The bones found in the Tarn on the instructions of Cédric Jubillar on Thursday are indeed those of his wife Delphine, who had disappeared at the end of 2020 and whom he admitted at the beginning of July to having killed, the public prosecutor of Toulouse said on Sunday July 19.
“The public prosecutor’s office confirms that the DNA analyzes carried out by the IRCGN (Criminal Research Institute of the National Gendarmerie, Editor’s note) made it possible to establish that the bones found correspond to those of Delphine Aussaguel”, her maiden name, declared Nicolas Jacquet. After five and a half years of silence and denials, the husband of this nurse who disappeared in the middle of the night in December 2020 sparked a legal thunderclap by recognizing, first in a letter then to investigators, “being at the origin of the death of Delphine Aussaguel”, according to his lawyers Mes Guy and Pierre Debuisson.
He then indicated where he had hidden the body, which had remained untraceable all these years, and the absence had been at the heart of the debates of his first instance trial, at the end of which he was nevertheless sentenced to 30 years of criminal imprisonment in October 2025. It was thanks to his information that excavations made it possible on Thursday, in a small perimeter of the village of Mailhoc (Tarn) cordoned off by a hundred gendarmes about ten kilometers from the couple’s home, to discover bones in a field on the edge of a wood.
These fragments, which come from the lower body of the missing woman according to a source close to the investigation, were immediately sent to the IRCGN laboratory in Pontoise, in the Paris region, which therefore confirmed that they did indeed belong to Delphine Aussaguel. The search continued on Friday in the hope of locating other fragments of the 33-year-old nurse’s body, probably scattered accidentally during agricultural work, before stopping in the afternoon.
« Abominable »
Cédric Jubillar, a 38-year-old painter and plasterer, had always denied his responsibility in the disappearance of his wife and mother of their two children, including during the four weeks of hearing before the Tarn Assize Court, in Albi, between September and October 2025.
He finally confessed to having killed his wife in a letter addressed to his new lawyers, Guy and Pierre Debuisson, which the latter made public on July 6. He admitted to having committed “an abominable act”, according to Pierre Debuisson. Delphine Jubillar, née Aussaguel, disappeared from the home of the divorcing couple in Cagnac-les-Mines, near Albi, on the night of December 15 to 16, 2020, during a curfew linked to the Covid-19 pandemic. She was preparing to start a new life with another man.
After his conviction, Cédric Jubillar appealed, one of his lawyers at the time, Alexandre Martin, having denounced during the trial a prosecution investigation which had rolled out the “red carpet for judicial error”. His new lawyers have indicated several times that holding his appeal trial on the scheduled dates, that is to say from September 21 before the Haute-Garonne Assize Court, in Toulouse, seemed impossible to them given the new procedures to be carried out after his confessions and the discovery of the bones.
