Sentenced to death by beheading on 10 March 1976, Ranucci was the third-to-last person executed in France, and frequently cited as the last due to the notoriety and media frenzy over the case.

Ranucci's case greatly influenced the debate over capital punishment in France after the book Le Pull-over rouge (1978) was published by former lawyer and journalist Gilles Perrault.

It called Ranucci's guilt into question, and had a notable impact on public opinion, with over one million copies sold,[3] and was translated into twenty languages.

[citation needed] When he was four years old, he witnessed his father slashing his mother in the face with a knife—similar to the one Ranucci would later use to commit murder[3]—at the door of a court after their divorce had been pronounced.

However, other sources, like Ranucci's father, testified that his son did not really witness this attack, but only saw his injured mother as a nursemaid was bringing him in her arms back home.

Years later, Ranucci, charged with Rambla's murder, confessed to the examining magistrate that he had lived his entire childhood with the constant fear that his father, depicted as violent by his mother, would eventually find and kill him.

[8] Meanwhile, he worked as a waiter in a bar, Le Rio Bravo, owned by his mother, located in Saint-Jean-de-Moirans, near Voiron (Isère), which he ran when she was absent.

On 24 May 1974, he was hired by Ets COTTO, a company that made and sold air-conditioning equipment based in Nice, and began working as a door-to-door salesman.

According to his later confession, the girl was initially reluctant to go with him, making him repeat his offer; he eventually gained her trust by promising to return her home for lunch time.

He then turned around and fled in the direction of Marseille, drove a few hundred metres before he stopped at the bottom of a hill, exited from his car with the young girl, and climbed up into underbrush holding her left arm.

Hearing Marie-Dolorès screaming and crying, as she had just lost her right shoe and had to walk barefoot over the vegetation,[17] he grabbed her by the neck and pushed her temple to the ground.

Returning to his car, he drove for a while, then hid in a mushroom farm in order to change his flat tyre and bloodied clothes, clean up, and hide his knife.

After being arrested, he was not recognized by the two witnesses to the abduction, and the only physical evidence implicating him in this phase of the crime was the drawing he made while in police custody showing the estate where the Rambla family lived.

Months later, while incarcerated at Baumettes prison (9th arrondissement of Marseille), he repudiated his confession after learning he was of the same blood type as the little girl (bloodstains had been found on his pants seized in his car trunk),[25] and hearing about a local pedophile who wore a red polo shirt or sweater—according to testimonies—similar to the one discovered near the mushroom farm where he had hidden after the murder.

[26] André Fraticelli, Ranucci's lawyer, originally planned to plead mitigating factors, citing his client's difficult childhood, the sight of his father slashing his mother's face, and the numerous moves made across France as a defence in court.

On the advice of his mother, Ranucci came to court dressed like a clergyman sporting a large pectoral cross, which irritated most of the jury and was interpreted by a few observers as an indication of his immaturity.

During the last hearing, and after his advocate's plea, minutes were communicated at the last moment to the jury and the defence lawyers, which, while not unheard of or illegal, was an extremely rare procedure.

Again on his mother's advice, Ranucci wrote a 74-page document titled "Récapitulatif" ("Summary") while on death row, in which he summed up the case from his point of view and attempted to prove he was innocent.

Gérard Bouladou, a retired police officer who has written books about the case, has observed signs of mythomania and even paranoia against the investigators in this document—as he was toward his army superiors[33]—and argued that Ranucci was trying to persuade himself of his own innocence.

[36] In 1978, a novel by Gilles Perrault, entitled Le Pull-over rouge (The Red Sweater), disputed Ranucci's involvement in the crime, expressing the writer's doubts about his guilt.

The title of the book refers to a red sweater found hidden in the mushroom bed where Ranucci hid after his car accident, which seemed similar to that worn by another man who sexually abused children in another Marseilles estate just two days before Rambla's kidnapping and murder.

[37] However, nothing within the penal case could corroborate this version; Perrault himself had no explanation or rebuttal to the main evidence, in particular the hiding place of the murder weapon Ranucci revealed.

The victim's father, Pierre Rambla, vehemently opposed the book and the subsequent campaign that supported Perrault's theses, arguing it made his family suffer, especially his elder son Jean-Baptiste who is among the last people to have seen Marie-Dolorès alive.

In 1989, having accused the policemen in charge of the inquiry of "abuse of authority" in a 1985 TV program titled "28 juillet 1976 : Qui a tué Christian Ranucci ?"

[44][3] In 2008, Perrault and his publisher Fayard were found guilty of defamation against the Marseille police in another book, L'ombre de Christian Ranucci,[45] in which it was stated that the investigators behaved with "casualness and partisanship".

[50] On multiple occasions, former President of the Republic Giscard d'Estaing has said in interviews that he did not feel remorse regarding his role in the case; he mentioned to journalist Laurent Delahousse in 2010 that he did not regret his decision to decline clemency to Ranucci, claiming that he was indeed guilty and that "he had to be punished".