After being vanished for a year, body of French teen found

Police announced Wednesday that the French youngster and her assailant are dead and that a car that was reported months into the search for the teen who vanished in September of last year had been stolen by her captor. Elle identified the girl as 15-year-old Lina Delsarte, whose body was discovered on Wednesday in a forested area close to the town of Nevers in the central Nievre region. This is some 300 miles west of the place where she disappeared, which is in the Alsace region that borders Germany and Switzerland. According to CBS News, the youngster was walking to a train station in the hamlet of Saint-Blaise-La-Roche on the morning of September 23, 2023, when her phone’s tracking signal was lost.

In the months that followed, authorities examined hundreds more automobiles. According to CBS, one of those was a Ford Puma that was reportedly in the vicinity when Lina disappeared. According to Le Figaro, the car was being driven by a homeless guy named Samuel Gonin on January 6 of this year when he attempted to avoid a customs inspection and ultimately crashed. It was discovered that the car had been stolen in August of last year in Germany. Authorities looking for Lina became interested in it months later, and according to Le Figaro, they discovered her DNA on a seatbelt and her luggage in the glove compartment.

According to CBS, Gonin, a carpentry instructor at a Besancon vocational school, committed suicide in July before he could be questioned with Lina’s abduction. “I have lost my honor, my dignity, my humanity, I must leave,” he wrote in the note he left behind. RTL says, “I don’t know how to control myself.” The site where Lina’s body was discovered immersed in a stream beneath an embankment was eventually determined by authorities using GPS data that they had taken from the Puma, according to CBS. According to reports, the Puma made a stop there on September 24, 2023. Shortly before that time, Gonin’s ex-partner told Le Figaro that he had “gone off the rails” and stopped taking medication for his bipolar disease.