Jacques Rançon was sentenced this Saturday to 30 years of criminal imprisonment with a 20-year security sentence by the Assize Court of the Somme for the rape and murder of Isabelle Mesnage in the summer of 1986. The jurors followed the requisitions of the general counsel against the former 61-year-old warehouse operator, already sentenced in 2018 to life imprisonment for the rapes and murders of two women near Perpignan station in 1997 and 1998.
Jacques Rançon had confessed in 2019 to having raped Isabelle Mesnage, a 20-year-old computer scientist found dead on the edge of a wood near Amiens, to have strangled her, then to have cut her penis and her breasts to erase her DNA.
He had repeated his confession before the examining magistrate, before retracting by mail.
The investigation had stalled before ending in a dismissal in 1992. But it had been relaunched in 2017 when Me Corinne Herrmann, specialist in unsolved cases, had requested on behalf of the family the reopening of the investigations and obtained gain of cause.
"Justice is finally served in a case which is now 35 years old"
"In the head of Jacques Rançon, everything is sexual, a violent sexuality", had launched the general counsel Anne-Laure Sandretto during his requisitions, on the fifth and last day of this trial.
“We are not very surprised.
The deliberation still lasted more than four hours.
In such a case, it is a small victory because it shows that the verdict has been discussed, ”responded to AFP Me Gerald Brivet-Galaup, his lawyer, who had pleaded for acquittal.
"Logic would want him to appeal," he said.
Me Didier Seban, lawyer for civil parties, told him of his "satisfaction" with "the idea that justice is finally served in a case which is now 35 years old".
Saturday morning, Anne-Laure Sandretto painted the portrait of a man "in reinforced concrete who has no emotional vibration", "unfathomable", "silent" and "dangerous", passing "from an ordinary life to a life of horror when he is unleashed by his impulses ”. In front of an impassive defendant, his head lowered in his box, she detailed the list of "charges", in particular the place of the facts, "hunting ground" of Jacques Rançon, close to his home at the time, a place that he “knows perfectly” and where he has “already made two known victims”. The Advocate General also noted the "concordance" between the disappearance of Isabelle Mesnage and the schedule of the accused that day. As for the “modus operandi”, she recalled the “similarity of injuries” inflicted on Isabelle Mesnage, Moktaria Chaïb and Marie-Hélène Gonzalez,the two victims of Perpignan.
Picardy
Murder
Justice
Trial
Rape