The last person to have seen the 23-year-old young woman alive, Jean-Marc Reiser, already convicted twice for rape and murder, was acquitted for lack of evidence in 2001. But the Strasbourg public prosecutor’s office reopened a judicial investigation into this case.
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Already twice convicted of rape and murder, Jean-Marc Reiser appealed to the Court of Cassation on Monday June 24 to contest his indictment as part of an investigation into the disappearance of a woman in Strasbourg in 1987, reported his lawyer. “I filed the appeal today”Emmanuel Spano told AFP, four days after the partial rejection by the Colmar Court of Appeal of an appeal for nullity formulated by Jean-Marc Reiser.
In 2001, Jean-Marc Reiser was definitively acquitted of the murder of Françoise Hohmann, 23, for lack of evidence. This vacuum cleaner representative’s last client was Jean-Marc Reiser, she then disappeared and her body was never found. But in February 2020, evoking “new charges”the Strasbourg public prosecutor’s office had reopened a judicial investigation in this case, not for murder this time, but for “criminal arbitrary confinement” and “concealment of a corpse”.
According to his lawyer, Jean-Marc Reiser, 63, contests his indictment in the name of prescription and the authority of res judicata which prohibits retrying a suspect for the same facts. “No one is fooled: this is the same person for whom Jean-Marc Reiser was tried and then acquitted more than 20 years ago for acts of homicide”argued Emmanuel Spano.
In another case, Jean-Marc Reiser was sentenced in June 2023 by the Haut-Rhin Assize Court to life imprisonment with 22 years of security for the murder of a young woman, Sophie Le Tan , in 2018. He also appealed to the Court of Cassation, which must render its decision on Wednesday.
