Murder of Charles-Édouard Turquin

On 21 March 1991, a veterinarian in Nice, France, Jean-Louis Turquin, telephoned the city's central police station to report that his eight-year-old son, Charles-Édouard Turquin, had vanished from their home on the heights of Nice during the night. Investigators found that none of the boy's belongings were missing, and a police-dog track ended abruptly in front of the house. Officers soon set aside the idea that the child had run away.

The Turquin marriage had been failing for years. The couple, who had met at veterinary school in 1972, were divorcing, and in January 1991 genetic testing led Jean-Louis Turquin to conclude that he was not the boy's biological father. In February 1991 he assaulted his wife with a tear-gas canister during an argument, and she left the family home. He then pressured and threatened her to return, setting an ultimatum that expired the night before the disappearance.

The boy's mother told police she suspected her husband and began recording their conversations. In late April 1991 he claimed the child was alive and being held abroad; days later, during a private meeting, he said he had killed the boy and buried him near the commune of Lucéram. At the investigating judge's urging she recorded a further conversation on 6 May 1991 in which he made additional admissions. Charged with murder, Jean-Louis Turquin was jailed on 13 May 1991, although the child's body was never found.

Released pending trial in February 1992, he printed reward posters and hired a private detective to pursue a theory that the boy had been taken to Israel; French police followed the lead abroad without result, and a man reported to be the child's biological father was found drowned near Nice in December 1993. When the trial opened in Nice in March 1997, the recorded admissions were central; the defendant said they had been a role-playing game meant to win back his wife. The prosecution sought life imprisonment, and on 21 March 1997 he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years.

Later appeals and a retrial request were rejected, most recently in 2001, and a 2003 jailhouse claim about another possible culprit was dismissed by prosecutors. Jean-Louis Turquin was granted conditional release in July 2006 and continued to assert his innocence. In January 2017 he was found shot dead at his home on the Caribbean island of Saint-Martin; his second wife, Nadine Turquin, was charged, but her indictment was overturned in 2019 and the case was dismissed in 2020. Charles-Édouard's remains have never been recovered.