Jean-Marc Reiser is appearing from this Monday, June 27 before the Bas-Rhin Assize Court for the assassination of Sophie Le Tan in 2018. The 61-year-old man is familiar with the courts. He has already been tried before four assize courts, including that of Doubs.
“He is someone who has a very particular profile”recognizes Me Emmanuel Spano, one of the many lawyers to have defended this 61-year-old Alsatian with a busy legal career.
The Strasbourg lawyer, who assisted Jean-Marc Reiser in several cases, will not be at his side during the assize trial. On the other hand, he defended him in the case of witness tampering during the investigation of the Le Tan case for which the Strasbourg criminal court imposed a six-month prison sentence on him, a decision which he appealed.
“You don’t often come across someone in the street who has already been convicted by an assize court, acquitted by another and been the subject of several procedures”, explains to AFP Me Spano. This paints the portrait of a client sometimes “gruff” but cultured, able to “intellectual reasoning”who “cares about his rights”. He’s been in prison for a few years now, and it’s not the first time.
On eight occasions, Jean-Marc Reiser appeared before a criminal court or an assize court, particularly in the Doubs in 2001. He had been sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment for rapes committed in 1995 and 1996, a sentence confirmed on appeal in 2003.
The very first mention on his criminal record dates back to July 13, 2000. He was then 39 years old when he was sentenced in Besançon to eight months in prison for having tried the day before to flee from the courthouse during the examination. of a request for release.
Because Jean-Marc Reiser had then been detained for three years: during a road check in June 1997 in the Doubs, near the border with Switzerland, customs officers discovered weapons, crowbars, a balaclava, cords and a bottle in his car. anesthetic.
As well as strange photographs of naked women, visibly asleep and staged with sexual penetrations. Among them, a friend of the companion of Mr. Reiser, a time his mistress, who has no memory of having posed for these shots.
The investigation will make the link with the rape of a young German in Gironde, in August 1995.
Sentenced in March 2001 in correctional to five months in prison for possession of weapons in his car and seven months for violence against a person in charge of a public service mission, Jean-Marc Reiser appeared in stride for the first time before a court of assizes, that of the Doubs, for the rapes of the young German and her ex-mistress.
He will be sentenced to 15 years in prison, then to 12 years on appeal in January 2002 by that of Bas-Rhin. But Jean-Marc Reiser, very procedural, managed to overturn this second verdict. A new appeal trial is organized before the Assize Court of Côte d’Or, which sentences him to 15 years in prison.
Me Jean-Pierre Degenève had defended him during the first assize trial. “A personality that I have not forgotten”, confided to AFP the criminal lawyer from Besançon. “He was in omnipotence”, “of a very great authoritarianism” but capable at the same time of a “great courtesy”, continues Me Degenève, who evokes a “meaningful” Reiser. “A funny character”.
In Dijon, it was Me Marc Vialle who assisted him. The Strasbourg lawyer remembers a trial held “in a rather heavy camera”.
Also in 2001, a few weeks after his conviction for rape in Besançon, Jean-Marc Reiser had been acquitted, for lack of evidence, by the Bas-Rhin assizes for the murder of Françoise Hohmann, a 23-year-old sales representative vanished in 1987 in Strasbourg. The last person she knocked on was Jean-Marc Reiser. This case, reopened in early 2020 against X, is still under investigation.
Between 2001 and 2003, Mr. Reiser therefore appeared before four different assize courts.
He spent part of his years in prison at the Ensisheim central (Haut-Rhin), where he played cards, notably with serial killers Guy Georges and Francis Heaulme.
Released on May 5, 2010, he quickly relapsed: two attempted robberies in veterinary clinics in Strasbourg and its suburbs in 2012 and 2016 earned him sentences of four years in prison, two of which were closed, and eight months, of which four were closed. And in 2017, the justice inflicts him again five months in prison for receiving stolen objects.
On September 15, 2018, he was arrested in connection with the disappearance of Sophie Le Tan. Me Spano, who had defended him in his last cases, was “surprised” at the time by this arrest: “He gave signs of insertion”like this Master in archeology that he had just obtained. “The signals were green, very sincerely…”
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