French court tries 79-year-old woman in 1995 Seine trunk murder

DNA evidence brought a 30-year-old cold case back before a French court, where Marie-Thérèse Garcia, 79, faced trial over the kidnapping and murder of her former sister-in-law, Corinne Di Dio. The case hinged on two hairs found in a metal trunk that investigators say belonged either to Garcia or to another woman in her matrilineal line, a forensic break that revived a file long thought beyond reach.

Di Dio disappeared in June 1995 at age 37. Days later, a metal trunk bound with a chain was found floating in the River Seine west of Paris. Inside was a dismembered female body with no head and no hands. The remains were identified as Di Dio’s in 1997, but the missing body parts were never found, and the investigation twice stalled for lack of evidence.

Garcia was detained in 2023 to await trial after the DNA breakthrough. In Versailles, west of Paris, she was described as France’s oldest female detainee, and repeated requests for conditional release on grounds of age and ill health were rejected. She has denied any role in the killing and recently said the case against her was “built on sand.”

Her defense has argued that the brutality of the crime points elsewhere. Garcia’s lawyer said the killing methods resembled those of organised crime, not those of a woman with no criminal record. That argument reflects the case’s long entanglement with the criminal underworld, where Di Dio and Garcia moved in overlapping circles for years.

In the 1980s, Di Dio was involved with Antonio Marquez-Gomez, a Spanish national known to police for links to the drugs trade. They had a son, Romain, now 41, who was often cared for by Garcia. Garcia later had a relationship with Antonio’s brother, Francisco. Their wider circle also included Jean-Jacques and Philippe Maurice, the latter once the last person condemned to death in France before François Mitterrand granted clemency.

Prosecutors said Garcia lured Di Dio to a home near Rambouillet, south-west of Paris, where she was stabbed to death and dismembered in the sitting room. They plan to argue that the killing stemmed from a pact between Garcia and Marquez-Gomez to take Romain, then 10, away from his mother, along with a personal grudge tied to Di Dio’s affair with Francisco.

The three-week trial in Versailles has turned a cold case into a test of what modern DNA can still unlock after three decades of delay. It also lays bare the human cost of delayed justice, as an aging defendant answers for a crime that had vanished into the Seine and nearly vanished from court with it.