Chevaline massacre: ten years later, where is the investigation?

Ten years ago to the day the Chevaline massacre took place, near Annecy, in Haute-Savoie. On September 5, 2012, a British family of Iraqi origin, on vacation in the area, as well as a French cyclist, were found dead in a parking lot, near a forest road. Each was killed by multiple bullets. Only the two little girls in the family, aged 4 and 7 at the time, had survived. One had hidden under her mother’s skirt. But ten years later, this quadruple murder still remains unexplained. The culprit has not been identified, despite extensive investigations, carried out jointly by the French and British police.

A psychological portrait of the established killer

The investigation, which explored dozens of leads, is therefore still ongoing. However, the “Chevaline mystery” would no longer be far from being resolved, according to the Annecy prosecutor, confident in the scientific work of the investigators. For several months, three gendarmes have been working full time on this file, resuming all the investigations from the beginning, checking all the seals. The means will be even greater in a few days, when the case will be transferred to the “Cold Case” center in Nanterre, which gives rise to new hope.

The file is now sprawling: 95 volumes and 8,000 procedural documents. The hypotheses are multiple and have, since the beginning of the case, confused the investigators. From now on, it would seem that it is the local track which is privileged. One of the daughters of the family, survivor of the massacre and now 17 years old, very recently was finally able to go back to the memory of “a man dressed in leather with white hands”.

Above all, a British profiler, after reading all the reports, established a psychological portrait of the killer: a local man, lonely, unemployed, passionate about weapons or a former soldier, having committed the acts possibly for a racist motive and with an asocial profile or psychiatric history. The registers of psychiatric establishments in the region that may have received this type of person between 2012 and 2015 have therefore recently been reviewed. The hope of finding the culprit is still there.