“Tiphaine, where are you?” In Search of Our Sister by Damien and Sibylle Véron

RFI: Damien and Sibylle Véron hello. It will soon be four years since your sister Tiphaine disappeared in Nikko, Japan. We have already spoken to RFI about it. For those of our listeners who don’t know, Damien, what happened ?

Damien Veron: So Tiphaine had carefully prepared her trip to Japan. Two days after his arrival, all of a sudden, no news. A few days later, we received a message from the embassy, ​​explaining to us that Tiphaine had disappeared. We immediately took plane tickets to go there. We thought we would find her very quickly, whether she was in a hospital or elsewhere. Finally, for four years, we are still looking for her.

Four years later, we still don’t know what happened. This book is the story of four particularly trying years for your whole family. You faced it together. Is that why you wrote this book together? How did you write it, Sibylle?

Sibyl Veron: It’s a book we wrote together. In fact, we were supposed to leave together for Japan. In March 2020, due to Covid-19, the borders closed. And there, Damien, stuck at home, said to himself: I can’t do anything. I will write “. Except that everything we had experienced, we had to check it together. I started helping him, cross-checking information, comparing our notes. Have we all experienced things the same way? We started sharing all that. This investigation, we conducted it together. Both on the front line. It ended up being a joint project, and we wrote it together.

After the disappearance, there is first of all the investigation carried out by the Japanese police. To the violence of the loss of a sister (or a daughter), were therefore very quickly added the difficulties of communication with the Japanese police.

Damien Veron : Absolutely. Very quickly. So it’s paradoxical, because when Tiphaine disappeared, the Japanese police immediately told us that they would not investigate. So we mediated on the spot. So the card of the mediatization made that the local police received us with the ambassador. However, despite the Interpol channel, they refused to speak to the French police. So we found ourselves on the front line, despite ourselves, having to try to decipher the cultural shock between France and Japan, but also having to try to recover elements of the investigation to feed French justice. So that’s also why we decided to write this story. It’s because we found ourselves immersed in Japan, with other cultural modes.

A language you don’t speak?

Damien Veron : Absolutely

What is impressive in reading this book is the way you quickly see that each of you specializes in areas that I imagine you were perhaps unaware of (terminating telephones, rainfall readings, the flow of the river.) – even if it means sometimes being more precise than your Japanese interlocutors.

Sibyl Veron : What is terrible in this story and which is told in the book, is that very quickly the Japanese policemen who thought of the criminal trail said to themselves: ” Oh dear, it’s going to be too complicated… It’s an accident! Go home ! ” and ” There was a typhoon, your sister went down the river, we’ll never find her “. In fact, we already had to prove that there was no typhoon, that all that was false. We had to do our own research. Fortunately, we could count on Damien’s expertise in terms of hydrology (he knows plants, he is a landscaper). Me, I rather took care of the telephony aspect, with our youngest brother. Obviously, they did not want to investigate! We were forced to take the place of that, to get information, to get information, to push the quest for information ever further. For example, for the telephone, we did not understand. We were saying : ” Do you have the telephone line? They answered: No, no, it’s not possible to recover the data, it’s a foreign phone “. No, that wasn’t the problem. It’s that the phone was brutally broken. And that, we had to contact Xavier Niel, by email…

Xavier Niel, the boss of the group which is the parent company of Free, your sister’s telephone operator.

Sibyl Veron : Exactly

This information that would have been fundamental if you had had it from the start?

Sibyl Veron : Eh yes. A priori, it is useful to know that if someone has fallen into the river, we find him. It is fundamental to know that a phone has stopped transmitting for abnormal reasons. And all of this is backed up with testimonials. And that’s the other problem, in this investigation, and that’s what we also talk about in the book. It’s that there is no audition. Even today, our lawyers are fighting to have hearings, to match each other’s schedules, just from the hotel.

And you always feel torn between the desire to respect the culture of your Japanese interlocutors, and this need to shed light on what is going on. And that is tricky.

Damien Veron : Very delicate. Especially since the ambassador warns us, he tells us ” You have interlocutors, they receive you, above all do not rush them so you have to juggle the frustration of not getting obvious leads. There is a suspicious person who directly challenged us with Sibylle, explaining to us that he knew where Tiphaine was. You have a lot of miscellaneous facts. Or the hotelier himself, who explains that Tiphaine left before 10 a.m., when in fact, thanks to our research, we see that she leaves the hotel almost at noon. With all this, we say to ourselves, you have to search ! They don’t “. So yes, it’s horrible, because we’re frustrated and angry, we don’t have an answer. And at the same time, that’s it, you mustn’t rush them, otherwise they’ll tell you ” Goodbye “.

And we feel a little bitterness when you mention the story of Narumi, this young Japanese woman who disappeared in France and for whom the French police did their utmost and found the murderer.

Damien Veron : Yes, this story is interesting, since Japan put pressure on France, saying: ” This is not normal, you have to find the criminal “. France did colossal research, the investigating judge carried out real investigations and finally, starting from the hotel room from which she disappeared, they ended up finding traces and finding the criminal who was recently condemned in France. While Tiphaine, there were traces of blood in her room, and finally, nothing started.

We feel you go through moments of helplessness, perhaps discouragement, yet you never give up.

Sibyl Veron : It is impossible to give up from the moment there is no investigation. As long as there is no criminal investigation, a solid investigation, where we leave the hotel, we question people and we find out why there are traces of blood appearing in his room, etc. From the moment when there is not this solid base, one cannot give up. Us, our private investigator who we recruited, our lawyers, if they believe that a maximum of investigative acts have been carried out. There, maybe we’ll stop. It seems hard to believe. But already I think that we may be able to find Tiphaine, if we carry out an investigation.

So it’s up to you that if you sometimes annoy, it’s because you publicize your research too much, and you are given to understand that it does you a disservice. How did you react to this?

Damien Veron : Well, that shocked me. Because the objective of the media coverage was to ensure that France had the means to be heard in Japan. And not to shake up our camp. We, we said to ourselves, Tiphaine is French, we need the investigating judge, we need the French police. The media coverage was to show that there was no investigation in Japan. We said to ourselves, it’s the world upside down. Especially since we ensured a link with the Japanese police. Precisely, we tried not to get annoyed so as not to break this link. The objective was precisely for France to benefit from it. It was not the case.

For the three years of the disappearance of Tiphaine, you get help from the actress Fanny Ardant who records a message, at the same time as a fresco is created. And you decide to change tactics with regard to the investigation.

Damien Veron : We call the examining magistrate directly. We’re having a rally in front of the courthouse, since Maître Antoine Vey – it’s also something important in our fight since he agreed to join us, through Éric Dupont-Moretti, so that proves that he believes in our fight – that they legitimized him. We only asked that the examining magistrate go to Japan, since the sense of protocol in Japan means that when you go there, it has nothing to do. They receive you. And so, the objective was for the investigating judge to go there. She refused to go. So there, we were really indignant. We decided to hold a rally in front of the Poitiers courthouse to denounce his refusal to go there.

Sibyl Veron : We were indignant, and we, on the advice of our lawyers, decided to recruit a private detective: Jean-François Abgrall. We cannot force the Japanese police to investigate. Maybe they are investigating behind the scenes, that’s not what we understand, that’s not what they give as a response to French justice. In any case, our lawyers said to themselves: no investigation, we must recruit someone and someone competent. And so fortunately, we were put on the path of Jean-François Abgrall who is a former policeman, who set up his private company and who succeeded when there were no investigative techniques of today. today to catch Francis Heaulme, serial killers like that. So we trust Jean-François Abgrall. We know very well that he can find Tiphaine.

Damien Veron : One last important thing, an international letter of request had been sent by the French judge to the Japanese. It came back last week, was translated, finally. And it turns out that there is nothing in this international letter of request. We asked that the suspects be heard, that was not the case. So now the move of the judge is really important. Which judge? In any case, a French magistrate must come to Nikko, otherwise we will never have an answer on certain points.

The private detective, he found something yet?

Sibyl Veron : We cannot talk about what Jean-François Abgrall is doing. Well, it’s complicated. Testimonies are coming to him, important testimonies. Really, even from a distance, because we are waiting for him to be able to go there, he managed to obtain a lot of information on the criminological climate of Nikko and the region. For him, it really is a place where terrible things happen. It’s normal, there are temples in the middle of the forests, so there are both a lot of people and they are isolated places. In short, he is aware of recurring facts, recurring attacks. He has testimonials to rely on. Him, he advances step by step and he has no doubt that we will find things.

► To read also:

Japan: three years after her disappearance, the family of Tiphaine Véron hopes for an investigation

Japan: gray areas on the mysterious disappearance of a French woman