advances in DNA technology, it was possible to show that Ingrid had fallen victim to the same man who had attacked Sarah and Marianne and killed Cécile.
In the meantime Le Grêlé had again gone quiet, this time apparently for good. Many of those involved with the case came to believe he had been jailed for another offence. Or had maybe even died, perhaps at his own hand. The investigation stalled again.
Then in 2001 came another breakthrough — again thanks to DNA, which was beginning to prove a vital tool in solving crimes, especially cold cases such as this one. The same man, it seemed, had been responsible for a very different, and especially horrible, double murder in 1987: on April 29 that year police had been called to a flat in the Marais in central Paris, where they found the bodies of Gilles Politi, 38, an engineer for Air France, and Irmgard Müller, 20, the family's au pair. The young woman had been tied to her bed as if she had been crucified; Politi was found in another room strangled to death on a bed, with his hands and feet bound. Both had been tortured with a lit cigarette and a knife.
Among Müller's possessions police found a notebook in which she had rated the sexual performance of 30 lovers, together with their addresses. Police worked their way through the list, checking alibis, until there was just one left: Elie Lauringe, whose name she had added the previous December. Müller had apparently not been impressed by him.
It quickly became clear that Lauringe was not his real name and the address he had provided was a flat in southeast Paris that had been abandoned and squatted. Curiously, back in the 1970s, it had belonged to the police. In reality Vérove was living just 200 yards from the scene of the double murder in the gendarmerie's Napoleon barracks.
By this time the identikit picture that had been drawn after Cécile Bloch's murder had been hanging for years in almost every police station in France, and survivors of his attacks had repeatedly described how their assailant had claimed to be a policeman. Yet investigators did not appear to have suspected him of being a genuine one. The search for suspects instead concentrated on former offenders and down-and-outs.
By contrast Luc-Richard Bloch says there was something about the demeanour of the man he met in the lift that had always made him think he had been a policeman or a soldier — a suspicion he had shared with detectives. "They did not take it very well at the beginning," he later told a French television documentary. "It seems they were really in denial. It took them a long time to realise and accept that it might have been a policeman or a soldier or a gendarme."
At the time of the murders Vérove was indeed a gendarme. After growing up near Lille in northern France, in 1983 he moved with his new bride, Isabelle, to Paris to join the gendarmerie — a branch of the French armed forces that comes under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Interior and is separate from the national police force. He became a member of the Garde républicaine, a prestigious section of the service that guards important public buildings such as the Elysée Palace. Although passionate about motorbikes from an early age, he joined the cavalry rather than the motorcycle division, which escorts the president and other dignitaries around Paris.
His career got off to a bad start. Questions were raised within the gendarmerie about his "morality", former colleagues recently told Le Parisien. There were "concerns" about an incident in the Bois de Boulogne, a public park in Paris notorious for its prostitutes. In response he was demoted from the cavalry to the infantry. These were the years in which he appears to have carried out most of his attacks.
Then in 1988 Vérove left the gendarmerie to join the police, eventually moving into its motorcycle division. In the same year his daughter was born and a son followed three years later — a period that coincided with the first pause. Had fatherhood changed him? If so, the change was insufficient, because in June 1994 came the attack on Ingrid.
A few months after the abduction and rape Vérove was experiencing serious psychological problems, according to Denis Jacob, a former colleague in the police force. "He had moments of crisis when he could come to the office in a terrible state, pale, trembling with a fleck of foam on his lips," he told French media. "You could see he was suffering." Jacob wanted to help, but Vérove resisted. In retrospect Jacob wonders "if it was these psychological problems that had led him to carry out these atrocities or whether it was these atrocities that were responsible for him being in this state".
At the turn of the century Vérove left the Paris area and moved to the south of France, with his wife and children, clearly determined to start anew. He appears to have succeeded. There has been no suggestion he was linked with any other crimes in the years after he moved there. Tellingly, perhaps, the symbol of one of the numerous Facebook accounts he kept was a phoenix. By then he had also grown a beard, though the acne that gave him his nickname had long since disappeared from his cheeks, judging from video footage, shot by a colleague, that has since appeared of him during police training, when he was still clean shaven.
Initially based near Marseilles, he moved several times, eventually to Prades-le-Lez, a place of just 6,000 people, where he and his wife bought some land and built themselves a large modern home. Lussert, the mayor, met Vérove when he came to submit the plans for the house and was so impressed by him that he invited him to join the list he was putting together for the 2014 municipal election.
Vérove, who was conservative politically, was placed low down the list and gained a seat only in 2019 when others above him dropped out — by which time he had moved home yet again, this time to La Grande-Motte. When the couple arrived there, they held a house-warming party — the first time anyone could remember a new arrival having done so. Despite the move Vérove agreed to drive back to Prades-le-Lez for council meetings — a sign to the mayor of the former gendarme's dedication to duty. "He was always obliging but always very punctilious about the rules. If there was a law you had to be obey it," Lussert recalls. "That went for himself too."
On one occasion Vérove invited his colleagues down to his house for a barbecue. Lussert was struck by the warmth of his relationship with his wife. "They seemed very close and to be really looking out for each other," he says. The couple's new neighbours in the La Grande-Motte liked him too. When some of the older ones struggled to get to their appointments for their Covid jab, Vérove offered to drive them.
Vérove would probably have continued to live out his retirement peacefully — and the mystery of Le Grêlé's identity would never have been solved — had it not been for the tenacity of one woman. Over the years no fewer than eight investigating judges had been given the task of cracking the case and each one had failed. In December 2014 it became the turn of Nathalie Turquey, vice-president in charge of investigation at the Paris judicial court, who was later to be praised publicly by one of her superiors for her "extraordinary professional commitment" and the "determination", "courage" and "hard work" she brought to the case.
By this time Le Grêlé had been linked formally with three murders — those of Cécile Bloch, Gilles Politi and Irmgard Müller — and with six rapes. A few months later another murder also dating back two decades was added to the list: on June 9, 1994, three weeks before the attack on Ingrid, Karine Leroy, 19, had been abducted on her way to school in Meaux, northeast of Paris. A month later her body was found lying on the edge of a wood a few miles away. She had been raped and strangled by a plastic strip tightened by a stick behind her neck.
Police struggled to make progress with the teenager's case, closed it in 1999, reopened it in 2004 and closed it a second time three years later. Then in May 2015 her mother, Annick Cagnet, was told by her lawyers that it would be opened a third time because of a possible link with another case involving unsolved killings in Paris. The case, it soon emerged, was that of Le Grêlé. The breakthrough was made thanks to Salvac, computer software used to establish links between violent crimes. Unlike previous investigators, Salvac had picked up the fact that Leroy had been strangled using precisely the same technique as that used on Politi.
The French media also began to speculate about a possible connection with another cold case, that of Sophie Narme, a 23-year-old estate agent who was raped and killed in December 1991 while showing a flat in northeast Paris to a potential buyer. She, too, had been strangled — in her case with a belt. The client turned out to have given a false name.
As Turquey worked through the countless witness statements and other documents that had amassed over the years she began to suspect that the killer who had passed himself off as a policeman may actually have been one — though a gendarme rather than a member of the national police force.
She took the extraordinary step of investigating all the gendarmes who had served in Paris and the surrounding area in the 1980s and 1990s at the time of the murders, with the aim of taking DNA samples from those who could have been Le Grêlé. The final list contained 750 names. All that was now needed was to work her way through them.
By this autumn they had reached Vérove. His shock at receiving the call on September 24 from Montpellier must have been enormous. He had killed at least four people, maybe several more — and for more than two decades had appeared to have got away with it. "I have the impression that he enjoyed his life as it was and just wanted it to continue," Lussert says. That was no longer an option, however, and 35 years after he had struck for the first time, Le Grêlé claimed one last life — his own.
Written by: Peter Conradi
© The Times of London
