Assassination with a carefully prepared trap to lure young single women looking for an apartment? Or, as he maintains, murder in anger after refused advances?
The jurors, who will be drawn at the start of the hearing at 2:00 p.m., will have until July 5 to try to understand what happened on September 7, 2018 in Schiltigheim, a municipality bordering Strasbourg.
“In any case, he will not tell us the truth” but “the facts are dramatically overwhelming”, considers Me Gérard Welzer, lawyer for the Le Tan family. This one “lives this drama for four years in a catastrophic way and has a lot of difficulty doing the work of mourning, taking into account the atrocious circumstances of the death of Sophie”.
Described by those close to her as a young girl without history, serious and kind, Sophie Le Tan disappeared on her twentieth birthday on September 8, 2018. She had gone to an apartment visit in the morning and her relatives did not more successful in reaching her afterwards. Excluding the escape scenario from the outset, they quickly became concerned.
– Unexpected confessions –
Their calls on social networks, in parallel with the police searches, caused other students to react who had responded to the same rental advertisement, but had never seen anyone arrive: Jean-Marc Reiser would have, according to the investigation, spied on the meeting point from his home, without following up when the young women were accompanied.
Through these testimonies and thanks to the telephone, the trail quickly went back to this man, already convicted of rape in 2003 and acquitted for lack of evidence in another case of disappearance in 2001. The one who has already faced four trials for ‘Assises was arrested on September 15, 2018.
The searches in his apartment show important traces of blood carefully erased and the DNA of the victim on a saw in his basement.
If his explanations will evolve as the interrogations progress, Jean-Marc Reiser will deny being involved in the death of Sophie Le Tan despite the overwhelming evidence, until an unexpected confession in January 2021. That is more than a year after the discovery by walkers of the incomplete skeleton of the student in a forest in Bas-Rhin in October 2019.
If the accused evokes blows and a fall, the state of the victim’s body did not make it possible to determine the cause of death or possible sexual violence.
“There is a before and after these confessions”, considers Me Pierre Giuriato, one of Jean-Marc Reiser’s lawyers, for whom the “systematic denial” maintained for more than two years by his client, very aware of his own record, “was not a position that could be held over the long term”.
The lawyer, who will defend him alongside Me Francis Metzger, hopes that his client will be “in a good mood” to explain the “grey areas” of the case and not “tense over inconsistencies” as it may have been in the past.
– Perpetuity incurred –
After the reading of the summary of “the Sophie Le Tan affair”, the first afternoon of the trial as well as the day of Tuesday will be devoted to the study of the personality of Jean-Marc Reiser, with the testimonies of relatives and former companions.
Raised in Alsace and Lorraine following the transfers of a forest ranger and alcoholic father, the accused, an eternal student after various jobs in a life punctuated by stays in prison, was sentenced in May for witness tampering with regard to of his former companion, who described the beatings and anger that punctuated their relationship.
The sexagenarian, described as “narcissistic” and “very sure of himself” according to experts, has been isolated in pre-trial detention at the Strasbourg remand center for three and a half years. He will be questioned on the merits of the case on Friday.
Judged as a legal recidivism, he faces life imprisonment.
