Accused of the rape and murder in 1986 of the young Isabelle Mesnage, "the killer of the Perpignan station", Jacques Rançon, will be sent back to the Somme assizes in June, we learned from a judicial source on Wednesday, confirming information from Courrier Picard.
The body of this young 20-year-old computer scientist was found on July 3, 1986 in a wood in the town of Cachy, a village in the Somme, a dozen kilometers from Amiens.
Her clothes were partially torn and objects belonging to her were scattered not far from her.
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Did Jacques Rançon confess all his crimes?
For lack of convincing evidence, the investigation had stalled until a dismissal pronounced in February 1992. After having long denied, Jacques Rançon had ended up confessing the rape and the murder of the young woman in June 2019, during 'police custody in Béziers, where he is being held.
This would be his fourth known crime.
His fourth known crime
This 59-year-old former warehouse operator was sentenced in March 2018 to life imprisonment with a safety period of 22 years for the rapes and murders of Moktaria Chaïb, 19, and Marie-Hélène Gonzalez, 22.
Two crimes committed in the district of Perpignan station in December 1997 and June 1998. He had already been convicted by the Somme Assize Court in January 1994 for a rape committed two years earlier.
During this custody, Rançon had admitted having kidnapped the young woman while she was hitchhiking.
He had then "hit, raped before strangling her" then "attacked her body with the same modus operandi as that which will be used for his future victims", indicated the Amiens prosecutor's office at the time.
The victim's family lawyers, intrigued by the similarity of the modus operandi, had made it possible to relaunch the case.
"The photograph of the crime scene, which was a true copy" of those of Moktaria Chaïb and Marie-Hélène Gonzalez, "was a trigger", then declared Me Corinne Herrmann.
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The investigation also showed that Rançon was living in the region at the time, that he knew "particularly well [...] the discreet places existing in the surroundings" and that "the place of the facts was located in a geographical proximity of the place" of the 1992 rape.