British woman was 'strangled on country cycle ride': Discovery of green moccasin at roadside put French police on trail of murder suspect

FIONA JONES, a teacher from Birmingham, was killed as she cycled through countryside north of Paris by a stranger who was in a rage at being rejected by his lover, a French court was told yesterday.

Frederic Blancke, 26, a radiographer, is charged with her murder in a case which caught the public imagination because of the dogged determination of Mrs Jones's husband, Mark, to find out what happened to his wife in the initial absence of a body.

In the assize court in the northern city of Beauvais yesterday Blancke admitted killing Mrs Jones.

On the day she disappeared in August 1989 he had come across his lover, Patricia Ringal, a nurse, with her former boyfriend. She had left him for her previous partner after Blancke had suffered from impotence.

He drove into the country in a rage of humiliation, and attacked Mrs Jones when he saw her cycling alone.

Police said Blancke told them he had strangled the woman when she struggled and left her in a maize field, then returned that night to bury her. When he went back, she was still breathing and he killed her with a knife. He threw her bicycle into a river.

Mrs Jones, was accompanying her husband, who was designing a golf course in the region.

She had gone cycling, but when she failed to return as planned to the chateau hotel where they were staying he raised the alarm.

The police started a murder hunt after they found her hotel key-card, her watch and a necklace by a roadside. A man's green moccasin was lying near by. Her grave was found in a wood in Picardy three months later. Police said Blancke had told them of its whereabouts.

Finding Blancke involved painstaking detective work. After contacting the manufacturers of the moccasin, they checked through the sales records of all shoe shops in the Oise area that had stocked any of the shoes. One man was questioned but was able to show that he still had a complete pair. The task was made simpler because the makers of the Arcus brand had only sold 152 pairs of the continental size 44 shoe in 76 shops in all of France.

Credit card slips led to Blancke. According to police, he confessed to the crime under questioning.

The case continues.