Again in the media because of his appeal trial for the appalling murder of Isabelle Mesnage which took place in 1986, Jacques Rançon was convicted in 2018 of two other murders, an attempted rape as well as an attempted murder. For this last case, the victim is Sabrina. This survivor of hell had to wait years before her aggression could find her culprit. An investigation which ended in a dismissal after the facts in 1998 in Perpignan. So much time to live with the trauma of an act of appalling violence that left him with a 32cm scar on his body and that of knowing the criminal was free. In the episode of Let the accused enter on France 2 devoted to Jacques Rançon, an explanation is given.
One night in March 1998, Sabrina, 19, who is waiting for her boyfriend at the foot of her building, comes across an alcoholic forty-something. Not standing up, the young woman helps him up and finds himself dragged under the porsche. It is there that he makes her live the horror, planting a knife in her stomach. His screams are heard by a resident of the neighborhood who manages to scare the killer away. Despite the horror of the scene she experienced, Sabrina was able to describe the culprit: very tall, brown hair, forty years old, he has blue eyes. His teeth are all damaged, all decayed, black.
“An attempted murder, with a knife, in the station district, on a young woman of twenty, three months after the murder of Mokhtaria, should that remind the police of things?” wonders the presenter and journalist Rachid M’Barki. But things will not go like that, details his colleague Dominique Rizet: “Sabrina’s attack will be taken by the public security of Perpignan, the police station. The other case, that of Mokhtaria, is the judicial police of Perpignan which is in charge, with an examining magistrate. In the Sabrina case, the prosecution will not open any information, so even less warn the investigating judge who is working on the Mokhtaria case. It is a real failure between the services of the State.“
Less than a year later, Sabrina’s assault will be dismissed in 1999 on the grounds that the perpetrator is unknown. It will take fifteen years for this case to come to light thanks to the perseverance of two lawyers specializing in cold boxes, Corinne Herrmann and Didier Seban, and the scientific advances that have made it possible to detect the DNA of Jacques Rançon.