Gregory case: a murder organized by several people ? The prosecutor discusses the latest leads

The Gregory case, named after the 4-year-old boy found dead in the Vosges in 1984, has still not been solved. The investigation continues, progresses, and the prosecutor specifies the preferred lead forty years after the events.

It is 40 years to the day since the body of Grégory Villemin was found lifeless in the Vologne, a river in the Vosges, on October 16, 1984. It is also 40 years since the perpetrators of the crime have been identified and the victim's parents are awaiting the legal outcome of this case. But even 40 years after the events, the investigation continues, assures Philippe Astruc, the new public prosecutor at the Court of Appeal of Dijon, in Côte-d'Or. The magistrate appointed in September 2024 has recovered the Gregory case file and makes it one of his priorities.

“We must work selflessly and do everything we can and must do to work towards revealing the truth” declared the attorney general on RTL, this Wednesday, October 16. While the case file contains more than 17,700 procedural documents, the investigations continue, in particular with the requests for acts regularly filed by the parents of Grégory Villemin. Recently, it has been the use of the technique of DNA kinship or that of voice recognition to identify the crow – or the authors of threatening letters, one of the last of which claims to have murdered the child – who have been requested. If there is no longer “a group of investigators working on “full time” on the case, investigations are conducted on a case-by-case basis on certain points at the request of the magistrate.

The final objective is to find the perpetrator(s) of Gregory's murder. Several people have already been imprisoned or indicted in this case, including members of the child's family: Bernard Laroche who is Gregory's father's cousin, Murielle Bolle, Bernard Laroche's sister-in-law, and the Jacob couple who are the child's great-uncle and great-aunt. The possibility of a family plot, raised at the beginning of the investigation due to obvious jealousy towards the social success of the Villemin couple, would be to this day “the dominant hypothesis” explained Philippe Astruc. It has been “for quite a long time now. It is the one that seems to result quite logically from all the “elements” continues the magistrate who nevertheless refuses to “give names as fodder”.

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“There is not a single author”

While he gives credence to the family lead, the public prosecutor of the Dijon Court of Appeal also confirms the hypothesis of a crime committed by several people: “We are all more or less aware that there is not a single perpetrator. There are, I remind you, about 1,000 appeals that preceded the facts, several letters from the raven. The materiality facts, on the day of the facts, suggests that there is a plurality of perpetrators.”

The possibility of a murder involving multiple perpetrators is suggested by several elements according to the prosecutor, who notably mentions 9 DNA samples that have still not been identified among the case files. However, these elements have been compared with 410 people, 244 of whom are considered to be “close to the investigation,” the magistrate said, in vain. DNA identification could allow for progress in the investigation, however this will not necessarily mean that the perpetrator of the crime will have been identified. It will then be necessary to study “the person's schedule”, a possible motive and determine “what they were doing at the time of the events”, the magistrate qualifies. In addition to DNA traces, numerous interviews have also been and continue to be conducted regularly. And the attorney general remains hopeful that one day someone will provide an answer: “Someone knows [what happened] and hasn't said it, and that seems obvious to me.”

A shared point of view by the lawyer for Gregory Villemin's parents, Me Thierry Moser, who believes that several decades after the child's death, people with information could one day bring it to the attention of the courts, as he said on France Bleu on October 16. “Today, we know, we think we know, we think we know and we certainly know who did what, how, why, in this case. We have convictions, but we have to demonstrate them,” he indicated in February 2024 on BFMTV.

These different hypotheses and the continuation of the investigations leave the door open to a possible resolution of the case, but nothing is guaranteed, warns Philippe Astruc. “We are progressing, I would say, at the same time as science. So this is one of the elements that can allow us to progress. I'm not necessarily saying to “solve” things, he said on RTL. But even without the assurance of having the final word on Gregory's death, the magistrate maintains that “we must continue to work as long as we can, because we owe it to this little boy, we owe it to his parents who are victims.”