A Year After Vanishing, Body of French Teen Found

A vehicle flagged months into the search for a French teenager who disappeared last September had been stolen by her kidnapper, police said Wednesday, announcing both the teen and her attacker are dead. The body of the girl, IDed by Elle as Lina Delsarte, 15, was found Wednesday in a wooded area near the town of Nevers in the central Nievre region, some 300 miles west of where she vanished from the Alsace region bordering Germany and Switzerland. Her phone's tracking signal was lost on the morning of Sept. 23, 2023, as the teen walked to a train station in the hamlet of Saint-Blaise-La-Roche, per CBS News.

Authorities analyzed hundreds of vehicles over the subsequent months. One of those was a Ford Puma, known to have been in the area when Lina vanished, per CBS. A homeless man named Samuel Gonin had been driving the vehicle on Jan. 6 of this year when he tried to evade a customs check and eventually crashed, reports Le Figaro. The vehicle was found to have been stolen in Germany the previous August. Months later, it drew the interest of authorities searching for Lina, who found her bag in the glove compartment and her DNA on a seatbelt, per Le Figaro.

Gonin, a carpentry teacher at a vocational school in Besancon, died by suicide in July before he could be questioned about Lina's disappearance, per CBS. He left behind a note reading, "I have lost my honor, my dignity, my humanity, I must leave. I do not know how to control myself," RTL reports. Authorities then extracted GPS data from the Puma, which ultimately led to the location where Lina's body was found submerged in a stream below an embankment, per CBS. The Puma had reportedly stopped at the location on Sept. 24, 2023. A former partner of Gonin claimed he'd "gone off the rails" and stopped taking medicine for bipolar disorder shortly before that time, per Le Figaro. (More France stories.)