[imagesource: AFP / Getty]

For decades, the crimes of a notorious French serial killer and child rapist have haunted Parisian detectives.

That was, until a 59-year-old former police officer made a chilling confession in a suicide note written just before he overdosed on pills this Wednesday (September 29).

Police found the man, François Vérove, in a rental flat in a seaside resort days after he was summoned for DNA testing in connection with murders linked to a serial killer known as Le Grêlé.

Now, prosecutors have confirmed that his DNA matched evidence found at several crime scenes related to the Le Grêlé crime spree.

As a former policeman, Vérove’s crimes were ferocious and horrifying, with everything outlined by The Daily Beast:

He was responsible for a string of rapes and killings in Paris in the 1980s and 1990s, including the murders of 11-year-old Cécile Bloch, and 38-year-old Gilles Politi and his 21-year-old au pair Irmgard Mueller, both of whom were savagely tortured.

The murder of a 19-year-old woman named Karine Leroy has also been attributed to “The Pockmarked Killer.”

The serial killer terrorised Paris for years, and was also accused in six different rapes. The crimes were shockingly brutal.

Block was snatched as she left home for school in May 1986, and later found dead in a basement half-naked and covered by a carpet.

The 11-year-old had been raped and strangled, as well as stabbed in the chest.

Various witness reports in the police investigation revealed that the man had “pockmarked” skin.

Bloch’s half-brother Luc Richard, described the man as “very sure of himself”:

“He spoke to me in a very bold, very polite way, too,” he told the Sud Ouest newspaper in 2015.

“He said something to me like, ‘Have a very, very good day’.”

He said the case left him with “a great feeling of injustice, irreparable.”

A drawing of  Le Grêlé was said to have hung for decades on the walls of the criminal brigade of the Paris judicial police:

Image: Reddit

In three different attacks, he also identified himself as a policeman, but investigators didn’t take that seriously as they thought it might have been a ploy.

Finally, the case was cracked when an investigating magistrate decided to send letters to 750 gendarmes (military police) stationed in the Paris region at the time, reports the BBC.

But Vérove didn’t stick around long enough to get the punishment he deserved.

The Independent has more on the suicide note left as police were closing in, which said the following:

“I admit being a great criminal who committed unforgivable acts until the end of the 1990s,” according to Le Parisien.

French reports said Verove wrote he was not well at the time of the crimes but had “got himself together”.

He was said to have confessed to murders without details of the victims or circumstances.

Vérove is linked to four murders and six rapes, but Didier Saban, a lawyer representing the victims’ families, said there were undoubtedly more.

Vérove managed to retire without anyone finding out, and was married, too. His wife had reported him missing before he killed himself.

His death has undoubtedly left many families without answers.

[sources:dailybeast&bbc&independent]