“Hail” case: what we know about this ex-gendarme and serial killer, wanted for 35 years – LCI

In a posthumous letter found near his body in an apartment in Grau-du-Roi on Wednesday, he says he was “taken in hand” over the past 25 years, a period during which he would not have “nothing done”. After taking his own life on Tuesday, François Vérove, 59, was identified as “Hail”, a serial killer and rapist wanted since the 1980s, the Paris prosecutor’s office said Thursday evening.

According to the first elements and testimonies collected in the wake of this revelation, the retiree, apparently without history and regularly described as charming and helpful, has lived above all suspicion during these four decades. What do we know about him?

“He is someone who was courteous, sympathetic” and “who liked the rules to be respected”, reports in particular to the microphone of LCI Jean-Marc Lussard, former mayor of Prades-le-Lez who rubbed shoulders with “Le Grêlé” for five years, period during which this denier lived with his companion in a large house that he had built . “As I was mayor, I had access to the building permit to instruct and authorize him. As the house was relatively original, I had noticed it”, remembers the elected official who subsequently offered to join his list for the 2014 municipal elections. “I met him in the village through the police and finally while talking he ended up agreeing to be on our list”, Jean-Marc Lussard further details, stressing that it was “a multi-opinion political list” with “the widest possible social panel” and that François V., “rather on the right”, represented by its functions “a certain class of society”.

In this town of 5,000 inhabitants very close to Montpellier, “There were resignations, and he joined the board in 2019. He had no particular function, except that he liked everything that is social networks, he was in particular in charge of list communication “, further details the former mayor on RTL describing a man forced to lean on a cane to walk. And to specify: “By plunging back into my memories, it is true that he was not demonstrative about his previous life. He always made it clear that his past was not talkative”.

François Vérove subsequently moved in 2019 to the neighboring town of La Grande-Motte. “To get closer to the sea with his wife”, he had settled in the Goélands district. Always invested in local and community life, he organized a meeting to create a support system between neighbors. “This summer we saw him go by with his electric bicycle with big wheels, he was pulling a small trailer in which his grandchildren took place to go to the beach” explains one of her neighbors to Parisian.

Victim of a motorcycle accident on his way to work, the man who had left the gendarmerie in 1988 to become a police officer had retired in 2019. Between 1983 and 1988, then a gendarme, he was stationed in the cavalry of the republican guard. He notably worked in Île-de-France during the period when the murders and rapes were perpetrated before joining the national police after his passage in the army. The latter was then a biker, a member of the miners’ brigade before becoming a union delegate.

Denis Jacob, union police officer, was his superior between 1995 and 1999 and provides the microphone of LCI “that nothing had been able to suggest” that François, “a professional friend”, could have committed these crimes. He describes “a particularly nice boy who could get angry easily” but also “very tormented” with “a very complicated period between 1995 and 1999” punctuated by sick leave, particularly due to depression. “Frankly with hindsight I ask myself a lot of questions: was his psychic state related to the horrible acts he committed or is it his state which pushed him to commit his acts ? “, openly questions his former superior.

According to information from Free noon, he justifies himself in his letter of confession, explaining that he had “impulses” at the material time. He explains in particular having had problems in his childhood, the cause of these murders and serial rapes. Meeting his wife and having children would have “appeased his demons”, since he assures that he has not acted since 1997.

“On the robot portrait you are showing I absolutely do not recognize François V.”, moreover took the liberty of specifying his former superior Denis Jacob to justify, in part, that “the affair dragged on all these decades”. And to underline that he does not remember that he “had a stung face”, whereas it is this distinctive sign which has nevertheless earned it its nickname in the press of “hailed”.

In 1986, after the first homicide, a robot portrait had indeed been widely circulated in the media, representing a man aged about 25, measuring 1.80 m with brown hair, pockmarked skin on his face because of traces. acne. To attract his victims, he was said to be showing a map and police equipment (weapon, walkie-talkie, handcuffs) before suffocating and tying them up. Investigators also knew he was looking for a man who drove a white vehicle, presumably a Volvo.

They had been on his trail for thirty-five years when François Vérove killed himself in an Airbnb rental in Grau-du-Roi, taking care to empty his accounts beforehand, on the eve of a summons to the police station for a DNA sample. According to several media, the father says in his letter of confession that he felt wanted by the police.

The judicial information concerning “the hail” has as a reminder been opened for “rape of 15-year-old minors, assassinations, attempted voluntary homicide, theft with a weapon, false use and kidnapping and forcible confinement of a 15-year-old minor”, detailed in a statement the prosecutor of the Republic of Paris, Laure Beccuau. The four cases opened for murder concern that of Cécile Bloch, committed on May 5, 1986 in Paris; those of Gilles Politi, 38, and Irmgard Mueller, 20, perpetrated on April 29, 1987 (all three in Paris) and that of Karine Leroy, aged 19, committed on June 9, 1994 in Meaux (Seine-et-Marne ).