Her bruised body was found lying in the water of a Loiret river in 2008. No one had since been really implicated for the murder of Caroline Marcel, a 45-year-old mother, strangled and suffocated by her killer.
Until Tuesday and the placement in police custody in Toulouse (Haute-Garonne) of a 34-year-old man who was a landscaper in the Orléans region (Loiret) at the time of the events.
The man must be presented to a judge on Friday for indictment.
Here is what we know about this affair which remained unresolved for more than 15 years.
Discovery
On June 23, 2008, children present at a picnic by the river, in Olivet, in the south of the outskirts of Orléans, discovered the body of the forty-year-old, divorced, who lives alone with her daughter aged one decade.
Quickly, the connection was made with the report by a worried ex-husband of the disappearance of a woman, who had gone jogging after dinner as she was accustomed to: Caroline Marcel did not come to pick up her daughter at the school.
An investigation is opened and entrusted to the DIPJ of Orléans.
Wound on the head, marks around the neck, bruises... The marks left on the victim's body allow us to imagine the ordeal endured by the mother in her last moments of life.
Putting up resistance to her attacker, Caroline Marcel was violently hit in the head.
She was thrown to the ground, tackled and strangled.
“We have a wound on the skull which is quite linear, clear, which is a bit like a burst.
There, we necessarily have the use of an object.
We will find strangulation marks, which indicates that we tried to strangle the person with a link”, explained years later Bernard Marc, forensic doctor in the show “Non Élucidé”.
“The woman died the day before by strangulation and suffocation before being placed in water,” indicated for her part the public prosecutor of Orléans, Isabelle Toulemonde.
Who are the suspects?
The DNA samples taken from the crime scene and from the body of Caroline Marcel were long considered unusable.
Initially, as reported by “Non Élucidé”, the victim’s relatives suspected her companion.
Described as violent towards the victim, angry, jealous, the man was about to be left by the jogger, who had even given herself a ring to make him believe in a new relationship.
But the jewel was never found.
Nothing in the investigation made it possible to implicate this companion.
There was also this connection made with another case that occurred barely 100 kilometers from Olivet: Marie-Christine Hodeau, a 42-year-old jogger, was murdered in Essonne more than a year after the discovery of the body of Caroline Marcel .
On September 28, 2009, Marie-Christine Hodeau was kidnapped while jogging near Milly-la-Forêt.
While she is sequestered in her captor's trunk, she manages to contact the gendarmerie: she describes her attacker and gives her license plate to the gendarmes.
The conversation is abruptly cut off.
Thanks to this information, the military follows the trail of Manuel Da Cruz, a 47-year-old repeat offender, released from prison in 2007 after serving a sentence for the rape of a teenage girl.
In police custody, the suspect confesses and leads investigators to the body of Marie-Christine Hodeau: she was hit in the head and raped.
In 2011, Manuel Da Cruz was sentenced to life imprisonment.
But there is nothing to implicate him in the death of Caroline Marcel.
Over the years and to no avail, six people were arrested in connection with this affair and then released.
Towards a resolution, fifteen years later?
At a standstill, the case was taken over by the Nanterre cold cases center (Hauts-de-Seine) in June 2022. Shortly before that, the national police had published a call for witnesses in January 2022, recalling the facts and broadcasting the photo by Caroline Marcel.
[#AppelATémoins] On June 22, 2008 around 8:00 p.m., Caroline Marcel went out for a jog in the #Orléans region, her body was discovered the next day in the river.
pic.twitter.com/xcLBj61hsd
— National Police (@PoliceNationale) January 31, 2022
According to information from BFMTV, the suspect arrested Tuesday lives in Ariège.
Father of a family and currently unemployed, he is already known to the police and justice services due to a sexual assault committed when he was 15 years old, in 2005. He worked as a landscaper around Orléans (Loiret) at the time of the murder of Caroline Marcel.
It was a new examination of the seals and a new DNA analysis which would have made it possible to trace his trail.
The suspect could be indicted on Friday.