These are perhaps the last chance analyses. Those which will finally make it possible to discover the author of the quadruple murder committed in September 2012 near the village of Chevaline, in Haute-Savoie. After recovering the file two years ago, the magistrates of the “cold cases” center of Nanterre recently ordered the carrying out of new expertise on several seals discovered near the parking lot. It was there that four members of a vacationing Anglo-Iraqi family, and a cyclist from the region, were executed by the killer, who fired 21 times in a few minutes. According to the Nanterre public prosecutor’s office, the investigating judges contacted “several public and private laboratories” to try to get these clues to speak.
According to RTL, who revealed the information on Wednesday, it concerns two cigarette butts. The technicians will also try to extract traces of DNA on the outfit worn on the day of the events by Sylvain Mollier, the 45-year-old amateur cyclist, and on the fragment of the butt of the weapon used by the author, a Luger collector’s pistol used by the Swiss army in the 1930s. They hope to take advantage of scientific advances in DNA extraction, as was the case in the Caroline Marcel affair earlier this year. The DNA of a suspect was finally discovered on a car key belonging to this mother killed in Loiret in 2008.
Butts that are too “old”?
“Of course we have to do them. But these are routine assessments. It is normal, in this type of case, to re-examine the seals taking into account scientific progress in DNA analysis,” explains 20 minutes the journalist Brendan Kemmet, co-author of an investigative book* and a series broadcast on Canal+ on this extraordinary Chevaline criminal case. Will these new analyzes make it possible to resolve the mystery that hangs over the assassination of Saad al-Hilli, his 47-year-old wife, his 74-year-old mother-in-law and Sylvain Mollier? “Twelve years later, there is not the beginning of a motive,” breathes Brendan Kemmet.
Several cigarette butts were discovered near the BMW in which the victims were found dead. “Expertises have already taken place on the least damaged cigarette butts. (The cigarettes) had been smoked by a man who appeared in a previous case, an Alpine hunter. He was present in this parking lot a week before the incident because he was waiting for his comrades who were on maneuvers in the Bauges massif,” recalls Brendan Kemmet. The cigarette butts which will be appraised once again are, he says, “older”; the cigarettes would therefore have been consumed several days, even several weeks before the killing. And therefore probably not by the murderer.
A meticulous killer
On the other hand, why would this “meticulous” criminal make the mistake of leaving cigarette butts? “It wouldn’t work because he left very few traces. We don’t know where he went, or where exactly he was positioned in the parking lot. He is a very organized person, who acted with cold blood, who was relentless and who even shot the eldest of the two little girls in the family,” observes the journalist.
As for the cyclist’s clothing, they have also already been assessed in the past. “But there have been advances in extracting DNA from materials that were very difficult to extract before. We know that the FBI works a lot on this,” notes Brendan Kemmet.
A “tainted” crime scene
As the journalist recently revealed in an investigation published by Marianne, “there was a lot of pollution at this crime scene”, which was “contaminated on multiple occasions”. The cyclist’s bottle, he recalls, had not been immediately sealed. “It was picked up by a repairman who came to remove the BMW, who then gave it to his children. It was a local elected official who reported it to the gendarmerie. Despite all the precautions that had to be taken, not everything was done well. It would be miraculous if other traces were discovered. »
* “The Chevaline affair, autopsy of a perfect crime”, by Brendan Kemmet and Imen Ghouali, Plon editions, 256 pages, 20.90 euros