When the young friends rented a home in Palaiseau, a tony suburb of southwest Paris, they were looking forward to a festive Saturday evening.
But the group's gathering was interrupted by a gruesome discovery: A woman's body, decomposing in a garden near the edge of the property.
"Her body was found at the bottom of the property which opens out into a woods," a police source told Agence-France Presse, adding that the body was found "hunched in a dug-out area, her head against the ground, covered in branches and surrounded by wood stumps."
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Investigators told AFP that foul play is suspected, and Bertrand Daillie, the deputy prosecutor for Evry, told the Associated Press that the body had been deliberately covered with tree branches.