“Unsurprisingly, I will ask you to answer yes to the question of whether he voluntarily killed him. And to the question of premeditation, I will also ask you to answer yes”, launched the jurors of the court of Assizes of the Bas-Rhin Advocate General, Laurent Guy.
Life imprisonment, with 22 years of security, the maximum sentence, was requested Monday against Jean-Marc Reiser, the alleged assassin of Sophie Le Tan who admitted to having killed and dismembered the young student but denies any premeditation. “Unsurprisingly, I will ask you to answer yes to the question of whether he voluntarily killed him. And to the question of premeditation, I will also ask you to answer yes”, launched the jurors of the court of Assizes of the Bas-Rhin Advocate General, Laurent Guy.
He requested “an extremely heavy sentence”: life imprisonment, with 22 years of security, the heaviest incurred by Mr. Reiser, tried for murder. “The arrival of Sophie Le Tan in this apartment owes nothing to chance (…) It is indeed into a trap that she fell”, insisted the Advocate General, evoking “a ray of sunshine broken clean ” by a “black, dark, chilling shadow”. Defense arguments are scheduled to follow.
From our special correspondent at the Sophie Le Tan murder trial: the psychological profile of the “monster” Reiser
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King Manipulator
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“You will give back to Sophie the humanity that Jean-Marc Reiser took away from her”, had launched in the morning to the jurors Me Rémi Stéphan, one of the family lawyers for whom the premeditation “is no doubt”. “He organizes himself to attract his prey into his web,” noted the lawyer again. Through her “unfortunate meeting with Jean-Marc Reiser”, Sophie “had an appointment with death”.
Me Gérard Welzer, he castigated the “patter” and the “chatter” of a Reiser according to him “manipulator king”. “The only one who knows the truth is Jean-Marc Reiser and he did not say it,” he told the jurors. On Tuesday, Mr. Reiser, 61, will have the floor one last time before the verdict. Despite his arrest a week after the disappearance of Sophie Le Tan on September 7, 2018, the day of her 20th birthday, the accused, already convicted in particular of rape, took more than two years to admit having killed the student.
According to him, he had drunk a lot the day before, met her downstairs, remembering then having fixed an appointment to show her apartment. While neighbors testified to having seen Sophie arrive alone in the building, she claims to have gone up with her to the 6th floor. He takes her hand, wants to kiss her on the cheek. She pushes him away, insults him, which plunges him into an uncontrollable “state of fury”. His fists and his feet are unleashed on the young woman, she falls heavily and no longer reacts.
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meticulousness
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This “does not come from reality but from a version made to stick as well as possible to the elements collected” by the investigators, disputed the Advocate General. “We still don’t know what Sophie Le Tan died of.” Then “I stripped her to dismember her” with a hacksaw, Jean-Marc Reiser said on Friday. First the legs then the head so that it fits in suitcases. Only part of the skeleton of Sophie Le Tan was found, by chance, in a forest in the Vosges in October 2019.
“Killing a young girl who could have been my daughter, dismembering her body, has haunted me since that day and will haunt me for the rest of my life,” the statement said. accused. Regrets, followed by a request for forgiveness that Sophie’s very tried family will reject, contesting her sincerity. Jean-Marc Reiser affirms that he did not want to kill her. However, he is on trial for murder and therefore for having prepared his act, which, according to the prosecution, demonstrates the fictitious real estate advertisements for students and his multiple telephone lines with false identities.
The Advocate General also underlined the “particular meticulousness of the preparation of the facts” on the part of Jean-Marc Reiser, attracted “by Asian women”, who “chose to work at home, on familiar ground, where he has perfect control.” The thesis of “the fortuitous meeting does not hold”, insisted Laurent Guy. In support of the thesis of premeditation, the lawyers for the civil parties again tried on Monday to raise the specter of Françoise Hohmann, a young and pretty sales representative who disappeared in 1987 after ringing the doorbell of Mr. Reiser. He was acquitted in 2001 in this case. Françoise Hohmann’s mother is present every day at the trial.