“According to the checks carried out, everything indicates that it is indeed the body of Justine Vayrac. The first findings establish a plurality of blows to the face, including at least one with a blunt weapon, “said Baptiste Porcher, public prosecutor of Limoges, during a press conference on Thursday.
The 20-year-old woman had been missing since Sunday morning after an evening with friends at the “La Charrette” nightclub in Brive-la-Gaillarde, Corrèze. A 21-year-old young man, an acquaintance she met in a nightclub that evening, was taken into custody on Tuesday and confessed to the rape and murder of the young woman on Thursday, before giving indications on the location of the body. He was found by investigators on the suspect’s family property in Beynat, located about twenty kilometers from Brive. The young man was indicted for “rape, kidnapping and murder preceded, accompanied or followed by another crime” and placed in pre-trial detention.
“A punch” given to the home of the young man
“He was confronted with the elements of the investigation, in particular the handbag found burnt near his home, the hearing of a witness who heard the telephone ringing in the car, the traces of blood in the vehicle, those badly cleaned at his home and the fact that he was the last person to have seen her alive, detailed the prosecutor. Faced with this evidence, the defendant admitted a few hours before the end of his police custody, in the presence of his counsel, having killed the victim when they were both at his home and had just come from ‘having consensual sex’.
The young man, a 21-year-old farmer, says, without giving further explanations, that he punched him which would have caused his death. “He would then have taken the body to the forest with his vehicle then would have gone to get an agricultural machine to dig the ground to bury the body there”, specifies the prosecutor. Back at his home, he allegedly tried to clean up the traces of blood and burned the victim’s handbag.
Autopsy and analyzes
“An autopsy and expertise will be carried out as soon as possible to formally confirm the identity of the victim, establish the cause of death, the nature of the violence suffered as well as to verify the possible presence of foreign substances in the blood”, adds the prosecutor.
The young man has never been convicted in the past but had been implicated for the degradation by dangerous means of an agricultural shed, in 2020. He complied with the judicial control measure to which he had been subject, effective until April 2021. Psychiatric and psychological expertise will be ordered to enlighten the justice on his personality.