Since his spectacular escape from prison, double murder suspect Jean-Pierre Treiber continues to confound police and embarrass the French government, writes Gráinne Harringtonin Paris
HE MAY be France’s most wanted man, but French authorities are beginning to wish he would keep a lower profile.
Since his daring escape from prison on September 8th, double murder suspect Jean-Pierre Treiber has been anything but discreet.
Treiber is accused of murdering actor Géraldine Giraud (36) and her lover, Katia Lherbier (32), in 2004 and burning their bodies at his home in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, southwest of Paris. Their remains were found in a well on his land and their charred possessions were discovered nearby.
The accused was arrested soon afterwards in possession of the victims’ credit cards.
Treiber (47) has been the target of France’s biggest manhunt since escaping from Auxerre prison in a lorry, inside a cardboard box he made in a prison workshop.
It took prison staff seven hours to notice he was missing, causing embarrassment to judicial authorities, particularly when it transpired that another prisoner had escaped in similar circumstances the same day.
The following week, a letter from Treiber was published in weekly news magazine Marianne, in which he proclaimed his innocence and condemned the French justice system. He had included his prisoner ID card as proof of his identity, and the postmark showed that the letter had been posted 12km (7.5 miles) from Auxerre. While hundreds of police officers scoured the forests in the Seine-et-Marne region where Treiber had worked as a gamekeeper before his arrest, popular glossy magazine Paris Matchpublished some of the abundant correspondence he had been keeping with his lover, Blandine Stassart, who had visited him in prison.
The passionate letters describe his life on the run and his happiness at being back in his beloved woods. Treiber, originally from Alsace, began each letter with “Mon harzala”– “my little heart” in Alsatian dialect.
“I am in a very beautiful forest at the moment,” reads one letter. “All the species of trees grow here . . . it’s really nice, the mist with the deer and wild boar.”
A raid at Stassart’s house led to a breakthrough. In a letter written while still in prison, he described a tree in a nearby forest where he promised to carve a heart for her.
As night fell on Friday, October 9th, a team from the elite high-risk police unit, the Raid, staked out the oak tree carved with a heart in the Forêt de Bombon.
Stassart had left a letter for Treiber under the tree earlier in the afternoon, watched by police.
At 9pm, a car arrived at the scene. "A couple of lovers arrived in a car and parked themselves on a path in the middle of the police operation," an officer later told Le Parisiennewspaper.
Forty-five minutes later, the couple left and heavy rain began to fall, uncovering some of the unit’s hiding places. The operation was abandoned.
The following morning, Stassart’s letter had disappeared. According to officials, surveillance cameras mounted in the forest had not recorded anything.
A large network of cameras had also been mounted in nearby villages. Today's Le Figaromagazine features new surveillance images of Treiber walking apparently calmly through the village of Bréau on September 15th and 16th.
As news broke of the existence of the pictures, an embarrassed police spokesman explained that the surveillance system was not monitored in real time.
French interior minister Brice Hortefeux called an emergency meeting with police on Thursday evening, demanding that the source of the leak be rapidly identified. A formal investigation was launched yesterday.