Thirty-one years after a headless, handless dismembered corpse was pulled from the River Seine west of Paris, one of France’s most chilling cold cases has finally come to trial, with 79-year-old Marie-Thérèse Garcia — the country’s oldest female detainee — standing accused of the kidnap and murder of her former sister-in-law Corinne Di Dio.
The tragedy dates back to June 1995, when 37-year-old Di Dio vanished without a trace. Just days after her disappearance, boaters spotted a heavy metal trunk chained shut floating on the river’s surface. When authorities pried it open, they found the dismembered remains of a woman, missing her head and hands — key identifying features that delayed a formal match until 1997, when investigators confirmed the body was Di Dio’s. To this day, the missing body parts have never been recovered.
Garcia emerged as a person of interest early in the investigation, but the case was twice dropped due to a crippling lack of evidence. That stalemate broke in recent years, however, when advances in DNA analysis unlocked a critical breakthrough: two hair strands recovered from inside the trunk were linked to Garcia or another woman sharing her maternal lineage. In 2023, Garcia was taken into custody to await trial, and all her requests for conditional release, made on the basis of her advanced age and poor health, have been rejected by courts.
Dubbed “Ma Dalton” by the French press, after the intimidating, redoubtable grandmother gang leader from the iconic Lucky Luke comic series, Garcia has repeatedly and forcefully proclaimed her innocence. In a recent interview with *Le Parisien*, she dismissed the entire prosecution’s case as “built on sand,” arguing that without concrete answers about what exactly happened to Di Dio, a conviction is impossible under French law. “No-one knows what happened. And in law if you don’t know, you can’t convict,” she stated, pointing out the hair evidence used against her does not even match her 1995 hair color — the hairs recovered were brown, while she had jet-black hair at the time of Di Dio’s disappearance.
Her defense attorney, Najwa El Haïté, has further pushed back against the charges, noting that the brutal, dismembered killing bears all the hallmarks of professional organized crime, not a first-time offender with no prior criminal record like Garcia. “The way [Di Dio] was killed – they were the methods of the underworld, of organised crime. No head, no hands – that’s not the method of a Marie-Thérèse, a woman with no criminal record,” El Haïté argued.
The case is complicated by the fact that both Garcia and Di Dio had deep ties to the French criminal underworld. In the 1980s, Di Dio was in a relationship with Antonio Marquez-Gomez, a Spanish man with known connections to drug trafficking networks. The pair shared a son, Romain, now 41 years old, who was frequently cared for by Garcia, who was also romantically involved with Marquez-Gomez’s brother, Francisco. The pair’s broader social circle included Jean-Jacques and Philippe Maurice, two infamous brothers with deep underworld ties; Philippe Maurice made history as the last person sentenced to death in France before receiving clemency from then-President François Mitterrand.
Over the course of the three-week trial, prosecutors will lay out their theory that Garcia lured Di Dio to her home south-west of Paris near Rambouillet, where she stabbed Di Dio to death in her living room before dismembering her body. Prosecutors claim the killing grew out of two motives: a pact between Garcia and Marquez-Gomez to take 10-year-old Romain away from his mother, and a bitter personal grudge Garcia held over Di Dio’s affair with Francisco.
Marquez-Gomez is also facing murder charges in connection with the killing, but he is believed to be hiding in Colombia and remains untraceable by law enforcement.
For Romain, the case has reopened decades of unhealed trauma. He told *Le Parisien* that just days after his mother disappeared, Garcia handed him over to his father, who by then was living in Madrid with a new wife and children. “I’m 10 years old, and suddenly I’m in Spain with a father I barely know and a family whose language I do not understand. That moment is not just a memory, it’s a scar,” he said.
Prosecutors are bringing forward multiple pieces of additional circumstantial evidence to bolster their case. The most damning may be testimony from Garcia’s own daughter Nancy, who told police in 2004 that she overheard her mother discussing the murder on the phone shortly before Di Dio vanished. A second, eerie incident also raised suspicions: in 2022, when a young couple including Garcia’s great-niece disappeared, police overheard Garcia tell an associate over a tapped phone line that if she found the people responsible, she would “cut them up and put the pieces in a suitcase.”
French media have described Garcia as a headstrong woman who is generous to her close circle but unforgiving to anyone she sees as an enemy. Garcia continues to maintain that all evidence against her is purely circumstantial, insisting: “And if I’d wanted to remove every woman who Francisco slept with, there wouldn’t be many women left in the world. There’s no proof against me. No clue. No motive. It’s all built on sand.”