A 60-year-old confessed to killing his wife 33 years after the fact. He says he killed her by strangling her with the landline telephone wire. Research has been underway since June 28, 2022, in a village in Orne to find his body.
The inhabitants of La Chapelle-Souëf, in the Orne, are in shock. Around 7 a.m. on June 28, 2022, gendarmes, speleologists and anthropologists landed in their village of 250 souls looking for a corpse. That of a woman killed by her companion 33 years ago. “About forty gendarmes are deployed on the ground”, said Lieutenant-Colonel Franck Piédagnel, of the Orne Gendarmerie Group, to the newspaper West France. The 62-year-old suspect was indicted in late May for kidnapping and forcible confinement after finally confessing facts.
Aged 29 at the time of the events, the alleged perpetrator admitted in exclusive testimony to West France have strangled his companion in bed, one night in 1989, with the landline telephone wire. He then explained that he was disposed of the body the next day morning on the way to work. He says he threw “the corpse covered with a sheet in a marl pit, a sort of underground cavity in his village” before adding: “I came back eight days later to hide the body by throwing sheet metal over it”. The cavity, dug at the time to extract chalk, has since been filled in with earth and is now part of a field.
The alleged perpetrator: “I’m ashamed and I blame myself”
“I assume my actions, I am ashamed and I blame myself”told the retiree to the regional daily which reveals that “nobody ever reported” the disappearance of his partner. To justify this sudden absence, he decided at the time to build a story from scratchexplaining that the mother of two children aged 3 years and 6 months had dropped everything to follow another man. But in 2019, his daughter started him ask more probing questions on the exact reasons for his mother’s hasty departure. “I wasn’t ready to tell the whole truth, but I said things. That’s where it all started”detailed the father of the family who is now cooperating with investigators : “I hope they find him. Thanks to the old location of a barrier, I gave quite precise indications.”
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Orne: he admits to having strangled his wife with the wire of the telephone, she is wanted 33 years later
Around 7 a.m. on June 28, 2022, gendarmes, speleologists and anthropologists arrived in their village of 250 souls in search of a corpse.
©Pixabay
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Orne: he admits to having strangled his wife with the wire of the telephone, she is wanted 33 years later
The 62-year-old suspect was indicted at the end of May for kidnapping and forcible confinement after finally confessing the facts.
©Pixabay
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Orne: he admits to having strangled his wife with the wire of the telephone, she is wanted 33 years later
Aged 29 at the time of the events, the alleged perpetrator admitted in an exclusive testimony to Ouest-France having strangled his companion in bed, one night in 1989, with the landline telephone wire.
©Pixabay
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Orne: he admits to having strangled his wife with the wire of the telephone, she is wanted 33 years later
The suspect then explained that he got rid of the body the next morning on his way to work.