Cold cases Investigations into murder and sexual assaults in 90s reopened

Dominique Pelicot, who has been jailed for 20 years for drugging his then wife, Gisele Pelicot, and inviting men to rape her, faces a further investigation for the rape and murder of an estate agent in Paris in 1991, and an attempted rape in 1999, amid questions over whether he could have been a serial offender for decades.

- Angelique Chrisafis

Investigators in Nanterre outside Paris have reopened two cold cases and placed Pelicot under formal investigation, as police consider potential links to other cases involving young estate agents. Pelicot could face another trial at a later date.

He was found guilty yesterday of crushing sleeping tablets and anti-anxiety medication into Gisele Pelicot's food and inviting dozens of men to rape her while she was unconscious from 2011 to 2020 in the village of Mazan in Provence, where the couple had retired.

After videos of the rapes of Gisele Pelicot by him and other men were found on his computer hard drive in a file labelled "abuse", Pelicot, 72, admitted the charges in court.

A total of 50 men were found guilty alongside him yesterday, but about another 20 shown in videos were not able to be identified and are potentially still at large.

Police uncovered Pelicot's rapes of his wife after they investigated his computer equipment when he was arrested for filming up women's skirts in a supermarket in the southern town of Carpentras in 2020.

But he had first come to the attention of police a decade earlier, in 2010, when he was caught filming up women's dresses with a small camera hidden in a pen in another supermarket in the Seine-et-Marne area east of Paris, near where he and Gisele Pelicot lived at the time. He was arrested and accepted a fine of €100 to avoid going to court. His wife was not informed.