He had however admitted his murder in 2019. Jacques Rançon, sentenced Saturday to 30 years of criminal imprisonment with a 20-year safety sentence for the rape and murder of Isabelle Mesnage in 1986, appealed, indicates one of his lawyers.
"This is not his usual way of doing things: he has a tendency to assume, but on this one (this crime, Editor's note), he gets stuck," said Me Xavier Capelet, while his client has already been sentenced to life imprisonment in Perpignan in 2018 for the murders and rapes of two women in 1997 and 1998.
His criminal record includes five other convictions, including one for a rape committed in 1992. The former driver was this time convicted by the Somme Assize Court for the rape and murder of Isabelle Mesnage, a young computer scientist from 20 years old, discovered dead in the summer of 1986 on the edge of a wood.
"We are quite surprised to see to what extent we have been able to evade certain material elements of this file to condemn it", estimated his lawyer.
Read alsoBehind the murder of Isabelle, 20, the shadow of the "killer of Perpignan"
In 2019, Jacques Rançon nicknamed the “killer of the Perpignan station” had confessed to having raped and killed the young computer scientist before mutilating her body, during his seventh custody hearing, then before the examining magistrate.
He then retracted in writing.
During his trial in Amiens, he consistently denied having committed this crime.
"We need certainties and not assumptions"
Advocate General Anne-Laure Sandretto had drawn up on Saturday the portrait of a man "in reinforced concrete who has no emotional vibration", "unfathomable", "silent" and "dangerous", passing "from a banal life to a life of horror when he is unleashed by his impulses ”. In front of an impassive defendant, his head lowered in his box, she detailed the list of "charges", in particular the place of the facts, "hunting ground" of Jacques Rançon, close to his home at the time, a place that he “knows perfectly” and where he has “already made two known victims”.
The Advocate General had also noted the "concordance" between the disappearance of Isabelle Mesnage and the schedule of the accused that day. As for the "mode of operation", she recalled the "similarity of the wounds" inflicted on Isabelle Mesnage, Moktaria Chaïb and Marie-Hélène Gonzalez, the two victims of Perpignan. “We would like to condemn Jacques Rançon on similarities, hypotheses. But it would take certainties and not assumptions, "retorted Me Xavier Capelet, defense lawyer.
