Where is the child, a never-ending story?

This article will tell you about a criminal case that shook France starting in 1991 with the disappearance of a child in Nice and resurfaced in 2017 with the murder of the child's father, who was not his biological father, on the tropical island of Saint-Martin. The father was found guilty of murdering his son in a trial held in 1997. Eleven years after he was released from prison, he was himself murdered. The murder was most likely unrelated to the child's disappearance, but it is impossible to know for sure.

This affair is, indeed, one of the most enigmatic in French criminal history. It is also the most famous criminal case in the South. France. The child's body was never found. The father's murder, twenty-six years later, remains unsolved. This terrible incident of the murder of a seven-year-old boy, who sabotaged his mother's life, is similar to another incident that shocked France seven years earlier, "The Gregory Affair", which also centers on the murder of a child. The "Gregory Affair" has also not been completely solved and contains unclear points.

Nice, a rich city. Photo: Zvi Hazanov

disappearance

On March 21, 1991, seven-year-old Charles-Édouard Turquin disappeared in the middle of the night. It seemed as if the ground had swallowed him. Charles-Édouard lived with his father in a twenty-one-room mansion in the heights of Nice: La Bastide haute, literally translated: “The Upper Mansion.” The mansion could have been beautiful, but in the reality of those days it was dark and sad, like an English castle with a winding interior. A maze, several floors, several entrances, many corners, staircases covered with floral paper in the style of those days that led to the rooms.

The estate could have been a seven-year-old boy’s paradise. Every morning he would feed his puppy and play in the garden, three thousand square meters of lush parkland. A whole world: the butterflies, the birds, the spiders, attracted him. The animals were his friends.

Nice, view from above the city. Source: Wikimedia, in the public domain

The morning after the night of March 21, the boy's grandparents did not find him in the garden. The grandparents, the parents of Michèle Balanger, Charles-Édouard's mother, also lived in the estate. The daughter, Michèle, a veterinarian, was in the process of divorcing her husband, Jean-Louis Turquin, also a veterinarian.

A couple of veterinarians in divorce proceedings, the husband, Jean-Louis Tircan, lives with his son and his estranged wife's parents in a large mansion in the heights of Nice. The son, Charles-Edouard, is not Jean-Louis' biological son. Michele left the mansion because she wanted to divorce Jean-Louis Tircan. Charles-Edouard now lives with his father, by court order. He spends every Wednesday with his mother.

Michel and Charles-Edouard in the garden of the Simeiz Monastery in Nice. Creation of artificial intelligence, credit Zvi Hazanov via Midjourney

Charles-Edouard spent the day before the fateful night with his mother. In the evening, Michel took him back to the estate to his father. Charles-Edouard did not want to return to the estate. Michel did not suspect anything and convinced him that he had better return. Her parents also lived in the estate, and what could happen? The boy told friends, with whom Michel had found refuge for a month, that his father had threatened him that if he did not return, he would kill his puppy. Another reason not to disobey him. Michel said goodbye to Charles-Edouard and went down to the house of the couple of friends near Nice.

Charles-Edouard slept in the same room as Jean-Louis, in two separate beds, next to each other. In the morning, Jean-Louis said that the child had disappeared. No, he had not heard anything during the night. No, not even a neighbor had seen the child. The sniffer dog was stopped in front of the gate of the estate. From this, the investigators concluded that the child had been driven out of the estate in a vehicle.

Jean-Louis Tirkan was arrested two days after he reported Charles-Edouard's disappearance to the police. Michele was sure he had taken her son away to get revenge on her for wanting to divorce him. She hadn't yet imagined the worst. Or had she known all along?

Jean-Louis, for his part, kept his cool. Nothing disturbed his composure. He claimed that he knew he would be arrested, that it was normal, that he was prepared for it. But the investigators made a mistake. He has no idea where the child is.

Kidnapping, murder

As the investigation continued, there was no longer talk of a disappearance, but of a kidnapping. Jean-Louis Tirkan appeared as a loving and caring father, determined to do everything to get his son back. To this end, he even took the initiative and posted about a thousand ads with a photograph of the child all over the area, promising a reward of one hundred thousand francs to anyone who could provide necessary information. “I do not see either my wife or her parents as the child’s kidnappers. My son ran away and apparently had an accident” – this was Tirkan’s first explanation. An unacceptable explanation because Charles-Edouard was a timid child and was even afraid to leave his room unaccompanied. How would he escape from the room, locked with a creaking door, how would he leave the mansion, whose gate was difficult to open, in the middle of the night, in his pajamas?

Jean-Louis thinks of everything. The investigators understand very well that they are dealing with a psychopath here. Michel is sure that he is the culprit. This is how the idea of extracting a confession from him through cunning and a certain amount of self-sacrifice ripens in her.

On the advice of investigators, Michelle bought a tape recorder and made an appointment with Jean-Louis at his clinic. She dressed seductively with the tape recorder ready in her bag. Jean-Louis could not resist the black garter she was wearing and confessed to strangling the boy with a tie after drugging him with animal drugs. 

“I killed him like that because I wanted to avoid blood. But you don’t have to think about it anymore. He was a parasite. It’s behind us now. I don’t want to spend twenty years in prison. Let’s live together again as a couple. Let’s start all over again, Michel.” Michel told the investigators that Jean-Louis Tirkan confessed to her about the murder with demonstrative indifference, as if Charles-Edouard were part of a past that should be forgotten. “And we will have another child, Michel.” And beneath this sentence he said, there is another one he didn’t say: And this child will be ours.

The confession is a dramatic turning point in the plot. Jean-Louis Tircan added that he buried the boy’s body next to the cross on the Col Saint Roch, in a village called Lucéram, about twenty-five kilometers from Nice. But it was dark, “I don’t remember exactly where.”

Lisram. Source: Wikimedia, in the public domain

Jean-Louis Tirkan was arrested again and the investigators questioned him about his confession. At first, Jean-Louis denied it, and then the investigators played him his recorded words. Despite the shrieks of a parrot in a cage in the clinic, it was impossible to mistake Tirkan's words.

“Yes, I confessed, that’s true, but that’s not the truth. My wife wanted me to confess, so I confessed, in a sort of game. It was role-playing. Because she kept telling me, ‘You killed Charles-Edouard, you killed Charles-Edouard, say you killed him,’ I said. I told her I killed him so she would come back to me. I told her what she wanted to hear. She seemed pleased.”

Is the explanation convincing? 

Jean-Louis Tirkan was accused of the murder of Charles-Edouard Tirkan and put on trial. The boy's body was never found.

Jean-Louis Tirkan, Michel Balenger, lines for their characters

Who was Jean-Louis Tirkan? Born in 1949, son of a loving family, father an agent for a biscuit company and mother a housewife, happy years with his parents and sister in a suburb near Paris Until within two years he lost his father and mother. At the age of eighteen he found himself an orphan. He hid his deep suffering under a hard, cold mask. He promised himself that he would go far and avenge his humble childhood with glittering wealth, dazzling professional success, and an enviable family life.

A student at the veterinary school in the southeastern suburb of Paris, Maisons Alfort, Tirkan would arrive neatly dressed in a suit and tie. Diligent, brilliant, self-assured, looking serious and mature. A few years below him, Michelle, shy, reserved, childish. Jean-Louis in his fourth year, Michelle in her first year. Jean-Louis took her under his wing and protected her from abuse. The innocent Michelle fell into the trap.

Michel Blenger and Jean-Louis Tirkan met in 1972, and in 1975 they were married in the municipality of Fouz-Alfort. The couple opened a clinic in the northwest suburb of Paris, Colombes. The plan was to move to Nice. The husband carried it out and the wife stayed to work in Colombes and only joined him in 1981, five years later. Two veterinarians in the wealthy city, life is good, money flows. Gastronomic restaurants, luxury hotels, cruise ships. And despite everything, Michel was not happy.

Jean-Louis worked seven days a week, bought a Rolls-Royce, had to buy the biggest clinic, live in the biggest house. That's how he bought the mansion in the heights of Nice. Michelle was unhappy. Tears appeared in the couple's life.

A year after they settled in the heights of Nice, in 1982, Michelle became pregnant. It was an accident. Michelle wanted to go to England to stop the process. Her husband threatened her: “If you do this, I will kill you.”

After giving birth, she returned to live with her husband for a while but eventually left the shared residence. Michele wanted to get away from her profession, away from a life that did not suit her. Charles-Edouard, a sensitive and intelligent boy, suffered from the situation.

Michelle was not maternal and did not want children from the beginning, but after giving birth, over time, she showed a lot of tenderness and love for Charles-Édouard. His father told him: “You should not love your mother because she tried to kill you when you were in her womb.” To “toughen up” the boy who was too sensitive for him, as he said, Jean-Louis strangled a chicken in front of Charles-Édouard’s eyes. A chicken that Charles-Édouard had tamed. He also marched the boy like a soldier while wearing a swastika armband. The boy needed treatment from a psychologist. 

Jean-Louis Tirkan was a tyrant and took control of Michel's life, managing everything. Michel could not tolerate his pursuit of money and honor, his sheer materialism, and so she was drawn to partners who were completely different from him, marginal people to whom she extended help. Such was Charles-Édouard's biological father, Moïse Ber Edelstein, an American Jew, born in Prague, a former dancer at the Nice Opera, a poet who lived a bohemian life. Their affair began when Moïse brought his dog to her clinic. His portrait can be seen HERE.

In 1993, his body was found in the waters of Nice Harbor. Moise Bar Edelstein was wearing a strange, heavy rubber suit and his body was covered in bruises. The mystery of his death has not been solved.

Creating Artificial Intelligence, Credit Zvi Hazanov via Midjourney

Jean-Louis Tirkan concluded from the affair between Michel and Moise that the latter was more sexually satisfying to her than he was because he was circumcised. And so, in his clinic, he circumcised himself, yes, with his own hands, in the hope of renewing his relationship with Michel. He was ready to do anything to win back his wife, the submissive woman for years who had suddenly become stronger and aspired to an independent life. Michel began psychotherapy and wrote down her dreams in a notebook. Tirkan, who found the secret notebook, presented her wife as “crazy.”

Michel, for her part, was determined to get a divorce and to gain custody of her son. In February 1991, she left their shared residence after Jean-Louis Tirkan violently beat her, causing serious injuries to her face and throwing tear gas at her. A month earlier, Tirkan had taken a paternity test after Michel had told him that he was not Charles-Édouard's biological father. The test results confirmed Michel's words. In Jean-Louis's mind, however, his wife Michel was his private property, like the house, the clinic, the child, and she could not demand a divorce. 

In 1990, a year before the child's disappearance, Michel Blenger, Charles-Édouard and Jean-Louis Tirkan went on a pleasure cruise in Norway, see photo HERE.

Doppelgangers of Michel Blenger, Charles-Édouard and Mollem Jean-Louis Tirkan on a cruise ship. Artificial intelligence creation, credit Zvi Khazanov via Midjourney

After his attempts at reconciliation failed, Michele received a telegram from Jean-Louis Tirkan containing an ultimatum: “If you do not return by midnight, serious and final things may happen.” This was on March 20. Michele did not take the threat seriously. In the evening she brought Charles-Édouard to the mansion and during the night he disappeared.

The extensive and meticulous searches turned up nothing, the boy's body was not found. It was suggested that Jean-Louis Tirkan, who was used to euthanizing dogs, had cremated the body in an animal crematorium, but here too, despite checks in all the furnaces in the area, nothing was found. Another suggestion was that Tirkan had cremated the body in an illegal crematorium. Michel's hope, already certain that her son was not alive, to bring him to a proper burial was not fulfilled.

Creating Artificial Intelligence, Credit Zvi Hazanov via Midjourney

After nine months, in February 1992, Jean-Louis Tirkan was released. In the last two months before his release, he began a hunger strike that greatly weakened him. “I wanted to die because I saw no other way out. I thank my lawyers who did everything to get me out of prison,” he told reporters in a weak voice and a coming-on tone, as he emerged staggering, bent over, leaning on a supporting arm. He continued to claim his innocence and expressed hope “to find his son alive.” He accused Michel of Charles-Edouard’s disappearance, kidnapping him and hiding him in Israel.

What didn't Tirkan invent: Michel's partner, Jean-Marc, abducted the child (luckily he had an alibi), gypsies kidnapped the child, the child is being held hostage in Morocco, the child is being held captive by a religious sect in Israel... Israel, at this point, seemed more plausible...

Michele studied Hebrew in a synagogue in Nice and began the process of converting. Jewish tradition and spirituality attracted her. Her visits to the Holy Land marked an escape route for Tirkan. To this end, he hired the services of a private detective. He followed Michele, in the summer of 1993, from Nice to Orly Airport, from Orly to Israel, to the university in Jerusalem where she enrolled in a course of studies, lectures and tours with two hundred other Francophones for a month.

The detective conducted searches in Ashdod, where he found a pair of barbers, Anna and David, who gave testimony about a woman, probably Michelle, who brought a child, probably Charles-Edouard, to their barbershop in 1993. The barbers identified the boy, who must have been 11 at the time, from photographs they were shown. A school teacher even stated that Charles-Edouard had been in her class for a few weeks.

Tirkan hurriedly boarded a plane accompanied by the private detective and from Israel sent messages to the prosecutor. He met dealers who declared that they had seen a woman with a child, similar to Michel and Charles-Edouard. A sensational turn that turned out to be ridiculous and burst like a balloon.

Trial and punishment

The trial date of Jean-Louis Tirkan was postponed to see if there was any truth to the claim that the boy was living in Israel. In March 1997, six years after the boy's disappearance, the trial finally opened. How do you determine guilt without a confession and without a body? Not easy. The two lawyers who came to the trial from Israel stuttered when they were shown a photo of Michel and Charles-Edouard. No, not sure, not familiar, not knowing. The date they gave on which they supposedly saw Michel took all the air out of the balloon. Michel brought proof that she was in Nice on that date. The detective's testimony added nothing.

The secret recording of Jean-Louis Tirkan's confession was more convincing. And especially the visit of all those involved in the trial to the mansion in Nice, a rare procedure due to the high cost. Instead of the boy's disappearance, the jury came to the firm conclusion that he could not have left the room where he slept in a bed next to his father's bed alone and on his own initiative.

On the kitchen range hood, Michelle noticed a photo of her son with the caption in Hebrew: “Where are you?”, in clumsy letters, perhaps handwritten, perhaps printed. Her ex-husband’s ruse to substantiate the absurd argument that Charles-Edouard was in Israel drove her crazy, and she lashed out at him so furiously that she had to be separated from him. According to her lawyer, showing the photo only proved Tirkan’s guilt.

The betrayed husband, who knows the child is not his and is not willing to accept a divorce that would mean a loss of control and power, took revenge. Two weeks after he gave Michelle the ultimatum, a dispute resolution process was supposed to take place to determine who would get custody of the child. You want, Michelle, to get custody, neither you nor I will have it.

Jean-Louis Tirkan, who was sure to go free, was sentenced to twenty years in prison for the murder of Charles-Édouard. After five days of a trial in an extremely tense atmosphere, the jury convened for a two-and-a-half-hour deliberation and reached a decision. Michel breathed as much relief as the situation allowed. Michel knew that her ex-husband had murdered her son and fought resolutely for justice to prevail. Justice for Charles-Édouard.

In July 1999, two people, one a journalist and the other a private detective, declared that sixteen-year-old Charles-Edouard was alive and well in a yeshiva in Tiberias. The boy spoke fluent Hebrew but with a European accent. The two did not see him but heard about him from a third person, a rabbi named Itzik Dori, who had secretly photographed the boy within the walls of the yeshiva. The latter arrived in Nice and gave evidence to the police.

And again the balloon burst. The policeman sent from Nice to Israel realized that the boy was not speaking a word. French And who was adopted as a baby by an Israeli family.

In 2003, Tirkan's hope was rekindled in the form of a letter. A prisoner named Paul, who had suddenly emerged from prison in the city of Toul, where he was serving a twenty-year sentence for murder, wrote to Tirkan's lawyer about a confession he had heard from a cellmate. The prisoner, he said, had accidentally run over a child in his pajamas while fleeing in a stolen car after a robbery in Nice. He and his partner in the robbery, who was in the car with him, put the child's body in the trunk and hid it in a cement factory near Marseille. The hitman boasted, according to prisoner Paul, that someone else, another bourgeois, was serving his sentence in his place. Prisoner Paul refused to name the hitman unless he was first released from prison and was sentenced to an additional year in prison for refusing to testify.

Nadine, Chapter Two in Tirkan's Life

After the jury's verdict, Tirkan was taken to prison in Nice and went on another hunger strike. After eight days, he was rushed to hospital. His story, which was reported on television, touched the heart of Nadine, a forty-six-year-old married fitness instructor. She wrote to him, he replied and an exchange of letters began. Tirkan asked her to visit him. For years, starting in 1997, she came to see him in prison, every week, following him from one prison to another. Nadine believed that he was innocent, that his son was alive, that one day he, she, her three children and his child would be reunited. In 1997, they married in Fresnes Prison (Le Centre pénitentiaire de Fresnes).

Nadine's three children did not understand why their mother decided to tie her fate to that of a convicted murderer, but they respected her wishes. The rest of the story proved that their fears were well-founded. Nadine, for her part, never imagined that the man she had fallen in love with during her visits to the various prisons throughout France and even in Corsica would appear in a completely different light when he was released. "One day he suddenly appeared in a daze and told me that he thanked me for believing in his innocence, but wherever he was, he would always be a prisoner because he would not know where his son was. A person who speaks like that cannot help but tell the truth." Nadine's words. Naive? Was she led astray by a manipulator, a showman?

In 2006, at the age of fifty-six, Tirkan was released from prison after ten years of exemplary behavior. He and Madame Tirkan II settled in a small house in the city of Arles. Jean-Louis Tirkan opened a clinic at home and Nadine helped him. A year later, a new sensation. A boy's skull was discovered by a hunter in a forest near Nice. DNA testing showed that the skull was not that of Charles-Édouard.

After a stay in Arles, Tirkan decided to fulfill a childhood dream and move to the tropical island of Saint-Martin, a seemingly paradise in the Caribbean Sea. The northern part of the island belongs to France. The couple moved to the island in 2010, and the veterinarian opened a clinic again, and Nadine helped him again. A seemingly perfect collaboration. The couple lived in a small, handsome villa, made of painted wood, surrounded by banana trees, in an affluent neighborhood.

Saint Martin, a tropical paradise. Source: Wikimedia, in the public domain

The romantic love, born under the sign of Tirkan's imprisonment, turned into a nightmare. Nadine's life became hell. Jean-Louis Tirkan, stingy and tyrannical, managed everything, belittled her, restricted her movements, monitored her email and phone accounts, cheated on her with younger women. Jean-Louis Tirkan had a regular lover at the time and was even financially generous to her, which greatly hurt Nadine, who had been completely devoted to him, as we have seen, for about twenty years.

Relations with him had deteriorated further since March 2016, the month in which Nadine's granddaughter was on the verge of death. Jean-Louis Tirkan refused to allow her to meet her family, children and grandchildren, in France and demanded that she travel with him to Bolivia to celebrate his birthday. Nadine complied. She was terrified by his cold fury and even filed a police report. Nadine feared for her safety and wanted a divorce.

The pattern of relations with Michelle repeated itself. As soon as he heard of his second wife Nadine's desire for a divorce, he disinherited her, deleted her from the list of beneficiaries of his life insurance, and gave her an ultimatum: she would live with him for four months, and for the rest of the year each of them would be free to do as he pleased. Nadine was about to sign this agreement, and then the event occurred that made her consent unnecessary.

Tirkan Affair Number Two

On January 6, 2017, Jean-Louis Tirkan was murdered with a bullet in his back, between the shoulders. Nadine was arrested but claimed her innocence. The same night that Tirkan was murdered, Nadine went out with friends to a restaurant to celebrate her sixty-sixth birthday. When she returned, she said, half an hour after midnight, she found her husband lying shot dead on the floor. He was sixty-eight years old when he died. A post-mortem examination determined that Tirkan was murdered around 22 p.m. Two XNUMX-millimeter bullets, banal, were found by the gendarmes.

Tirkan was suffering from knee pain and was scheduled to have surgery about a dozen days later. On the evening of the murder, before his wife left, he took his medication along with two sleeping pills. The previous evening, he had celebrated her birthday with his wife at a good restaurant over lobster, grilled fish, and a bottle of chilled white wine.

Nadine told investigators that when she returned from the restaurant where she had spent time with four friends, she was surprised to see the door of the house open and the lights on. Two of the three rooms were in disarray after being ransacked. In one of them, a large wooden radio from the 1940s had been broken into. Tirkan used to hide large sums of money and jewelry he had inherited, including Cartier watches. A small knife, apparently used to cut the radio casing, was thrown by the window. A knife that Nadine had seen for the first time and that had male DNA on it that remained unidentified.

When Nadine entered the bedroom, she saw her husband lying on his back, in a pool of blood, holding a piece of glass in his hand, with a dozen shards shining on the floor and bed. She ran to her neighbor, who had just left her when they returned from the restaurant, and she called the gendarmes. Nadine went back into the house to wait for them to arrive.

Nadine was arrested on suspicion of murdering her husband. Gunpowder residue was found on her hands. Her DNA was found on the shards of the glass jar. Her lawyer claimed that she was contaminated when she touched her husband's body. She also touched objects near the body, he added. An indictment was filed against Nadine, but after eight months in prison she was released and acquitted. The case has not been solved to this day.

Did Nadine murder her husband or hire professionals to do it? She was released because the gunpowder residue on her hands did not constitute evidence, according to the firm opinion of Swiss and Belgian experts consulted by the French investigators. Was it a break-in for the purpose of theft that ended in murder? The island of Saint-Martin, a tropical paradise, is known for the many robberies that occur in the homes of wealthy people whose properties attract the attention of criminals. The crime rate is high there. A neighbor who lived in a nearby neighborhood, also a retired veterinarian, told investigators that four days before the murder, three locals entered his house and demanded money from him. They left quite quickly, as if realizing their mistake and only stole an Opinel knife.

Watch a short video released after Nadine's arrest, describing the life of the Tirkan couple on the island of Saint-Martin before briefly recapping the events surrounding Charles-Edouard's disappearance.

Michelle Blenger – A candle in her memory

Michelle died in January 2014, at the age of 61. She swallowed pills in her beautiful apartment in an affluent neighborhood in Marseille. She renovated and decorated it with her own hands. It was her second suicide attempt. The first one was unsuccessful thanks to her partner of many years who was present and saved her. The second time, unfortunately, her partner was not in the apartment. Precious time was lost until a neighbor, who had the key to the apartment, entered and found her unconscious. Michelle was taken to the hospital and after a few days of hospitalization, the lead got stuck in her esophagus and she suffocated. May her memory be blessed!

I personally knew Michelle Belanger in her later years. I met her because of our shared interest in the Hebrew language. Michelle, like me, researched the roots of Hebrew words.

Michelle was beautiful, both inside and out, gentle, sensitive, educated, blessed with talents: golden hands and a wise head. This article is a candle in her memory.