Estelle Mouzin, Yanis Moré or Marion Wagon … These missing children that investigators and families are still looking for

She is nicknamed “the little girl of the milk cartons”. It’s been 25 years, Sunday, November 14, that Marion Wagon disappeared in Agen. Ten years old at the time, she vanished from her school leaving no trace. The portrait of the little girl had been printed on millions of cartons of milk sold in supermarkets to promote testimonies but without success, the mystery of her disappearance remains intact.

In France, 1,000 worrying disappearances of minors are reported each year. Most of these children are found within 48 hours. But others disappear without leaving a trace, like Marion Wagon. And years later, families, associations and investigators continue to look for them.

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The files on which these discreet investigators are working all bear the name of a child who has been missing for a few hours, for ten years, sometimes for twenty or thirty years: Estelle Mouzin, Cécile Vallin, Yanis Moré or even Marion Wagon. These are some of the most high profile cases among hundreds of others. “We are looking for between 500 and 700 who have disappeared, indicates Marie-Laure Brunel-Dupin, head of the unclear affairs division of the gendarmerie. In this figure, we have a lot of runaways and a lot of parental kidnappings. But it can still be, unfortunately, homicides or suicides. “

“In any case, a disappearance of minors is worrying from the start”, continues Marie-Laure Brunel-Dupin. With each disappearance, investigators attempt to collect the child’s DNA or fingerprints. The investigators also note the details of the morphology, recover information on the dentition. So many elements that can be used to relaunch an investigation, even years later. “There are always investigators working or someone to verify information to try to find the child “, says the gendarme.

“No file is ever closed definitively saying it’s over.”

Marie-Laure Brunel-Dupin, National Gendarmerie

to franceinfo

With the hope that a new element appears, that it also sometimes corresponds to the traces left by the great sexual predators such as Michel Fourniret, Patrice Alègre or Francis Heaulme. “It takes a new element, a new technology, an intelligence or an arrest to restart the case, explains Marie-Laure Brunel-Dupin. A program that would appear on television about a disappearance can revive and yield new testimony that investigators will verify. “

And even if the years pass, they do not diminish the hope for the families to find a trace of the child. Pascale Bathany, president of the Assistance and Search for Missing Persons association, has been supporting parents for 16 years: “There will always be this heartbreak of losing a child and not knowing. Families tell us: ‘I would so much like to know…’ There are some who do not know, thirty to forty years later, and even sixty years to some. It is the worst thing and especially not being able to meditate. We always hope that someone will speak, even twenty years later. “

Abroad, children have been found sometimes years after their disappearance: thirty years later, for example in the United States. Austrian Natascha Kampusch, too, had managed to escape her captor after eight years of kidnapping.