François Vérove
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François Vérove (22 January 1962 - 29 September 2021) was a French police officer and serial killer nicknamed Le Grêlé ("The Pockmarked Man"). He was linked to four murders and six rapes in Paris in the 1980s - 1990s.
Biography edit
On 5 May 1986, 11-year-old Cécile Bloch was abducted just after leaving her apartment on the way to school. The apartment building was searched and Bloch was found, naked, in the basement wrapped in a carpet, having been raped, stabbed and strangled. Several residents of the building remembered seeing a man with a pockmarked face acting suspiciously, including Bloch's brother Luc, who had spoken to the suspect in the lift. A composite sketch of the suspect was created based on the description and hung in the local police station.
The unsolved Bloch case was closed in 1992, but was reopened in 1996 for DNA testing. The DNA profile linked the killer to the 1987 double murder of Gilles Politi and Irmgard Müller, who were tied up, burned with cigarettes and strangled, and the 1994 abduction, rape and murder of Karine Leroy. The profile also linked the same killer to six rapes, including an eight-year-old girl who was attacked a month before the murder of Cécile Bloch. Four of the victims reported that their rapist had lured them by claiming to be a police officer, and had possessed authentic police ID and handcuffs, the latter of which he had used to restrain them during the rapes. This lead to the suspicion that the killer was in law enforcement.
After a lengthy investigation, police found that the killer used restraint techniques taught in police training and had committed all his crimes near a Gendarmerie Station, concluding that he was indeed a police officer. In 2021 750 police officers who had been stationed in Paris at the time were ordered to provide DNA samples. One, François Vérove, refused and could not be found when the police came for him. He was reported missing on 27 September 2021. On 29 September Vérove was found dead in a rental property where he had been hiding. He had committed suicide via a barbiturate overdose, leaving behind a note confessing that he had "committed unforgivable acts until the 1990s". His DNA was taken and found to be a match for the DNA taken from the killer.