Alleged murderer confused by cigarette butt 19 years after the fact

A 50-year-old already known to justice has been indicted in Valencia for the murder of a 55-year-old woman, after discovering his DNA on a cigarette butt, nineteen years after the facts, we learned on Saturday from a judicial source. The man, on whom no further details have been given, is “very unfavorably known to the justice system,” said Valencia public prosecutor Alex Perrin.

Aged 36 at the time of the events, he was arrested Wednesday before “partially recognizing the facts” and being indicted on Friday in Valence, for “murder preceded, accompanied or followed by another crime” then placed in pre-trial detention, the prosecutor said in a press release.

Her DNA was found on a cigarette butt discovered at the crime scene, as well as on the victim’s T-shirt, Chantal de Chillou de Saint Albert, a 55-year-old woman who was then domiciled in Allauch, in the suburbs. from Marseille. His body was discovered on a path bordering the Isère, in Chatuzange-le-Goubet (Drôme), on August 2, 2001.

A “Cold Case” tray

The case remained unresolved despite many years of investigation, and the investigation was closed in 2010.

The file was reopened in 2019 by the investigation panel “Cold Case” (PICC) of the judicial center of the national gendarmerie in Pontoise, a research unit specializing in unsolved cases with expertise in the fields of analysis, forensics, behavioral sciences and investigation.

This unit had carried out an analysis of the archive of the procedure and noted, on the one hand, that there were old seals that could be compared with modern techniques of forensic science and, on the other hand, that a track studied in 2002 deserved to be deepened. In October 2019, the public prosecutor of Valencia reopened the investigation for assassination. The Grenoble research section and the PICC were cosaisis.