The prison suicide that has shocked France

France has the highest suicide rate in its prisons of any EU country, but no case has been as infamous as that of the latest inmate to take his own life. Jean-Pierre Treiber, the 14th suicide this year, was found hanged in his cell at 7am on Saturday morning, with a note nearby declaring: "I've had enough of being taken for a murderer and deprived of my loved ones".

The death of 47-year-old Treiber brings to the end what was until six years ago an uneventful life. That all changed on November 25, 2004 when the forestry worker from Villeneuve-sur-Yonne in Burgundy was arrested on suspicion of kidnap, theft, and fraud.

The kidnap was alleged to have involved the 36-year-old actress Geraldine Giraud (daughter of Roland Graud, a well-known French actor), and her 32-year-old lover Katia Lherbier.

Treiber, said to have been in debt, was in possession of the women's credit cards at the time of his arrest though for two weeks he denied any knowledge of their whereabouts. Then in December the charred bodies of Giraud and Lherbier were discovered at the bottom of a well on Treiber's rambling countryside property.

Still Treiber maintained his innocence and post-mortems revealed no DNA evidence to conclusively link him to the murders. All that was established was that neither women had been subjected to a physical assault; instead investigators believed the pair were either gassed or poisoned.

A roll of adhesive tape found at Treiber's house and similar to that used to bind one of the victims revealed the DNA of two persons unknown, but not the suspect's. Nonetheless, on December 20, 2004, Treiber was charged with murder.

But the wheels of French justice turn slowly and nearly five years later Treiber was still awaiting trial in prison at Auxerre, close to his Burgundy home. He was regarded as a model prisoner, in charge of the workshop that manufactured clothes and stationery.

On September 8 last year he was loading onto a delivery lorry a consignment of cardboard boxes containing goods to be sold outside the prison walls. When no one was looking Treiber slipped inside a box and was driven to freedom. His escape was only noticed several hours later and soon hundred of gendarmes were scouring the local Foret d'Othe. "He knows the area like the back of his hand," one was reported as saying, "he's a real woodsman."

For two months Treiber humiliated the French police and judicial system, not only evading a huge manhunt but also corresponding with the press. The weekly news magazine Marianne published a letter sent by Treiber, in which he proclaimed his innocence – though he never adequately explained why he had the women's credit cards. The postmark on the letter indicated it had been sent from somewhere close to his village, suggesting he had accomplices.

Paris Match then printed a letter from Treiber in which he waxed lyrical about his hideout: "I am in a very beautiful forest at the moment... all the species of trees grow here... it is really nice, the mist with the deer and wild boar."

French interior minister Brice Hortefeux called an emergency meeting and demanded Treiber be recaptured as a matter of urgency. In the meantime, two different versions of the escapee emerged in the French press. Was Treiber the "violent, unpredictable, perverse and manipulative" man described by his former wife, or the "generous, kind, thoughtful" man depicted by his most recent girlfriend?

The opinion of the village in which Treiber lived at the time of his arrest veered towards the latter, with one man telling reporters: "He is the victim of a conspiracy. We know he is innocent... no one would hand him over to the police, including me. If I saw him, I would give him money to buy food."

Treiber had alluded to the conspiracy in the letter to Marianne, saying: "I have not escaped, I have merely taken back a small part of what the murderers, 'the real ones', have stolen from me. I could no longer stand being inside and I was close to suicide..." He added that the investigators had ignored evidence which clearly exonerated him and implicated a former lover of Geraldine Giraud. "I therefore decide to escape... as the only way of getting my side of the case heard before my trial, which I will attend."

Treiber was eventually tracked down not to a forest hideout but to a small flat in Melun, a banal town on the outskirts of Paris and 60 miles north-west of Auxerre. The police released photos of Treiber's recapture but the publicity stunt backfired: people got their first glimpse of the balding man with a bad eye and a gammy leg. How on earth, they wondered, had he managed to evade arrest for 10 weeks?

For the lawyer of the Giraud family, Treiber's suicide – two months before his trial was due to start - is the "ultimate confession" because "an innocent [man] has nothing to hide". But the headline on the front page of Sunday's best-selling tabloid Le Parisien offers an alternative theory: 'Treiber's Ultimate Escape'.

In short, did he hang himself  because he despaired of ever being believed he was innocent, or because he was unable to confront the enormity of the crime he'd committed? It's a question that has transfixed France, or most of it. Only Prime Minister Francois Fillon seemed indifferent to the death of Treiber, commenting at the weekend during an official visit to Jordan: "I don't think that Mr. Treiber is so well-known that it needs to be discussed here." ·