Grégory affair: in Lépanges, the residents are “fed up” – 10/11/2024 at 6:18 p.m.

A “quiet” village where “life is good”: the inhabitants of Lépanges-sur-Vologne, infamous for having been the home of Grégory Villemin, want to turn the page, 40 years after the murder of the little boy.

Dozens of curious people still come every year to this village of 850 inhabitants to visit the grave of “little Grégory”, murdered at the age of 4.

Located high up, with a panoramic view of the Vologne valley, its hills and the white houses of the town, the Lépanges cemetery also adjoins the church and the town hall.

Near one of the entrances, the child’s name no longer appears on the tombstone. Everything about him disappeared when his parents, Christine and Jean-Marie Villemin, exhumed him and cremated his remains almost 20 years after his death, in 2004. They themselves live in the Paris region.

A notebook placed in the church bears witness to the passage of numerous visitors.

“Very moving place due to the cruel, tragic, unforgettable events! Little Grégory, how can we remain silent?” asks “Marie du Finistère”, in a message left in October 2023.

There are dozens of messages like this, written by travelers from all over France or even Belgium. They are “people of all ages, sometimes families,” explains a local resident to AFP.

“These words are useless,” complains Danielle Didier, member of a collective which campaigns to change the image of Lépanges. In the notebook, “people should just talk about the church. Not the affair, not Gregory, not the cemetery.”

– “Dispossessed” of their village –

On a daily basis, “we don’t talk about it”, assures a resident who is walking her son in a stroller and who does not wish to give her identity.

“We have to let the water flow under the bridges,” adds Adrien Michel, 37, who moved here three years ago for the “tranquility” of the town. He has just dropped his daughter off at the village nursery school, among dozens of other children.

A sign indicating the La Vologne river, in Lépanges-sur-Vologne, in the Vosges, October 22, 2009 (AFP / FREDERICK FLORIN)

From now on, the village lives peacefully, and this dramatic day is far away, except when Vosges Matin, the local newspaper, publishes an article relating to the affair: “People read it and talk about it”, says a trader.

At the “Bistrot”, the Lépanges café-restaurant, a historian, a local press correspondent and a municipal councilor offer to discover “something else” about this village that they “love” and which is “more than the Grégory affair “, as Cédric Prévot, the historian, says. Like its “17 businesses, 30 associations”, its “tranquility”…

The choice of location is not trivial: in October 1984 and during the months that followed, the people of Lépange were “dispossessed” of this restaurant, where the editorial staff had taken up residence.

At midday, dozens of workers have lunch there. At the station, the trains no longer stop, but buses transport residents to work in Epinal or Rambervillers.

The butcher, who has been there for 20 years, is “fed up” at being questioned about the affair, and says he gives the same answer, a bit annoyed, to all the journalists who enter his business.

– Turn the page –

Certainly, “something terrible happened, a real tragedy, a trauma for the village, and our initiative is absolutely not to position ourselves against the Grégory affair, against its journalistic treatment, or against the victims” , assures Cédric Prévot.

But for the inhabitants of Lépanges, morbid curiosity is unwelcome, especially since it was in Docelles, six kilometers away, that the child’s body was found.

The Vologne river in Docelles, June 14, 2017, in which Gregory Villemin, aged four, was found tied up and drowned in October 1984 (AFP / Patrick HERTZOG)

Owner of a house in Docelles for around twenty years, Jean-Michel Boucaud says he has “never heard anyone talk about the affair” in this village. “I learned that they had found the body here” with the Netflix series on the case released in 2019, he says. “People were a little disgusted. They don’t want to hear about it anymore.”

Docelles is, however, less mentioned, particularly in the media, than Lépanges, known as far away as Canada, according to a resident of a neighboring village.

In Lépanges, “there is not only the fortieth anniversary of the Grégory affair, there is also the centenary of two paintings present in the church, listed as heritage since 2008”, explains Cédric Prévot.

So many “heritage or cultural riches” that the collective wishes to highlight, far from “all the fantasies” linked to the Grégory affair.