Hi everyone, I hope you’re doing okay. Today, I’m going to tell you about a manipulative man who kept going from prison to wandering the streets, from wandering the streets to assaulting women, and from assaulting women to returning to prison. A sad cycle that cost three lives before being halted. Ladies, gentlemen, and everyone in between, this is the case of Jacques Fruminet.

A lamb among wolves

Jacques Fruminet opens his eyes for the first time on September 4th, 1959, in Évaux-et-Mesnil, in Northeastern France. He’s the youngest of seven children, and he is not welcome in the family.

First of all, his mother lives not only with her husband but also with her lover, so we don’t really know who Jacques’ father is. It doesn’t help that everyone is alcoholic and abusive.

When he doesn’t get beaten at home, he terrorizes kids at school. His default setting is stress (which is perfectly understandable), so he has breakdowns, screams, and throws things at people. Nobody helps the poor child, since everybody just sees him as a particularly noisy shithead.

As if all of this wasn’t enough, his education doesn’t go well. At the age of 8, he still doesn’t know how to read and write. So when kids don’t avoid him, they bully him.

Someone ends up noticing something, I suppose, because Jacques is placed in a medico-educational institute. This type of institution generally takes care of children from 3 to 20 years old who have difficulties or disabilities that hinder their development in normal settings. To this day, we see medico-educational institutes come under scrutiny for diverse scandals regarding mistreatments, neglect, and sexual abuse, so I’ll let you imagine what it was like in the 60s.

However, Jacques likes it there, because yes, his home life was that bad. He learns painting and masonry and makes some progress regarding his behavior.

Sadly, it doesn’t last long because at 16, his parents take him back home to make him work. So he finds a job, and his salary goes into the pockets of his parents/tormentors.

From lamb to wolf

Now back in his home village, Jacques starts his life of crime. He steals and doesn’t hesitate to use violence, which gets him sentenced to 8 months in prison in January 1980. Surprisingly, he is a model prisoner and is allowed to go free sooner, on May 27th.

This release doesn’t come as good news to the people of Évaux-et-Mesnil, to the point where the local gendarmes come to warn the population, telling the most vulnerable to reinforce their home security. They are not wrong, because it takes less than 24 hours for Jacques to bring chaos after his release.

On the morning of May 28th, 1980, Lucie Bottini, a 78-year-old widow, is found dead in her bedroom under her mattress.

She was a nice little old lady who lived on her modest farm with her cows.

Her bedroom is ravaged, making it hard for investigators to even access her body. The latter is bound and gagged, with the inferior part undressed.

Everybody knows Jacques did it. He is arrested around noon at the Épinal train station. He has the 21 francs (0.10€ , 0.12USD) he found in Lucie’s bedroom with him. He confesses easily once in the interrogation room, but there is one thing he won’t discuss: the sexual assault. His semen was found on her bed and on her body.

In June 1981, he goes on trial for murder, robbery, and rape. His complicated childhood is taken into consideration, and he is considered to have a chance for rehabilitation, so he ends up being sentenced to 15 years in prison.

He goes back to being a model prisoner, and the authorities fall for it again. He is released in June 1989 for good behavior, and almost immediately goes back to his devious ways. He moves to Colmar, and three months after getting out of prison, he assaults an elderly woman in the local train station and steals her handbag. For that, he gets sentenced to 4 years in prison in February 1990. As usual, he’s a little angel in his prison cell and gets another opportunity to prey on women.

In December 1991, he is granted a two-day release and uses it to assault two women, threatening them with a firearm to get them to obey. One of them is in a parking lot when he opens her car door, threatens her, and starts driving her car. He drives about 20 kilometers before stopping in the middle of the countryside. He starts sexually assaulting her, and she tells him that if that’s what he wants, he should look for someone younger, to which he replies “But I like old ladies”. He then forces her into oral sex, and once he finishes he drives her back to Colmar and leaves her there.

He is quickly arrested for these assaults and is sentenced to 9 additional years in prison. You guessed it, he goes back to being a model prisoner. He gets his driver’s license and a cooking certification. His good behavior allows him once again to end his sentence early, and he is released on May 11th, 1998. He moves into a shelter and gets hired as a janitor in a residence. Despite all of his efforts to keep a low profile, he makes the women living in the residence very uncomfortable. He corners one of them in an elevator. He squeezes the neck of another one. The cleaning lady avoids him altogether. The signs are there, but nobody can do anything. Not until the next tragedy.

The rampage

On November 20th, 1998, around 10pm, the firefighters arrive at the Colmar train station. A car is burning in the parking lot. They put out the fire, and soon discover a body in the trunk. It’s a partially undressed woman. The scene is already giving clues: the passenger front seat is tilted back, hinting at a sexual assault.

As the investigators are examining the scene, a man appears. He explains that he is Stéphane Obrecht, the car’s owner. His girlfriend, 33-year-old Sylvie Arcangeli, uses it for her daily trips between home and the train station. He is oddly calm, so the police bring him in for questioning. However, when he learns about the body in the trunk, who is very probably Sylvie, he breaks down and the investigators take him off the list of suspects.

Stéphane and Sylvie were a loving couple and were thinking about having a child. Everything collapses for Stéphane, Sylvie will never come home.

Experts deduce from the crime scene that the person who set the car on fire definitely got burned. And sure enough, the next Sunday, Jacques turns up at the police station, and he looks crispy as hell. He has a crazy story to tell investigators: he was there when the car was burning, yes, but he got burned trying to put the fire out, and since he has a criminal record, he didn’t want to stick around waiting for the police. He doesn’t deviate from this bllsht, so after a few hours of interrogation, the investigators tell him that Sylvie might have been pregnant. And that’s when he breaks, because killing a woman is okay, but oh god not the baby!

He starts telling the officers that he met Sylvie 10 days earlier, and that they had started an affair. On November 20th, they met and had sex, but then Sylvie told him that she wanted to end the relationship. After that, for some reason, she agreed to go into the trunk of the car without wearing anything below the waist. Even if we go past the absurdity of this statement, the investigators know that Sylvie was strangled. Jacques still maintains this ridiculous version of events.

He is indicted and incarcerated in the Strasbourg jail. The investigators, certain that this isn’t his first murder, start digging into his life. That’s when they find out about Nicole Kritter.

Nicole is a 41-year-old mother who works as a manager in a supermarket. On Friday, November 13th, she doesn’t get home from work. Her husband, Jean-Marc, is worried and calls the supermarket, only to find out that she never actually got there. He then starts calling her loved ones and the local hospitals, to no avail. He goes to the police station, but the police officers not only tell him that she probably ran away, but they also tell him that even if something happened to her, he probably did it. I sincerely hope that whoever said that got fired. As a last resort, Jean-Marc went to the local media, which publishes a report. That’s how, 4 days after Nicole’s disappearance, a man notices a Peugeot 205 parked in a weird way in a residential neighborhood. He calls the police, who quickly find out that it’s Nicole’s car. Inside, they find cigarette ash, even though Nicole doesn’t smoke, and the radio is gone. Also, the passenger front seat is laid back. This case’s investigators are still scratching their heads when Sylvie’s body is found.

On December 1st, the Great Alsace Canal is searched, and Nicole’s body is found. She is wrapped in trash bags and weighted down by manhole covers. The autopsy shows that she’s been beaten, strangled, but the state of her body makes it impossible to determine if she has been sexually assaulted. Other detail: she seems to have ingested an important amount of neuroleptics, which must have made her very weak in her last moments.

Investigators rapidly find out that the trash bags and manhole covers aren’t widely available, but they are used in the residence where Jacques works. They also discover that he and Nicole have mutual acquaintances who noticed how interested he was in her.

He is interrogated again in January 2000, and this time we get a new version, a remix if you will. Nicole isn’t his type, she’s too skinny. But wasn’t Sylvie also skinny, and didn’t she have an affair with him, according to him? Stop thinking, he’s trying to tell you a story!

Never done with being creepy, he talks with the investigators after a conversation with his lawyer and describes her as “too skinny”. I want to throw up.

During another interrogation session, he curses us with another remix. He tells investigators that he had an affair with Nicole, who loved him to the point of wanting to leave her husband for him. Disgusted by her behavior, he decided to end the affair, prompting Nicole to come into his janitor’s office and kill herself with pills. Then why was she undressed? Jacques says that’s because he undressed before her death so she would sleep well, or so that her clothes wouldn’t get creased, or to avoid leaving traces of the affair. Depends on who he is speaking to. And why was she beaten? He actually never answers that question.

He clearly doesn’t intend to tell the truth, but the clues he left in his path allow the investigators to figure some things out. He probably stopped Nicole while she was getting to work and assaulted her in her own car.

The different reconstitutions show how full of sh*t Jacques, but he still claims that he is telling the truth. Even his lawyers know that they have a better shot at getting a reduced sentence than actually trying to get him acquitted.

Declared fit to stand trial, Jacques is brought to court in December 2001. He has gained 30 kilos in prison and is barely recognizable. He still refuses to tell the truth, simply stating that he “lost it”. He ends up confessing that he forced Nicole to take the pills, though.

Experts describe him as unsalvageable, a truly sadistic and remorseless predator. Thanks, but we noticed already.

Some of his victims come to testify, but he doesn’t react to them. However, he gets mad at a journalist and tries to throw himself at him, for a reason only he knows.

Jacques Fruminet gets sentenced to life in prison with a 22-year custodial sentence. He could have asked for parole in 2020, but he died on June 7th, 2014. He was 54 and had spent a total of 33 years in prison. When I think of his death, I feel a lot of things. Sadness isn’t one of them. Bye bitch!

Tell me what you think about this case down below, or on r/Murder_Wine_Cheese, Tumblr or Bluesky. I hope you’ll find some money on the ground today, and I’ll see you next time!