Hello and welcome to Crime on the Clarkfork, the true crime podcast that only covers cases that happened in areas with populations of 15,000 or less. On this week's episode, I am telling you the story of Little Gregory out of Lépanges-sur-Vologne, France.
Hello and welcome to Crime on the Clarkfork, the true crime podcast that only covers cases that happened in areas with populations of 15,000 or less. On this week's episode, I am telling you the story of Little Gregory out of Lépanges-sur-Vologne, France.
Hello and welcome back to Crime on the Clarkfork, the true crime podcast where I tell you about big crimes that happen in small places with each case having occurred in areas with populations of 15,000 or less. My name is Mackenzie Spence and I am so glad you are joining this week for a case that happened far from my hometown. I hope you are ready for a complex case, because this one takes the cake. I also want to give a trigger warning that this case covers crime against a child, so if that isn’t your jam, I’d tune in next episode insead. Alright, let’s get our notepads out and do this.
The sources for this week’s episode are: map-france.com, The Standard, the Washington Post, the LA Times, BBC, RFI France, France 24, The Local, The Journal, The Guardian, Reuters, The Cinemaholic, L’Est Republicain, Societe
This week, the Murder of Gregory Villemin. Let’s get into it.
Lépanges-sur-Vologne, 1984, population 1,035
Lepanges-sur-Vologne, is a quaint village in Eastern France that sits near the Western border of Germany in a mountainous region. It is considered as deep-rural France where nothing much ever happens.
On October 16, 1984 at 5:26pm, 4-year-old Gregory Villemin was reported missing by his parents, Jean-Marie and Christine Villemin. It was a chilly evening, so Christine had given Gregory a wool hat to keep him warm while he played in the garden beside the house. Christine was in the house ironing and listening to the radio while Gregory was outside playing in the garden, but when she went outside to fetch her son to tell him it was time to come in, he was gone. When Christine noticed that her little boy was missing, she frantically got into the car and drove around the small village that they lived in, but no one had seen her son. She called the authorities 26 minutes after she noticed her son was gone, but not long after he was reported missing, Gregory’s uncle received a phone call from an anonymous caller who stated that the young boy had been kidnapped and then dumped into the Vologne River.
The police sprung into action after this phone call was made and unfortunately, the phone call was true. The little boy was found by firefighters at 9:15pm, 7km from home, drowned in the Vologne River stuffed in a plastic bag, gagged, with his hands and feet bound with rope, and his wool hat pulled over his face. His cause of death was determined to be drowning and contact with the cold water of the river. With that being said, experts have not been able to agree on if Gregory was drowned in river water or tap water since there were no microscopic organisms found in the little boy’s lungs that would be expected to be found in the river water. Another discrepancy that came about with the discovery of his body was that there were no signs of a struggle, which would have been expected from a young boy with his hands tied. A couple of days after Gregory was found in the river, the local police found a hypodermic syringe and an empty vial of insulin near the riverbank. Pathologists said that insulin would be something that could have rendered Gregory unconscious, but it wouldn’t have been detectable in the autopsy. Furthermore, none of the pathologists looked for needle marks on the body of the little boy. If this was the case, there is a chance that Little Gregory didn’t put up a fight because he was unconscious when he was tied up and then thrown into the river.
The day after Gregory’s death, on October 17, 1984, Gregory’s parents received a letter in the mail that said “I hope that you will die from sorrow, boss. Even your money cannot give you back your son. This is my vengeance…” The letter was postmarked the day before at the Lepanges post office just hours before the little boy’s body was pulled from the cold water. This was not the first threatening letter that the Villeman family had received from an anonymous author who called himself The Crow. For four years prior to Gregory’s death, hundreds of letters arrived at the Villeman household as well as phone calls from an anonymous caller that were filled with jealousy and anger. The writer and caller often threatened murder in his communications to the family, specifically to Jean-Marie, the patriarch of the family which the Crow called “the little boss”. One of the letters from before Gregory’s death was written to Jean-Marie and said “I hate you so much, the day you die I will spit on your grave”. On top of the letters and phone calls, bricks were thrown through the family’s windows and their tires had been slashed.
On October 22, investigators were able to release a sketch of a man who neighbors had seen lurking around the post office the evening that the crime occurred. The man was said to be around 40 years old, 1.8 meters tall (5 foot 9 inches), with a strong build, and medium length brown hair. The parliament police also determined that this crime would have had to be committed by someone with intimate knowledge of the Villemin family. Due to this, all of the local relatives of the Villemin’s were required to submit a writing sample of the final letter sent by the crow to compare to the final letter.
On top of gathering handwriting from each of the relatives, a reconstruction of the crime was done with a mannequin. After several tests, the police were able to determine that Gregory was not thrown in the water between Deycimont and Docelles, where they presumed he was dumped, but rather in the center of the village, incredibly close to where he was eventually found.
While the handwriting comparisons and reconstruction were being done, a man that claimed to be the person who was seen loitering around the post office on the day of the crime came forward to police to let them know that he was not involved in the crime and was able to exonerate himself. After the police determined he had nothing to do with the case, a second sketch was released based on testimony from a local cafe owner.
Graphological experts (aka handwriting experts) were finally able to make their initial recommendations to police on October 30, 1984. They concluded that The Crow’s handwriting was an 80% match to a family member of the Villemin’s, Jean-Marie’s cousin, Bernard Laroche, but requested more time for analysis to be sure. Laroche was a factory foreman in the town of Lépanges-sur-Vologne who was generally unkempt with a mustache and, according to sources, was often profane. He and Jean-Marie often played together as children, but eventually drifted apart as time went on. Laroche had also been quoted after Gregory was murdered saying that “They’ve paid for what they’ve done. I’m the poor stupid fool, because each time they need me, I come. And they never invite me to their house on Sundays” soon after the murder of Gregory.
Police did not listen to the request of the handwriting analysts and Laroche was arrested and brought in for questioning regarding Gregory’s case. Laroche was able to give an alibi for the time of the crime, his 15-year-old sister-in-law, Murielle Bolle, but not long after she was used as Laroche’s alibi, the investigators found discrepancies in the story the two were telling. Laroche said that he had arrived home that day before Murielle got home from school, but Murielle said that he got home after she did. When the investigators brought up the discrepancies in their stories, Murielle admitted to police that Laroche had actually picked her up from school that day and then picked up a young boy she had never met before. After picking up the young boy, Laroche drove to the river and took Gregory on a walk, leaving her in the vehicle. When he returned to the car, Gregory was no longer with him and he brought her home. Murielle was also able to point out Laroche’s movement on the day of the murder on a map even though the investigators did not tell her which map they provided was of the area that little Gregory was from. Laroche was swiftly arrested and sent to jail based on suspicion that he murdered little Gregory. He was held in jail for three months before he was released due to accumulated evidence that suggested he wasn’t The Crow after all, specifically, Murielle recanting her allegations claiming that she was pressured by police to say Laroche murdered Gregory. She even wrote a book about the case in 2018, in which she stated that the police had coerced her into making the statements that she did at the time.
After Laroche was released, the handwriting test was redone and the judge overseeing the case, Jean-Michel Lambert, then placed the suspicion on Christine Villemin, Gregory’s mother. She had been seen in the post office the day the final letter was sent out, couldn’t remember the song that was on the radio at the time she noticed Gregory had disappeared, and the Villemin’s had rope in their basement that were identical to the ropes that were used to tie up Gregory. With that being said, many people believe that the ropes were planted by police in the home in order to implicate someone, anyone, in the insanely publicized case. With the blame pointed at Christine, the media ran with the story. She was portrayed as an evil witch who hated her husband and even a well-known author went to the Villeman house without talking to the family and wrote an article that pronounced Christine guilty. Investigators also used the fact that she was wearing a “pleasant outfit” to Gregory’s funeral and that her sweater was tight rather than being disheveled with her hair not done. They also said that she was putting on a show at her son’s funeral saying that “It’s a funeral. What can we say about it? I’ve seen a funeral where the only person who cried was the perpetrator.”
This can be seen in other cases as well where the mother is suspected because she is not acting the way that others may find appropriate for grieving, but what I can tell you, with my little knowledge of how grief outside of my own works, is that people react to situations in different ways and that there is no one way to experience grief and no one way to react when tragedies happen. So the fact that they used this against her to try and prove that she is guilty for her son’s murder is absolutely ridiculous.
Anyways, I digress. On the day of Laroche’s release, Gregory’s father vowed to the media that he was going to kill his cousin and as more and more attention was being put on his wife, his anger for Laroche grew. Even with this threat against him, the police refused to offer Laroche any protection and on May 29, 1985, Jean-Marie went to his cousin’s house, calmly waited for him and then shot him outside of his home, killing him as he left for work in front of Laroche’s wife and father-in-law. Jean-Marie then went to his wife and told her that “I did this for you. Don’t you ever forget it.” before turning himself into police for the murder of his cousin, for which, he was then sentenced to 5-years in prison, of which he only served 4. Laroche was buried and on his gravestone reads “Here lies Bernard Laroche, innocent victim of a blind hatred.”
Four months after the murder of Laroche, Christine was charged with the murder of her son. At this time Christine was pregnant with her and Jean-Marie’s second child and went on an 11 day hunger strike to proclaim her innocence. She was brought in for questioning and after the questioning concluded, she collapsed and was rushed to the hospital. She was then released a few days later after a judge ruled that she could not have killed Gregory based on the timeline of events. When she was released, she went to live with her parents, whose house was guarded by police to keep her safe from the public.
I want to stop here to provide some background on the Villemin family. Gregory’s extended family consisted of over 100 aunts, uncles, cousins, grandfathers, and grandmothers. Their family was one that the French call la France profonde or “average people”. This family tended to keep their heads down and punch their time clocks in the area’s many factories, including iron, steel, and textile. The harassing letters and phone calls actually began by being sent to Gregory’s grandfather, Albert Villemin, in 1979. Due to the threatening calls, the police tapped Albert’s phone. Unfortunately, this did not help find the offender as the calls stopped after this happened. The letters did continue to arrive though. The letters that Albert received continually harassed Albert to disown Jean-Marie, Gregory’s father. They also scolded the Villeman clan for mistreating a child born out of wedlock to the oldest Villeman and his wife. At the time of the murder, Jean-Marie was 26 years old and had recently taken a job as a foreman in a car-upholstery factory, which was paying him $15,000 a year, which equates to just over $45,000 a year today. Christine worked in a textile mill and the couple had recently purchased their new $50,000 home in Lépanges-sur-Vologne. Jean-Marie often boasted to others about his new home, pointing out to visitors that his dining room furniture was made of oak and the couches in the living room were real leather.
With that background, prior to Gregory’s kidnapping and murder, let’s get back into the case. After Christine was arrested, she was eventually released and a judge issued an order that forbade her from being prosecuted, which is incredibly rare. Even with this order, it would take 8-years for Gregory’s mother to be cleared of wrongdoing. At the time of Christine’s arrest, the judicial side of the case was a mess. Investigators were bickering amongst themselves. The regular police had suspected Christine the entire time as she was the last person to see Gregory alive, but the parliamentary police thought that this was unacceptable as they placed a lot of importance on motherly love and the bonds that families have for each other. By the time Christine was cleared, 8 years later, her and Jean-Marie had moved away from Lépanges-sur-Vologne and to a town near Paris where they had two children. While the charges were still held against her, Christine had written a book that further declared her innocence in the murder of her first-born, Gregory. After the book was published, a court ordered her to give the proceeds to Laroche’s children.
Even after the charges were dropped, Jean-Michel Lambert, the original prosecutor on the case that was replaced in 1987 due to the unprofessional handling of the case, remained convinced of Christine’s guilt and wrote about it in his autobiography that he titled “The Little Judge”.
When the new judge, Judge Simon, took over the case in 1987, he requested that another reconstruction of the crime be completed to determine the exact place that Gregory was thrown into the river, but unfortunately, this raised more questions than answers in the case, yet again.
In 1993, the case was brought in front of a court in Dijon, France and oh boy, was it a mess. The entire case was full of contradictory testimony. Under something called the Ruyussen Rules, there is no topic that is off limits and witnesses with differing testimonies can be called in to create debates. With this, the judge, jurors, and the defendant are able to join in on questioning the witness. One of the witnesses in the case was Murielle Bolle, who has a new story about the day little Gregory disappeared stating that Laroche did not, in fact, drive her home from school, but rather, she rode the bus that day. The bus driver was also a witness who contradicted Murielle’s testimony saying that she was never on the bus that day and a neighbor to the Villemins testified that they saw a young woman with red hair and a man with a mustache, which describe Murielle and Laroche, outside of the Villemin’s house the day of the kidnapping and murder. Another witness was a nurse that helped treat Murielle’s mother’s diabetes in the early 1980s. She testified that she showed Murielle how to administer insulin in case her mother needed help, but she couldn’t remember if this was before or after the disappearance of Gregory. In this trial, Christine was also brought on as a witness where she was accused of killing her son, yet again, with four out of five handwriting experts claiming that she wrote the letter that was delivered to her and her husband the day after her son’s murder. She continued to denounce the accusations and even went on to say that her coworkers who saw her at the post office the day of the kidnapping were mistaken.
Another person that was of interest at this time was Gregory’s uncle, Michel Villeman, the one who received the phone call from the crow the day Gregory was kidnapped and murdered. The new judge on the case that replaced Lambert believed that two people were involved with the kidnapping and murder, specifically that one person picked Gregory up from his house and another dumped him in the river. On top of this, it has already been stated that they believe that the crow is someone who had intimate knowledge about the family, whether it was a family member or someone who was getting this knowledge from a family member, Michel would be on that list. To take the cake, Michel was very nervous in his interviews with judge Simon when questioned about the kidnapping and murder of the young boy.
The case was closed in 1993 after it had gone cold again after court in Dijon, but was reopened in 2000 when, at the request of Jean-Marie and Christine, DNA was attempted to be retrieved from a stamp that was affixed to one of the letters they had received from the Crow prior to Gregory’s murder. Unfortunately, the DNA was unusable and did not yield any additional evidence for the case. The case was closed again on April 11, 2001.
In 2004, Christine and Jean-Marie Villemin were awarded €35,000 each from the French State due to the failed investigation that caused them personal harm and continued to deny them the knowledge of what truly happened to their little boy.
The case sat cold until July 9, 2008 when a judge reopened the case of Gregory Villemin to attempt to find DNA on the ropes that were used to tie Gregory’s hands and feet up that may point to a culprit in the case. Again, the DNA test came back inconclusive and the case went cold.
The case was again opened in 2009 to test traces of DNA evidence that was recovered from the anonymous letter sent to the Villeman family before Gregory’s death. According to the state prosecutor at the time, the DNA belonged to a man and a woman. The DNA was tested against Christine and Jean-Marie Villeman and it came back as negative for a match. It was also tested against the 150 other protagonists in the case, but nothing was able to be determined.
On September 1, 2012, the voice of the Crow was able to be analyzed as it was finally digitized. Experts listened to recordings of the Crow, obtained from phone call recordings from the hate calls that the Villemins received and they were compared to the voices that could be heard in recordings that were made by journalists during their reporting on the case. The analysts were able to determine that the voice of the Crow belonged to two people, a man and a woman, but were unable to identify either person.
On September 26, 2012, new DNA tests were ordered to attempt to find new evidence in the case. The request for new testing came from Christine and Jean-Marie Villemin, asking tests to be done on Gregory’s clothing and shoes. The court granted their request, which was supported by the public prosecutor on the case. The family’s lawyer was pleased with the decision for more DNA testing since the testing that had been done previously was not as advanced as it now was in 2012. The main goal of looking at Gregory’s shoes and clothing was to search for any minute traces of DNA that may have been left behind by the killer, but again, the DNA analysis brought forward no new clues in the case.
In 2017, Judge Jean-Michel Lambert, the judge who was tasked with the murder of Gregory Villemin in 1984, who was 34 at the time, was found dead in his home with a plastic bag over his head and a scarf tied around his neck. There was no evidence of foul play and it was ruled a suicide. Not long after his death, the local newspaper received a letter from Lambert postmarked prior to his suicide in which he said that he no longer had energy to fight and that he believed that he was going to be used as a scapegoat to save face and he did not want to play that part. Prior to his death, Lambert had admitted to making mistakes in the case and not giving it full attention as it was being reopened in 2017, a few weeks before his death, when new evidence came to light. Even back in 1984 and 1985, Lambert was facing criticism, along with many others on the case, having been accused of procedural errors that caused evidence to be inadmissible in court, inexperience, blocking pathologists from collecting enough samples at the autopsy, and leaking information about the open investigation to the media.
The evidence that was found in the case was in the form of chronological inconsistencies in various testimonies in the initial investigation. In June of 2017, three members of Gregory’s dad’s family were under suspicion of being accomplices to the little boy’s murder and were held by police. The three family members were Marcel Jacob, Gregory’s great-uncle, his wife Jacqueline, both in their 70s, and Muriel Bolle, now 48, who was the fifteen year-old who had accused Laroche of the kidnapping and murder in 1984. Marcel and Jaqueline were placed under a formal investigation for being complacent to the kidnapping of Gregory that resulted in death as well as failing to report a crime or help the person at risk. They were later released from police custody. Muriel was held under similar allegations as Marcel and Jaqueline. She held to the fact that she was innocent and went on a hunger strike that lasted until the day that Judge Jean-Michel Lambert was found dead in his home. There are also sources that say Gregory’s grandmother was also taken in as a witness and his grandfather taken in for questioning. At the time, the prosecutor of the case stated that analysis has shown that Gregory was held for a certain amount of time after his kidnapping before his death and that several people had cooperated to commit the crime.
Prior to the arrests of the Jacobs and Muriel, over 100 witnesses were interviewed and 12,000 pieces of evidence were run through an AI program, AnaCrim. AnaCrim is a software that locates potential suspects at given moments in time to uncover any inconsistencies in their statements and alibis. According to AnaCrim, the Jacobs’ testimonies and alibis were unable to be confirmed and substantiated. On top of this, modern handwriting and linguistic analysis occurred of 2,000 letters and voice recordings that were sent to the Villemins over the 4-year period and it was concluded that the authors were a man and a woman.
With that being said, I want to point to a podcast that I listened to recently that spoke about junk science and how a lot of experts that are called in to testify regarding handwriting, voice analysis, etc. are sharing their opinion rather than concrete fact, so I want to bring that up because a lot of the evidence that I have talked about in this case have to be analyzed by people who give their opinion on who did it rather than something that can 100% be substantiated. If you are interested in listening to that podcast, it is called “You’re Wrong About” and it is the episode from February 20, 2022 called CSI: Junk Science with Josie Duffy Rice.
Anyways, detectives also stated that they believed the culprits were someone who was close to Bernard Laroche, the original suspect. After the three were released, the Jacobs’ attorney stated that the couple denied any allegations against them and they there was no material proof that pointed to them. Similarly, Murielle denies any involvement, but according to testimony from a cousin of Murielle, she was bullied by her family into retracting her statement about Laroche rather than the statement being coerced out of her by police in 1984. Her cousin stated that he was present at the family’s home on the evening of November 5, 1984 and that he heard Murielle being assaulted upstairs by her family members to the point where Marie Ange, her sister, came downstairs with a handful of Murielle’s hair. He also stated that Murielle had confided in him that she saw Laroche kidnap and then hand Gregory over to two people on the day of his murder This is another place where the original judge, Lambert, made a mistake. When Murielle gave her first testimony against Laroche, he leaked her name to the press and sent her back to the Laroche household without any police protection. Murielle denied these allegations about her family bullying her into recanting her statement, but the investigators don’t quite believe her.
In January of 2020, Murielle Bolle’s testimony was officially canceled by the Paris Court of Appeals. They argued that the way the young girl, 15 at the time, was questioned, was against the French constitution. She was questioned without her parents present and did not have access to a lawyer. As of 2022, Murielle is still living in the valley of Vologne and stands with her story that she was pressured by police to give her statement against Laroche.
Also in 2020, a new examining magistrate, which is a type of judge, was put in charge of the case. He held new witness interviews, which caused the case to get kicked back into action. This was because police said that a new tool that they could use to look at the handwriting had been invented in Switzerland, called stylometrics. With this new tool, they would be able to not only compare the handwriting, but also the style, punctuation, syntax, and “turn of phrase” that they Crow used.
Unfortunately, that is where this story ends. The only information that has been released to the public after using the stylometrics was that the method helped investigators identify a suspect in the case who they are expecting to face with criminal charges. As of this recording, the name of the suspect has not been revealed and no further information has been released.
Little Gregory was buried in Lépanges-sur-Vologne with Kiki, his stuffed monkey. The cemetery where his body lies in the church cemetery that is high on a hill, overlooking the river that he was found in. His parents stayed together through this entire ordeal, which, to me, is surprising as many couples split when a tragedy like this happens to them due to the stress and grief that they experience.
As of this recording in February 2024, the Little Gregory case is still unsolved. With key witnesses and suspects growing old and passing away, it is a race against time to find justice for the 4-year-old who had a whole life ahead of him.
As I dug deeper into the case, it seems that the twists and turns never end. You may have heard this story before since it has had more than 3,000 newspaper articles, 50 academic theses, 15 books, documentaries, and a 6-part TV series covering it, but nonetheless, this may be one of the most well-known small-town cases I have heard of. Unfortunately, there have been many people who have created hoaxes in this case as well including a woman in Paris that sent a letter pretending to be the crow to Gregory’s grandparents or someone writing a confession in a church register as Murille Bolle saying that Bernard Laroche actually did kill Little Gregory. As of now, only time will tell.
As always, if you liked this episode, please give me 5-stars on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well as a review on Apple Podcasts. You can listen to this podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts! If you have a case suggestion, please visit the link in the show’s instagram page, @CrimeontheClarkfork. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I will catch you next time with more big crime in small places.