the struggle of families faced with cold cases

Families often fight for decades in the hope, one day, of knowing who killed their loved one. The franceinfo police-justice service was interested in cases which do not necessarily make the headlines in the media but which all had a failure at the start of the investigation.

The podcast “Cold cases, the fight of families”, produced by the franceinfo police-justice service, is released on Thursday May 16. These six episodes are devoted not to cases that make headlines in the media like the Grégory affair or the disappearance of Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès but to lesser known cases, often with the same starting point: flaws in the investigation. . “In most of these cases where we are unable to find an answer, to access the truth, very often we see that the investigations and the elements of the initial investigation are botched,” underlines criminal lawyer Franck Berton.

This is precisely the case in the case of the disappearance of Malik Boutevillain. This 32-year-old young man vanished in Échirolles, near Grenoble, on May 6, 2012, while he was out jogging. And as he is an adult, his sister Dalila cannot convince him when she goes to the police station. “A Departmental Security inspector receives us anyway. I tell him : ‘But now, it’s been almost four days, what are we doing? ? come ! Provide me with dogs ! We have our dirty laundry, we haven’t touched anything. At least we’ll know which way he went. And he says : ‘It’s a sensitive neighborhood. If we bring back dogs, it risks disturbing public order.’ I tell them: ‘It might disturb what ? We’re looking for a human, we’re not going to look for a piece of shit. ‘No no. In any case, we are understaffed and no one is going to come. And no one ever came out of their office for Malik.”. Dalila conducted her own investigation for a long time. And 12 years later, through perseverance, she got two investigating judges to look into the mysterious disappearance of her brother.

The investigating judges, in fact, play a vital role in these unresolved cases. Their main difficulty is dealing with these old cases while they are overwhelmed by complex files, often more than a hundred per investigating judge. Isabelle Théry testifies in our podcast. She was a judge in Évry, in the Paris region.

“Often, unsolved crimes are at the back of the closet and when we arrive in an investigation office, it already takes us about two years to read all the files. So obviously, we start with the detainees, with the emergencies” .

Isabelle Théry, former investigating judge

at franceinfo

And the greatest fear of the families we met is the dismissal of the case, that is to say the closure of the case. Nonsense for former judge Isabelle Théry, passionate about these cases. “We are obsessed with the cases that we have not been able to solve. We think about them all the time, we want them to be solved, they accompany us. I find that the fact that in a country, there are unsolved crimes, this in itself is a serious disturbance to public order. It is the achievement of democracy, the fight against unsolved crime. according to the magistrate.

The point of completing the investigation is above all to give the families an answer. Gaëlle Dumont, for example, has been waiting for 36 years to find out who raped and killed her little sister Sabine, then only 8 years old. And she continues to hope that one day someone will say to her: “So ! Your sister’s killer has been identified.” “I’ve thought about that day a billion times. I need to face his gazeshe confides. I want to see it right in front of me, even though it will probably be extremely painful, I can’t wait for that day to come and I hope it comes quickly, not in twenty years, not in ten.”

It’s almost the fight of a lifetime for Jonathan Oliver too. Her daughter, Cécile Vallin, disappeared on the side of a road on June 8, 1997, in Savoie. The case was taken over by the Nanterre cold case unit, and the trail of serial killer Michel Fourniret is being studied again. In the meantime, this 78-year-old father still does not give up. “At first, I counted the days, then the weeks, the months. And now, I count the years and that’s terrible,” he says sadly.

“There is at least one person who knows what happened to Cécile. Let this person speak! For me, it is more important to have the information than to seek revenge.”

Jonathan Oliver, father of Cécile Vallin, who disappeared in 1997

at franceinfo

“In any case, I hope from the bottom of my heart that Cécile is at peace,” concludes Jonathan Oliver. To help all these families, the association helping victims of unsolved cases, Avane, has just been created this week. Families sometimes mistreated by the law, but who always maintain the hope of one day knowing the truth.