Netflix’s Next French Show is a Docuseries on the Unsolved Murder of a Little Boy

It is perhaps the most famous French news story and it’s about to be broadcast on Netflix. Announced more than a year ago, a documentary retracing the mysterious unsolved murder of a young French boy named Grégory (known as l’affaire Grégory) is coming to the streaming platform on November 20. In total, five one-hour episodes will trace the unsolved case. The series is produced by Élodie Polo Ackermann (Lagardère Studios) and directed by Gilles Marchand. The site indicates that journalist Patricia Tourancheau also participated in the project. There’s no way it won’t be a success.

A first French-language trailer of the documentary soberly entitled “Grégory” (or “Who Killed Little Gregory?” in English) was published this Monday, November 11 by Netflix. One minute and forty-two seconds of alternating archive images, press clippings and interviews with experts. The news of the pending Netflix show on the Gregory case inspired other television stations. In December 2018, France 3 broadcast a documentary series on this incident called “La Malédiction de la Vologne.” “To tell the Gregory affair, we focused the story on the essential: the crime, the valley, the family,” explained the director to France 3.

On October 16, 1984, the body of Grégory Villemin, 4 years old, was discovered, feet and fists bound, in the waters of the Vologne in Vosges, France. The case had (and still has) all the elements of a gripping story. For years, the Villemin family had been receiving mysterious phone calls and letters from a man, later known as “Le corbeau,” threatening violence against the family. An anonymous caller informed the Villemins that their son had been taken. Family members were accused — an uncle, the mother — and after years of quiet, more family members were arrested and accused in 2017. The little boy, whose face was disseminated through newspapers and TV reports all across the country, was adorable.

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Over the past thirty-four years, the case has undergone many developments. The Paris Court of Appeals will soon examine the procedural problems related to the indictment of Murielle Bolle, a minor at the time of the events. Bolle, then fifteen years old, accused her brother-in-law Bernard Laroche of kidnapping the little boy in her presence when she was taken into police custody in early November 1984. She then retracted her statement claiming she was coerced by the police to make the accusation.

Since then, Bolle has consistently claimed the innocence of Laroche, shot dead by Jean-Marie Villemin, Gregory’s father and a cousin of Laroche, in 1985. Even today, the change in her story remains at the heart of the investigation. In November, the Constitutional Council granted her a major victory by censoring several provisions of the 1945 Ordinance on “Delinquent Childhood,” which then governed the judicial treatment of minors, as it was written. The Council determined that the detention of the adolescent girl was carried out in unconstitutional conditions, as the law did not provide, for example, for the presence of a lawyer or notification of the right to remain silent.

 

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(Image: Netflix)

There’s a chilling new crime documentary to stream.

New limited series Who Killed Little Gregory? is available now on Netflix and examines the horrific unsolved murder of four-year-old Gregory Villemin in France in 1984.

Netflix’s official description for the documentary says: “When their 4-year-old son is murdered, a young couple fights a twisting and arduous battle trying to identify a frustratingly elusive killer.”

But what happened to Gregory Villemin in real life, and has the case now been solved?

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Here is what you need to know about the case that has gripped France for three decades, with a number of twists and turns and further murders to complicate the investigation.

What happened to Little Gregory?

 

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On October 16, 1984, Jean-Marie and wife Christine reported the disappearance of their young son Gregory to police at 5pm.

At 5.30pm that day, Gregory’s uncle Michel received an anonymous phone call saying that Gregory had been kidnapped and dumped in the Vologne River.

Searching the river in the Vologne mountains, his body was found.

 

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(Image: Patrick Hertzog/AFP via Getty Images)

His hands and feet were tied together with rope, his face in a woolen hat, and it emerged that the boy had been drowned.

The next day, Jean-Marie and Christine received an anonymous letter that claimed responsibility for the murder, which it said was motivated by revenge.

What happened next?

 

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Jean-Marie and Christine

The case came to national attention and gripped France for the next three decades.

Initially, Gregory’s second cousin Bernard Laroche was charged with the killing due to evidence from his 15-year-old sister-in-law Murielle Bolle, but the charges were dropped when she withdrew evidence and said she had been pressured to implicate him by the authorities.

Jean-Marie, Gregory’s father, publicly vowed to kill Laroche.

Meanwhile, the police turned their focus to Gregory’s mother, Christine, who was then heavily pregnant. She was accused by handwriting experts of having written the anonymous letters herself.

After being questioned by the authorities, Christine collapsed and reportedly miscarried one of the twins that she was carrying.

Between hospital visits to his wife, Jean-Marie visited Laroche at his home and shot him to death, going on to be sentenced to five years in prison for the crime, but was released after two and a half years.

Christine was charged with murdering her son in 1985, but was cleared of charges in 1993 due to the failure of the prosecution to find a coherent motive to killing her son.

Reopening the case

The case was reopened in 2000 for DNA testing on the stamp of the anonymous letter, but this proved inconculsive.

Further testing was done in 2008 on the rope, letters, and other evidence, but also proved inconclusive.

In 2013, further testing on Gregory’s clothes also proved inconclusive.

 

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The Villemins still look for the truth

Events took a surprising turn in 2017 when three arrests were made based on new evidence: Gregory’s great-uncle, his great-aunt, and his aunt by marriage.

Eventually, the aunt was released, but the great-uncle and great-aunt chose to remain silent in the investogations.

Murielle Bolle, who originally put Laroche in the frame, was also arrested but released after 36 days.

That same year, the magistrate leading the investigation, Jean-Michel Lambert, committed suicide and cited the pressure resulting from the re-opening of the case in a suicide note.

Bolle herself went on to release a book in 2018 entitled Breaking the Silence. She doubled down on proclaiming her and Laroche’s innocence and blamed the police for her original testimony.

She also accused her cousin Patrick Faivre of lying when he said that her family abused her in 1984 until she recanted her testimony against Laroche.

Faivre lodged a complaint against Bolle, who was indicted for “aggravated defamation” in June 2019, according to Teller Report.

The case of who killed Gregory remains unsolved.

Who Killed Little Gregory? is available now on Netflix.

Have you watched Who Killed Little Gregory? Let us know in the comments below.