Nearly thirty-five years separate the Sophie Le Tan and Françoise Hohmann cases, but only one man links them in pain: Jean-Marc Reiser. Before the Strasbourg Court of Justice for the assassination of the student Sophie, he was also the last to have seen Françoise alive, at the time and whose body remains untraceable. He had been brought to justice but ended up being acquitted. Thierry Moser, lawyer for the Hohmann family until 2020, sees in these similarities the sign “a kind of signature, like a modus operandi,” we read on franceinfo.
The relatives of François Hohmann note the common points between the two young women: Sophie Le Tan was barely celebrating her twentieth year, François Hohmann was 23 years old, they were both pretty brunettes and pretty. But above all the circumstances of their disappearance echo each other: The first visited Jean-Marc Reiser’s apartment, the second went door to door as a salesperson. The traces of Françoise’s existence end there, on the ground floor of a building. The police had quickly made the connection with Reiser but he was dismissed in 1992 because there was nothing to confuse him.
A routine check that becomes a major twist
Ten years later, Jean-Marc Reiser was arrested during a routine customs check. “The latter discover in his car an arsenal of handguns, a shotgun, balaclavas, narcotics, and above all photos of visibly unconscious women, in degrading sexual positions.“, writes franceinfo. What to give another image of him when Françoise Hohmann disappeared.
The irreproachable image enjoyed by the former student of the Regional Institute of Administration of Bastia at the time of the disappearance of Françoise Hohmann is seriously shaken, he is now considered a sexual predator. He is indicted for two rapes committed in 1995 and 1996: that of a former companion, identified in the photos, and that of a German hitchhiker. In 2001, he was sentenced by the assizes of Doubs to 15 years in prison. Her conviction for rape that year revives the hope of Françoise’s family to determine the culprit. However, the Hohmann file remains thin, the body of the victim cannot be found and the scientific police could not do much in 1987: Jean-Marc Reiser was acquitted for lack of evidence in 2001.
Successfully grieving
Fanny Mehauden, niece of Françoise Hohmann, tried to revive the file on her aunt in light of the disappearance of Sophie Le Tan. Lawyer Thierry Moser requested prosecution not for “homicide”, the verdict being final, but for “concealment of corpse”, as well as a reopening of the judicial information for “sequestration”. Its weapons are the conviction for rape of Jean-Marc Reiser in 2001 which makes him a real predator, the Sophie Le Tan affair and finally scientific progress: the file is reopened. The father of the disappeared died last May, without having a new verdict but without ever stopping to fight for his daughter.