“I’m the serial killer you’ve been looking for for 35 years.” The confession of the former policeman

Le Grau-du-Roi (Montpellier), 1 October 2021 – Neat hair, slightly sunken eyes and a skin battered by pimples. Thus appeared, in the identikit drawn in pencil at the end of the 80s, the serial killer francese known as Le Grêlé, ‘The Pockmarked’. Francois Verove, a ex-cop 59-year-old retired father of two, he killed himself last Wednesday 29 September in the town of Le Grau-du-Roi, on the French Mediterranean coast, and left a message which reads: ‘Le Grêlé, the pockmarked man, it’s me ‘. As reported by Aljazeera, the investigations made by the French police after the discovery of the body seem to confirm what is written on the suicide confession: the dna has been confirmed on various pieces of evidence related to numerous past crime scenes.

The investigations on this multiple murderer, which he would have killed at least 4 people e sexually abused of numerous women, they lasted from over 35 years. It was the 1986 when the first victim was found lifeless in Paris, Cecile Bloch, at the time only 11 years old. Subsequently to the Butterato were attributed the deaths of Irmgard Mueller, 20 years old of German descent, Karine Leroy, 19, and a 38-year-old man, Gilles Politi. The trail of blood and rape seems to stop in 1994. We will have to wait for the results of other forensic tests to be sure that Verove actually committed all these crimes, and in general that he is the serial killer Le Grêlé. But the clues collected so far, and above all the DNA evidence, make the investigators across the Alps rather optimistic.

In the message-confession left by the ex-suicide policeman there would be none precise descriptions of victims, or details of circumstances in which the crimes were committed, which complicates the work of reconstruction and matching with the investigations carried out in the last 30 years. The content of Verove’s farewell letter has not yet been confirmed or officially disclosed by the investigative authorities, but this is known: the impulse to kill himself has come due to pressing questions that the police were starting to turn to him, in relation to the Le Grêlé case. The solution to the case, therefore, was close.