A family outing on a Wednesday in autumn to pick up mushrooms in a Vosges forest… Which turns into a macabre discovery. The walker who had found the body of Sophie Le Tan told Thursday in front of the Assizes of Bas-Rhin the chance which led him to the only bones found.
“It was the mushrooms that led me to find the skull,” said this Alsatian retiree, on the fourth day of Jean-Marc Reiser’s trial, which is due to conclude next Tuesday. “It was October 23 (2019), I like picking mushrooms with my family. It’s a place I’ve been going to for thirty years. The week before there were no mushrooms and there they were everywhere,” he continued.
Sophie Le Tan had disappeared a little over a year earlier, on September 7, 2018, the day of her 20th birthday, while going to visit an apartment near Strasbourg, and the extensive searches by the police and the numerous beatings of citizens did not couldn’t find her.
Accompanied by his wife and his daughter, a policeman by profession, the pensioner, who came to testify on Thursday, will first find, at the foot of an embankment, a skull without a lower jaw and a humerus in a shallow pit covered with stones and branches.
The family warns the gendarmes, accompanies them to the place, then, after an hour of searching around, is authorized to leave the place and continue their walk. The man and his wife decide to go near an apiary, another place known for picking mushrooms, 450 meters away. They then discover human ribs.
“I was able to bring Sophie back to you”
“Since that day, every day I think of this girl who could be my daughter. Today is a culmination for me, because I was able to bring Sophie back to you, ”explained, moved, the pensioner. Despite intense searches, the investigators did not find any bones in other places.
Tried for murder, therefore for having premeditated his act, Jean-Marc Reiser denies having set a trap for the student, evoking having “lost the pedals” when she rejected his advances. He punched and kicked her to death in a “state of rage”, in his words, and then disposed of the body by dismembering it with a hacksaw.
The condition of the body parts found, which had therefore remained in the forest for more than a year, did not make it possible to determine the cause of death or whether the young woman had been the victim of sexual violence.