On August 20, the charred body of a teenage girl was found in a burnt down Nantes apartment. A week after the incident, the suspect admitted to having raped and killed her. A convicted repeat offender, he had benefited from a reduced sentence.
Thursday August 20, firefighters called to extinguish a fire in a Nantes apartment found the body of C., a 15-year-old teenager. The following Wednesday, a suspect was taken into custody, and he admitted the facts this Saturday, August 29, reports AFP. The 45-year-old man, François V., was sentenced in December 2005 to 18 years imprisonment for nine rapes, three attempts and one sexual assault between 2001 and 2003. He was released in 2016, with an obligation to find a work and be psychologically monitored. "He had even found a companion. We could have thought of a form of stabilization ", indicates Yvon Ollivier, deputy prosecutor of Nantes.
"In this case, we are dealing with someone who presented a quite smooth face", adds the prosecutor. However, the man had prepared his passage to the act. A few days before, he had already come to Nantes to locate an unoccupied apartment. C., who had gone to look for a package, was passing by when he asked her for help to assemble a box, an operating procedure already used with some of his previous victims. He then raped her and strangled her with a cable, before spraying her body with bleach and setting the apartment on fire with matches.
François V. was fined for inconvenient parking on the day of the incident, and the neighborhood investigation confirmed the hypothesis of the investigators. His DNA was also found under the victim's fingernails. He was then arrested and taken into custody, where "he spontaneously delivered precise and detailed confessions", says Pascal Gontier, deputy interregional director of the Rennes judicial police. The man acknowledged the murder and rape, as well as the destruction of other people's property.
Saturday, the multiple repeat offender was presented to the Nantes court, which opened a criminal investigation for intentional homicide followed by another crime in recidivism, rape in recidivism and willful destruction by fire in recidivism. Charged, François V. was placed in pre-trial detention.
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