While French police were frantically searching for a serial killer and serial rapist, the perpetrator apparently felt so safe that he even appeared publicly in a quiz. Francois Verove also talked about his police career on the show.
Verove was involved in mischief in the Paris area for decades; his crime spree started in the 1980s. As a police officer intimately familiar with executive branch procedures, his crimes went unpunished for a long time. He probably didn’t feel like he had to hide: a journalist who wrote a book about the serious criminal discovered a television appearance by the serial killer from May 2019.
Colleagues are looking for a murderer – he appears on TV
The serial perpetrator seems like an ordinary quiz guest: an older gentleman, not very striking, but not unsympathetic either. In it, the then 57-year-old also talks about his work in the police – at a time when his colleagues were feverishly looking for the still unknown perpetrator who raped several girls and young women and then murdered some of his victims.
The crimes took place between 1980 and 1994 – after the bloody act against eleven-year-old Cécile Bloch, witnesses recalled seeing a smallpox-scarred man in the house who had noticeable scars on his face. The man he was looking for was then nicknamed ‘Pockmarked’. The police were in the dark for a long time. In 2021, another attempt was made to track down the perpetrator.
The police photo with which the police searched for the “pockmarked man” can be seen here:
Hundreds of police officers had to provide DNA samples
The investigators suspected early on that the person they were looking for might be someone from their own ranks. Verove was also subpoenaed and, like hundreds of other police officers working in Paris at the time of the murder series, was asked to provide a DNA sample. The 59-year-old knew that the police would now track him down. He eventually took his own life in a rented apartment.
After his marriage he stopped killing
Verove left his wife a suicide note in which he justified his actions with his ‘difficult childhood’ and ‘sudden impulses’. However, it was only after his marriage and the birth of his children that peace returned to his life – and that is why he “did nothing more after 1997”. Using a DNA sample, it was eventually confirmed that the 59-year-old police officer was the “pockmarked man”.
Source: Krone
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