French cold case: Ex-police officer linked to rapes, murders

By NICOLAS VAUX-MONTAGNY
Associated Press

PARIS (AP) — One of France’s biggest unsolved criminal cases appears to have been cracked. The decades-long hunt for a suspect in at least six rapes and four killings during the 1980s and 1990s led to a former police officer. Prosecutors announced that DNA from a 59-year-old former gendarme who killed himself this week corresponded to genetic traces from the crime scenes. The horrors began with the rape of an 8-year-old girl in 1986. After 35 years of digging, investigators determined that the suspect worked as a gendarme in the Paris region between 1986 and 1994, and summoned 750 current or former officers for questioning this week. One didn’t show up, and was declared missing by his wife,