Murder of Jonathan Coulom: 17 years after the facts, a German serial killer indicted

Martin Ney, a German detainee already convicted of the murder of three children, was indicted on Monday January 25 in the evening for the kidnapping and murder of Jonathan, 11, in April 2004, whose body was found in a pond near Guérande (Loire-Atlantique).

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Aged 50, Martin Ney was handed over to the French authorities last Friday.

He was indicted for "murder of a minor under 15 and arrest, kidnapping and sequestration, or arbitrary diversion of minors under 15," said the Nantes prosecutor's office.

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Jonathan, originally from Cher, had disappeared during the night of April 6 to 7, 2004 from a holiday center in Saint-Brévin-les-Pins.

His body had been discovered on May 19, tied up and weighted with a cinder block, in a pond near Guérande, 25 kilometers from the place of the kidnapping.

He would have celebrated his 28th birthday on April 29.

A European arrest warrant was issued against Martin Ney in October 2019. The hypothesis of his responsibility was, among others, explored for a long time by investigators and this track was relaunched in April 2018 by indirect confessions , between inmates.

Martin Ney's fellow prisoner then claimed to have taken the confession of this criminal, already sentenced to life in 2012 for the murder of three children in northern Germany.

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According to Me Catherine Salsac, lawyer for Jonathan's mother,

"the investigators had found similarities between the operating methods"

but the procedure

"accelerated"

after his confession to his fellow prisoner.

"The man in the mask"

Born December 12, 1970, Martin Ney, was, until his transfer to Nantes, imprisoned in Celle, in Lower Saxony (north-western Germany) where he was serving a life sentence for the murder of three boys.

Dressed in a jacket and a black hood during his acting out, Martin Ney was nicknamed "

the man in the mask"

by the German press.

Arrested in 2011 in Hamburg, following a wanted notice, he was sentenced the following year to life imprisonment with a 15-year prison sentence, for the murders of three boys aged eight, nine and thirteen, between 1992 and 2001. He admitted the facts.

Martin Ney used his job as an educator to come into contact with his victims.

He had abducted these three boys from a boarding school, a rural school, and a settlement in the Bremen region before killing them.

He was also found guilty of sexually abusing 40 boys, according to the

Bild

daily

.

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Jonathan had disappeared barefoot and probably dressed in his only vacation center pajamas, in the middle of the night.

On the morning of April 7, 2004, his comrades found his bed empty, with all his belongings in the dormitory.

Found six weeks later, his body bore no traces of beatings or sexual violence.

He would have been killed by "suffocation", according to an expert report.

2300 DNA tests performed

The main lead available to investigators was a DNA trace found on Jonathan's bed.

Some 2,300 DNA tests have been carried out in order to find his killer and the DNA trace had even been disseminated to Interpol, to no avail.

In 2008, the gendarmerie and justice had launched a dedicated website, www.dossierjonathan.fr, to try to relaunch the investigation into this unsolved case, counting on this tool to

“wake up memories”

four years after the fact.

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Several calls for witnesses had been launched and the gendarmerie had created a special cell - called cell 44 - in charge of the investigation into the kidnapping and murder of Jonathan.

About twenty investigators worked simultaneously on the file.

The French aspect of the Martin Ney affair is closely followed by the German media.

"Is one of Germany's worst child killers responsible for the death of a boy in France?"

, wondered Saturday the daily Bild.

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