A girl disappears at a wedding party. After six months there is sad certainty: Maëlys is dead. In court, the accused admits that he killed her on purpose. A verdict is due today.
Grenoble – It’s a summer night in a small French commune. A couple is celebrating their wedding with friends until an eight-year-old girl is suddenly nowhere to be found and the happy moment turns into a nightmare for her family.
Six months later, the bad suspicion was confirmed: Maëlys is dead, her body buried in nature. The case stirred up France and caused horror. Four and a half years after the disappearance of the little one, a verdict is expected in Grenoble against the man who is said to have kidnapped and killed her.
“At least tell the truth!”
But even three weeks of court hearings will probably leave one central question unanswered: why? The accused ex-soldier, who has already been convicted of murder, admitted at the beginning of the trial at the end of January, as in the investigation, that he had killed Maëlys. While he initially asserted that he did not want her dead, he later admitted that he intentionally took her life. But his motive and the circumstances of the crime in the morning hours of August 27, 2017 continue to be a mystery. The sister of the deceased urged the court: “At least tell the truth!”
At the wedding party, the defendant and the little one talked and looked at photos of his dogs. According to the former dog handler, the girl then got into his car just before three in the morning to see his animals, voluntarily, as the late 30s said. Then she cried, wanted to go back, and he hit her in the face and killed him. Pictures taken by investigators showed the accused traveling with a small figure in the passenger seat and later returning to the party without it.
Was Maëlys also sexually abused?
The prosecution in Grenoble repeatedly raised the question of whether the former soldier not only kidnapped and killed Maëlys, but also sexually abused him. Because in the process he also has to answer for sexual assaults on two cousins. At the time of the crime, a few weeks before Maëlys’ death, they were four and six years old. Both children were asleep when the man assaulted them. He was unable to do this on a child who was awake, he said at trial, and admitted to having pedophilic thoughts. But he did not abuse Maëlys.
The defendant told the court that when he struck, he saw the face of another soldier he had murdered a few months earlier. However, a psychiatrist in Grenoble said these hallucinations did not exist. The man deliberately wanted to manipulate the story.
The process thus follows on from the investigations, in which the information also came to light only slowly and in dribs and drabs. At the time, DNA traces and camera recordings substantiated the suspicion against the ex-soldier, who finally led the investigators to his corpse six months after Maëlys disappeared, repeatedly changing his version of what happened.
The public prosecutor’s office demanded a life sentence with 22 years of detention for the accused. The defense asked for a sentence with possible early parole. The former dog handler was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the murder of a young soldier last May. Investigations have been reopened into other unsolved missing persons and murder cases in order to examine a possible connection to him. dpa
