Eroline O'Keeffe yesterday won her lawsuit against the French state for bungling the investigation into her son Trevor's murder.
But the judiciary's tardy admission of "the dysfunction of the public service of justice" was of little comfort to Ms O'Keeffe, 17½ years after Trevor was found strangled and buried in a shallow grave in north-eastern France.
Trevor O'Keeffe was 19 when he went to France on summer holiday. He was hitch-hiking home when he was picked up by Warrant Officer Pierre Chanal, a sadistic, homosexual serial killer.
Trevor was at least the eighth young man killed by Chanal in as many years. Only two bodies, his and that of a conscript named Olivier Donner, were ever found.
One week after Trevor was murdered, Interpol notified Ms O'Keeffe. She and her sister, Noeleen Slattery, travelled to Saint Quentin to collect his body. Though the local gendarmerie knew the women were coming they buried Trevor the day before their arrival. It took six weeks to get the body exhumed.
The exhumation at the end of September 1987 was like a horror film. Trevor had been buried in a paupers' field, in a plastic bag inside a cheap wooden coffin. When the mechanical digger pulled it out, the boards broke.
Several months later, Ms O'Keeffe received a letter from a Frenchwoman who found Trevor's belongings in a forest. When the woman notified the police, they told her to keep the haversack, tent, birth cert and FCA registration, so she wrote to the address on the documents.
Exactly one year after Trevor's death, Chanal's van was found by a roadside with Palasz Falvay, a Hungarian hitch-hiker, imprisoned in the back. For 20 hours, Chanal had sodomised Falvay.
Ms O'Keeffe believed the evidence found in Chanal's van would lead to his being charged with Trevor's murder. She identified her son's socks and underpants. Soil on the spade in the van was identical to that in Trevor's grave. A handkerchief with Chanal's initials was found near Trevor's body. But this evidence, and some 600 hairs found in the van, was lost for eight years.
Attending Chanal's trial for the kidnapping and rape of Falvay was a terrible ordeal. With relatives of Chanal's other victims, the Irish women watched Chanal's videotape of his crime, and heard Falvay's account of the torture he endured.
Judge Charles Marien, who lost the physical evidence linking Chanal to O'Keeffe's murder, promised Ms O'Keeffe that Chanal would serve his entire 10-year sentence. Then he freed Chanal after 6½ years.
There were many fruitless, traumatic visits to France. Ms Slattery said yesterday: "They didn't want to know us. When we went to the Department of Justice in Paris, a civil servant told us that our case had nothing to do with his ministry. He told us, literally, to go home." In 2002, Judge Pascal Chapart, the seventh magistrate to be assigned to the O'Keeffe case, finally charged Chanal with three murders. Chapart found the hair samples lost by Marien, and DNA tests proved that O'Keeffe and two of the missing men had been in Chanal's van.
Chanal had repeatedly said he would commit suicide if he was put on trial again. In May 2003, when his murder trial was to begin, he took an overdose. He went on a hunger strike in summer 2003. Hours after his trial started on October 14th, he slashed his left femoral artery in a hospital bed. The families were cheated of a guilty verdict and, in six of eight cases, of all hope of knowing where their loved ones were buried.
Yesterday's verdict did not end Ms O'Keeffe's pursuit of justice. "We are going to file another suit against the state for their responsibility in allowing Chanal to die," said her lawyer, Mr Éric Dupont-Moretti.