The last chance trial for Guerric Jehanno. Sentenced twice to thirty years in prison for the murder of Amandine Estrabaud, who disappeared in 2013 and never found, the former mason must again be tried at the assizes from Monday in Montauban, by decision of the Court of Cassation. Now 35 years old, he appealed to the Court of Cassation against the judgment of the Haute-Garonne Assize Court, which in 2021 confirmed on appeal the sentence pronounced the previous year by the Assize Court du Tarn, before being broken and canceled in June 2022 for procedural defects.
Investigators alerted by his mother
Amandine Estrabaud, 30, disappeared on June 18, 2013 in Tarn, after leaving Castres high school on foot where she worked as a supervisor, to return home to Roquecourbe. In the afternoon, she was seen in front of her home by a neighbor, getting out of a white van with a man she seemed to know.
That day, Guerric Jehanno, who lived with his mother in this same village about ten kilometers from Castres and corresponds to the description given by the witness, was working on a construction site in Roquecourbe and could drive a similar vehicle. Placed in police custody for the first time in 2014, the young mason was released without any charges.
But investigators from the Toulouse gendarmerie research section were alerted by the suspect’s mother, reporting her son’s strange behavior after the disappearance of the young woman, for whom he had an attraction. Indicted in April 2016, Guerric Jehanno is placed in pre-trial detention. Fellow prisoners will then claim that he described to them the way in which he allegedly raped and killed a girl from his village, even drawing a detailed plan of the place where he would have buried the body.
He throws everything away in prison then proclaims his innocence
During his first trial in 2020, the accused claimed to have invented everything, without explaining the reason. The following year, he reaffirmed his innocence: “I understand the pain of Amandine Estrabaud’s family, but it was not me who was with Amandine Estrabaud that day.” The court will confirm the conviction, following the requisitions of the attorney general, who had argued for the principle of “intimate conviction” allowing the jurors to decide on the basis of a body of evidence.
Guerric Jehanno’s lawyer, lawyer Simon Cohen, for his part, pleaded by asking the jury “to say no!” Because there is no evidence…” The verdict of the third trial is scheduled for Friday, January 26.