Arrested on Tuesday morning, Tom had lent his house to the young couple who disappeared at the end of November. On Wednesday and Thursday, two other individuals were taken into custody.
By Charles Guyard
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Dn this small housing estate at the entrance to L’Aiguillon-sur-Mer (Vendée), tranquility was shattered on Tuesday morning when the police blocked all access to rue du Général-de-Gaulle. Their target? A white single-storey house surrounded by a garden in which two dogs bark as soon as you get too close to the gate. It was here, at number 13, that they picked up Tom T., 22, out of bed. The young man did not put up any resistance or show any sign of concern according to his father, questioned by The Western Mail.
After all, the person concerned had already been heard as a simple witness by the investigators for an obvious reason: it was at his home, in his absence, that Leslie Hoorelbeke and Kevin Trompat were to spend the night after an evening spent with a neighbor in Prahecq last November 25. Since then, the two lovers, aged 22 and 21, have shown no sign of life, a judicial investigation for kidnapping and forcible confinement has been opened, several of their personal effects have been discovered in a clothing container several kilometers away, and the small house on the edge of the main road of the village of 2,000 inhabitants which was to accommodate them in the vicinity of Niort was placed under seal. This is why, in particular, its owner had to migrate to Vendée to find a roof there.
Tom T. had however returned to Prahecq on January 6 to participate in a hunt organized by Kevin’s mother-in-law. That day, in front of the microphones and cameras, he said he was totally unfamiliar with this double disappearance and had unrolled (recited, some would say) his full schedule to silence the first suspicions arising around him. Selected pieces: “On Friday, I was at a techno evening at La Crèche [à 15 km de Prahecq, NDLR] where I spent the night, and the next day I went to another techno party…Sunday there was no more their bag of business at my house…From Monday, I sent them messages and I I saw that it still didn’t answer, we started to worry… There are so many versions that have been said that we don’t even know where we’re going anymore… I’m waiting for answers from the gendarmerie. »
The demarcation of the telephone casts doubt
Less than two months after this media release, it is the opposite: it is the gendarmes, now, who are waiting for answers. Because after conducting some one hundred and twenty hearings and taking dozens of samples, they ended up finding inconsistencies between the alibis provided by the main suspect and the geolocation of his mobile phone. The times or places mentioned do not all coincide. As for the links that unite all the protagonists of this story, they also raise many questions.
First, Tom and Kevin reportedly smuggled drugs together in the area. Was there a financial dispute between them? On the evening of his disappearance, Kevin was in possession of a large sum of money (10,000 euros in cash brought in the afternoon by his mother-in-law, to pay for the purchase of a car according to her, so that the young man does not have a driver’s license) which has never been found. Then Kevin and Leslie had met a month earlier through Tom. However, the latter felt an attraction towards Leslie, as he had thus entrusted to the magazine The New Detective in January. Was he too enterprising, or simply jealous?
Extended for the first time on Tuesday evening, his police custody seemed to have to go to the end of the legal forty-eight hours, until Thursday morning. He must in any case be presented before an examining magistrate, in Poitiers, for a possible indictment. It remains to be seen under which leaders and whether he acted alone. On Wednesday, another 22-year-old was also arrested in La Rochelle in connection with the same case. His custody began at 2 p.m. Ninety-five days earlier, Kevin, Leslie and Leslie’s dog vanished…
A third individual was in turn placed in police custody, heard by the investigators since this Thursday afternoon, according to The Parisian.