Hi guys, I hope you’re doing well. I also hope that’s it’s not too hot where you are, because we’re getting cooked over here in France !
Anyway, today I’m going to tell you the story of one of the youngest French serial killers, who is also known as “the man with the 50 cases” because he just never stopped committing crimes. Ladies, gentlemen and everyone in between, here’s the case of Vincenzo Aiutino !
A youth full of chaos and suffering
Vincenzo Aiutino was born on March 11th, 1970 in Switzerland, but grows up in Belgium. We don’t know much about his mother, but we know just enough about his father to hate him.
Domenico Aiutino shows his colors to his son as soon as he is born by refusing to officially claim him. He still stays to raise him, thus ensuring that the little boy will grow up to be at least horribly traumatized.
Vincenzo often sees his father beat his mother and at 5 years old, he sees him rape his 7-year-old sister. He is sadly not safe from his father’s evil, and when Vincenzo doesn’t get to the toilet in time, especially at night, he makes the little boy eat his feces.
We will never know if it was a first expression of rage or an attempt at escaping these horrors, but Vincenzo, at only 7, sets the family’s house on fire. His sister will end up being badly burned by the flames. For this act, he will be reported, but never be taken or even seen by any child service.
5 years later, at 12 years old, Vincenzo becomes a delinquent, and joins a soccer club to gain access to the locker room and steal. He is quickly caught, and ends up being sent to a center for special needs children. He discovers mechanics there, but is unable to attend classes because of his problem with authority and his inability to admit guilt. He gets kicked out after a while.
In 1985, he is fired from his job as an apprentice on a construction site and sent to a mental institution after exposing himself in front of a woman.
The following year, Vincenzo completely gives up on his education, without having earned any degree. He starts working at a garage, but ends up being fired because he keeps using the phone to call women and tell them obscenities.
During this period, he gets by by stealing cars and selling marijuana, which often leads him to the other side of the border, in the projects of Mont-Saint-Martin, a town in northeastern France.
As time passes, he gets more dangerous.
In January 1988, he is sent to a mental institution in Belgium after exposing himself to a minor and breaking into a woman’s house to force her to perform oral sex on him. He ends up being released at his father’s request.
In 1989, Vincenzo is arrested for a violent robbery. The same year, he is also arrested for exposing himself in front of women and asking them to masturbate him. At the same time in Longwy, near Mont-Saint-Martin, he sexually assaults women and follows them to their house.
In 1990, he assaults a female driver who was broken down on the side of the road. He drags to a deserted area and removes his clothes, asking her to masturbate him. When she screams, he strangles her and leaves her for dead. Luckily, she survives.
For this last assault, he is sentenced to 18 months in prison plus an 18 month suspended sentence. During his detention, in 1991, he marries Marie-Antoinette Calla. The couple will later have a son.
As soon as he’s released, Vincenzo is arrested again for assaulting someone in public. Soon, he enters a whole new category of sexual predator.
Isabelle Le Nénan
Isabelle Le Nénan is a 20-year-old sales representative. She is described as well-rounded and very in love with her fiancé.
On August 6th, 1991, she leaves works in Longwy to go have lunch at a friend’s apartment. She is on her way when she runs into Vincenzo, who asks her to help him carry something heavy. He leads her to where he works, which is a garage according to some sources. Once there, he exposes himself and tries to sexually assault Isabelle, before killing her with an iron bar. After that, he takes the body to the Turpange forest, in Belgium, and leaves it there.
Isabelle’s absence is noticed at 3pm the day she disappears. A colleague calls her parents, who immediately start looking for her. Soon they find her car parked near a roundabout, with a sandwich still inside. After this discovery, Isabelle’s father goes to the local police station.
However, Isabelle is legally an adult, so the police officers think that she ran away, thus a simple search in the family’s interest is started. This type of search is way less thorough than a search conducted when the investigators believe that the person is in danger. The police officers justify this lack of action with the fact that Isabelle was feeling some pressure regarding her matrimonial status. She wanted to get married fast, her father wanted her to get married fast, but her fiancé, who was engaged in very long studies, wanted to wait and finish them before tying the knot.
The family is unsatisfied, but doesn’t give up. Isabelle’s father is convinced that she didn’t park the car where it was found. Indeed, she always parks her car with the tires facing straight ahead, and this time the tires were turned to the side. For him, that’s a dead giveaway. He asks the police to look for fingerprints on the car, but the officers refuse.
The father doesn’t stop looking for his daughter, and even tries to initiate vehicle checks on the road, but the police stop him from doing that.
On August 10th, Isabelle’s relatives find her purse in a wasteland near the place where her car was found. They tell this to the police, and the investigators finally get more active in their search. Dogs lead them to decantation tanks, and they empty them, in vain.
They then decide to broadcast an appeal in the press to find potential witnesses. Following this appeal, several people come to the police saying that they saw Isabelle, but she isn’t found.
Without anything to go on criminally speaking, the case is closed on August 22nd. The family, who is getting desperate, presses charges against X (which is done when the culprit is unknown) for kidnapping and false imprisonment, hoping that it will get the case reopened.
A few days later, another woman goes missing.
Isabelle Christophe
On September 13th, 1991, Isabelle Christophe, a 21-year-old employee of a supermarket in Mont-Saint-Martin, crosses paths with Vincenzo after leaving work at 10am. He tells her the same thing he told Isabelle Le Nénan, which is that he needs help carrying something heavy. He leads her to his garage, where he rapes her before strangling her and beating her to death with an iron bar. He then rolls the body into a white sheet and leaves it in the Turpange forest, near the location where he left Isabelle Le Nénan’s body a few weeks prior.
Isabelle Christophe’s family quickly realizes something isn’t right the day she disappears. They go to the police, who start searching for her, but they find in her apartment a letter hinting towards a possible suicide. In this letter, she talks about a recent heartbreak and considers ending it all. When they add that to the fact that she never recovered from her parents’ divorce 10 years earlier and from her sister’s death 2 years earlier, the investigators get a clear, although wrong, picture. For them, it’s a suicide, despite the similarities with the Isabelle Le Nénan case, which reaches a sad turning point a month later.
On October 20th, Isabelle Le Nénan’s body is found, and the Belgian police officers, who have heard about the two French women’s disappearance, call their French colleagues. The body, though in an advanced state of decomposition, is identified, and the investigators start considering the possibility of a sexual crime, since the body was found naked.
They examine the files of all the known sex offenders in the region, and soon have a shortlist of 4 suspects. They focus on one of those suspects, who lives and works near where the two Isabelle disappeared. This suspect is obviously Vincenzo Aiutino.
He is arrested on November 20th, and as soon as he is in the interrogation room, he starts bragging about his previous assaults. However, he denies any implication in the two disappearances and gives an alibi for each one that his wife confirms. The investigators don’t have enough evidence against him, so they release him after a few hours.
Vincenzo is now free to commit his last murder.
Bernadette
Bernadette Bour is a 40-year-old medical sales representative. On February 24th, 1992, as she is meeting with a doctor, she crosses paths with Vincenzo, who is in the waiting room. He immediately sets his sights on her, goes out, and slashes one of the tires of her car. When she comes out and tries to change the tire, he offers his help. He changes the tire, and tells Bernadette that she can go to his place to wash her hands. She accepts and follows him.
She washes her hands in his house, but as she is about to leave, he pushes her into his basement. Bernadette does her best to remain calm, and even tries to reason with Vincenzo, but when he pulls out his penis and tries to sexually assault her, she resists and starts screaming. He then hits her with an iron bar and leaves her to die on his basement floor.
He goes out and smokes cigarettes on a parking lot, slowly realizing what he has done. He goes back to his house, covers Bernadette with a blanket, and hides her watch in a rag at the back of the basement. After doing that, he goes back up to spend time with his family, as Bernadette is still dying on the floor. After dinner, he goes down and strangles her to death. After nightfall, he leaves with the body and leaves it in a forest, about 20 kilometers away from his house.
Bernadette’s disappearance is reported to the police the next day. However, the police officers tell his boyfriend to come back later. He begins the search himself, and soon finds the last doctor that Bernadette saw before vanishing. This doctor tells him that a very dangerous man named Vincenzo Aiutino was in the waiting room when Bernadette came. Her boyfriend immediately gives this information to the police.
Officers go to Vincenzo’s house, but nobody is there. They talk to his neighbor, who tells them that she saw Vincenzo coming home the previous day with a woman that she never saw leave. After that, she saw Vincenzo move a car, a Peugeot 205 similar to the car Bernadette was driving.
On the run
The next evening, on February 26th, police officers stake out Vincenzo’s house. They are told to arrest him when they see him getting into his SUV with his wife and son, but he manages to lose the police officers and get through the Belgian border.
An international letter rogatory is soon sent to the Belgian authorities. The following day, Vincenzo’s father goes to his son’s house, and finds police officers there. They go through his car and find inside a ZZ Top tape. The father explains that it probably belongs to his son, since he borrowed the car not long ago. Bernadette had an identical tape in her car.
The police officers also learn that Vincenzo’s wife took out all the light bulbs in the basement, which is searched soon after with the rest of the house.
A lot of blood traces are seen in the basement, and Bernadette’s watch is also found. In the yard, the investigators find a bloody iron bar, and in the washing machine they find a bloody sweater.
On the other side of the border, the Belgian policemen discover that Vincenzo is hiding in his parents’ house. He is arrested on February 27th.
The confession and the escape
Once he is in the interrogation room, Vincenzo begins denying everything, but faced with all the evidence, he ends up confessing to the three murders and indicates to the investigators where the bodies of Bernadette Bour and Isabelle Christophe are. They are found on February 28th.
At 22, he is incarcerated in the Arlon prison in Belgium, with the status of the youngest French serial killer at the time. A status he apparently doesn’t want.
In April, he retracts his confession and accuses his father of the murders, thus delaying his extradition to France, where sentences are usually more severe than in Belgium. However, his father is quickly cleared of any wrongdoing.
Vincenzo’s lawyers then try to get him declared criminally irresponsible, but experts conclude that even though he is a psychopath, he is criminally responsible.
A few days later, probably out of desperation, Vincenzo escapes out of prison after taking a prison guard hostage with a butter knife that he had sharpened. However, he is caught the same day, having found no place to hide.
On August 6th, he is sentenced for unrelated indecent assaults cases (for which he was arrested in 1989) to 2 years in prison. On January 6th, 1993, he is sentenced for the hostage taking and the escape to three years in prison. This sentence will be extended to 5 years after the appeal of the prosecutor.
In March, Vincenzo’s wife Marie-Antoinette is indicted for destructing evidence and tampering with a dead body. She apparently covered for Vincenzo (we don’t know to which extent, but the fake alibi when he was arrested in 1991 may be a start), and got rid of Bernadette’s credit card.
On August 19th, Vincenzo is extradited to France, and ends up in the Metz prison. Once there, he accuses his wife’s brother, saying that he only helped dispose of the bodies.
On January 12th, 1996, even though he attempted suicide the previous night, he is taken to a reconstitution of one of the murders. The victims’ families are there, hoping for some answers, but Vincenzo refuses to cooperate, and ends up leaving with a smile on his face.
The trial
Vincenzo’s trial for the murders starts on March 2nd, 1998 in Nancy. For the first time in a French courtroom, a bulletproof glass is installed to protect the defendant, and people attending the trial are searched. Despite all these measures, Vincenzo is pretty relaxed, and even throws seductive looks to a journalist.
His wife, on the other hand, tries to justify herself by saying that her husband was abusive and that she was scared of him. The couple has fights during the trial.
Despite his confession, Vincenzo first denies everything, but his lawyers manage to pressure him into at least admitting the murder of Bernadette Bour.
On March 6th, 1998, Vincenzo is sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 18 years, which makes him eligible for parole in February 2010. As the verdict is being read, Isabelle Le Nénan’s father shouts “Murderer, you’re gonna die!”, in response to which Vincenzo jumps up and tries to assault him. It takes at least 8 men to restrain him.
His wife, Marie-Antoinette Aiutino, is sentenced to a 6 months suspended sentence.
Vincenzo doesn’t calm down after the trial. In November 1998, he is sentenced to four months of prison for ransacking four prison cells and assaulting prison guards.
In 2000, Sid Ahmed Rezala replaces Vincenzo as the youngest French serial killer.
In addition to his sentence for the murders, Vincenzo must give financial compensation to the victims, but since he doesn’t have much money as a prisoner, he often sends 15cts at a time. A pitiful amount which only reminds the families that he is still alive while their loved ones are dead.
Vincenzo is eligible for parole since 2011, but all of his attempts to be released have been in vain.
That’s it for today ! Tell me what you think about this case on r/Murder_Wine_Cheese. Also, you can follow me on Instagram (@mwacblog) and on Tumblr (@mwacblog). Watch some cute animal videos to relax, and I’ll see you with the next case !
Sources :
Images sources:
Vincenzo Aiutino : Le Républicain Lorrain
Isabelle Le Nénan : Le Républicain Lorrain
Isabelle Christophe : Psycho-Criminologie
Bernadette Bour : Psycho-Criminologie