Chronicle of the murder of a Spanish girl in rural France

Evil breaks in when no one expects it, it hits who least expects it.

One day, a 14-year-old girl leaves school at one in the afternoon to go home for lunch and says goodbye to the person in charge of guarding the front door.

-Bon Appetite.

-Bye.

The guard, Valmont Zanardo, remembers that he checked the notebook that the students carry with their schedules.

He authorized her to come in after checking that he had finished his morning classes.

He was one of the last people to see her alive.

"You say to yourself: 'If he had spent one more minute checking his notebook or if we had talked for a moment'...", Zanardo will say a week later.

"Who knows".

The school is located on the edge of Tonneins, a municipality of 9,000 inhabitants in the south of France, and the teenager walks towards the center, like every day.

She crosses the bridge over the train track.

She continues along the avenue parallel to the track and passes in front of the old station.

She turns left.

In rue Lamaison, a man forces her into his car.

He takes her to an undetermined place.

He rapes her.

He strangles her.

She drives along the roads that crisscross farmland between Bordeaux and Toulouse, on the banks of the Garonne and Lot rivers.

She parks in front of an abandoned house along the secondary road, 10 kilometers from Tonneins.

She leaves her body inside and goes to her house in Marmande, the most populous municipality in the area.

It is Friday, November 18, and there is a family in Tonneins that is worried: Vanessa's mother;

the mother's partner, who played father to the little ones, and her brother and sister, Boris, 12 years old;

Sara, 10. They are Spanish-Colombian, they have been in France for a year, they still do not speak French well.

Vanessa plays the violin.

Boris belongs to the local

bike club .

This is a story of a France that is not quite rural, nor quite urban.

It is what some geographers call peripheral France: towns surrounded by shopping centers and fast food restaurants, roundabouts where the revolt of the yellow vests broke out four years ago, these Frenchmen who felt despised by the elites of the big cities and Paris.

It is also a land of immigration.

Decades ago it welcomed Italians, Portuguese, Spanish.

Now, to Latin Americans.

"Many work in agriculture, they are formidable," says Dante Rinaudo, the son of Italians and mayor of Tonneins.

Some passed through Spain before.

Vanesa's mother —the last name has not been disclosed— was born in Cali (Colombia), she arrived in Granada at the age of seven, she grew up there, her children were born there.

In the summer of 2021 they moved to Tonneins.

A Colombian couple from the town explained that they had met her mother working in the strawberry fields.

A woman cries over Vanesa's coffin, this Friday during a mass celebrated in the French town of Tonneins.CAROLINE BLUMBERG (EFE)

"Vanessa came to our house in search of a better life and was the victim of a savagery, of an act that leaves us without a voice," the priest said at a mass on Friday in the Tonneins church.

The afternoon and night of November 18 must have been long for that family at the Tonneins gendarmerie barracks, where they had gone to report Vanessa's disappearance.

Thanks to the dozens of video surveillance cameras in the streets, the gendarmes located the image of the kidnapping on Rue Lamaison and recorded the vehicle's license plate, which allowed them to locate the owner.

His name is Romain Chevrel, he is 31 years old, he has a five-year-old son and another one who is months old, according to the local newspaper

.

At the age of 15, he was sentenced to two weeks in prison for sexual abuse of a minor.

He was not on any register of sexual offenders nor was he subjected to any type of control by the authorities.

After 10 pm, the gendarmes knocked on the door of Chevrel, in Marmande, who told them: "I know why you are here."

He then he confessed.

Chevrel, who enjoys the presumption of innocence, has been charged and is in prison.

The abandoned house is sealed with red gendarmerie tape and an official document with handwritten words is taped to a wooden door: "Kidnapping, rape, murder of a minor."

What does a family of immigrants do with little command of the language, in a strange country and at an ungodly hour, when a gendarmerie colonel announces that their daughter has died?

“When they were given the sad news, you don't have to tell them what state mom and dad were in,” says Annie Gourgue, president of La Mouette, an association for the defense and protection of children.

Gourgue embraced them at that moment: "It is our role: to be there, shake hands, hug, tell them that we will not abandon them."

Since that day in Tonneins, the neighbors warn their young children to watch out when they walk alone in the street and not attend to strangers.

At Vanesa's school, this week parents who until now let them go alone accompany them in the morning and pick them up in the afternoon.

There is no psychosis, but there is prudence.

Everyone remembers recent cases, like that of little Lola in Paris.

There is a difference in the reactions to Lola's death and to Vanessa's.

The confessed perpetrator of the rape and murder of Lola in early October, she was an undocumented Algerian immigrant.

The extreme right did not wait a minute to cry out against immigration and call a demonstration, despite the opposition of the parents of the victim.

The confessed author of the rape and murder of Vanesa is French, and the victim, an immigrant.

There have not been, this time, attempts of political instrumentalization.

No calls for revenge.

Vanessa's remains will be moved to Granada, where she will be buried in the coming days in an intimate ceremony.

The City Council of this city will be in charge of the burial.

The family does not want to return to Tonneins.

Neither go to Spain, explains the mayor Rinaudo, who has initiated the procedures so that they can settle in a French city near Switzerland, where they have relatives.

At the initiative of the

club, a boat has been opened to help them.

The people have turned to them.

They are no longer alone.

“Now they feel strong support from the population, the mayor, the institutions, the school.

This helps them.

Since they are in this whirlwind, I don't think they have had time to think about the situation," says the family's lawyer, Christine Roul, of Spanish and Spanish-speaking origin.

"It will be difficult when things calm down and they realize that he is gone."

On Friday at seven in the evening, after mass, the parents, the brother, the sister paraded in front of hundreds of people in a silent, sober and dignified march.

"Justice for Vanessa," read one sign.

"Never again," read another.

Sara, the little sister, hugged an old doll tightly throughout the journey, without detaching herself from it.

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