The 30-year-old murder case reopened by two strands of hair found in Paris
In June 1995, a trunk bound with a metal chain was found floating in the Seine, to the west of Paris.
Despite being the spine of the most romantic city in the world, anyone who knows Paris knows that nothing good floats in the Seine. People must have been aware of this when they hauled this trunk out of the river, clipped off the chain and prepared to open it up. However, nothing could have prepared them for what was inside. The corpse of a woman, missing its head and hands.
Immediately, the case made headlines all across France, but the identity of said woman was a mystery for the next two years until extensive DNA testing was performed on the corpse. In 1997, it was announced that the identity of the deceased was Corinne Di Dio, a 37-year-old woman who had gone missing weeks before being found in the trunk. While the identity of the corpse had been found, no investigation of the corpse or the trunk had brought anyone closer to finding the culprit.
Di Dio’s inner circle had been questioned, and twice suspicion had fallen on her sister-in-law, Marie-Thérèse Garcia. This may sound like a soap opera storyline, but the truth is so much more bizarre than that. Because this was no ordinary family that Di Dio and Garcia were part of. No, the two had direct familial connections to one of the most notorious families in the history of European organised crime.
Ten years before her murder, Di Dio had a relationship with known Spanish drug lord Antonio Marquez-Gomez. They had a child together, Romain, but split soon after he was born. Di Dio seemingly had a rebound relationship with Antonio’s brother Francisco, but by the mid-1990s, had taken Romain away from the Spanish side of his family and was in no mood to let him associate with them. Wanting as little to do with the criminal aspect of their family as possible.
This meant that there was no shortage of possible candidates for Di Dio’s murder, especially when you consider the strong possibility that there was a separation between who gave the order and who carried it out. That is, until 2023, nearly 30 years after the discovery of her body, when DNA testing developed to the point where individual hairs could be tested and reliable information gleaned from them. Two hairs were found in the trunk, and now they could actually be tested.
They were revealed to belong to someone in Garcia’s matrilineal family line. This includes Garcia herself.
Suddenly, the case was blown wide open. Garcia, then 79, was arrested. She has remained in prison until she stands trial for the murder of Di Dio, despite repeated pleas for her released based on her age and health. She is insistent about her innocence, telling Le Parisien, “The hairs they found were brown, but back then everyone knew I had black hair.”
Before adding cattily, “And if I’d wanted to remove every woman who Francisco slept with, there wouldn’t be many women left in the world. There’s no proof against me. No clue. No motive. It’s all built on sand.”
This is, of course, ignoring all the proof, clues and motive against her. You can’t really expect a crook to take something like this lying down though, can you?