The appeal trial will not have changed anything. Jean-Marc Reiser was sentenced Thursday, June 29 by the Haut-Rhin Assize Court to the same sentence as at first instance: life imprisonment with twenty-two years of security for the assassination of Sophie Le Tan in 2018. He will also have to pay a total of 435,000 euros in civil interest to the relatives of the young woman.
“You are found guilty of the murder of Sophie Le Tan,” court president Christine Schlumberger said after about three hours of deliberation. The accused showed no emotion at the verdict. “I’m not a cold, bloodthirsty monster,” the 62-year-old tried to plead in his last speech.
While he admitted killing the 20-year-old student of Vietnamese origin “in a fit of rage”, then dismembering her with a hacksaw before going to bury the remains of her body in a forest, he on the other hand, always denied having premeditated his action. But the jurors did not follow the arguments of this man with a heavy judicial past, tried in a state of legal recidivism after a first conviction for rape and sexual assault in 2003, and who was facing his sixth assize trial.
The jurors followed the Advocate General’s requisitions and pronounced the same sentence as at first instance, the heaviest sentence incurred. “We must respect this decision”, soberly reacted one of his lawyers, Me Emmanuel Spano, who could not immediately indicate whether his client intended to appeal to the Court of Cassation. He has five days to do so.
“We are relieved by this verdict,” responded Sophie’s mother, Huong Le Tan, speaking in Vietnamese. But “the pain of the loss of our daughter will follow me until the end of my life. We do not want revenge, but it is important that society be protected from the actions of these types of individuals. “Justice has passed”, reacted one of their counsel, Mr. Gérard Welzer, welcoming an “exemplary” trial which will nevertheless have constituted “an additional ordeal” for the family.
“A Fit of Fury”
The jurors answered yes to the four questions put to them: Is the defendant guilty of willfully committing violence against Sophie Le Tan? Did the violence result in death? Did he intend to kill? Did he premeditate his actions? Dismembered with a hacksaw, Sophie Le Tan had been buried on the edge of the forest. The body of the 20-year-old student was finally discovered a year later by mushroom pickers.
Five years and two assize trials later, certain gray areas persist, in particular the exact cause of the student’s death: the state of decomposition of the corpse did not make it possible to determine it. In these circumstances, two versions clashed throughout the eight days of this trial. The prosecution alleged that Jean-Marc Reiser, a former Category A civil servant with a degree in Byzantine archeology, had knowingly devised a scheme to lure a female student into a trap at his home, in order to sexually abuse her, before killing her, premeditated.
The defence, on the contrary, stuck to the suspect’s confessions, made at the very end of the investigation, when all the experts had given conclusions to which he had had access. And which therefore allowed him perhaps to adapt his version… According to his story, he had tried, after the visit to his apartment, to take Sophie Le Tan’s hand and give her a kiss. She then pushed him away insultingly, causing him “a fit of fury” that resulted in multiple kicks and punches.
The student, featherweight (1.55 meters, less than 55 kilos) facing a hefty landlord (1.88 meters, more than 90 kilos at the time), then collapsed, fatally hitting the toilet bowl. The defense thus hoped that the jurors would retain only “assaults causing death without intention to give it”, which would have implied a symbolically less heavy sentence of thirty years of imprisonment.