Identified Bones, Unanswered Questions: Why Delphine Aussaguel’s Cause of Death May Remain Unclear

Toulouse – 20.07.2026: For the family, certainty is a painful but crucial step: Following DNA analyses, the human bones found in the Tarn have been attributed to Delphine Aussaguel. The 33-year-old nurse, who took the name Jubillar after her marriage, had disappeared from her home in Cagnac-les-Mines during the night of December 15 to 16, 2020.

The public prosecutor general at the Toulouse Court of Appeal, Nicolas Jacquet, confirmed on Sunday, July 19, the results of the investigations by the Gendarmerie’s Criminal Research Institute, IRCGN. The remains had been found on July 16 on land in the Tarn that, according to the judiciary, Cédric Jubillar had identified to investigators as the location where the body was disposed of.

However, the identification does not end the criminal investigation. Instead, it opens a new and difficult phase. After five and a half years outdoors, bones may still bear clues to injuries, such as fractures or signs of severe violence. Whether such findings are present and whether they can reliably establish a mechanism of death has not yet been publicly disclosed.

Forensic pathologist Karine Dabadie warned on Franceinfo that crucial answers may remain unavailable. Soft tissue, internal organs and toxicological traces, which are often decisive in a timely autopsy, are generally no longer available after such a long period. As a result, neither possible poisoning nor suffocation or some consequences of injuries may be demonstrable beyond doubt.

This is of considerable importance for the criminal proceedings, without automatically calling the previous conviction into question. Cédric Jubillar was sentenced in Albi in October 2025 to 30 years in prison for the murder of his wife. The verdict is not yet final; appeal proceedings before the Haute-Garonne Assize Court in Toulouse had so far been scheduled to begin on September 21, 2026.

Jubillar, who has been in pretrial detention and then prison since June 2021, admitted responsibility for his wife’s death in mid-July, according to the prosecution, and gave investigators information. What details he may have provided about the sequence of events, the motive and the precise cause of death has not been comprehensively published. His defense can assess the new forensic steps and have them examined during the appeal proceedings.

Investigators are now likely to order further examinations of the recovered items and the site where they were found. For Delphine Aussaguel’s relatives, the identification primarily means that the long uncertainty about her whereabouts has ended. The question of how she died may nevertheless only be answered by the judiciary through a combination of traces, testimony and evidence already gathered – rather than through an unequivocal medical finding.