Dominique Pelicot, who has been jailed for 20 years for drugging his then wife, Gisèle Pelicot, and inviting men to rape her, faces a further investigation for the rape and murder of an estate agent in Paris in 1991, and an attempted rape in 1999, amid questions over whether he could have been a serial offender for decades.

Investigators in Nanterre outside Paris have reopened two cold cases and placed Pelicot under formal investigation, as police consider potential links to other cases involving young estate agents. Pelicot could face another trial at a later date.

He was found guilty on Thursday of crushing sleeping tablets and anti-anxiety medication into Gisèle Pelicot’s food and, over a nine-year period from 2011 to 2020, inviting dozens of men to rape her while she was unconscious, in the village of Mazan in Provence, where the couple had retired. After videos of the rapes of Gisèle Pelicot by him and other men were found meticulously categorised on his computer hard drive in a file labelled “abuse”, Pelicot, 72, admitted the charges in court, telling judges: “I am a rapist.”

A total of 50 men were found guilty alongside him on Thursday but about another 20 shown in videos were not able to be identified and are potentially still at large.

Police uncovered Pelicot’s rapes of his wife after they investigated his computer equipment when he was arrested for secretly filming up women’s skirts in a supermarket in the southern French town of Carpentras in 2020.

But he first came to the attention of police a decade earlier, in 2010, when he was caught filming up women’s dresses with a small camera hidden in a pen in another supermarket in the Seine-et-Marne area east of Paris, near where he and Gisèle lived at the time. He was arrested and accepted a fine of €100 to avoid going to court. Gisèle was not informed.

After that arrest in 2010, police collected Dominique Pelicot’s DNA. When it was entered into a national database, it matched with a trace of blood found on a shoe at the scene of an attempted rape of a young estate agent outside Paris in 1999.

At that time, Pelicot was 46 and had previously worked as an estate agent himself. The attacker had walked into an estate agent’s office in the Seine-et-Marne area and said he wanted to urgently view a top-floor rental flat, giving a false name and address. The young estate agent tasked with showing the man round was 19 and had just started working there.

Once in the flat, the estate agent was pushed to the ground on her stomach, her hands tied behind her back with rope and her mouth and nose covered with fabric soaked in ether, which can have an anaesthetic effect. “It smelled very strong … it made my head turn,” the woman later told investigators. “I was a prisoner in my body and felt I couldn’t move.” The attacker removed some of her clothes and placed her shoes neatly beside her. She felt a knife held to her neck. She came round and fought back, managing to lock herself in a cupboard, and the man left.

The 2010 DNA evidence that showed a match with Pelicot did not make it into the case file at the time. It is unclear why. But the cold case was reopened by an investigating magistrate in Nanterre after Pelicot’s 2020 arrest for raping his wife. Questioned by police in 2022, Pelicot first denied any involvement, until he was presented with the DNA evidence of his blood on the shoe.

He then admitted attempted rape to police investigators but denied using a knife as a weapon. He is expected to face trial at a later date.

He told police he had had an “urge” the moment he saw the woman, but that when he took her trousers off he had realised she was the same age as his daughter and had felt “blocked”. Gisèle Pelicot had no idea of the 1999 case. “When I discovered that he’d attempted to rape a young woman the same age as his daughter, it was like an explosion,” she said in court in Avignon.

View image in fullscreen

Police noticed there were similarities between the 1999 attempted rape and a 1991 rape and murder of another estate agent, aged 23, who had also just started her job. A man who gave a false name and address asked to look at a top-floor flat in Paris. The estate agent, who had been strangled to death and knifed, was found on her stomach, hands tied behind her back, shoes carefully placed beside her, with a smell of ether in the room and traces of ether in her blood.

Pelicot has denied any involvement. He has been placed under formal investigation for both crimes and the investigation continues.

Florence Rault, a lawyer for the families of the two women, said police work on the cases would continue. She said: “Investigations are ongoing so we have to see what that brings. There are likely to be further interviews in the cases.”

She added: “Clearly the families hope that they will one day have a definitive answer and a conviction in court.”

Antoine Camus, a lawyer for Gisèle Pelicot and other members of her family, had told the Avignon trial that questions remained over the full extent of Pelicot’s offending. “Today, my clients struggle to believe that between 1999 – to just take one date – and 2011, Dominique Pelicot was off playing board games. My clients, unfortunately, rule nothing out and are eaten up by anxiety over discovering even more, and over years.”

Camus said the Gisèle Pelicot investigation showed that Dominique Pelicot only admitted crimes when irrefutable evidence was presented, and even then often only partially. He said Pelicot had, in his first police interviews, minimised the potential number of men involved in the rapes of Gisèle.

• Gisèle Pelicot rape trial
• France
• Rape and sexual assault
• Europe
• news