Monday, Jean-marc Reiser was taken from the Strasbourg remand center to be placed in police custody. The reason ? A potential twist in the case of the disappearance of Françoise Hohmann, which occurred in 1987.
On September 26, 2022, members of a team from the Central Office for the Suppression of Violence against Persons (OCRVP) combed through a small apartment located on Boulevard Victor-Hugo in Strasbourg, in the Hautepierre district. The police intervened at the request of judge Marc Picard, the latter being in charge of the sequestration and concealment of corpse proceedings opened in February 2020 by the Strasbourg public prosecutor’s office in the context of the Hohmann case.
Acquitted despite suspicion
For two days, OCRVP officials had carried out numerous searches and samples that could potentially implicate the then tenant: Jean-Marc Reiser. The suspect, who was a postman at the Poste de la Marseillaise, in Strasbourg, had above all been the very last customer of the seller of vacuum cleaners at home and whose body was never found.
In 2001, he was sent back to the Assizes of Bas-Rhin for the murder of the 23-year-old young woman, but was acquitted despite the suspicions that weighed on him. A final acquittal, in other words legally impossible to challenge for any reason whatsoever.
According to information from our colleagues from DNA, several samples had been taken in Hautepierre’s apartment. Requested by the examining magistrate, an expert had recommended a complete asbestos removal from the premises in order to be able to analyze certain elements of the accommodation, in particular the baseboards and the bathroom siphon, unchanged since the 1980s. In addition, the linoleum and the wallpapers of the time had simply been covered with additional layers.
Difficult to evoke the Françoise Hohmann affair without thinking of the disappearance of Sophie Le Tan. The bones of the student who disappeared in September 2018 were discovered by walkers 13 months later near Grendelbruch, in the forest of Rosheim (Alsace).
Found guilty of the murder of Sophie Le Tan
After eight days of hearing, Jean-Marc Reiser was found guilty of the assassination of Sophie Le Tan by the Haut-Rhin Assize Court of Appeal on June 29, 2023. Sentenced to life imprisonment with a security period of 22 years, exactly like a year earlier at first instance in Strasbourg. He decided to appeal in cassation.
This former Crous executive persisted in arguing before the Colmar jurors that he violently hit the 20-year-old student in a fit of fury while claiming that he did not want to kill her, on September 7, 2018, in his apartment in Schiltigheim. He also refuted any premeditation despite numerous clues showing his intention to attract young women to him by creating bogus rental ads on Leboncoin.