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| Yves Bert |
What happened to Yves on February 3rd 1977, at the door of the Mazenod School in the 3rd Arrondissement of Lyon, France? Forty years later, the mystery remains complete. The six-year-old boy with blond curls, in his first year of primary school, disappeared with no witnesses.
That day the bell rang "as it did every evening at 5pm. The teacher took her pupils to the exit and they joined hands to go out two by two" the head of the primary school told the French newspaper France-Soir that year. Yves’s older brother Yannick, who was eight at the time, waited for him at the corner of the street. Eventually he was joined by his parents, who were worried by the absence of their children; the journey to the family home in the Rue Paul-Bert took only a few minutes. "I immediately thought it was serious. We visited the classrooms, but there was no one. The head gave us parents' addresses, thinking that Yves had perhaps gone home with one of the other children. At 6pm, we finally called the police," Thérèse Deleuze, the little boy's mother told the paper. According to the caretaker of the school, there was no doubt about it: the boy definitely left the building. He was holding the hand of a little girl, who let go of him once they were outside to join her mother.
An anonymous letter
That same evening, the police started their search for the missing child. The cellars of the district were turned over, but in vain. Yves’s parents, helped by a group of friends, criss-crossed the area putting up posters. Calls to potential witnesses were made across France. Yves's parents were to receive many letters, of which one in particular stood out. "I am writing to you to let you know that I have very good news about your son... Since we cannot have a child, we felt that we had to resort to kidnapping. But now we are tortured by remorse and have decided to return your child to you" wrote an anonymous correspondent on July 24th 1978.
The letter was posted in Privas, in the Ardèche and told Yves’s parents to expect a call to a phone box at the Perrache station in Lyon for further information. On the evening when the call was due they waited as instructed, but it never came. In the following months, four more messages followed. Each one came to nothing.
The case relaunched
On 12 June 1979 the body of a child found in the Rhone was presented to Yves's parents for identification. DNA identification did not yet exist at the time, but the police nevertheless excluded the possibility that it was Yves. Thirty-two years later, in 2009, with the advance of forensic science, the case was relaunched. But whether the body in the river was ever positively identified (and how it came to be there) is not clear– certainly it appears that it was not Yves Bert, as the investigation remains open to this day and is now noted as France’s oldest “cold case”.
Every year, on the anniversary of Yves’s disappearance Thérèse Deleuze contacts the press in the hope that a fresh appeal will bring some new information which might lead to discovering the truth about her son’s disappearance. But so far, only silence. And at the age of seventy, with forty years now passed since the event, she increasingly feels that there is little hope left of ever knowing what happened that day in the short distance between the door of the school and the street corner. She had intended not to approach the press as usual this year, but finally felt she had to, as she “owes it to little Yves”.
If you have any information which might help to resolve this case, please contact APEV:
Aide aux Parents d’Enfants Victimes
3, Rue Edouard Branly
92130 Issy-les-Moulineaux
Tel/Fax: 01 46 48 35 94
Email: contact@apev.org
