The story is incredible. “Le Grêlé”, a serial killer and rapist hunted for around thirty years, participated under his real name, François Véroveon the show “Everyone wants to take their place”, broadcast on France 2 on May 13, 2019.
Facing Nagui, far from imagining who was in front of him, the candidate explained his career in the police then got the two questions wrong, relating to the breakdancing event at the Olympic Games and the acronym for tuberculosis vaccine.
This surreal sequence (from 12:30) was exhumed by Mariannefollowing the program “L’heure du crime” from RTL of February 26, in which the journalist Patricia Tourancheau, author of the book “Le Grêlé: the killer was a cop”, revealed that the wife of François Vérove declared having never been aware of his dual personality.
According to her, he would not have never gave the feeling of wanting to protect his identityhence his appearance on the game show in 2019.
Suicide after 35 years on the run
The 59-year-old retired gendarme and police officer committed suicide in a rental apartment in Grau-du-Roi, in the Gard. He was found dead on September 29, 2021, five days after his summons for a hearing as part of the investigation into “Le Grêlé”.
A test confirmed that his DNA matched the genetic profile found at several crime scenes, confirming that he was indeed the serial killer and rapist hunted for 35 years for five crimes committed from 1986 to 1994.
In his Gard apartment, François Vérove had hung his identity card and a sheet on a piece of furniture in the kitchen on which he indicated that he had committed suicide.
He had left a second, longer letter. Without recognizing that he was the “Grêlé”, he spoke of his “impulses” at the time of the events and explained that he had ended his life to avoid bringing shame to his family.
His letter did not mention any specific facts about the crimes of which he was suspected, rather it was a letter of general repentance. François Vérove affirmed that his wife, met in 1984, “had noticed things about his past.”
Years after the identikit
Did he commit crimes other than the five for which he was wanted? The ex-gendarme extended in his letter his “impulses” until 1997three years after the last package attributed to “Grêlé”.
He was notably suspected of having killed and raped little Cécile, 11 years old, found dead in the basement of her building in the 19th arrondissement of Paris in May 1986, and of having strangled a couple in the Marais district in 1987.
At the time, a robot portrait had been widely distributed in the media, representing a man aged around 25, 1.80m tall with brown hair, a pockmarked skin on the face due to traces of acne.
François Vérove was also suspected of a fourth murder, that of Karine Leroy, 19, who disappeared in June 1994 in Meaux in Seine-et-Marne.
This case was one of the oldest unresolved cases of “36”, the Parisian judicial police.