Bereaved fight for French justice

THERE is no grief so terrible as the loss of a child. Even more unbearable for a parent is to know the child died after being raped or tortured. But when the police don't seem to bother to hunt down the killers, grief can turn to rage.

This is terrain well known to Eroline O'Keeffe, whose son Trevor was murdered in northern France a few months before his 20th birthday in 1987. Meanwhile the body of Paula Jennings's son, Shane McCartan, then 22, was washed up by floods in the southwestern Corbieres area of France in 1994. Neither case has been solved.

On average about 1,500 people are murdered each year in France. Justice Ministry statistics show that approximately 40 per cent of murder cases lead to convictions. There are no statistics available for foreigners, but if the two unresolved Irish deaths and the murders of 24 English people over the past 20 years are anything to go by, crimes against foreigners are rarely solved. Only four of the 24 killings of Britons led to convictions.

Announcing a major overhaul of the French justice system last month, President Chirac said on television. "Justice does not respond to the needs of the French. Many of you find it too slow, sometimes too expensive and difficult to understand." Mr Chirac's appraisal is shared by Eroline O'Keeffe, Paula Jennings and Roger Parrish, an Englishman whose only daughter, Joanna, was strangled and left on a riverbank in Auxerre, central France, in 1990. But rather than suffer passively, these grieving parents continue to fight for justice.

Eroline O'Keeffe works with the Committee for Truth about the Disappeared of Mourmelon. The committee believes that Pierre Chanal, a former warrant officer who was convicted of raping a Hungarian hitch hiker in 1988, could be linked to the disappearance of eight other young men including Trevor O'Keeffe.

Paula Jennings and Mr Parrish have created an informal association to lobby Irish and British authorities and European members of parliament. They are demanding greater European co-ordination in murder investigations, accountability on the part of a country investigating the murder of a non-national, and access to legal assistance and financial aid for families whose loved ones are murdered abroad.

As the families have discovered, investigating a murder in France is financially ruinous. Eroline O'Keeffe, who runs a driving school, has spent more than £20,000 travelling to France several times a year.

"We borrow and try to pay it off before the next time we go back," she says. Mr Parrish has spent £29,000 sterling from his civil service salary. And in the 21/2 years since her son's death, Paula Jennings, a law student, has paid £12,000 for travel, legal fees and phone calls.

MR Parrish has also joined an association of French families from the Auxerre area whose children's murders are unsolved. And he often speaks to other English families who lost loved ones in France, including John Dickinson, whose 13 year old daughter Caroline was raped and murdered during a school trip to Brittany last summer. It helps them just to talk to one another, he says. "It's really only people who've been in that situation who know what you're going through."

When I met her in Dublin, Paula Jennings was carrying a copy of Blackstone's EC Legislation, which she opened on Title VI of the Treaty on European Union, "Provisions on Co-operation in the Fields of Justice and Home Affairs". It says that EU members should co-ordinate their actions. Yet when TD Tom Kitt asked the Tanaiste this month what the Irish Government had done "to ensure that a proper investigation was carried out", Mr Spring answered in writing. "The investigation of the circumstances in which this person tragically died is a matter for the French authorities".

Paula Jennings was disappointed. "This is the kind of answer we would have got 100 years ago," she says. "They're not taking advantage of the EU treaty. We are citizens of Europe and we deserve answers.

Paul Jennings remembers sadly how she gave Shane a perfunctory goodbye hug when she left for a holiday with her two younger sons in September 1994. Shane complained. "That's as good as you're getting," she told him. A few days later, her husband Paddy McCartan almost parted from Shane on bald terms after a row over the telephone. "What are we doing this for, Dad?" Shane said. "Don't you know I love you?" The father and son embraced for the last time.

When Shane didn't call home on his 22nd birthday, Paula Jennings became worried. She waited another week before contacting his friends. On October 24th, 1994, she learned that the French had found a body she travelled to Lagrasse, a small village near Carcassonnne, to identify his belongings. Her son had been dead for nearly three weeks and his body was badly decomposed. His face, jaw and neck had been eaten away by animals and he was identified by the unusual chain he wore around his neck.

According to McCartan's travelling companions, he and another young Irishman had become fascinated with a mentally ill Englishman named Stewart Gibson, who committed suicide seven months after Shane's death. The group stayed at Gibson's isolated home, where they appear to have experimented with drugs and occult rituals. Shane, who was a gifted painter and musician, spent much of his time alone in a nearby cave. Although foul play is suspected, it has not been established with certainty that he was murdered.

THE French investigation into McCartan's death has been unimpressive. In December 1994, the investigating magistrate sent an urgent request for information regarding traces of drugs, including LSD and Datura, a mind altering plant used by cults. It took 13 months for the forensic scientist to write back, noting that it was now impossible to do the tests requested since the bile and urine samples taken from McCartan were more than a year old. Furthermore the French continued to state their intention to question Stewart Gibson long after the Englishman committed suicide. Because the examining magistrate did not speak English, she said she was incapable of obtaining Gibson's death certificate.

French police have shown no interest in evidence which Paula Jennings believes is important to the investigation. One of McCartan's teeth was extracted about 10 days before his death, but there has been no effort to determine by whom or in what circumstances, she says. French police did not take note of the stone circles and burned crosses around Gibson's house evidence of cult rituals. They have also dismissed any connection between McCartan's death and the death of Ilona Mosco, a young German woman, in the same area and in similar circumstances in 1993. Mosco was found with a six pointed star used in devil worship tattooed on her chest.

Furthermore, five unexplained deaths have been linked to the area since 1993. In addition to Mosco, McCartan and Gibson, the forensic scientist working on the McCartan case was mysteriously shot dead, and part of a fifth body was washed up on the Mediterranean coast nearby. "It seems to me that there's an enormous desire not to do anything," Paula Jennings says. "I can't understand why nobody will sit down and talk about this."

Eroline O'Keeffe's experience with French justice was abysmal from the outset. When she and her sister arrived to identify Trevor's body in August 1987, they were told that he had been buried that day, although the police knew they were coming and had even booked their hotel room. It took Irish barristers six weeks to get the French to exhume the body and send it home for burial.

O'Keeffe, the fourth of five children, had hoped to earn money picking fruit in France. "He was outgoing and bubbly and happy and he liked girls and football and running," his mother says. "He was only there for three days when he was murdered." Hitch hiking he unwittingly ventured into the "Triangle of Death" the area around the Mourmelon military camp in north eastern France where six soldiers and one civilian had disappeared since 1980. O'Keeffe's naked body was found 100 kilometres away, buried in the distinctive manner taught to paratroopers.

A FEW months after Trevor's death, Eroline O'Keeffe received a letter addressed to him from Joelle Charnel, a French woman who had found his belongings in a forest and was worried about him. When she notified the French police, Charnel wrote, rather than take an interest in the haversack, tent, birth certificate and FCA registration with O'Keeffe's home address in Ireland, they told her to leave his things in her garage. So she wrote to the address in the documents.

"She was more efficient than the police," Eroline O'Keeffe says. She was also more compassionate. After Eroline O'Keeffe told her of Trevor's terrible fate, Ms Charnel wrote again "I'm very sad for what happened to you. I have three sons and I know life would not be the same anymore if one of them was dead. You must find the person who did this horrible crime.

It enrages Eroline O'Keeffe that the man still under investigation for Trevor's death is free. Exactly a year after Trevor was killed, French police stopped warrant officer Pierre Chanal's Volkswagen van. They heard a moan from under a blanket on the backseat. Chanal had bound Palasz Falvay, a Hungarian student, in such a way that he would strangle himself if he moved. Chanal sodomised his victim for 20 hours if more proof were needed, Chanal's videotape of the assault was found in the van.

When stopped by police Chanal had 33 pairs of men's underpants of different sizes in his van. "Chanal had underpants in his van that I knew were my son's the police said it was a coincidence. They found soil on a spade in his van that corresponded to soil at my son's grave they said it was a coincidence. There was also a handkerchief with Pierre Chanal's initials on it found near Trevor's body. When Trevor's body was found he wore white socks with stripes on the top. They found identical socks in Chanal's van they said it was a coincidence. They lost quite a lot of samples, including hairs they found in the van," says Eroline O'Keeffe.

Pierre Chanal served 61/2 years of his 10 year sentence for raping Palasz Falvay. Although he is still mis en examen or under investigation for Trevor O'Keeffe's murder, French authorities say they do not yet have enough evidence to prosecute him.

Eleven months ago, Roger Parrish and his ex-wife Pauline appealed on the French television crime show Temoin No 1 for information about the murder of their daughter Joanna. They received more than 30 telephone calls, but the French police have not yet followed up on all of these new leads.

"The French investigative authorities seem to have lost the will to do anything about it," Mr Parrish says. He has noticed a difference between police community relations in Britain and France. "In France, there seems to be a barrier between the police and the community. People don't like coming forward."

Like Eroline O'Keeffe and Paula Jennings, he feels he owes it to his dead daughter to keep pursuing her killer. "We were very close. The passage of time doesn't change that."

Eroline O'Keeffe met a high ranking official at the French justice ministry last summer who apologised for the errors committed by the police. In his statement to Tom Kitt on the Shane McCartan case, the Tanaiste said. "I have instructed the embassy in Paris to ask the Ministry of Justice to see whether anything can be done to bring it to an early conclusion". Yet when The Irish Times repeatedly asks the Justice Ministry for comment on the O'Keeffe and McCartan cases, spokeswoman Delphine Vara says. "The ministry cannot comment on such affairs. Tee elements of the cases don't come up this far. It's very decentralised". There was "not really a problem" of unresolved murders of foreigners, Ms Vara adds. "These are classic murders. The judges are diligent. There is special procedure for foreigners.