Featured Image Credit: France 2/Supplied
Topics: Crime, Police, World News
Emily Brown
A French serial killer appeared as free as a bird as he featured on a TV quiz show while evading justice for his horrific crimes.
Retired police officer François Vérove appeared on the French show Tout le monde veut prendre sa place (Everyone Wants to Take His Place) in 2019, when he entertained the audience by working his way through the general knowledge questions.
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On the show, footage of which was uncovered by the news magazine Marianne, Vérove chatted casually with presenter Nagui Fam about his work in the police, apparently not concerned in the slightest about the fact he was broadcasting himself to the country.
While to viewers he just seemed to be another contestant, Vérove was actually evading justice in multiple cases of rape and murder of children and adults in the 1980s and 1990s.
Detectives had a description of the perpetrator in the case and a strong belief that the suspect was a police officer, as victims reported him showing a police badge.
The perpetrator was described to officers as Le Grêlé (The Pockmarked Man) due to his acne-marked face, The Times reports.
Decades after the killings, investigators attempted again to solve the case when they identified 750 police officers based in Paris at the time of the murders and asked them to provide a DNA sample.
Police were able to link Vérove to the crimes through the sample, confirming he had been the killer they had been looking for since the death of 11-year-old Cécile Bloch in 1986.
Vérove's other victims included 38-year-old Gilles Politi and 20-year-old Irmgard Müller, who were both killed in Paris in 1987.
Vérove is known to have raped at least two other children, and is suspected of having committed a total of up to 31 murders and rapes until 1994.
However, before police were able to convict Vérove, he took his own life in 2021.
He left behind a note which claimed he had 'carried a mad rage that made of [him] a criminal'.
“There were times when I couldn’t stand it and I had to destroy, sully, kill someone innocent," he wrote.
Patricia Tourancheau, the author of Le Grêlé: Le tueur était un flic (The Pockmarked Man: The Killer Was a Cop), has expressed belief that Vérove's appearance on the quiz show was a 'form of provocation'.
“It’s unbelievable?," she wrote. "Why? Because we know that he is a serial killer and there he looks like an ordinary person. It’s stupefying to see him take part in the game and defy everyone in a sort of way. But at the same time that confirms that big criminals look like ordinary people. They don’t have monsters’ heads.”