An extraordinary affair. On September 5, 2012, four inanimate bodies were found near a forest road in Chevaline, in Haute-Savoie. Among the victims, three people from the same family – the parents and maternal grandmother – and a cyclist. During this terrible tragedy, the two little girls of the familyZeena and Zainab, aged 4 and 7 at the time, will be spared. If no new elements have made it possible to understand what happened in recent years, the case was finally entrusted to the Nanterre cold case center in 2022. Thus, many investigators are still trying today to find the or the murderers of the Al-Hilli family and the cyclist. 11 years after this tragedy, Canal+ unveiled, Wednesday November 15, 2023, a documentary called No way out: the Chevaline killinginspired by the investigative book by Brendan Kemmet and Imen Ghouali, The Chevaline affair, revelations of a perfect crime, published by Plon editions. One of the authors confided in our colleagues at 20 minutes in an article published the same day.
A “perfect crime”? These elements which still remain unanswered
And for Brendan Kemmet, it could well be that the name of the murderer has already been mentioned in the file. “I think the name of the killer is in the investigation file, because we cast an extremely wide net”, he specifies. According to him, the transfer of this case to the unresolved cases center is not necessarily very good news. “But the transfer of the investigation to the cold case center is not encouraging. It is not a cold case: the investigations have never stopped. I see it as an admission of failure even if, obviously, there are still a lot of investigations and cross-checking to be done.”. For the journalist, the Chevaline killing can be described as “perfect crime”, “in the sense that 11 years later, not only has the perpetrator not been identified, but we have very little information. We are not certain of the order of execution of the victims, we do not know nor who was precisely targeted.” More than a decade after the events, many mysteries still surround this terrible affair.