“The media coverage, which presented me so much as a monster, influenced many people” questioned during the investigation, said the 61-year-old accused, speaking in an unaffected voice.
Asked by the lawyer for the Le Tan family, Me Gérard Welzer, about his feeling of being “a fairground beast”, Jean-Marc Reiser will answer: “Somewhere, yes I have the impression”.
“As soon as I was arrested, I was named as guilty”, launched the one who took more than two years to confess to having killed and dismembered Sophie Le Tan, triggering indignant reactions in the room.
Mask on the nose and in a T-shirt, Jean-Marc Reiser was voluble, speaking with many incongruous details and convolutions, without letting go of the microphone of the glass box of the accused.
“Again, that was not the question, Mr. Reiser”, had to reframe it several times the president of the court, Antoine Giessenhoffer.
Known for his very procedural side, Jean-Marc Reiser, glasses on his nose, still leafed through files and notes before the start of the hearing, devoted Tuesday morning to his personality.
The three long interviews carried out during the investigation with him in prison and those with his relatives revealed a “lonely childhood” in a family damaged by the alcoholism of the father, a “social isolation” with few friends, but also the “high esteem of himself”, of a man “refusing to let himself be cut off” and speaking “with enthusiasm for his university career and pride in his appearance of yesteryear”.
“A tendency to minimize” the violence committed on his former companions was also noted.
“The personality survey is fragmented, it could have been more complete,” criticized Mr. Reiser.
A witness, who rubbed shoulders with him in 2018 via a collective outing site, will evoke “a man alone and offbeat in his questions and in his answers”.
Sophie Le Tan disappeared on her 20th birthday after visiting an apartment north of Strasbourg. Author of the rental announcement, the accused was confused by 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 up the body of the young woman, found in the forest more than a year later.
Jean-Marc Reiser first denied before eventually confessing in early 2021 to having killed Sophie Le Tan and dismembering her. He nevertheless denies having premeditated his act and having voluntarily set a trap for him with this fictitious real estate ad.
