Luc Tangorre

On September 12, 2019, the Nîmes Correctional Tribunal sentenced Luc Tangorre to three and a half years for sexually assaulting three minors between July 1, 2012 and July 19, 2019. His civil and civic rights were withdrawn for a period of five years, and after he was convicted of rape six times, he continues to proclaim himself a victim of a miscarriage of justice.

Finally, contrary to what his lawyers suggested, he will appeal this decision. Luc Tangorre will soon appear in a Lyon court for similar events, denounced in 2018 by another teenager near Lyon.

In December 2017, Tangorre was indicted again, this time for corrupting a minor in Saint-Martin-en-Haut, in Rhône. He was placed, eight months later, under judicial control.

Domiciled in the Lyon area, since his release from prison in 2000, Luc Tangorre became the talk of the town again on August 12, 2014, when he was indicted in Grau-du-Roi, on suspicion of sexually assaulting a 12-year-old child. The case experienced ramifications, as two other minors joined in the indictment, bringing the total number to three assaults in Gard. Luc Tangorre was left free, with a travel ban on Gard, although the Nîmes Procurate required that he be placed in provisional custody.

Sylviane returned home and on the next day, the filed a complaint to the police station in Marseille for rape. She made a facial composite of her rapist (20–25 years old, wore white sneakers and a dark jacket), learning that she, in fact, had not been the only one to do so: between late 1979 and April 1981, nine other young women had reported being sexually assaulted in the 8th and 9th arrondissements. That same evening, another rape took place in Marseille, then another one just a week later.

This time, Tangorre was not released on parole. He only got two permissions granted within four months, before his release on September 1, 2000.

The second trial of Luc Tangorre began on February 3, 1992, before the cour d'assises of Gard and Nîmes, under presiding Justice Maurice Malleval. As in the first trial at Aix-en-Provence, Tangorre cried out that this was a scandal. At the request of both victims, the trial was held in private.

On February 15, 1988, after serving almost seven years in detention, Luc Tangorre obtained parole through Albin Chalandon. A cohort of journalists were present during his exit, during which he made a statement signifying the continuation of his fight. After that, he moved to Lyon, where he opened a tobacco shop.

Coming from Paris so they could hitchhike on the Côte d'Azur for the weekend of May 21 and 22, 1988, 20-year-old Jennifer Mac Luney and 21-year-old Carol Ackermann, American students in Paris, went to Marseille at first, before moving to a beach in Les Sablettes in La Seyne-sur-Mer. On May 23, they hitchhiked again to return to the capital, where they were taking advanced French courses in an American college. They were standing at the outskirts of Marseille when a man driving Renault 4, aged 30, with brown hair and a friendly demeanor, offered to bring them to Lyon. Shortly before Nîmes, the man claimed that he wanted to go pick cherries, so he deviated from the main route and stopped his apple-green 4L in an isolated cherry plantation, located about three kilometers from Nîmes. There, under the threat of a weapon, he raped them for a long time, sodomizing them with engine oil to make things easier. He then abandoned the girls, without giving them a hundred francs to take a taxi, because "the roads are not safe". After walking through the fields for 35 minutes, they found a highway terminal, where they called the police, reporting that they had been raped.

The police also searched for a book whose title contained the word 'guilt'. They also composed a list of all owners of green Renaults 4L and, in August 1988, a bookseller from Marseille called the police of Nîmes, telling them that he had found a book that matched the one they were looking for: it was written by a CNRS biologist (Gisèle Tichané, a friend of the Tangorre family) titled Guilty at any price: the Luc Tangorre case, which also had the face of a mustachioed man at the bottom of the cover page.

He was partially pardoned for these acts by the then-president, François Mitterrand, in 1987. Five years later, Tangorre was convicted of raping two American students and resentenced to 18 years imprisonment. In 2019, he was sentenced to an additional to three and a half years for sexually assaulting three minors.

Between December 1984 and February 1988, Tangorre was incarcerated at the Muret detention center, where, with the help of his parents, he attempted to get a retrial. The request for review was based on counter-expertise from across the country, which called into question the conclusions of the first examiners. Rumors circulated: his family financed this counter-expertise, and his brother gave a later testimony to justify the traces of the product that had "the characteristics of petroleum jelly", when a witness had largely explained the origin of these lipid spots observed on the raincoat from the beginning of the inspection. These observations annihilated the conclusions of the previous examiners because of "serious methodological errors". On July 21, 1987, after the rejection of an appeal in cassation, Tangorre obtained a presidential pardon from François Mitterrand, but only a partial one, which reduced his sentence to four years.

On May 19, 1983, the trial of Luc Tangorre opened before the cour d'assises of Aix-en-Provence. His family and friends firmly believed in his acquittal, with his defense being provided by Anne and Jean Dissler, François Chevallier and Paul Lombard. Of the seventeen alleged victims of Luc Tangorre, who were assaulted between December 6, 1979 and April 10, 1981, five victims testified before the cour d'assises. Their testimonies weighed heavily, while Tangorre defended himself by presenting alibis that could be hardly be proven or emanated from his entourage: among others, on the evening that he supposedly raped Sylviane, he was hospitalized. Similarly, he claimed that he was together with friends on the evening of the other attacks.

A few weeks later, the examining experts explained that the first sample taken constituted "an element of presumption of great importance", while the second differed from the comparison sample. A controversy over the choice of barium arose, as the plastic revolver itself was made of that material, with the samples the rape scene of victim Aline. Moreover, the stains on Luc's jacket turned out to have the "characteristics of petroleum jelly", and one of the victims had stated that the rapist had used "a fatty substance taken from a cosmetic box" to rape her, later stating after Tangorre's arrest that "it could be petroleum jelly". Following identification from some of the assaulted women and the evidence against him, Luc Tangorre was referred before an examining magistrate and locked up. When friends and family learned what had happened to Luc, nobody believed the accusations: everyone described him as a simple, kind and considerate man, who could never do such things. On May 13, 1982, Tangorre started a hunger strike: a support committee was made on the following day. The case became so well-publicized, that even intellectuals began to defend Luc Tangorre, including historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, writers Marguerite Duras and Françoise Sagan, and the politicians Robert Badinter, Albin Chalandon, Jean-Claude Gaudin and Dominique Baudis.

On April 1, 1981, a 31-year-old woman named Sylviane was going home at 2 PM in the 8th arrondissement. She closed her car, took a few steps towards her home and then noticed a strange man, who immediately threatened her with a weapon and forced her to go back into the vehicle with him. Under the threat of what turns out to be a fake revolver, Sylviane entered the car and drove around the streets of Marseille with her kidnapper, stopping on a path upon request of the latter. There, the man raped her and then forced her to bring him back to the residence where, it seemed, his moped was.

The police made the trip to Marseille-Nîmes to find out if Luc Tangorre could have the necessary time to violate the two students. Modeled on the fluctuating declarations of the Americans, no less than four thirty-month retrospective trajectory trials were necessary to be conducted, taking into account the claims by the girls. It was concluded that Tangorre could have had the material time to carry out this course to violate them, even if, at the end of the third trial, the magistrates at the cour d'assises of Montpellier recognized the fact that "contradictions as they appear in the story of the initial journey, as described by the victims". Tangorre's five lawyers challenged the honesty of the fourth trial, and gave reasons in writing as to why they refused to participate. Finally, it was noted that the crime scene was a place where Luc came to play as a child, 2.5 km away from the "Daffodils" building in Nîmes, his former place of residence, as discovered by the original 1981 investigation..

The police searched his home the next day, and found a dummy revolver containing some dried mud, a moped and a khaki raincoat, crowned with suspicious spots. Those spots were examined, which later proved to be petroleum jelly. Authorities then went to the edge monument of the Morgiou parking lot, where the rapist had assaulted victims Béatrice and Dominique in December 1980 and February 1981, to take samples from the ground to compare with those found on the dummy found at Tangorre's home. Moreover, one of the victims said that the attacker had brandished a revolver before raping her, and others testified that he had a small box of petroleum jelly in his pockets.

Luc Tangorre (born 1959), known as the Marseille Southern Districts Rapist, is a French serial rapist whose crimes were highly publicized in France. He has been sentenced twice, the first time in 1983, to 15 years imprisonment for nine sexual assaults and rapes committed in Marseille.