France’s oldest female detainee. 79-year-old Marie-Thérèse Garcia. Has gone on trial in Versailles for the murder of her former sister-in-law, Corinne Di Dio, in a cold case that dates back to 1995, according to BBC. The case centers on the dismembered body of Di Dio, found in a metal trunk in the River Seine in 1995; Garcia is charged with kidnap and murder.

31-Year-Old Case Revived by DNA Breakthrough

Corinne Di Dio went missing in June 1995 when she was 37, though Days later, a metal trunk bound with a metal chain was discovered floating in the River Seine, west of Paris. Inside was the dismembered corpse of a woman,without head and hands, as the body was only identified as Di Dio in 1997, and the missing body parts have never been found.

Garcia was initially under suspicion but the case was closed twice due to lack of evidence, though Recently, DNA technology provided police with a breakthrough — Two hairs found inside the trunk were found to belong either to the defendant or to another woman in her matrilineal descent.

Marriage, Crime, and Family Ties

In 2023, Garcia was put in prison to await trial. She has repeatedly requested conditional release on grounds of age and ill health, but her requests have been denied. Garcia, who is dubbed “Ma Dalton” by the French press after the grandmother of the Lucky Luke comic strip, insists she is innocent. She told Le Parisien that the case against her is “built on sand.”

Her lawyer, Najwa El Haïté, argued that the method of Di Dio’s killing—without head and hands—points to organized crime. “No head, no hands,this is not the method of a Marie-Thérèse, a woman with no criminal record,” she said. The complicating factor is that both Garcia and Di Dio were connected to the criminal underworld.

Back in the 1980s, Di Dio was the lover of Antonio Marquez-Gomez, a Spanish national known to police for his links to the drugs trade. The couple had a child, Romain, now aged 41, who was often looked after by Garcia. She had a relationship with Antonio’s brother, Francisco. Their wider circle included two well-known criminal brothers, Jean-Jacques and Philippe Maurice. Philippe was the last person to be condemned to death in France before clemency was granted by then-President François Mitterrand.

Trial Begins; Prosecution Outlines Alleged Motive

During the three-week trial, the prosecution will argue that Garcia lured Di Dio to her home near Rambouillet, where she was allegedly stabbed to death and dismembered. The motive prosecutors will try to establish was a pact between Garcia and Marquez-Gomez to get the boy Romain, then aged 10, away from his mother. The accused also allegedly bore a grudge against the victim because she had engaged in an affair with Francisco.

Marquez-Gomez is also accused of murder, but he is believed to be living in Colombia and is untraceable. Romain told Le Parisien last week that, a few days after his mother’s disappearance, Garcia entrusted him to his father, who was living in Madrid with a wife and children. “I’m 10 years old, and suddenly I’m in Spain with a father I barely know and a family whose language I do not understand. That moment is not just a memory, it’s a scar,” he said.

Other evidence expected in the trial includes the testimony of Garcia’s daughter, Nancy, who in 2004 told police she had heard her mother discussing murder on the telephone shortly before Di Dio’s disappearance. Police were also alerted by a strange coincidence in 2022 involving the disappearance of a young couple, one of whom was the great-niece of the defendant. When police tapped Garcia’s telephone, she was heard saying that if she caught the culprits she would “cut them up and put the pieces in a suitcase.”

Garcia, described in the French press as a headstrong woman who is generous to friends but implacable to her enemies, says the case against her is circumstantial. “The hairs they found were brown, but back then everyone knows I had black hair,” she told Le Parisien. She also argued that if she had 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.”