Disappearances in Yonne
Between 1975 and 1979, seven young disabled girls from the Departmental Directorate of Health and Social Affairs (DDASS) disappeared in Yonne. Their names are Jacqueline Weis, Madeleine Dejust, Bernadette and Françoise Lemoine, Chantal Gras, Christine Marlot and Martine Renault.
In December 1979, Emile Louis, the bus driver who usually transported the young girls from their host families to their medical-pedagogical institute, was heard about the disappearance in September of Martine Renault.
In 1981, the body of another young girl from the DDASS, Sylviane Lesage, was discovered in an abandoned stable in Rouvray, near Auxerre (Yonne). Indicted and imprisoned, Emile Louis was dismissed for lack of evidence in February 1984.
That year, gendarme Christian Jambert submitted a damning report for Émile Louis, but the report was sent to the archives of closed cases and only reappeared twelve years later. Christian Jambert was found dead in 1997 in Auxerre with two bullets in the skull.
Life sentence for the deaths of seven young girls
The investigation into the disappearances was relaunched in July 1996 by several complaints filed by the lawyer of an association bringing together the host families of the disappeared.
Émile Louis was arrested again in December 2000. He admitted to having killed “six or seven” young girls after having had sexual relations with them but retracted his statement a month later. However, the skeletons of Jacqueline Weis, 18 years old, and Madeleine Dejust, 21 years old, were discovered in Rouvray on his instructions. The other five bodies have still not been found.
He was sentenced on November 26, 2004 to life imprisonment, with a security period of 18 years. A verdict confirmed on appeal in 2006 then on cassation in 2007.
In 2024, a skull found at the end of 2018 in the “cemetery” of Émile Louis is identified as that of a previously unknown woman, Marie Coussin, a child from the audience who disappeared in 1975. This woman did not appear on the list of seven known victims of Emile Louis but his home was on the route he took as a bus driver.
Two convictions for indecent assault
Émile Louis’ first conviction dates back to the 1980s, for indecent assault.
While in police custody in connection with the murder of Sylviane Lesage in December 1981, the bus driver admitted to having abused, in the 1970s, two little girls and a teenager from the DDASS who were looked after by his partner. Facts for which he was sentenced on March 17, 1983 to five years in prison by the Auxerre court (his sentence will be reduced to 4 years).
Released in 1986, he moved to the Var. In 1989, he was again sentenced to five years in prison for similar acts against three little girls and a boy in a campsite in Roquebrune-sur-Argens where he was staying. He was released in 1992 and remarried.
30 years for rape with torture and barbaric acts
At the beginning of the 2000s, his wife, Chantal Paradis, interviewed as part of the investigation into “the missing women of Yonne”, claimed to have been the victim, between 1992 and 1995, of rape and abuse. She also accuses him of having abused her daughter, then aged 14. The latter filed a complaint in January 2001.
