Top French chef Poinard’s corpse found in freezer

The deep freeze appears to be an increasingly favoured hiding-place for murder victims in France. Now the body of Jean-Francois Poinard, one of the greatest chefs in the gastronomic city of Lyon, who has been missing for nearly two years, has been discovered in a freezer.
 
In the 1970s and 1980s Poinard, who would now be 71, ran two of Lyon's leading restaurants, the prestigious Restaurant de Paris and the Panier à Salade. The Lyon newspaper Le Progres described him as one of the city's "great names" and "a true bon viveur".
 
On Tuesday his body was found in a chest freezer in his former girlfriend Guylene Collober's apartment. The corpse was curled up in a foetal position and covered in plastic bags. Police raided the flat after Collober told her daughter that "something unfortunate" had happened to Poinard.
 
Under interrogation, Collober, 51, has confessed to fatally punching Poinard back in November 2008 following an argument. Prosecutor Marc Desert described Collober as having "pathological tendencies, narcissistic, possessive and violent". After delivering the fatal punch, she apparently left Poinard's body in the bath for several days before buying a chest freezer.
 
Collober is now in custody, charged with concealing a body. Once the autopsy is completed, she is likely to face additional charges, a police spokesman said. She had earlier explained Poinard's absence by saying he could have been killed by extortionists.

Poinard's son Jean-Stephane, also a chef, last saw his father in June 2007 when he moved to the US. He told reporters yesterday: "Somehow she [Collober] isolated him from everyone he loved. It was a mystery to me and to our entire family why he seemed to always be under a spell... she knew how to manipulate my father and cut him from people who loved him."

If Collober is charged with murder, Poinard will not be the first French victim to be preserved congele by his killer. In 2001 the body of a 41-year-old Toulouse woman Yasmina Rebouh was found in a freezer in the southeastern city of Rochebrune. Her partner was suspected of the murder and tracked down the following year in Italy.
 
In 2009, Veronique Courjault was convicted of murdering three of her babies and hiding two of the corpses in a freezer (pictured above). The case - 'l'affaire des bebes congeles', as it became known in France - caused a sensation when it first came to light in 2006.

It has been suggested that Courjault's crime inspired the author Mazarine Pingeot - the illegitimate daughter of Francois Mitterand - whose 2007 novel Le Cimetière des poupées ('The Cemetery of the Dolls') centred on a mother who hides her dead babies in a freezer. ·