Almost 30 years later, the murder of little Marie-Chantale Desjardins, 10 years old, would finally be solved. Réal Courtemanche will appear Tuesday afternoon on a charge of first degree murder. A true predator, he once kidnapped a woman at the point of a knife, then dragged her by force into a wooded area.
It was July 16, 1994. Little Marie-Chantale left home by bike to visit a friend, but the little girl turned back. In the afternoon, witnesses saw Marie-Chantale at a snack bar in Sainte-Thérèse. Then nothing. For four days, his parents had no news and alerted the police.
Her body was finally found on July 20, 1994 in the woods behind the Place Rosemère shopping center, two kilometers from her home. His bicycle is not very far away. The autopsy reveals that she was strangled by her executioner. Hand marks are indeed visible on his neck. The child also has bruises on his genitals, suggesting sexual assault.
Who is the author of this heinous crime?
For three decades, investigators were unable to answer this question and the murder of Marie-Chantale Desjardins ended up falling into the unsolved files, these famous cold cases. Then, in recent months, scientific advances in DNA analysis have helped to resolve the impasse in the investigation.
“It is thanks to the meticulous and long-term work of investigators from the unresolved files division of the Sûreté du Québec, in collaboration with the laboratory of judicial sciences and forensic medicine, and the innovative methods used today in biology judicial, that the suspect was able to be identified and arrested,” welcomes the Sûreté du Québec in a press release.
Réal Courtemanche has spent almost his entire life behind bars. Since 2015, he has been labeled a dangerous offender and is serving an indeterminate sentence – the worst sentence – for the kidnapping of a 27-year-old woman. One evening in 2011, in Princeville, Courtemanche sneaks into his prey’s car and hides in the back seat. He wears a hat, gloves and protective glasses.
When the victim enters his car, Courtemanche emerges and places a knife near her head and orders her to obey him, otherwise he will kill her. He sits next to his victim and asks him to drive in an industrial neighborhood. He takes the opportunity to touch her thigh. At their destination, a fight breaks out with the victim.
Courtemanche drags his victim by the hair down a path. Desperate, she managed to convince him to return to the car, then took advantage of the arrival of another vehicle to hit her attacker and flee.
In detention, Courtemanche is so threatening towards staff that he has been detained since 1999 in maximum security penitentiaries, recalls the most recent decision of the Parole Board of Canada (PBC) which refused to release him in 2021.
Experts paint the picture of a real predator with a “very high” risk of violent recidivism. A phallometric evaluation even concluded that there was a significant sexual preference for “rape with humiliation” scenarios. Courtemanche is described as a pathological liar and manipulator in reports.
One expert concludes that he is at the upper end of “mixed” psychopath cases.