Between false leads and cyberbullying, a look back at ten months of a painful investigation

Autumn is coming, but the weather is still mild in the Bruche Valley (Bas-Rhin), September 23, 2023. “The vegetation was still very green”recalls the former mayor of Plaine, Jean-Marc Chipon, to franceinfo.Lina, she was dressed in white. You could only see her from the side of the road.” Consistent with the clothing habits of young people her age, the teenager, who blew out her fifteenth candle a month ago, wears a gray dress covered with a white sleeveless down jacket. Her immaculate Converse shoes screwed to her feet, Lina, who lives with her mother in the hamlet of Champenay, walks towards the Saint-Blaise-la-Roche train station, more than two kilometers away, along the D350 departmental road.

The former councilor sees her on this road around 11:15 a.m. When he goes back the same way in the opposite direction a few moments later, Lina is no longer there.. “She must walk fast”, he finds himself thinking, far from imagining that he will be one of the last to have seen the young girl, whose trace investigators are still looking for ten months later. Searches resumed in the Vosges on Wednesday, July 31, to try to shed light on this affair.

On September 23, at midday, Tao, 19, an apprentice with the Compagnons du Devoir, is feverishly waiting at the Strasbourg train station for his girlfriend to arrive by train. The meeting is scheduled for 12:53 p.m. In his pocket, proof of her imminent arrival: Lina sent him a video of her outfit while she was on the way, a few moments before disappearing, he tells TF1. This video will be the last digital trace of the young girl. His cell phone is definitively cut off at 11:22 a.m.

The young couple, formed a few weeks earlier, must spend the day shopping in the Alsatian capital. Worried about not seeing the teenager get off the train, Tao calls Lina’s mother to inform her of the situation. Fanny Groll rushes to report her daughter’s disappearance to the police. The first step in a procedure that will last more than ten months.

In the days that followed, searches were carried out by the gendarmerie, with the support of 400 volunteers, along the departmental road where Lina had disappeared. Dog teams were deployed, as well as a helicopter and drones. The young girl’s relatives were dismayed. “She’s a happy little girl, full of life. It’s incomprehensible.”laments Olivier Delsarte, Lina’s father, on BFMTV.

A few days after the disappearance of the teenager, a judicial investigation was opened for kidnapping and sequestration. The Strasbourg prosecutor’s office took over the case from the Saverne prosecutor’s office, a sign of the seriousness of the situation.

Soon, all eyes turn to Tao, the boyfriend whose media appearances are sometimes poorly controlled. On social networks, rumors incriminate him, presenting him as possibly jealous. When he momentarily loses his phone in an old disused garage in Saint-Blaise-la-Roche, it doesn’t take much to amplify suspicions. In The New DetectiveTao says: “I get calls from people I don’t even know, threats (…). I have colleagues who send me what is being said on social media, that it’s me (…) I see things, it hurts.” To the point of pushing the teenager’s mother to publicly defend her on September 29.

“It’s no longer possible, I can’t let this happen. Tao is suffering (…) I realised that I had to intervene because I saw him crumbling.”

Fanny Groll, Lina’s mother

to TF1

“But I prefer that people talk about me in a negative way and that they find Lina,” concedes Tao, very worried about his girlfriend, in this same interview with New Detective. A task that investigators are tackling. At the same time, a house located in Diespach (Bas-Rhin), four kilometers from the teenager’s home, particularly attracts attention. It belongs to a local music teacher, aged around forty. His Clio looks like the one that a witness claims to have seen pass by on the route taken by Lina on the day of her disappearance. But this is a false lead. The first of many others in this case.

Investigators are making no progress, but information from the past appears in the press in January and rekindles all the speculations. Lina filed a complaint for “gang rape” against two young men a year and a half before her disappearance. She was 13 years old at the time. The Saverne public prosecutor’s office has announced that it will be carrying out a “new legal study” of the complaint, which had initially been dismissed as an “insufficiently characterized” offense: the two young men in question admitted to consensual sexual relations, but not rape. This lead to a new dead end: according to information from the Latest News from Alsacethe latter were able to provide an alibi exonerating them in the disappearance.

The doors are closing one by one, but the case fascinates the French, to the point of going beyond understanding. Lina’s mother denounces several times, during these months of investigation, the harassment of which she is the target. At a press conference in March, she deplores the behavior of Internet users who “allow themselves to make horrible reflections, deductions that have no place, interpretations”. “We cannot let everything be said, everything done, without reacting, hammers Fanny Groll. I’m going through hell and it’s extremely violent.”

“From the start, it’s been horrible. I don’t even have the words anymore, it’s so relentless, everything and anything is said everywhere.”

Fanny Groll, Lina’s mother

at a press conference

During the same press conference, she claims to have discovered that her daughter had also been the victim of cyberbullying before her disappearance, and had “experienced horrible comments” who had “damaged his reputation.” Insults following Lina’s complaint of rape, according to the story given by her cousin on the show “Sept à huit”. “She told me that she was being threatened with death, that her family was being threatened, that she was being told that someone was going to come into her house and get her,” Louane explains. Enough to push Fanny Groll to found the association Les Bonnes Etoiles de Lina, notably intended to provide information on the phenomenon of cyberbullying and its consequences.

The new year does not allow for a new start for Lina’s relatives: between January and March, several elements are explored, without success. The police thus launch an appeal for witnesses to the parents of young girls enrolled in the establishment where Lina studied, reports France 2. They are interested in a young man in his twenties, seen near a playground in the town of Saulxures at the wheel of a gray Renault Clio. A friend of Lina had reported having been followed by a man matching her description on two occasions, a few days before the teenager’s disappearance.

In March, three people were taken into custody to be questioned about schedule inconsistencies on the day of Lina’s disappearance. A lead that still yielded nothing: they were released, without prosecution.

The media coverage of the case has, against all expectations, allowed some progress to be made. Eight months after Lina’s disappearance, the M6 ​​program “Appel à témoins” devotes a broadcast to the case. A businessman contacts the channel and assures that one of his employees disappeared overnight, in September 2023, at the same time as Lina. The profile of this man attracts the attention of investigators. He “lives about ten kilometers from Lina’s home. This is why the police were very interested in this testimony”explains the producer of the show, Jean-Marie Goix, on RTL. Checks are carried out and, once again, lead to nothing.

After months of judicial wandering and false hopes, the decisive turning point in this case occurred on July 26. Lina’s DNA was discovered in a stolen vehicle that had been geolocated. “not far from the point of disappearance of the young girl”, announces the public prosecutor of Strasbourg, Yolande Renzi. “A major step forward in the investigation”in his words. “The attention of investigators was drawn to a vehicle not previously mentioned,” can be read in the press release from the public prosecutor’s office.

Everything then follows: the press reveals that a suspect, identified several weeks ago, committed suicide after the seizure of the car in which Lina’s DNA was found and that he is said to have driven. He is a 43-year-old man, who hanged himself on July 10 in Besançon (Doubs), franceinfo learned from a source close to the case, confirming the newspaper’s information. The Republican EastThe forty-year-old was due to be tried on July 22 for violent robberies committed in August 2023. Previously integrated, according to a source close to the case, the man found himself involved in delinquency. He has also spent time in a psychiatric hospital.

A major discovery which has triggered new searches in the Grand Est region since Tuesday, in the hope of finally finding Lina, ten months after her disappearance on this small departmental road in Bas-Rhin.