A DOUBLE-MURDER suspect whose case transfixed France last year after he escaped from jail hidden in a cardboard box and evaded capture for two months has been found dead in his prison cell.
Jean-Pierre Treiber (47), who was due to stand trial for the murders of two women in Burgundy in 2004, died by suicide on Saturday morning, a justice ministry spokesman said.
French police mounted one of the country’s biggest ever manhunts last September after the former forest worker managed to slip out of a prison in Auxerre and take refuge in a woodland hideout. He had escaped by concealing himself in a cardboard box he made in the prison workshop and waiting for a delivery van to collect it.
The high-profile suspect’s escape and accusations of a bungled search operation led to heavy criticism of the French judicial authorities and the country’s run-down prison system.
While on the run, Treiber taunted police, wrote to the media insisting he was innocent and sent accounts of his days in the woods to his girlfriend. He was eventually arrested in November in Melun, near Paris, after an extensive two-month search involving hundreds of police, soldiers, hidden cameras and stake-outs.
Treiber was accused of murdering actor Géraldine Giraud (36) and her lover, Katia Lherbier (32), in 2004 and burning their bodies at his home in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, southwest of Paris. Their remains were found in a well on his land and their charred possessions were discovered nearby. The accused was arrested soon afterwards in possession of the victims’ credit cards.
Reports at the weekend suggested Treiber, whose trial was due to begin in April, left behind a note saying he was “fed up” with being treated like a criminal and could no longer stand being apart from his loved ones.
As search teams last autumn scoured the forests of the Seine-et-Marne region where Treiber had worked as a gamekeeper, the magazine Paris Matchpublished some of the letters he had been writing to his girlfriend, who had visited him in prison.
The passionate letters describe his life on the run and his happiness at being back in his beloved woods. Treiber, originally from Alsace, began each letter with “Mon hartzala” – “my little heart” in Alsatian.
“I am in a very beautiful forest at the moment,” read one letter. “All the species of trees grow here . . . it’s really nice, the mist with the deer and wild boar.” When the press published leaked surveillance images of Treiber walking calmly through the streets of the small country town of Bréau in Seine-et-Marne, interior minister Brice Hortefeux spoke angrily of his “impatience” at the failure to catch the suspect.
Treiber’s death comes as a second major embarrassment for the French authorities and has provoked an outcry from relatives of the two murdered women. Justice minister Michèle Alliot-Marie has ordered an investigation, but the incident has already brought intense criticism of France’s under-funded prison system, which has one of Europe’s highest jail suicide rates.