A fifties already known to justice has been indicted in Valencia for the murder of a 55-year-old woman, after the discovery of her DNA on a cigarette butt, 19 years after the facts, we learned on Saturday from judicial sources. The man, on whom no other details have been given, is "very unfavorably known to the courts," said the public prosecutor of Valencia, Alex Perrin.
Aged 36 at the time of the events, he was arrested Wednesday before "partially recognizing the facts" and being indicted on Friday in Valence, for "murder preceded, accompanied or followed by another crime" then placed in pre-trial detention, the prosecutor said in a press release.
Her DNA was found on a cigarette butt discovered at the crime scene, as well as on the victim's T-shirt, Chantal de Chillou de Saint Albert, a 55-year-old woman who was then domiciled in Allauch, in the suburbs. from Marseille. His body was discovered on a path bordering the Isère, in Chatuzange-le-Goubet (Drôme), on August 2, 2001.
A "Cold Case" tray
The case remained unresolved despite many years of investigation, and the investigation was closed in 2010.
The file had been reopened in 2019 by the "Cold Case" investigation board (PICC) of the judicial department of the national gendarmerie in Pontoise, a research unit specializing in unsolved cases with expertise in the areas of , forensics, behavioral science and investigation.
This unit had carried out an analysis of the archive of the procedure and noted, on the one hand, that there were old seals which could be confronted with modern techniques of forensic science and, on the other hand, that a track studied in 2002 deserved to be deepened. In October 2019, the public prosecutor of Valence had reopened the investigation for assassination. The Grenoble Research Section and the PICC had been cosaised.
- Investigation
- Murder
- Justice
- Cold case
- Society