“Individual rents F1 1/2 in Strasbourg (…) rent plus charges 350 € including tax, eligible APL (…) Would suit a student”.
This advertisement, posted by Jean-Marc Reiser on a specialized site, is one of the centerpieces of the accusation against him, proof according to her of the trap intended to attract young women to his apartment and one of the elements attesting to the premeditation in the assassination of Sophie: the young woman had responded to it and had an appointment to visit it on September 7, 2018, the day of her disappearance.
Audrey had spotted her too, on August 18th. The young woman, now 25, was then looking for accommodation for the start of the academic year.
The text “was not very precise, there were no photos. I sent a message and had an exchange” with the rental company, the young woman told the court, who spoke in videoconference.
– “Bizarre” –
“I asked him a few basic questions” but “the systematic answer was that I would see once there,” said Audrey, who adds that she found it “weird”.
Another strange point, his interlocutor, “fleeing”, does not give him an appointment at the apartment but “in the sector”.
Surprised by this way of proceeding, she goes to the appointment, fixed two days later, with her boyfriend. But once there, no one comes, despite Audrey’s reminders.
At that moment, “my boyfriend said to me: Imagine if it’s a false announcement with bad intentions”, recalls Audrey, who will see the announcement of Sophie Le Tan’s disappearance on Facebook a few weeks later and will go to the police station.
Absent on Thursday for medical reasons, Zehra also responded to the same announcement in early August.
According to the report of her hearing before the investigators, read by the president of the assize court, she exchanged with a certain “Pierre”, who offered to rent the apartment left vacant by his daughter.
After two missed appointments, Zehra comes to the third on August 13 with a little delay, but having warned “Pierre”, who will never show up, says the young woman, now 29 years old.
A little later, she will come across another ad, also written by Jean-Marc Reiser and whose telephone number, different from the first, will turn out to be the same as the one offered to Audrey.
At the appointment that she ends up getting, again, no one comes. In the building where she entered, residents tell her that no apartment is for rent. Furious, she leaves, not without leaving a volley of insults on the renter’s answering machine.
There followed an exchange of text messages lasting several days between Reiser and the young woman, a sort of unhealthy attempt at seduction between the two correspondents to which Zehra put an end.
– “Couch psychoanalysis” –
Reiser describes himself as an “annuitant” with a “sporty look”, offering to offer him free accommodation in exchange for an “extra once or twice a month like couch psychoanalysis”.
While on trial for murder, he denies having premeditated his act and having set a trap with this false announcement.
He had initially claimed to have met Sophie by chance in the street. She would then have been injured in one hand and Reiser had offered to come to his house to treat her.
A scenario undermined by two neighbors of the accused, who met the student in the building on September 7 and assured that she was “not injured” and that she was “alone”.
At the helm, the latter also mentioned the pestilential smell and the presence of flies in the garbage room of the building a few days later.
Surrounded by the evidence, including the telephone, significant traces of blood erased in his apartment and the DNA of the victim found on the handle of a hacksaw which was used to cut the body of the young woman, Jean -Marc Reiser ended up confessing in early 2021 to having killed Sophie, found in the forest more than a year after her disappearance.
