National Road 12 near Houdan during the police investigations
A Murder Trial Without a Body: How Courts Build Certainty
In criminal justice, the absence of a body is often described as a weakness. In reality, it can be something else entirely: an invitation to narrative.
When a victim disappears without leaving physical traces, investigators are forced to rely on indirect evidence. Timelines, behavior, documents, inconsistencies—these become the building blocks of certainty. Over time, they can weigh as heavily as forensic proof.
The Seznec case is one of the most striking examples of this dynamic.
Pierre Quéméneur vanished in May 1923. No body was found. No confirmed crime scene was identified. Yet within a year, a man was convicted of murder and sentenced to life at hard labor.
How does a court reach such a conclusion?
The answer lies less in any single piece of evidence than in the accumulation of plausibility. When a suspect is the last person seen with the victim, when his story changes, when documents appear after the disappearance and are later identified as forged, a narrative begins to form. Each element reinforces the others. Doubt narrows.
From a judicial perspective, this process can feel logical, even necessary. Courts are not designed to leave questions unanswered indefinitely. They must decide. And when direct proof is absent, coherence becomes persuasive.
In the Seznec trial, the prosecution did not claim to know precisely how the victim died or where his body was hidden. Instead, it argued that the surrounding facts pointed inexorably toward guilt. The forged documents were not treated merely as acts of fraud, but as signs of a larger deception. The inconsistencies in testimony were framed not as confusion, but as strategy.
Once that interpretation took hold, alternative explanations became increasingly difficult to introduce. Evidence was no longer evaluated in isolation. It was read through the lens of a story already accepted as true.
This is not unique to the Seznec case. Legal systems around the world struggle with the same tension: how to distinguish between probability and proof, between plausibility and certainty. The risk is not necessarily bad faith. It is momentum.
When a case moves forward without a body, it often compensates by relying more heavily on interpretation. And interpretation, once stabilized in court, can be remarkably resistant to revision.
Nearly a century later, the Seznec case continues to provoke debate not because it lacks evidence, but because it raises a deeper question: how much certainty is enough to end doubt forever?