# Jean-Louis Turquin case

The Jean-Louis Turquin case is a criminal investigation that began in March 1991 in Nice, France, involving the disappearance and presumed murder of eight-year-old Charles-Édouard Turquin, allegedly at the hands of his father. The boy's body was never recovered.

## Disappearance of Charles-Édouard

On March 21, 1991, at 7:15 a.m., Jean-Louis Turquin called the Central Police Station in Nice to report the disappearance of his son, Charles-Édouard Turquin, born April 7, 1983, during the night. Jean-Louis Turquin, 41, a veterinarian in Nice, lived alone with his son in a large estate on the heights of Nice, the Bastide haute.

## Start of the investigation

The initial findings indicated that no personal belongings of the child had disappeared. The child's trail, followed by police dogs, ended abruptly in front of the house. Quickly abandoning the idea of a runaway, the police favored the theory of a family abduction after conducting their investigation. The Turquin couple had been living a tumultuous marriage for a long time: Michèle Balanger and Jean-Louis Turquin had met at the École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort in 1972 and started living together in 1973. For several years, Michèle Turquin, who found her husband too authoritarian, had been having extramarital affairs, which she did not hide from her husband. In January 1991, doubting his paternity, Jean-Louis Turquin had genetic tests performed and learned that he was not the biological father of Charles-Édouard. In February 1991, during a violent argument, he attacked his wife with a tear gas canister, prompting her to leave the marital home. At the time of the events, the couple was in the process of divorcing, and Jean-Louis Turquin, unwilling to lose custody of the child and pay alimony to his wife, pressured her to return, harassed, and threatened her. He gave his wife an ultimatum, which expired at midnight on March 20.

## Progress of the investigation and confession

In the days following the disappearance, Michèle Turquin shared her suspicions about her husband with the police. She even went as far as to record their phone conversations. In one of them, on April 25, 1991, Jean-Louis Turquin told her that the child was being held in Morocco and could be released if she returned to the Bastide haute. On April 27, during an intimate encounter granted by Michèle Turquin, her husband, questioned by her, admitted to having killed and buried their son in the commune of Lucéram. The investigating judge, informed of this, convinced Michèle Turquin to obtain recorded confessions on tape. On May 6, 1991, during a new intimate encounter recorded on tape, when asked by his wife, "But why did you strangle him rather than something else?", Turquin replied, "If I had used a knife, there would have been blood everywhere." Based on this recorded confession, Jean-Louis Turquin was charged with murder and imprisoned on May 13, 1991. Released on February 14, 1992, nine months later, while awaiting his trial, Turquin had posters printed offering a reward of 100,000 francs for anyone who found a trace of his son, and he hired a detective to investigate in Israel. Indeed, the child's biological father was believed to be an American of Czech origin and Jewish faith, Moïse Ber Edelstein (a marginal figure from Nice who was once a dancer at the Opéra de Nice), whom Michèle had met at her veterinary office. Thanks to him, she had established connections in Israel. The justice system postponed the trial to gather additional information. The detective found Israeli hairdressers who claimed to have seen the child accompanied by a woman and convinced them to come to France to testify at the trial. French police traveled to Israel to question these witnesses under a letter rogatory, but without conclusive results.
On December 24, 1993, Moïse Ber Edelstein was found drowned near the old port of Nice, strangely dressed in fisherman's waders.

## Trial

The trial began on March 17, 1997. His lawyers were Jacques Peyrat, the mayor of Nice, and Jean-Marc Varaut. On the first day, the tumultuous life of the Turquin couple and Michèle Turquin's extramarital affairs were examined. The prosecution emphasized the accused's cold demeanor on the day of the disappearance. On the second day, the confession tapes were presented, which proved disastrous for Turquin's defense. He explained that it was a "role-playing game" meant to tell her what she wanted to hear in hopes of winning her back. In response, the defense exploited the Israeli theory, which appeared unreliable and very weak during the debates. At the end of the hearings, the prosecutor requested life imprisonment. On March 21, 1997, six years after his son's disappearance, Jean-Louis Turquin was sentenced to 20 years in prison. On April 9, 1997, the appeals court denied his request for release. Two years later, in July 1999, Jean-Louis Turquin filed for a retrial. Despite the hope raised by a new lead in Israel, where an investigator allegedly found a teenage boy in a rabbinical school of the same age as Charles-Édouard, born like him in Nice, with the same eye and hair color, and who also spoke with a strong European accent, the request for retrial was rejected on May 14, 2001.
In 2003, a new development emerged: a detainee claimed to have received a confession from another inmate, who admitted to accidentally hitting and killing a child in pajamas one night on the heights of Nice, whose body was later incinerated in a cement factory. However, the informant refused to reveal his fellow inmate's identity without securing his own release in exchange. Due to these outlandish demands, the prosecutor dismissed this as an attempt to manipulate the system for early release.
On July 11, 2006, the Bastia Penal Enforcement Tribunal granted Jean-Louis Turquin conditional release. He was freed from the Casabianda Detention Center (Haute-Corse) on July 18.
Michèle Turquin died of a heart attack in Marseille on January 8, 2014, at the age of 61, after reportedly living with an Orthodox Jewish man, according to her ex-husband. She had not initiated any proceedings to officially declare her son's death. The inheritance from the sums she received upon her separation (Jean-Louis Turquin mentioned 1 million euros) could not be traced by Jean-Louis Turquin.

## Murder of Jean-Louis Turquin

In June 2000, Jean-Louis Turquin married Nadine, a fitness instructor he had met in prison visiting hours. In 2010, the couple settled on the island of Saint-Martin, in the Caribbean. On January 7, 2017, he was found dead, with a gunshot wound to the back, in his home in Saint-Martin. His wife, Nadine Turquin, discovered his body upon returning from a restaurant where she had just celebrated her birthday. She found him lying on his back in a pool of blood on the floor of his bedroom. Local rumors suggested it might have been a burglary gone wrong, but the possibility of a vendetta or revenge could not be ruled out.
In 2017, Nadine Turquin was placed under investigation and jailed for her husband's murder. On June 21, 2019, the Court of Appeal of Basse-Terre overturned her indictment because, according to her lawyer Olivier Morice, "a third expert report, delivered in February 2019, invalidated the investigating judge’s conclusions by indicating that the traces of gunpowder on her hands could have been caused by contamination from contact with her murdered husband." Nadine Turquin was granted the status of assisted witness. She was ultimately cleared of all charges with a dismissal of the case in the spring of 2020.