This photograph taken on January 8, 1992 shows Thérèse Saia, the mother of disappeared 25-year-old Marie-Thérèse Bonfanti, who was later revealed to have been murdered. - / AFP
France's top court ruled on Friday, January 16, that it was too late to try a man who confessed to a murder decades after his victim disappeared, a judgment that could affect other "cold case" investigations.
The Court of Cassation ruled that Yves Chatain, who in 2022 confessed to the 1986 murder of 25-year-old Marie-Thérèse Bonfanti, could not be tried because too much time had passed. The court rejected the argument of France's top prosecutor Rémy Heitz for a more flexible view of the statute of limitations. Addressing the court last November, he had warned that if the court did not do so, it would jeopardize similar "cold cases" under investigation.
Of 22 cases being investigated by a unit specializing in unsolved historic cases, said Heitz, seven could be affected if the court confirmed the ruling on the statute of limitations in the Bonfanti case.
Bonfanti disappeared in May 1986 in the Isère region in eastern France. Her partial remains were only discovered after Chatain, long a suspect in the case, finally confessed to having strangled her.
