For the third time in four years, Chilean national Nicolas Zepeda is appearing before a criminal court to face charges of murdering his Japanese ex-girlfriend, Narumi Kurosaki, in Besançon, eastern France, in December 2016. The trial, which began on Tuesday, March 17, in Lyon, was set to last two weeks. The proceedings follow a decision by the Cour de Cassation, France's highest court of appeal, which in February 2025 overturned the ruling by a court of appeal from December 2023 on procedural grounds. That court had found Zepeda guilty and sentenced him to 28 years in prison. The verdict was identical to the one handed down in the first trial by jury in April 2022. Zepeda has always denied killing his ex-girlfriend, whose body has never been found. "I am innocent, I did not kill Narumi and I am fighting to prove it," he declared at the start of the hearing, in perfect French.
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Nicolas Zepeda, the killer who can't confess
Few criminal cases involve as much evidence as what has been amassed against the now 35-year-old defendant. Before the tragedy, Zepeda obsessively stalked the young woman online for several weeks, accessing her messaging accounts and ordering her to delete photos of new male friends from her Facebook page. Then, beginning on November 30, 2016, after his surprise arrival in Besançon from Santiago, Chile, surveillance cameras at the residence captured a person passing 11 times in three days and nights beneath the window of room 106 – Kurosaki's room. The investigation found that, each time, in the minutes before this figure appeared, the GPS of Zepeda's rental car and his mobile phone pinged at the cell tower located on campus.
