Riddle of French villager's Disappearance Ends
Jon Henley
The Guardian
__________
Paris (France):
Henri Mouttet was, by all accounts, a handsome but unremarkable young man, just turned 30. He worked at the cheese factory at Gresse-en-Vercors, in the harsh, unforgiving peaks of the Isère, south of Grenoble.Then, one night 92 years ago, Mouttet vanished. In his personal diary, the local gendarme, Régis Cuchet, recorded: "1913: young Mouttet ... mysteriously disappears after spending evening in village cafe."
The police investigation was short-lived: there was no clue, no trace, no motive. Within a few months, the first world war broke out, and soon Gresse - nowadays a popular ski and summer mountain resort - had far more than one missing man to mourn.
For decades, however, the remote mountain village continued to puzzle over Mouttet's fate. There were rumours, theories, heated accusations, fierce denials. But no body was found - no proof uncovered.Until last April, when two amateur potholers exploring the Chéteau-Vert cave complex high above Gresse-en-Vercors stumbled across the scattered remains of a human skeleton at the back of one of the deepest caverns.
Alarmed, they alerted the nearest gendarmerie, in the town of La Mure. And the best part of a century after it happened, the mystery of of Mouttet's disappearance was at long last on its way to being solved.Sifting carefully through the soil at the back of the Chéteau-Vert, the gendarmes found buttons, scraps of cloth, a wooden pipe and an ageing leather wallet.
Inside the wallet was a handful of coins - Napoleons from the 1870s, but also a 50-centime piece dating from 1913."That was the starting point for the whole investigation," Sgt Laurent Charbonnel told Le Parisien newspaper yesterday. "We soon discovered the village was still deeply marked by an unexplained disappearance in precisely that year."Hearing of the inquiry, a village resident presented Sgt Charbonnel with Cuchet's diary. With a possible name to put to the skeleton, the remains were sent to the gendarmerie's criminal research institute north of Paris.
There, police experts established that the victim had suffered from a slight limp. Mouttet's papers, traced after some months by the La Mure gendarmes, showed that he had been turned down for military service because of a limp.
Seeking a more conclusive identification, Sgt Charbonnel tracked down a grand-nephew of the missing man, André Mouttet, in Aix-en-Provence. The results were indisputable: the remains found at the back of the Chéteau-Vert belonged to Henri Mouttet.
Nov 21, 2005
Jon Henley
The Guardian
__________
Paris (France):
Henri Mouttet was, by all accounts, a handsome but unremarkable young man, just turned 30. He worked at the cheese factory at Gresse-en-Vercors, in the harsh, unforgiving peaks of the Isère, south of Grenoble.Then, one night 92 years ago, Mouttet vanished. In his personal diary, the local gendarme, Régis Cuchet, recorded: "1913: young Mouttet ... mysteriously disappears after spending evening in village cafe."
The police investigation was short-lived: there was no clue, no trace, no motive. Within a few months, the first world war broke out, and soon Gresse - nowadays a popular ski and summer mountain resort - had far more than one missing man to mourn.
For decades, however, the remote mountain village continued to puzzle over Mouttet's fate. There were rumours, theories, heated accusations, fierce denials. But no body was found - no proof uncovered.Until last April, when two amateur potholers exploring the Chéteau-Vert cave complex high above Gresse-en-Vercors stumbled across the scattered remains of a human skeleton at the back of one of the deepest caverns.
Alarmed, they alerted the nearest gendarmerie, in the town of La Mure. And the best part of a century after it happened, the mystery of of Mouttet's disappearance was at long last on its way to being solved.Sifting carefully through the soil at the back of the Chéteau-Vert, the gendarmes found buttons, scraps of cloth, a wooden pipe and an ageing leather wallet.
Inside the wallet was a handful of coins - Napoleons from the 1870s, but also a 50-centime piece dating from 1913."That was the starting point for the whole investigation," Sgt Laurent Charbonnel told Le Parisien newspaper yesterday. "We soon discovered the village was still deeply marked by an unexplained disappearance in precisely that year."Hearing of the inquiry, a village resident presented Sgt Charbonnel with Cuchet's diary. With a possible name to put to the skeleton, the remains were sent to the gendarmerie's criminal research institute north of Paris.
There, police experts established that the victim had suffered from a slight limp. Mouttet's papers, traced after some months by the La Mure gendarmes, showed that he had been turned down for military service because of a limp.
Seeking a more conclusive identification, Sgt Charbonnel tracked down a grand-nephew of the missing man, André Mouttet, in Aix-en-Provence. The results were indisputable: the remains found at the back of the Chéteau-Vert belonged to Henri Mouttet.
Nov 21, 2005
