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Written by Riviera Reporter
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One of us for many years had a very bad-tempered dog. For some time he was treated for a chronic ear infection by Nice vet Jean-Louis Turquin. “He had a magic touch with animals,” recalls our colleague. “He’d pat my dog’s head and he’d become as calm as you’d like.” Most of this animal doctor’s clients were surprised when they heard one day that he had been arrested and charged with the murder of his 8-year-old son Charles-Edouard. As Nice-Matin commented recently this was the first public revelation of “one of the great criminal riddles of the Coast”.
One night in March 1991 the boy disappeared from his bedroom in the Nice villa where he lived with his father. His body has never been found. Not long after his son disappeared Dr Turquin was arrested and charged. The prosecution’s case rested on recorded telephone conversations with his estranged wife in which he admitted the killing. Brought to trial in March 1997 (he was defended by Me Jacques Peyrat) he claimed this was part of a mind game with his wife. Certainly, lawyers on both sides agreed that the Turquins were an odd couple. He, for example, once gave his son a swastika armband as a birthday present. It also emerged that he was possibly not the boy’s father.
Anyway, despite Me Peyrat’s eloquence and Turquin’s claim that the boy had been abducted to Israel, he was convicted, got twenty years, came out after ten (having gained a degree in English while inside) and is now working again as a vet, well away from Nice. End of story? Not quite. Early this year hunters near the village of Duranus, not far from where Turquin once had his office, turned up the skull of a child, seemingly of about Charles-Edouard’s age. Medical examiners are at this time still working to refine their identification – including with DNA tests. Jean-Louis Turquin seems unfazed by all this: “I still believe my son is in Israel but if this is his skull maybe we’ll learn the truth.”
From Riviera Reporter Issue 126: April/May 2008
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