Jacques Rançon is again at the helm for the appeal trial of the murder of Isabelle Mesnage in 1986, which opened in Laon in the Aisne. Nicknamed the “Perpignan station killer”, the 62-year-old former forklift operator had been sentenced in 2021 to 30 years in prison for the rape and murder in 1986 of the young woman, gone hiking and found dead at the edge of a wood. In 2018, appearing for a previous trial before the Assize Court of Pyrénées-Orientales, he returned to his past…
In court in 2018, Jacques Rançon was tried for having killed, raped and mutilated Mokhtaria Chaïb in December 1997 and Marie-Hélène Gonzalez in June 1998. He was then sentenced to life imprisonment with a security period 22 years old. In front of the mother of one of the victims and the justice system, he returned to his experience. “When I was little, my parents were already retired. The father. And the mother, she never worked, she couldn’t read or write, she was a simpleton and my father was a builder. Every day he went fishing, he didn’t take care of me. He didn’t care. He never hit me, it was my mother who beat me. When I was bullshitting. One day my father wanted to hit my mother, I put myself between them and he never tried again.”
Facing the court, he recounts his unhappy childhood, in a wooden house with unloving and friendless parents: “I was the plague victim of the village.“His father, who died of lung cancer, had 13 children with his first wife, who died, then 4 with her mother. twins died a month after birth.
As a teenager, Jacques Rançon fell into delinquency for his taste for cars: “With a friend, we stole cars. We stole 48.” It was also at this time that he committed his first sexual assault against a young girl of his age, 16 years old. She will not file a complaint, dissuaded by the authorities in the face of what is described as a “poor wretch“.
This is how Jacques Rançon came back to his past for facts that he recognized. During this trial, he was also accused of having tried to rape a third woman and of having left a fourth for dead. In 1992, he also raped a woman there at knifepoint, for which he was sentenced to eight years in prison.