the Court of Nanterre (Hauts-de-Seine) has been hosting since March 1, 2022 a national judicial center dedicated to “Cold boxes“, the unsolved cases. While this center is currently selecting the cases it will recover, the national police have already brought up 98 files according to information from franceinfo and Parisien / Today in France. This is a new step in the constitution of this center eagerly awaited by the families of the victims.
Several selection criteria
These 98 files were selected on the basis of “the age of the facts” and “risk that they fall into the prescription”, explains Franck Dannerolle, head of the Central Office for the Suppression of Violence against Persons (OCRVP), referent on “cold cases” in France. “The proven or strongly suspected seriality of the facts”, “certain particularly violent modes of operation”, or “the victimology of certain victims such as children” have been the subject of a “particular attention” to make this selection. It remains to add to these 98 files those of the gendarmerie and the Paris police headquarters.
According to the boss of the OCRVP, this judicial center should allow investigators to “continue to refine the course” individuals suspected criminal, “even if they are in prison”. Until now they could only work from specific crimes, such as murder or rape, at a specific time and place. With this new tool, they will now be able to do the opposite starting from the course of an individual suspected of having been able to commit several crimes.“There was no specific legal framework”says Franck Dannerolle. “Once the investigation of the facts was completed, we could no longer work on them.”
With this new tool for which the Nanterre judicial center will have exclusive jurisdiction, the investigators therefore hope to speed up the resolution of certain unsolved cases. This idea had been supported and demanded for decades by associations of families of victims and by lawyers specializing in “cold boxes”, in particular by Didier Seban and Corinne Herrmann, notably known for defending the father of Estelle Mouzin, whose serial killer Michel Fourniret admitted to the murder.