poisoned a lesbian couple Thinking outta the box?
You just gotta keep cool says French dick Liberte Egalite Sororite! It is a manhunt which has transfixed a nation. After an extraordinary sequence of events, monitoring the progress of Jean-Pierre Treiber, an unprepossessing alleged double-murderer who escaped from prison last month hidden in a cardboard box, is becoming France's favourite spectator sport. The saga's latest instalment came yesterday when Le Figaro magazine published grainy but clear surveillance pictures of a bespectacled Treiber, alleged to have poisoned a lesbian couple in 2004 to steal their credit cards, walking peacefully at dusk through the streets of the small country town of Bréau in the department of Seine-et-Marne. The images, leaked to the press, provoked an angry intervention from the interior minister, Brice Hortefeux, who spoke of his "impatience" at the failure to catch the former forestry guard. So far Treiber, 46, a veteran hunter, accomplished "woodsman" and survival expert, has evaded sweeps involving hundreds of soldiers, hidden cameras, mobile roadblocks and stake-outs. Mocking his pursuers, he has sent a series of letters to his girlfriend signed "Jean Jean of the woods" and to media organisations in which he talks of the joys of living rough. Several have been published in the mass-circulation Paris-Match. The Nouveau Détective compared him with the Count of Monte Cristo, the vengeful hero of Alexandre Dumas's novel. "I have swapped one prison for another, larger one… At the moment I am in a very beautiful forest, I think all the different species of trees are here and it's really very lovely," Treiber wrote to his girlfriend. "It is nice with the mist and the deer and the boar." After his escape from prison in the town of Auxerre on 8 September, Treiber is thought to have headed directly to the forest of Bombon, 25 miles to the south-east of Paris, close to where he lived and where he is alleged to have committed his crimes. Last Wednesday, a TV crew found a letter left for Treiber by his girlfriend in a tree mentioned as a potential rendez-vous point or message-drop in letters he wrote from prison. Local bureaucrats have blamed the hordes of journalists that have descended on the area for the failure to find him. "There are dozens of reporters every square metre," one local official said. Treiber has deliberately stoked media interest, joining the long list of escapees who have fascinated the French public and who have turned to books, newspapers or television to project an image of a wronged rebel single-handedly taking on a repressive, unjust state. The most famous remains Jacques Mesrine, a bank robber and kidnapper who boasted of killing dozens of men and who himself was controversially shot dead by police in north Paris in 1979 after escaping from a high-security prison. Mesrine, played by actor Vincent Cassel in a two-part biopic released in the UK this year, published two books and gave a series of interviews during his 20-year career. "It's difficult to see how he [Treiber] is going to stay free forever... but that, if I understand rightly, isn't his aim," said Georges Moréas, a former policeman and writer. "He wants to get publicity and prove his innocence, and that's something new. Certainly if he does turn up for his trial, as he says he is going to do, then he will certainly have scored a serious point with any jurors." But while friends from the small village where Treiber lived and his hunting companions claim to remember someone "calm, discreet and convivial", the fugitive's effort to boost his media profile faces two major obstacles: a book published last week by his former wife in which he is denounced as a "manipulator" who must now believe himself "invincible", and the sordid nature of the crime with which he is charged. Treiber was arrested in November 2004, three weeks after 36-year-old actress Géraldine Giraud and Katia Lherbier, disappeared from the Giraud family's country house. Though he denied wrongdoing, police claim Treiber, who had grave financial problems, used credit cards belonging to the pair to buy groceries after their disappearance. After searching around Treiber's home, the two women's remains were found at the bottom of a well. They showed no marks of violence and investigators concluded that the women could have been gassed or poisoned with chemicals used in hunting. Treiber remained in detention throughout a complex and troubled investigation which has yet to go to trial. Giraud's aunt was at one point detained and then finally cleared of having asked the principal suspect to "imprison" or "punish" the two women. There was also a fruitless reconstruction of the crime and prolonged inquiries overseas. It is not the first time the French police have been mocked by a man they have been seeking. More recently than Mesrine, there was the fugitive who escaped from a Belgian prison in 2006 and called various European police forces several times a day to tell them that they would never catch him. After a year he was arrested in Toulouse, south-west France. "You just have to keep cool," a senior police officer told Le Monde. An international arrest warrant for Treiber has been issued. Officials say there is no indication that he has fled overseas but that his whereabouts are still unknown. Meanwhile, France is eagerly waiting for the next instalment.
