Marie-Laure Brunel-Dupin, the lieutenant-colonel on the trail of French "cold cases"

Lieutenant-Colonel Marie-Laure Brunel-Dupin apologizes. The soldier (who prefers the male version of her rank) receives us in a bare meeting room, rather than in her bright office where a collection of orchids stands guard along the bay window. Order from above: a searching eye might see, here a file name, there a diagram likely to reveal the investigations in progress in the premises of the Judicial Center of the National Gendarmerie, in Cergy-Pontoise, on the borders of the suburbs of Paris and the fields of Vexin. Welcome to the top secret world of Diane, the latest addition to the Gendarmerie: Diane, or the Unsolved Affairs Division; Diana, or the huntress goddess whose bow appears on the crest of unity decorated, in the background, with a body lying face down. The message is clear: the perpetrators of unsolved crimes are within the reach of the gendarmes - or rather, the fresh look put on these procedures by 21 investigators armed with the latest scientific advances.

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The training and the nerve

First head of this division launched in the spring of 2021, Marie-Laure Brunel-Dupin, 45, has the job under her skin. After having navigated between the law schools of Cergy, Nanterre and Assas, "to do as much criminal justice as possible", obtained her master's degree and followed a specialization in criminology, the student knows very precisely what she wants to do. : to set up, within the gendarmerie, a department of behavioral sciences, on the model of the famous Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI, founded in 1985 to put psychology at the service of American bloodhounds. Among the gendarmes, and not elsewhere, because she “likes their way of working, their square side”, discovered during internships. Undaunted, the 24-year-old sent an application letter detailing her project to the director general of the national gendarmerie. "I told myself that if it didn't work, I would be a lawyer while waiting for better days," she says. But the nerve pays off. On December 24, 2000, Santa Claus brings her a nice gift: a first date a few days later.

Put on the uniform

What she still doesn't know is that her proposal is timely. The military wondered, at the time, about how to better support investigators confronted with serial criminals. Multiple interviews followed during the first months of 2001, then, in September, training at the Officers' School in Melun, in Seine-et-Marne. Three months to "turn blue", she says, the graduates of higher education who join, like her, the ranks of the gendarmerie. The volunteer candidate Brunel is struggling. Her years on the benches of the university did not prepare her to trudge in fatigues in the undergrowth. “It was brutal,” jokes the mother of two young teenagers. She could have tried her luck as a contractor, without donning the navy blue uniform. "But it seemed difficult for me to gain the trust of my future colleagues if I was not, too, a policeman, because I knew that it would not be easy to put psychology into the investigations", justifies- she.

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Reality far from American series

Alone at first, then supported by specialists from the judicial police and by two fellow criminologists, one of whom is now her assistant, she gradually built up her department of behavioral sciences, today the centerpiece of the new division. Diana. She trained in profiling with an American professor in Brussels, then with FBI experts, in their temple in Quantico, Virginia. Multiply the conferences. Co-author of very specialized works such as Regards sur le crime et lecriminal (Éd. Amalthée) and Les Fausses Allégations d'abduction d'enfants: the practice of the FBI applied in a new intervention protocol of the department of behavioral sciences of the gendarmerie national (Medico-psychological Annals).

At length of interventions, she repeats that her job has little to do with the profilers of the small or the big screen, these silent police officers capable of deciphering a crime scene in a few minutes and leading their colleagues to to the culprit by dint of brilliant intuitions. “French behavioral analysis has three main aspects,” she explains. The realization of an "unknown author profile", that is to say his psycho-socio-pathological or psychocriminological portrait from the objective data of the procedure; the conduct of hearings, through advice provided to investigators, such as, for example, the use of a form of apparent compassion or familiarity in certain cases; seriality detection. Never, however, the minutes of the analysts contain the name of the culprit, with all due respect to Cluedo enthusiasts.

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The impetus of the Lelandais affair

The disappearance of a little girl, on August 27, 2017, will encourage the gendarmerie to create a unit entirely dedicated to unsolved cases, these sometimes decades-old legal mysteries that haunt the families of the victims and the specialists of the PJ. On a hot summer night, Maëlys de Araujo, 8, takes part in a joyous wedding in the village hall of Pont-de-Beauvoisin, in Isère. Around 3 o'clock in the morning, the child vanishes. Her body will be found six months later, thanks to the indications of the man who kidnapped and killed her, Nordahl Lelandais. The investigations lead to impute to him a second homicide, that of the young soldier Arthur Noyer, who disappeared in April 2017.

Did Lelandais commit other misdeeds? At the beginning of 2018, the gendarmerie set up a cell to search for his trace through hundreds of other cases. Team code name: Ariane, like the thread that one pulls so as not to get lost in the heart of a labyrinth. Cops love mythology. “We said to ourselves that what had been achieved in the case of Lelandais, by aggregating existing skills, could be transformed into a full-fledged mission”, summarizes Lieutenant-Colonel Brunel-Dupin.

The creation of the Diane division

In October 2020, the project took shape with the establishment of a Cold Case division. But the anglicism, which recalls the American television series of the 2000s, goes badly. And then all the unsolved files are not old filing cabinets covered with dust. Some are recent, such as the Delphine Jubillar affair, this nurse vanished in December 2020, whom her husband fiercely denies having made disappear. Sometimes, despite the years, investigations continue. To find the body of little Estelle Mouzin, kidnapped and murdered in 2003 by serial killer Michel Fourniret. Or to clarify the massacre of Chevaline, in Haute-Savoie, which claimed the lives, in 2012, of three members of an Iraqi family settled in England and a cyclist from the region.

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Farewell Cold Case, therefore: the division is renamed Diane, and Marie-Laure Brunel-Dupin appointed head of this team of behavioral analysts and specialists in disappearances and serial criminals. Among the fifty crimes dissected by the unit are a dozen old enigmas but also others much more recent. Which ones? Top secret, there too… “We intervene at the request of our colleagues or of an examining magistrate, or by proposing a referral on our own initiative, in non-standard cases, whether they are two hours old, eighteen months old or thirty years”, specifies the chef. Clearly, when the victim is a minor, a serial killer may be at work or the murderer's modus operandi seems unusual - mutilation of the body, humiliating posture, singular relentlessness, etc.

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Resume Surveys

The first stage is the essential “deconstruction” of the procedure. “Each one, and this is normal, is imprinted with the human biases given to it by the director of investigation”, explains the lieutenant-colonel. The task is difficult. You have to go to the scene of the crime, take all the pieces of the file, re-examine the material elements, reread the multiple hearings. Objective: to detect contradictions between witnesses, to identify the omissions of the first sleuths, to detect neglected leads. “For example, if Béatrice said that at 4 p.m., sitting on a bench with Véronique, she saw a black 4x4 go by, we will check that Véronique was heard, that her statements are consistent with those of her friend, and that the vehicle has been identified”, illustrates Marie-Laure Brunel-Dupin.

Then, once the "holes in the racket" have been identified, the gendarmes of Diane have full latitude to request new hearings, order expertise and launch requisitions. They can even call on the insights of their colleagues in white coats from the Criminal Research Institute, whose labs are also at the Cergy Judicial Center. Because science has made giant strides in recent years, making it possible to exploit previously silent material clues. Now, DNA can be extracted from a few cells present in a fingerprint. From this genetic signature, it is possible to determine certain morphological characteristics of an individual: the color of his eyes, his skin and his hair, and his geographical origin.

The first successes

It is thanks to the DNA pros that the cold case specialists signed their first coup: the arrest of the murderer of Chantal de Chillou de Saint-Albert, found in August 2001 on a forest road at the edge of Isere. A cigarette butt and traces on the victim's T-shirt revealed their secrets two decades later. But still it is necessary to get hold of the seals, these elements collected according to the investigations - clothes, documents or objects. Sometimes the court moved, misplacing or destroying these precious pieces. Sometimes the premises have burned down or been flooded. "In old files, it is not uncommon for the seals to have disappeared or to be very degraded, even unusable", regrets the head of Diane. This one is not the type to "count the sticks", as she says. Translation: don't count on her to boast about the successes of her unit. “We are proud to make our contribution to certain investigations, she underlines. And we are happy when we are able to give an answer to the families.” Even if it means rubbing shoulders, every day, with photos of missing children, bloody crime scenes and twisted profiles of psychopathic killers.

Lieutenant-Colonel Brunel-Dupin, who lives with her family close to her office, on the site of the Judicial Center, often feels the need to escape. Her thing, to decompress, is to make pretty things with her ten fingers. Jewels, light boxes - these paper paintings lit from behind - and book-nooks - small three-dimensional scenes that slip between books on a shelf. With a writer friend, she also set about writing a "half-fiction, half-reality" thriller. Very inspired by his daily life, of course. We don't redo each other.