Orne: extensive excavations organized to find a body 33 years after a feminicide

Europe1 .fr with AFP 2:29 p.m., June 28, 2022

An exceptional excavation system was deployed Tuesday morning in Orne to try to find the body of a woman her husband says he killed 33 years ago, the gendarmes announced.

"The excavations have started (...) in the La Chapelle-Souëf sector", about fifty kilometers east of Alençon and "we have around 40 gendarmes who have been deployed since this morning for several days if necessary. east," Lieutenant-Colonel Franck Piédagnel, deputy commander of the Orne gendarmerie group, told AFP.

Four speleologists and two anthropologists mobilized

The place was indicated to the investigators by the 62-year-old suspect indicted at the end of May for kidnapping and forcible confinement, when he had just confessed to having strangled his wife who disappeared in 1989. The investigation had not started until 2021 , following a report of the couple's children who are now adults.

READ ALSO

- Femicide: life for a man guilty of killing his ex-girlfriend in the middle of the street in 2018

The device "which is out of the ordinary" includes in particular "four speleologists from the group of speleologists of the national gendarmerie" because "the body is supposed to be in an old marl", a cavity dug by man to extract chalk, a specified the soldier, adding that we did not know "to what depth".

Two anthropologists from the hemato-morphology anthropology department, and two gendarmes from the speech image signal (SIP) department, responsible for processing video and audio data, with a georadar, are also mobilized.

"The goal with the radar is the detection of anomalies in the ground. This is the technique used to search for the buried body," added the lieutenant-colonel.

It will be up to the examining magistrate of the judicial court of Alençon, who is leading the investigation, to decide on the duration of these excavations, underlined the lieutenant-colonel.

"I assume my actions"

In an exclusive interview with Ouest-France published on Tuesday, the suspect explained that he had strangled his companion in the marital bed with the landline telephone wire.

"A version impossible to verify but identical to that given to the gendarmes", writes the regional daily.

Contacted on Tuesday, the prosecution did not respond.

The gendarmes do not communicate on the investigation.

"I take responsibility for my actions, I'm ashamed and I blame myself," the retiree told

.

The man explained that he shared his secret with his mother who had doubts, then with his new partner, whom he met four years later.

"From the first months, I told her everything. It shocked her. But she trusted me," he said, quoted by

.

This second wife died in 2008, according to the daily.