Patrick Salameh

Patrick Salameh (born April 21, 1957), known as The Marseille Ripper, is a French criminal and serial killer.

In 2008, women began disappearing from the Marseille area without any trace left. Despite the investigating authorities' efforts, no bodies were found until statements from a key witness helped relaunch the investigation, which eventually lead them to Salameh. While examining his past, investigators were overwhelmed by his checkered criminal record.

In 2014, he was sentenced to life imprisonment with 22 years preventive detention for kidnapping, sequestration and rape leading to death.

Biography[]

Patrick Salameh was born on April 21, 1957 in Fréjus, Var Department. He was born into a large family of Lebanese-Syrian origin, with nine other siblings. When he was a child, the whole family moved to Marseille. As an adult, Salameh married and later fathered two children. In the 1980s, he ran a restaurant.

Earlier crimes[]

The entirety of Salameh's life is punctuated with delinquent acts. Between September 1988 and February 1989, along with a group of friends, he carried out numerous burglaries in Var. They broke into homes, attacked the residents and stole their valuables, earning the nickname "The Wild Horde" by the press and the media. Finally, the gang was arrested and imprisoned at the Baumettes Prison. Salameh was accused by his accomplices of being the only violent member, but he denied those claims.

On May 10, 1996, he was put on trial before the assizes in Draguignan, accompanied by his three accomplices. At the end of the trial, the jurors deliberated for four hours about the sentences. The prosecutor requested a 20-year sentence for Patrick Salameh, and he was later convicted for armed robbery, sequestration, torture and indecent assault. He was later released after 16 years behind bars.

During his years in prison, Salameh wrote and painted, revealing real talent in the latter. His painted canvases were exhibited in several galleries, and often portrayed tortured characters. Upon his release in 2005, he resumed living a normal life, forming a family, exhibiting his works while also working as a site manager.

Case summary[]

Victims[]

In 2008, in the span of a little more than a month, three prostitutes mysteriously disappeared in Marseille.^[1] They were the following:

• Iryna Sytnyk (42) - Ukrainian. Disappeared on the evening of October 5th.^[2]
• Cristina Bahulea (23) - Romanian. Vanished without a trace two weeks after Sytnyk, on October 22nd.^[3]
• Zineb Chebout (28) - Algerian. Left her house to visit a fair on the evening of November 7th, but never returned.^[4]

The key witness[]

The investigators suspected early on that a serial killer was rampant in Marseille, as he kidnapped and killed victims fitting the same profile - foreign prostitutes. However, they had no clues, and no potential suspects.^[5]

However, a revelation soon disrupted the course of investigation. A Moroccan prostitute, Soumia El Kandadi, named a man whom she suspected could be responsible for the killings - Patrick Salameh, who on the night of October 5-6, abducted and raped her in his home. When he finished with her, El Kandadi noticed that a lifeless body lied in her attacker's bathtub, with Salameh informing her that "this is the fate [he reserves] for women who don't obey [him]."^[6]

Soumia's statements put investigators on the trail for Salameh. Soon after, another clue reinforced their suspicions. The telephone of one of the prostitutes continued to transmit a signal after her disappearance. The police located the signal's source in Marseille: it was a child, which claimed to have been given a SIM card by a certain Patrick Salameh.

Patrick Salameh took his victims' SIM cards and later gave them away, a technique which made the police believe that the missing were still alive, since their telephone numbers continued to emit a localizable signal.

The search[]

The investigators, in an attempt to locate the bodies, searched Salameh's residency in Saint-Mitre, in Marseille's northern districts. They were aided by Soumia, whom guided them to the place where she had seen the corpse of a woman, leading them to Salameh's studio apartment adjacent to his main home. Although investigators couldn't find any bodies, they found DNA from all three missing women, as well as some of their personal possessions such as jewelry and underwear. Prostitutes often frequented the apartment, but no traces of blood were discovered.

During the pre-trial hearings, Salameh denied killing the prostitutes and remained silent. The bodies were never recovered.

Link to previous case[]

The investigators, whom wondered if there were other possible victims, expanded their search for any women fitting their criteria. Eventually, they linked Salameh to the disappearance of 20-year-old Fatima Saiah, a student who had vanished a few months earlier from the main murder series. Unlike the victims that followed, she was not a prostitute.^[7]

Saiah had published an offer online as a babysitter, and was later contacted by a divorced man on Saturday afternoon, May 7th. The two met at 3 PM, at the Malpassé Metro. The man refused to tell his name, but specified that his wife would pick Saiah up in a grey Volkswagen at the metro's exit, which was not far from Salameh's studio apartment.

Initially, Saiah's boyfriend accompanied her to the scene, but later left shortly before she met with the man, agreeing to message each other in a few hours. Two hours later, he received a strange text message saying "I met an old friend, I will be back this weekend." Finding this suspicious, the boyfriend started worrying and tried to contact Saiah, but failed, as her phone had been turned off. The next day, both Saiah's family and boyfriend went to the police station to report her disappearance.

The investigators later traced the phone call Saiah had received for the babysitting offer. It had been made from a telephone booth at Gare de Marseille-Saint-Charles, but that was the only lead they had in the case. A homeless person who was questioned during the investigation later recalled that on that day, he recognized the man using the phone booth as Patrick Salameh.

Arrest[]

On the evening of November 15, 2008, Patrick Salameh was arrested. Immediately after he was jailed, the disappearances in Marseille ceased. Salameh's criminal past played no favors on his part. He had recently been released from prison, after serving a 16-year sentence for theft, carrying of illegal weapons, kidnapping and torture.

The trial[]

Salameh's first trial took place in March 2014, before the assizes in Aix-en-Provence. He was found guilty of kidnapping, forcible confinement and rape causing death in the cases of Sytnyk, Bahulea and Chebout, as well as kidnapping and raping El Kandadi, the main witness in the trial. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.^[8]

In October 2015, his second trial was held before the assizes in Bouches-du-Rhône. He was again found guilty of kidnapping and murdering Fatima Saiah, whose body was also never found.^[9] He received another life imprisonment term, as well as 22 years of preventive detention.^[10]

See also[]

• List of serial killers by country

References[]

Citations[]

Bibliography[]

• Patrick Salameh, The Marseille Disappearances - The Three Prostitutes, Auto-Edition, Marseille, 2015 (1230000499958).
• Patrick Salameh, The Marseille Disappearances - The Fatima Case, Auto-Edition, Marseille, 2015 (1230000643757).
• Stéphane Bourgoin, Killers - The murderers who marked history, Points, Paris, 2012 (275782810X).
• Véronique Chalmet, In the minds of killers. Profilers' Portraits, Point, Paris, 2015 (2757856316).

External links[]

• Court decision on life sentence
• The defense lawyer's arguments
• Salameh's artworks