Death of Vanilla: tale of an infanticide, first failure of the Abduction Alert system

It is indeed very early yesterday that the trace of Nathalie Stephan is found in Nantes. The manager of the Terminus hotel, where she spent the night, informed the police when he reconciled the name of the fugitive with that on the identity card left by a client. She was arrested without problems and, during her police custody, Nathalie Stephan went on mutism, denials and contradictions. The mother claims to have deposited her daughter with a friend in Angers, without giving either a name or address.

A mother with a complex profile

But the police are no longer fooled. “They retraced his journey, which allowed them to point out the contradictions in his story,” said a source close to the investigation. The few door-to-door completes to convince the investigators that Nathalie Stephan got rid of her child. After having put her in confidence, they push her to confess.

At the end of the afternoon, the suspect finally directs the police from the PJ to where she deposited the body. The investigation will now focus on determining the reasons for this infanticide. “He has several hypotheses,” slips one close to the investigations. Maybe she felt that she could no longer provide Vanille with education. Or the prospect of a change in the care of her daughter disturbed her. Nathalie Stephan was to change center soon.

The custody right in question

“In police custody, however, she did not indicate at this stage that she felt victim of a particular injustice”, continues the same source. The suspect’s psychological profile is particularly complex. According to a psychiatric report, which will be carried out after his police custody, “his destination could be a detention or a hospitalization,” said the Angers prosecutor.

The almost forty-something, who presents herself on social networks as a former maternal assistant, had a recent suicidal episode and had left in her room of the writings qualified by the prosecution of “relatively worrying”, in which she wrote in particular “I love you “. “She is not known to have engaged in violent behavior towards children or to represent a danger for them,” notes a source close to the investigation. The suspect, unemployed, was unknown to the justice system.

Another daughter’s mother, Vanille’s half-sister

Witnesses interviewed described her as a woman “discreet and handicapped by her mental disorders”. The identity of Vanille’s father is nebulous. The man she designated in custody does not recognize the infant. The occasional custody rights that had been issued for Vanille is also a source of questions when Nathalie Stephan, mother of another daughter, Vanille’s half-sister, of whom she also does not have custody, had already failed obligations by not bringing it back to ASE at the time indicated. According to a connoisseur of the file, “his strong psychiatric disorders did not prevent him from having days of education with his daughter”. These moments were supervised and limited to forty-eight hours due to his short capacity for concentration.

Since its creation in 2006, this is the 23rd time that the Abduction Alert device has been triggered. Until Vanilla, all the kidnapped children had been found safe and sound.