Catch Me If You Can

Before the invention of television, head hunters rode on horseback into dusty towns and in their saddlebags were the wanted poster for the man they’d gone to find.

Today, a head hunter is a cop in a fast car with an earsplitting siren and a rotating red light, or he is cop in a helicopter equipped with infra-red camera equipment that turns night into day. And, today, because of 24/7 breaking news reports on television, the wanted poster has become obsolete because now we know the face of a man on the run like we know our own.

This has become the case with the man on the picture above – Jean-Pierre Treiber – on the run from prison where he was awaiting trial for the kidnap and murder of two young women.

So familiar has become his face that his marked squint is even being targeted by stand-up comics and talk show hosts.

But Treiber’s story is far from something to laugh about.

Two is company; three is a crowd

It was only 48 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday, November 1, 2004, in the region of Burgundy, southeast of Paris. It was All Saints Day and a public holiday in most of Europe and the French actress Géraldine Giraud, 36, was spending the long weekend in the vacation cottage of her showbiz parents, the actors Roland Giraud and Maaike Jansen, in the Burgundy village of La Postolle (pop. 138).

Early that morning she called a friend in Paris on her cell phone to say that she would be returning to her apartment in the capital towards the end of the day. She had work waiting for her there; she was not exactly a box office attraction and had appeared in only three movies, but she kept busy with dubbing work.

Géraldine and her parents were known in the village and the locals always allowed them to enjoy the tranquility the three went in search of. Paris was only 70 miles from the village, but it be might just as well have been on the other side of the Atlantic, because the Postollieès and the Postolliers, as the locals were called, were not show business people like the Girauds, but sturdy country bumpkins. One can almost say that the last time the region had been spoken of for a reason other than its splendid wines and delicious escargots de Bourgogne – garlic-buttered snails cooked in their shells – was in 1946 when the serial killer Dr. Marcel Petiot, a local son, was guillotined in Paris for the murder of 26 people.

Géraldine never returned home to her apartment in Paris, and when her parents and friends started looking for her, the life of the young woman became prime-time news and filled the front pages of the gossip media.

Géraldine was a lesbian and missing with her was her new lover, the 32-year-old Katia Lherbier, an aspiring singer.

It was only two weeks previously, on Thursday, October 14, that Géraldine had snapped Katia away from another woman, an older woman named Marie-Christene Van Kempen. The latter, Géraldine’s maternal aunt, lived in the town of Sens, only a few miles from La Postolle and the Girauds’ vacation cottage. Van Kempen had been giving Katia, her lodger, singing lessons when she introduced her to her niece. Perhaps one can say that it was love at first sight for the two young women, because, within a fortnight, the two were spending a weekend together in the tranquility of La Postolle.

Thus, with neither the aspiring actress nor the aspiring singer, giving any sign of life, had they perhaps fled from the wrath of a jilted Van Kempen? Or from the accusing eyes of Géraldine’s family; Van Kempen was, after all, the sister of Géraldine’s mother.

Or, had they slipped away to a place even quieter than La Postolle to cement their relationship?

Twenty-two days later, on Tuesday, November 23, police arrested a forest guard – Jean-Pierre Treiber. A spy camera had photographed him using the credit cards of Geraldine and Katia in his home village of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. It turned out he had also been shopping in the region with their credit cards. Because he knew their pin codes, the shop assistants had not objected to his using their credit cards. It was of this village, also in Burgundy and also just a few miles from Sens and La Postolle, that Dr. Petiot had once been mayor.

His explanation to the police for having been in possession of the cards was that the two women had given him the cards and so too the pin codes. They had told him that they “wanted to disappear,” he said, and they had urged him to use their cards as he wished. He gave the police his girlfriend, one Patricia Darbeau, as alibi: She was, he said, present when the two women, acquaintances of his, had given him their cards and pin codes.

Géraldine Giraud

Two days later, on Thursday, November 25, Treiber was locked up in the jail of Auxerre, another Burgundy town and birthplace of Dr. Petiot. He was held on suspicion of “kidnapping, illegal confinement, theft and fraud.” His friends were flabbergasted; he was, they said, a really nice guy and not a thief, and certainly not someone who would have harmed anyone.

On Thursday, December 9, as the temperatures dropped to 2 degrees Fahrenheit in Burgundy, police found the half-naked and tied-up bodies of Géraldine Giraud and Katia Lherbier at the bottom of a disused well in Treiber’s garden. An effort had been made to burn the two bodies. Immediately, comparisons were drawn between Treiber and Dr. Petiot, because the maniacal doctor had also burned the bodies of his victims.

Six days later, on Wednesday, December 15, police, fine-combing Treiber’s property found a set of Géraldine’s keys and her partly melted cell phone buried in the garden. They also found a role of adhesive tape and a roll of electrical wire on a shelf in the cellar of his house. It was not a full roll of tape and neither was it a full roll of electrical wire, and the forensic team on the case quickly matched the tape and the wire to those with which the two dead women had been tied up. Treiber’s DNA was found on the tape in his cellar as well as on the tape on the two bodies. Two other DNAs were also found on the tape and wire, but those the police failed to identify; both items would have been touched by many hands from the time of their manufacture to ending up in Treiber’s cellar.

Pathologists meanwhile reported that despite that the two women had been half-naked, they had not been raped and no sexual penetration had taken place in the hours immediately before their death.

Why some of the two women’s clothes had been removed, and indeed when this had happened, the police said they did not know, but they had ruled out rape as the motive for their slaying.

Had the motive been robbery?

By then the police knew that Treiber was in dire financial straights. Doing odd jobs around Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, he had a monthly income of just $750. He also had a debt of $1,500 on his credit card and his bank had withdrawn the card and put him on a credit risk list which meant that no other bank would have allowed him a card.

Therefore, the motive had probably been robbery, but what had been the murder method?

Pathologists found that the women had inhaled the lethal gas chloropicrin. It is a gas that the Germans used against the Allies in World War I and today it is classified as a chemical warfare agent. An oily and colorless liquid, it must be handled with gloves, and safety glasses are to be worn by the handler.

It is almost impossible for the general public to buy chloropicrin, but farmers are allowed to purchase it because it is used as a soil fumigant and to kill fungi and soil insects. So are forest guards because they have to kill rodents and this they do with chloropicrin.

On Monday, December 20, the Auxerre prosecutor changed Treiber’s indictment to murder.

Treiber was transferred to Paris’s La Santé prison; it was in La Santé where Dr. Petiot was guillotined. Treiber, if found guilty of the double murder, would not have to fear losing his head to the guillotine’s kiss because capital punishment was abolished in France in 1981. Instead, he risked life imprisonment. “Life” in France means one could walk free after 18 years.

In La Santé, Treiber protested his innocence. When he chose to reply to questions, he said that he had no idea how the women’s bodies had ended up in the well in his garden. Similarly, he could not recall ever having seen Géraldine’s cell phone and her set of keys. He knew her and her friend, yes, but he was adamant that he had not harmed them. His explanation for his DNA on the tape and wire which had been used to tie up the two women was that it was only normal that it should have been there because the murderer or murderers had used his tape and wire.

Would not hurt a fly

The year 2004 ended. Roland Giraud, Géraldine’s father, interviewed by journalists, spoke in anger of the slowness of the murder investigation. Yes, his daughter was a lesbian. Yes, she had never hidden her sexual preference for women. No, she had never spoken of a man named Treiber. No, he was certainly not a friend.

Treiber’s friends on the other hand spoke up in support of him.

He appeared a good man. Yes, he was short of money, but that was not a crime, was it?

Hunting companions, asked by journalist to tell them about their tall, blond friend with the big ears and the marked squint, said that he was “always calm and discreet, friendly, a good sort when out hunting, an excellent forest guard, and certainly not a bandit.”

In 1989, at 26 years of age, Treiber, working for a gardening firm in his native Alsace (a French province on the French/German border), had married a young colleague, Marie-Pascale, the daughter of a physician; she was a single mother with a daughter. A year later, having moved to the town of Fontainebleau, south of Paris, Treiber and Marie-Pascale’s only child, also a daughter, was born. Fontainebleau is surrounded by forests and it was there that France’s kings used to hunt, and it was those former royal forests and its rich flora and fawn that had drawn Treiber to the region.

Working as hunting guide for the wealthy owner of a chateau, the Treibers lived well, but when killing animals became something unacceptable and unsociable, Treiber lost his job.

His next employment would be as a gardener when he took up with a couple who were running a small local restaurant.

When the restaurateur, identified only as François V, went off to serve a short sentence in jail for petty theft, Treiber started seeing the woman the man had left behind. Her name was Patricia Darbeau.

Treiber and Darbeau’s love affair ended the Treiber marriage although neither Marie-Pascale nor Treiber took steps to start divorce proceedings. This was in 2003 and while Marie-Pascale and her two daughters remained in Fontainebleau, Treiber and Darbeau set off for Burgundy. Burgundy also has many forests, and again, it were those that drew Treiber.

Working either as forest guard or hunting guide or gardener, even as an odd-jobs man, Treiber moved around Burgundy, Darbeau patiently trailing along, and then they finally settled down in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, in a small house on a street that dead-ended into yet another forest. After a while the couple began to quarrel and Darbeau moved out. She went to live in a rented trailer on a camping site.

Living alone but continuing to visit Darbeau in her trailer, Treiber got on well with his neighbors and, as they would tell journalists, he was always pleased to lend a hand when something had to be done in their gardens. But it was obvious that he had a financial problem because he had told them that, because of the high price of gasoline, he was unable to drive 30 miles to the town where his teenage daughter was lying ill. Police have not revealed the daughter’s name or what her illness had been, but Treiber was not totally truthful; it was not Treiber’s biological child who had been ill, but the daughter Marie-Pascale had given birth to before she had met him.)

On the day that police vehicles drove up to his little house and cordoned off the street, these neighbors watched from behind their curtains. They found it difficult to believe that the tall, blond man was a murderer.

Marie-Pascale Treiber would perhaps be the one who would describe Jean-Pierre Treiber best. She’s now written a book about him (published by l’Archipel in October 2009, titled Ma Vérité – My Truth) in which she wrote of what he was like when she met him: “He was quite fantastic and a very hard worker. He must have weighed between 165 and 170 lbs for his five-foot-nine inches. He did twice as much work as anybody else. He was not an idiot, but dynamic, and never vulgar, and with lots of character.”

Of the break-up of their marriage she wrote that once he had become friendly with the two restaurateurs he changed though. He started to use aftershave and eau de toilette. She wrote that he began to stay out at night. He also was no longer such a good worker because he was “the last to arrive at work and the first to leave.”

“He really lost it,” she wrote.

So, Treiber, the good guy had at some stage wandered off the right path. And he was broke. Therefore no longer Mr. Nice Guy, he might well have lost control completely and had murdered Géraldine and Katia to get his hands on their credit cards.

But on Tuesday, March 1, Burgundy, indeed most of France and Europe under snow, the police called in on Marie-Christene Van Kempen at her house in Sens. They had gone to fetch her for questioning. Treiber had come out with the story that he knew Van Kempen and had visited her at her house and that he had there met Géraldine and Katia. The police, following up on this, had searched Van Kempen’s house and had found traces of chloroform on a rag in her cellar. She denied that she had ever used chloroform or possessed chloroform, and claimed that Treiber was not a friend and that she knew him only because he had some years previously done gardening work for her but that she certainly had not introduced him to her niece and the young pianist. The police believed her and after a few days she was released.

The police meanwhile took in for questioning another eight people who had had contact at some time or other with Treiber. They too were soon released.

That spring of 2005 ended and so did the summer, and then, on Thursday, November 24, yet again a freezing cold day, Marie-Christene van Kempen was arrested and charged with “complicity to murder.” Also arrested that day was Darbeau. She too was charged with complicity to murder.

According to the police, the reason for the double murder was a love triangle. Van Kempen, furious at Géraldine for having stolen Katia, had hired Treiber to murder the two young women, and Darbeau had known of the plan.

Again, Roland Giraud appeared on TV news programs. He said that both he and his wife, Van Kempen’s sister, failed to understand what the police were up to. Both were convinced that Van Kempen was innocent.

Three months later, in February 2006, the police released Van Kempen and Darbeau, but they remained indicted with complicity to murder. The indictments would be lifted, but not until October 2008 when another two years had passed. Darbeau, no longer considering herself Treiber’s girlfriend, had convinced the police that she had never met Géraldine and Katia and therefore could not have been present when they had given Treiber their credit cards and pin codes. As for Van Kempen, her DNA did not match the two mystery DNAs found on the tape and wire used to tie up the two women; those two DNAs were to remain unidentified.

So, the police were back with one suspect only: Jean-Pierre Treiber.

His trial was set for the spring of 2010, so he had almost another two years of waiting for it to commence. He was transferred from Paris’s La Santé back to that of Auxerre, there to wait for his day of judgment.

A model prisoner, Treiber became overseer in the prison’s work atelier making pencils and other wooden objects. He was quiet and polite and liked by all.

And outside, in the free world, his compatriots forgot about him.

Then, on Tuesday, September 8, 2009, an unusually hot day for so late in summer, Treiber was back on prime time TV and on the front pages of newspapers and magazines.

He had escaped.

Hearing of his escape did not raise many eyebrows in France. Each year, half a dozen or more inmates go on the run. He may not return from what the French call a permission – a day or a weekend at home or an afternoon of liberty to attend, for example, a funeral. Another may make a ladder from sheets and escape that way, and, until a few years ago when safety nets were strung across exercise yards, escaping audaciously and glamorously by helicopter, an accomplice lowering a cord from the chopper with which to whisk the inmate to freedom, had happened frequently.

Treiber’s escape was, if not glamorous, then certainly audacious.

He had escaped in a cardboard box.

The story was that the box, wrapped in cellophane, along with other boxes, all filled with the wooden objects that Treiber and his fellow inmates had made in the work atelier, had been fork-lifted onto a truck which had then been driven to a factory in the town of Bonnard, a few miles from Auxerre. There the boxes had been unloaded to await further transport by rail to the four corners of France.

The escape scenario that a red-faced prison authority put together was that Treiber, equipped with warm clothing and with a few objects with which to keep himself clean and neat, had climbed into the box shortly after a 10:30 a.m. coffee break for the atelier team, and that a fellow inmate, one Flavien Cosson, serving 20 years for the murder of his girlfriend, had then wrapped the cellophane around the box. Next, Cosson had lied to the warders about Treiber’s whereabouts, saying that he was in conference with his lawyer, and it was not until 7:30 that night, some seven hours later, that it had become clear that Treiber had escaped. (Cosson now risks having a couple of years added to his the 20 he is already serving.)

Where exactly between prison to factory had Treiber bid his box and the truck farewell, the police did not know, but they did know that the factory, manufacturer of the boxes, stood on the edge of a forest, the 45-mile long forest of Orthe. And they also knew that a forest would not intimidate a forest guard and hunting guide like Treiber.

Prison life

Auxerre prison

Auxerre prison, built in the 19^th century, has 183 inmates. It should have no more than 111.

Cédric Labigne, one of its warders and an official of the warders’ union, UFAP, tried to explain on television news, how a prisoner could have escaped without the staff knowing about it for seven hours. He said that there were just 45 warders and that they were unable to cope with the supervision of 183 men, men whose nerves were all stretched to the limit because of the overcrowding conditions of prison life. “We now have two to a cell. Some times even three to a cell. It’s inhumane to lock people up like this. And it is inhumane to expect the staff to do their work properly,” he said. He was echoing what other UFAP members have been saying for years.

Official justice ministry statistics seem to endorse their concern. They show that from January 1 to August 19 of 2009, 81 prisoners in French prisons have committed suicide. The figure of 81 is however contested by the Paris-based International Prison Observatory (IPO) that monitors jail conditions and prisoners’ rights in France. The IPO claims that 88 prisoners had killed themselves in jail in that period. It also gives the figure for 2007 as 96, and that of 2008 as 115.

Justice-Minister Michelle Alliot-Marie, aware that French prisons holding 62,000 men and women in a nationwide prison capacity of 51,000, are among the most overcrowded in Europe, knows that something must be done. In a first step she announced that from later this year prisons will be equipped with anti-suicide “kits.” In such a kit will be tear-proof bedding and single-use paper pajamas to prevent cell hangings as these account for 90 percent of prison suicides.

Next, she filed a motion in parliament in October of 2009 that there should never be more than one inmate per cell. The motion was adopted after only one debate but, as critics pointed out before this new rule can be implemented several prisons would have to be built. And until then the number of suicides will continue to rise. So too the number of escapees.

On the run

It is known that Treiber took badly to prison life. He had already shown signs of depression when he was being held in Paris’s La Santé, but once in Auxerre prison, he had complained to family and friends of his problems with being incarcerated.

On the morning after his escape, more than a hundred police and gendarmes (militarized police who fall under the Ministry of Defense) began a search of Orthe forest. Treiber was however not to be found there and a mocking media pointed out that with a day and a night to his advantage he could already have booked into a hotel in any of the countries on France’s eastern border.

But Treiber was still in France as he manifested by sending a letter to the weekly Paris-published news magazine, Marianne. He had posted the letter on Monday, September 14, seven days after his escape from prison, and he had posted it in the town of Monéteau (pop. 3,826) only four miles from Auxerre and 20 miles from Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. He wrote in the letter, which the magazine published, that he had not gone on the run, he was only reclaiming what the two women’s real murderers had taken from him: His freedom. He described himself as having been close to suicide in jail, and he promised that he will be turn up for the opening day of his trial. But until then he will remain a free man. He had enclosed his prisoner’s card bearing the number 13855 with the letter.

Treiber was to write more letters, each one posted in a town a little closer to Paris. He was obviously making his way to the capital. In one letter written to Blandine Stassart, a woman prison visitor with whom he had fallen in love (and apparently she with him), and addressing her as Hartzala – “little heart” in Alsatian – he wrote lyrically of the beauty of nature. (Alsatian is close to German which Treiber, though he was a non-achiever in school, speaks fluently.)

He also wrote of a “little old lady” who had given him some tomatoes although she had obviously recognized him.

And he wrote about overhead helicopters, and having seen newspapers with his photograph splashed on the front page when he’d gone to post her a letter. “I did not hang around,” he wrote.

At the home of his “little heart” police found 152 letters he had written her from prison. In one he told her that he will, in the fall, see her in the forest of Bombon south of Paris and close to Fontainebleau where he had once lived. He will, he wrote, carve a large red heart on a tree and when the time came she should leave letters for him under that tree and he would leave some there for her.

Police immediately proceeded to the forest and soon they found a tree with a large red heart carved into its bark. On Friday, October 9, a warm and sunny day, 150 police and gendarmes in camouflage clothing began to stake out the forest, hiding in trees and under fallen trunks and in the forest’s numerous small caves and coves. Night fell and still they were waiting for Public Enemy No.1, as the media had begun to call Treiber. There were even police in helicopters with infra-red equipment aimed down onto the forest, circling overhead as if in a war zone.

Then, towards 9 p.m. a car with two passengers – a man and a woman – drew up. The couple started to make love and the police and gendarmes watched, unable to step from their hiding places to move the two amorous lovers along. After a frustrating 45 minutes, the car finally drove off.

Soon afterwards, a man came walking towards the tree, but suddenly he stopped and cocked his head to one side as if he was listening to the silence of the night. Maybe in that silence he had heard a twig snap or maybe he felt the tension of the men hiding all around the tree, but he turned on his heels and ran away and before any of the police could run after him, he had vanished.

The man was obviously Treiber.

Not even trying to explain their failure to catch this man, the police are now saying that he is not hiding in the forest itself, but that he is staying with someone who lives close to it.

More the police will not say, but a Paris newspaper has printed two photographs of a man casually dressed in jeans, open-necked shirt and windbreaker walking along a street. The photos had been taken by a spy camera on that street.

The newspaper did not name the town or city where the photos were taken, and neither had it explained how the photographs had come into its possession.

The police are not only now looking for Treiber but also for the mole among their ranks because only the police knew of those photographs and that a street spy camera had taken them.

Meanwhile, Treiber remains on the run. His family and friends say that he is a man of the forests and as long as there is a forest in France he will remain free.

Roland Giraud, unable to put closure to the murder of his daughter, wants to know how the police can be so incompetent.

He also says that if anything proves Jean-Pierre Treiber’s guilt, then it is his escape.

Last word must however go to Marie-Pascale Treiber. In an interview in the Paris-based weekly VSD of 16/22 September (2009), she predicted that Jean-Pierre Treiber will never be seen again.

She said: “He is neither a serial killer nor a dangerous madman. He is without doubt a most knowledgeable forester. He knows every plant that there is and he can identify every bird’s song. It is revolting what has been written about him. He is not a halfwit. I think the way he escaped proves this surely.

“He was not a good husband or father. He was even a bad father. But being a husband and a father was difficult for him because he loved nature so much. We must have been a kind of prison for him.”

She said that he knows the forests of his native Alsace province well and as there are still many World War Two German shelters and bunkers (Nazi Germany annexed Alsace during the war) in those forests, they would be a perfect setting to play “catch me if you can” with the police.

His trial, scheduled for April next year (2010) will go ahead with or without him in the dock.

He risks life imprisonment.

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