Gregory Villemin was four years old when he was murdered on an autumn day in 1984, his hands and feet bound when his body was found in a river in eastern France.
The case of ‘little Gregory’, as it became known, has haunted the judiciary, the media and the French public for forty years, and its resolution is as elusive today as it was on October 16, 1984, when he was found.
Investigators have collected nearly 18,000 reports over the decades, bound into 42 volumes, and seven investigating judges have worked on the case, said Philippe Astruc, chief prosecutor in the eastern city of Dijon, where the investigation is ongoing.
At times, the twists and turns of the investigation seemed to come straight out of a TV mystery: one suspect was murdered, an investigating magistrate committed suicide, and charges were filed several times but dropped.
“I don’t know how we survived,” Jean-Marie Villemin, Gregory’s father, said of the past forty years in a recently published comic book, one of several works devoted to the Gregory mystery.
– ‘This is my revenge’ –
At first, the investigation seemed to move quickly. A written note was sent to Jean-Marie Villemin saying: “This is my revenge, you sad fool.”
Villemin, then 26, and his wife Christine, 24, had been receiving anonymous, threatening letters and phone calls for years.
The murder investigation initially focused on the extended Villemin family. A media frenzy ensued, with one journalist even hiding a microphone in a relative’s wardrobe in the hope of recording a confession.
Investigating judge Jean-Michel Lambert hoped that the case would give him the breakthrough he hoped for in his first job in the judiciary.
Within three weeks, the 32-year-old filed charges against Bernard Laroche, a cousin of Gregory’s father, who was later released on bail.
– ‘Incompetent’ –
Gregory’s father was convinced that Laroche was his son’s killer. In March 1985, weeks after Laroche’s release, Villemin killed him with a rifle.
He was sentenced to five years in prison for the murder and served 34 months in prison.
The investigation sensationally focused on Gregory’s mother, who was charged with murder in 1985, but the charges were dropped due to errors committed by investigating judge Lambert.
“The work of the judiciary was pathetic,” said Thierry Moser, lawyer for the Villemins and involved in the case for 39 years. “The investigating judge was incompetent.”
Lambert committed suicide in 2017.
Later researchers failed to make a breakthrough. In 2017, charges were filed against Gregory’s great-aunt and great-uncle, Jacqueline and Marcel Jacob, as well as Murielle Bolle, an adolescent who once gave testimony against Laroche.
Within a year, all three cases were dismissed due to legal technicalities.
After decades of failure, there is now hope that modern DNA analysis and voice recognition software can help identify the man or people who harassed the Villemin family for years.
“I’m pretty optimistic,” Moser said.
A lawyer in the case, Francois Saint-Pierre, said it was still possible to salvage the investigation. “Today we are able to solve the mystery of the Pharaohs, so why not this one too?” he said.
But Etienne Sesmat, a former gendarmerie colonel who initially worked on the killing, said police never found any case-specific DNA, usually contained in blood or semen.
“All we have is contact DNA,” which did not necessarily allow for firm conclusions, he said.
Sesmat, who has published a book on the case, said that as far as he was concerned it was “established” that the killer was Bernard Laroche, a view shared by the Villemins’ lawyers.
Some lawyers have suggested the case will never be solved, but Dijon chief prosecutor Astruc dismissed that speculation.
“We have to keep going,” he said. “We owe a lot to this little boy and his parents.”
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