30 years ago, his daughter Karine Vocklaert was the victim of serial killer Patrick Tissier in Perpignan. Jacqueline Milluy recounts this drama and confides her despair while the ogre of Perpignan has been able to file a request for release since September 21.
Like a bad feeling. When her neighbor tells her that Karine hasn’t come home from school, Jocelyne Milluy “feels like a blow to the stomach. Something weird. A strange feeling”, she says 30 years later, still in transit of fear by the memory of this premonitory intuition.
This Monday, September 13, 1993, her 8-year-old granddaughter wanted to stay at school against her mother’s advice to be with her friends. While his brother returned alone at the end of school time, to their small apartment in the Sunny City in Perpignan, located a few meters from the school. After the study, Karine did not come home.
Cédric, Karine’s brother: “I felt guilty for a long time”
Thirty years after the assassination of his sister, Cédric Voklaert recounts this disastrous September 13, 1993 in a flood of sobs, forever devastated by this tragedy.
“I was almost 10 years old when it happened. That day, I came home from school at the normal dismissal time. Karine had wanted to stay in school. My sister was studious. From From the day she disappeared, everything was hidden from me. I couldn’t go to her funeral. I don’t even remember if anyone told me she was dead. Maybe people wanted to protect me but I think it was a mistake to do that. I experienced the disappearance of my sister long after. This story has been playing around in my head for 30 years. The guilt, I have worn for a long time. I told myself that if we had gone out at the same time, they would have taken us both away. I think he wanted to hurt all three of us, my mother, my sister and me. It was days that he was filming at the foot of our building. He was angry that my mother had refused his advances. This whole story ruined my life. Today, I talk a lot with my sister… The “thing” will ask to go out, I’m sure of it. If he comes out, I know what I have to do…”
Jocelyne immediately leaves her job and sets out to find her daughter’s schoolbag. “I don’t know why, I told myself that if I found him, I would also find my daughter.” With her heart aching with worry, she went to the police station, but at the time, she says, “you had to wait 48 hours before you could report a disappearance.” With Monica, the neighbor who looks after the children, they search every corner of their neighborhood for hours. In vain. The specter of tragedy fades as night falls. “I started going crazy,” she said.
She gave the gentleman a kiss then got into her car
The police knocked at her house the next day and showed her the photo of Patrick Tissier. Patrick is a family friend. The children call him uncle. They celebrated his birthday at home at the end of August. Jocelyne does not understand that the police already suspect him in the disappearance of her daughter. She doesn’t make the connection at all. Karine has disappeared. It’s all that matters. She has to find her.
The only witness to the disappearance at the time was a child from school. He told the police that he saw the little girl “give a kiss to a gentleman then she got into a white car with him”. Tissier has just taken little Karine to hell. He suggests playing a game with her. He handcuffs her, gags her and puts a hood on her. He forces her to hide in the car. Then he goes near a small abandoned cabin in Fitou. In the car, he rapes her. The little girl is struggling. He hit her. Then realizes what he just did. He strangles her to death and rapes her again.
The police are on his trail but it is too late. Karine is dead.
Three days earlier, on September 10, he also left Marie-José Gauze, a friend of his, between life and death. He tried to strangle her with a scarf because she refused his advances and hit her head violently on the ground. Several times. He then tied her up, raped her and when she woke up, he tried to kill her. “She screamed, and he didn’t go all the way and ran away,” says Maître Claude Py, the lawyer for little Karine’s father. Very quickly, the police made the link with Karine’s disappearance. Jocelyne doesn’t understand what’s going on and doesn’t know anything. “I was forbidden from watching TV and I was completely stunned by the pills.”
Karine’s body found at the bottom of a well with her schoolbag
On September 21, Tissier was arrested in Paulhan in Hérault. “He confessed immediately and led the investigators to the scene of the crime,” says Maître Py. He threw Karine’s body into a well with her schoolbag and covered it with trash. Jocelyne is devastated but she still does not believe in Tissier’s guilt. “The death of my daughter was such a shock. At the funeral of my little Karine, I screamed in the church, “we have to stop those who did this”. We had to arrive at the trial so that I realize that he was her murderer.”
Master Py says that the killer had everything premeditated. “He had bought handcuffs, emptied his bank accounts and spotted the old cabin; he certainly intended to disappear after that.” He chose Karine because she is easy, harmless prey and because she is the daughter of Jocelyne, who refused his advances a few weeks earlier. “I remember that day, he clenched his jaw and his fists really hard.” After this setback, he attacked Marie-José Gauze, mad with rage.
I brought an assassin into my house
A few weeks after his arrest, the police discovered that he had also murdered Concetta Lemma, a neighbor of Jocelyne. He also strangled her and then raped her. He wrapped it in his shower curtain and hid it in a small tunnel in Canohès. Behind the kind Uncle Patrick hides the monster Tissier, a serial killer. “I welcomed him into my home. We attended the same Mormon church. He took the children on his knee, gave them stuffed animals. I brought a murderer into my house…”
At the trial, in 1998, Jacqueline learned that he had also killed two other women, in 1971 and 1982. Two victims massacred by the same method: strangled then raped. For his last crime, he was released eight years later, although he should have remained behind bars until 1995. “If he had served his entire sentence, Karine would still be alive,” laments Maître Py.
For the murder of Karine, he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a security period of 30 years. The man we now call the ogre of Perpignan can file a request for release since September 21. He has, for the moment, done nothing in this direction and continues to serve his sentence in Ensisheim prison in Haut-Rhin, with a neighbor, a certain Francis Heaulme. In his cell, Tissier would spend his days reading and would have the novel about Hannibal Lecter as his bedside book.
Patrick Tissier, soon to be released?
She no longer sleeps at night. Jocelyne Milluy, the mother of little Karine, lives in fear that her daughter’s killer will leave prison. For months, she has been anxious in her small house in Cuiny in the North of France where she now lives, without really knowing how to act. Since September 21, he can potentially file a request for release, as authorized by law after 30 years in prison. She wrote a letter to the judges last February to tell them “not to let him out”. In recent days, she has become closer to Maître Christelle Nicolau, the daughter of the late Étienne Nicolau, the tenor of the Perpignan bar who had represented her. “For the moment, Tissier is eligible for a request but we have not been informed of any request. In the event that he does so, we will express ourselves in writing or orally, directly before the judges.”
Even if he made a request, he will be subject to several psychiatric assessments but “Tissier has little chance of obtaining release given his CV and his dangerousness”, affirms Maître Claude Py.
Real perpetuity
The affair had caused such a stir that a law on actual life imprisonment had been promulgated. It is in reality a life prison sentence with an irreducible security sentence of 30 years.
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