Shortly after 5.30pm on 16 October 1984, Christine Villemin abandoned her ironing in the newly built chalet that she and her husband, Jean-Marie, had moved into just over a year earlier, and stepped outside.

It was getting chilly. She had given their four-year-old son, Grégory, a woollen hat to wear so he could play on the mound of builders’ sand still beside the house, but it was time for him to come in.

He was not there. Christine jumped into her car and drove increasingly frantically around the small village of Lépanges-sur-Vologne, in France’s eastern Vosges region. No one had seen her son.

It was the start of perhaps France’s best-known unsolved murder case; a tale of twisted family jealousies and festering village feuds, of poison-pen letters, judicial incompetence, false accusations and a revenge killing – a crime that 30 years later would drive a man to take his life.

Christine and Jean-Marie Villemin, centre and right, attend a court hearing following the murder of their four-year-old son. Photograph: Charles Caratini/Sygma via Getty Images

More than 3,000 newspaper articles, 50 academic theses and 15 books have been devoted to the mystery, plus countless documentaries and a six-part TV series. Instantly recognisable, a photo of the little boy, all tousled hair and trusting grin, has haunted a generation.



But more than three decades after it began, l’affaire du petit Grégory could finally be nearing its dénouement.

The boy’s great aunt and uncle, Marcel and Jacqueline Jacob, aged 72 and 73, were arrested in June and placed under formal investigation for “kidnapping and confinement followed by death”. Days later another relative, Murielle Bolle, 15 at the time of the murder, was detained and similarly charged.

“Grégory was kidnapped from his parents’ home and held for a certain time before his death,” the prosecutor in Dijon, Jean-Jacques Bosc, said as he announced the charges. “The investigations and analyses show that several people cooperated together in the commission of this crime.”

Soon after, following the publication of yet more damning criticism of his handling of the case, Jean-Michel Lambert, the retired judge who as a young examining magistrate had led the initial investigation, was found dead at his home, a plastic bag over his head. Police said the evidence pointed to suicide.

Jean-Michel Lambert, centre, taking part in the crime scene reconstruction after Grégory Villemin was found dead in the river in Lépanges-sur-Vologne. Photograph: Patrick Hertzog/AFP/Getty Images

Bound hand and foot and still wearing his woolly hat, Grégory was pulled from the Vologne river four miles (7km) from his home at 9.30pm on the evening of his disappearance, and buried four days later in the local cemetery. “Grégory, my darling, don’t go, come back!” sobbed his mother Christine, then 24. “Why have they done this to you?”

From the beginning, suspicion fell on the family of the boy’s father, 26, whose parents, brothers, aunts, uncles and cousins all lived nearby. Three years earlier, Jean-Marie Villemin had been promoted to foreman at the car parts factory where he worked. Some family members were unhappy about it.

One of the anonymous threatening letters sent to Jean-Marie Villemin. Photograph: Armel Brucelle/Sygma via Getty Images

Ever since, he and Christine had been plagued by anonymous phone calls, from a person clearly familiar with details of their lives that only a relative could know. The Villemins alerted the police and began recording the calls, whereupon they stopped – and the poison-pen letters started.

Many directly threatened “the boss” - Jean Marie was in charge of 20 men - and his family. “I’ll have all your hides,” one letter said. Another read: “I hate you so much, the day you die I will spit on your grave.” The ugliest was the one that arrived the day after Grégory’s murder: “I hope you die of grief, boss. Your money will not bring your son back. This is my revenge, you bastard.”



The investigation into the four-year-old’s murder did not begin well. Lambert, aged 32, in his first investigation and under unrelenting media pressure, made critical procedural errors, failing to secure the crime scene or a full autopsy. Potentially vital evidence would later be thrown out. But in November, Bernard Laroche, a cousin of Jean-Marie, was arrested and charged with murder.

Laroche fitted the bill perfectly: handwriting experts argued he had written two of the poison-pen letters, and his sister-in-law, the teenaged Bolle, told gendarmes she had accompanied him when he drove to the Villemin’s house, picked up Grégory, headed for the river, then “went off with him, and came back alone”.

Bernard Laroche with his wife Marie-Ange Laroche (standing) and his sister-in-law Murielle Bolle. Photograph: Eric Préau/Sygma via Getty Images

Two days later, however, Bolle retracted her story. Against the public prosecutor’s advice, Lambert ordered that Laroche be set free. The case passed from the local gendarmerie to the CID in nearby Nancy – who under Lambert’s direction began, sensationally, to build a case against Christine.

Three locals swore they had seen Grégory’s mother at the post office on the day before his death, when the “revenge” letter had been posted; graphologists argued there was an 80% chance she was the letter’s author; string identical to that used to tie the boy’s hands and legs was found in the chalet’s cellar.

Jean-Marie Villemin in police custody during his trial for the murder of Bernard Laroche. Photograph: Charles Caratini/Sygma via Getty Images

As he had threatened publicly to do, Jean-Marie Villemin, his wife six months pregnant with their second child and now suspected of murdering their first, took his hunting rifle and shot Laroche dead. He turned himself in immediately, and would not be released from jail until late 1987.

Meanwhile Lambert had Christine arrested, charged her with the murder of her son, and placed her in pre-trial detention in July 1985. Freed after an 11-day hunger strike, Grégory’s mother was not fully cleared for eight years, when the case against her was dismissed as “utterly without charge”.

Lambert, dismissively dubbed “le petit juge” for his erratic handling of the investigation, was replaced in 1987, and the case closed in 2001 after DNA tests on a postage stamp proved inconclusive. It was reopened, for further forensic analyses, in 2008 and 2010, but again with no concrete results.

In 2004, Christine and Jean-Marie Villemin were awarded compensation of €35,000 (£32,000) each for the multiple shortcomings of an “entirely failed investigation” that had “denied them the chance of knowing the circumstances of their son’s death” and caused them “personal harm”.

Christine Villemin arrives at prison in Dijon. Photograph: Thierry Orban/Sygma via Getty Images

And there l’affaire du petit Grégory rested – until this summer. The charges against the little boy’s great-aunt and uncle followed modern handwriting and linguistic analysis of some 2,000 letters and voice recordings that led police to conclude their authors were “a man and a woman”, the prosecutor, Bosc, said.

More than 100 witnesses were also interviewed and some 12,000 separate pieces of evidence run through an advanced artificial intelligence programme, AnaCrim, that locates potential suspects at given moments and uncovers inconsistencies in statements and alibis. The Jacobs’ alibis, Bosc said, were “unconfirmed and unsubstantiated”.

Citing sources close to the case, French media have said detectives believe a “clan” around the original suspect, Bernard Laroche, were behind the killing: the Jacobs were his aunt and uncle, Bolle was his sister-in-law.

Lawyers for the accused couple say they strongly deny the allegations. “There is no material proof, nothing,” said one, Stephane Giuranna. Bolle, who similarly denies any involvement, was recently freed but under court supervision after five weeks in jail. She has rejected investigators’ firm belief – and the testimony of a cousin – that she was bullied by the family into retracting her 1984 statement incriminating her brother-in-law.

Many remain sceptical. “They’ve been promising a decisive new development for more than 30 years now,” said the Laroche family’s lawyer, Gérard Welzer. But Thierry Moser, a lawyer for the Villemins, is quietly hopeful that Christine and Jean-Marie may soon learn the identity of their son’s killer.



The recent detective work, he said, is “monumental, and of high quality”. After more than three decades, l’affaire du petit Grégory may finally be ready to yield its secrets.