The national center specializing in “cold cases”, to designate unsolved blood and/or sex cases, was created in March 2022. In all, no less than 240 cases fall within the scope of competence of the brand new pole, including 68 serial crimes and 173 unsolved.
But two months after its creation, where is this specialized pole, launched within the court of Nanterre? According to the revelations of Parisian Tuesday, 107 files are currently in the hands of specialized investigators. Among them, a “little dozen” are already in the office of the investigating judge or else in the hands of the prosecution for follow-up in the preliminary investigation, indicates for his part Le Figaro.
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These cases currently being analyzed include four “major files” that Sabine Khéris was already handling in her Paris office, including three Michel Fourniret and Monique Olivier cases and two files dating from 1993 and 2017. According to Le Figaro, some fifty files have also arrived in Nanterre. They come either from the families of the victims or from their lawyers.
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What cases are involved?
On a daily basis, Pascal Prache, the prosecutor of Nanterre which houses this new specialized national pole, specifies that the figures “change every day”, but that their logic is “to avoid an arrival which would overwhelm the nascent pole when we want to be effective”.
The crimes of the “Ogre des Ardennes”, the Chevaline massacre, the disappearance of Estelle Mouzin… The unsolved cases in the hands of the specialized national center sometimes date back to the 1970s.
The procedures that may fall under the new pole concern murders by poisoning, kidnappings, rapes, sequestrations… And to advance the cases, the Nanterre prosecution is experimenting with a new criminal procedure: the criminal course, also concern our colleagues from the Figaro.
“New Hope”
For the families of victims, the work of the “cold case” center makes it possible to relaunch cases that have been stagnating for many years. “It’s a new hope”, launches in particular Boris Fauvet at the Parisian. He, whose brother disappeared in 1985 and whose body has never been found, adds: “It has now been ten years since I was received by a judge. I sincerely hope that the judges of the pole will have the means to delve deeply into my brother’s case. »
But other families are still waiting for their file to be handled by the experts, with the infinite hope of obtaining answers.
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