A French prosecutor confirmed that DNA evidence has linked a retired policeman to a series of rapes and murders in Paris from 1986 to 1994. The suspect François Vérove, 59, was found dead in a rented apartment in the south of France after taking his own life, with a suicide note apparently claiming to admit to the crimes. Like in the case of the recently-convicted London Metropolitan officer Wayne Couzens, Vérove is believed to have abused his position as a police officer to attack women and girls.

Paris investigators had been undertaking a review of one of France’s biggest cold cases since 2014, that of “le Grêlé”, the Pockmarked Man, who had evaded authorities for 35 years and was linked to six rapes and four murders in the capital, including those of minors, with one victim just 11 years old.

According to Franceinfo, investigators had narrowed down the suspects to someone who had served in the police force or gendarmery, summoning in the past few months 750 men who had been officers in the region at the time of the attacks.

On Thursday, Paris’s prosecutor’s office confirmed that DNA evidence from several of the cases matched that of the former gendarme and policeman named by multiple French media outlets as 59-year-old François Vérove. He was believed to have committed suicide in a rented flat in Grau-du-Roi on the Mediterranean coast after being ordered on September 24th to provide a DNA sample in relation to the crimes. His wife reported him missing on the 27th, with his remains found on the 29th. French media claims that the suicide letter revealed he had admitted to the crimes.

One of his victims was 11-year-old Cécile Bloch who was found raped, stabbed, and strangled to death in the basement of her apartment building on May 5th, 1986. Just a month before, eight-year-old Sarah had said she had been assaulted by a man with a marked face in the basement of a building, strangling her with a scarf and leaving her for dead. However, the child had just lost consciousness. Sarah said her attacker had claimed to be a policeman.

Similarly in October 1987, a man pretending to be a policeman approached a 14-year-old girl and threatening her with a gun, took her to her home and raped her. Eleven-year-old Ingrid was raped in 1994, with her attacker identified as a man posing as a police officer.

Vérove is also believed to have murdered a 20-year-old German au parent and her 38-year-old male employer and killed a 19-year-old woman.

Dider Saban, a lawyer representing the families of the victims, said there are likely more crimes, with judicial inquiries opened for decades including attempted murders, theft with a weapon, kidnapping, and false imprisonment of minors. Indeed, Vérove is reported to have claimed in his suicide note that he had not committed any other crimes after 1997 — three years after the period in question that investigators are currently examining.

The theory that the murderer and rapist was a law enforcement officer had been explored since as early as 1987. The testimony of victims revealed their attacker had claimed to be an officer, had an ID card, and used police terminology, as well as evidence of him using handcuffs and professional methods of restraint to subdue the girls and young women he raped and murdered.

“We had this conviction that he was either an officer or a gendarme, both from the violence he used against his victims and the tactics he adopted,” Mr Saban had told Franceinfo.

Vérove had a varied career in law enforcement, involved in elite roles such as protecting the presidential palace and foreign dignitaries, and belonging to a unit that investigated paedophilia.

The conclusion that a former French law enforcement officer had committed a number of heinous crimes while abusing the trust his victims put in him as a policeman comes as Metropolitan police officer Wayne Couzens was sentenced to a full life term in prison for the abduction, rape, and murder of 33-year-old Londoner Sarah Everard.

The prosecution had determined that Couzens, who had planned in advance to attack a woman on March 3rd, had pretended to be working undercover enforcing coronavirus lockdown laws when he stopped Miss Everard on the street, showed her his badge, handcuffed her, and forced her into his unmarked car before driving her away to rape and murder her.