He was 14 years old. On April 12, 2003, Mario Leblanc was preparing to spend the holidays with his mother Graziella Ortolan and his stepfather Xavier Flactif, with his three half-brothers and sisters. However, he finds himself alone in front of the family chalet in Grand-Bornand, in Haute-Savoie. After months of investigation, the teenager learned that his family had been murdered by a “jealous” neighbor, David Hotyat.
More than twenty years after the events, while the murderer will be able to request his parole in September 2025, the only surviving son insisted on testify to “Seven to Eight”“so as not to forget” his family and “to reestablish a certain truth”.
The teenager who raised the alarm of the disappearance
“I didn’t understand what was happening,” confides Mario Leblanc. In front of the cameras of the TF1 show, he retraces the entire chronology of the “Flactif affair”, as the media called it at the time. It was this 14-year-old teenager who raised the alarm about the disappearance of his family. That day, he arrived in front of the family chalet and no one was there. After sleeping with friends, he manages to enter the house. The sheets are missing, the whole house is “tidy” but pots and pans are not washed. “I asked myself 1,000 questions,” he recalls, emphasizing that for him there was “no rational explanation.”
An investigation is open to try to find this couple and the three children. While the theory of the escape is mentioned, the 14-year-old does not believe it, assuring that his mother “would have found a way” to prevent him.
In his testimony, Mario Leblanc recalls that he should have been present on the day of the murders. His father would have refused to allow him to go to his mother’s house on Friday since it would have caused him to miss a day of school. “If I could have been there, maybe I could have gotten some of them out,” he says, moved, speaking of his half-brothers and sisters, imagining that they could have “alerted someone ‘A “.
A curious hypothesis from a neighbor and the 6th DNA found in the chalet
The investigations continue and in the media hype of the “Flactif affair”, a neighbor, David Hotyat interviewed for “Sept à quatre”, delivers a “curious hypothesis”, still unexplored: someone could have come in and made “a carnage.” Even today, Mario Leblanc points out how “suspicious” this theory was at the time.
The criminal trail was finally considered after the discovery of DNA traces from a sixth person in the chalet. At that moment, the teenager still held out hope. For him, “as long as nothing had been found”, he could still “find [sa] mother “.
“How do you kill two people and three children? »
Five months after the events, David Hotyat finally admitted the murders. The reason ? Jealousy that turns into obsession. “How do we get here? How do you kill two people, three children? ! », asks Mario Leblanc again, twenty years later.
Regarding the approach of a possible release from custody of his family’s murderer, the young man says: “He will be outside, he will have served his sentence while I will still be serving mine. » He assures that he wants to make this drama a “strength” and no longer an “impediment”. “I’m doing everything I can to become someone my mother would be proud of,” he confides. I think about it every day. »