A suspect but no victim. A 46-year-old motorist was indicted and imprisoned in June for killing a cyclist in the Eure. Problem: the body of the victim has not been found and the investigators (the gendarmes of the Rouen research section and the Bernay research brigade) are still trying to identify him, the prosecutor’s office said on Wednesday. ‘Evreux.
The case, more than confusing, dates back to mid-May. At that time, a woman presented herself to the Dieppe gendarmerie to denounce a murder committed by her ex-companion two months earlier. According to her, on March 9, this carpenter of Polish origin from whom she had just separated, had called her, “obviously panicked and under the influence of alcohol, to tell her that he had just killed someone. a” by car.
“He had finished her off by hitting her several times with a shovel”
On March 13, his ex-companion confided to him that he had hit a woman who was riding a bicycle while he was drunk, said Wednesday the public prosecutor of Evreux, Rémi Coutin. And to add: “This woman was about sixty years old and looked, in her words, like a tramp. »
The man told him that he loaded the body and the bicycle into his vehicle before hiding them in an embankment and returning with a shovel to bury them. On his return, the cyclist being still alive, “he had finished her off by shoveling her several times before burying her, with her bicycle”, according to the story reported by the magistrate. The carpenter had declared, on May 10, the theft of his vehicle, which had been discovered charred on April 12 on a road.
“But we are faced with a particular situation”
Arrested on June 21, the suspect gave, during his police custody, “two diametrically opposed versions”, still according to the prosecution: first that “of a joke to his ex-partner so that she takes him in pity and come back to live with him”, before explaining that he had “well hit a cyclist”, but that “this one had recovered and was able to leave”. Eventually acknowledging that he had set fire to his vehicle himself, he “was walled in silence” when the investigators asked him why.
Indicted on counts of “murder, concealment of a corpse, destruction of evidence and false denunciations”, the carpenter was then placed in pre-trial detention and has not since filed an application for release. “But we are faced with a particular situation since we do not have a body, nor do we have an identity as to the supposed victim”, underlined Rémi Coutin. Searches in the area of the accident and the burial of the body turned up nothing. “It’s unheard of in 23 years of practice,” added the prosecutor, who therefore launched an appeal for witnesses convinced that the crime “took place”.
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