On September 2, 1999, Doctor Yves Godard and his two children disappeared at sea off Saint-Malo (Ille-et-Vilaine). A mysterious crow then made himself known to the police…
The most famous crow in France is undoubtedly that of the Grégory affair. Nevertheless, the murder of the little Vosges boy is far from being the only affair to have been marked by the intervention of a mysterious letter-writer… At the end of the 1990s, the case of the disappearance of the Godard family was notably polluted by the appearance of a mysterious crow. From letter to letter, the latter led the police to the wand, causing the investigators to stumble on several tracks without ever succeeding in finding the trace of the Godards.
As a reminder, Doctor Yves Godard and his children, Camille, 6, and Marius, 4, disappeared at sea on September 2, 1999 after leaving the port of Saint-Malo (Ille-et-Vilaine) aboard a sailboat. The shipwreck thesis was first considered, but the discovery of the blood of Godard’s wife, Marie-France, in her husband’s combi and the family home, quickly made Yves Godard a suspect. For several weeks, a real manhunt was orchestrated across the English Channel. It was then that mysterious letters began to arrive at the gendarmerie in Falaise, Normandy.
“Doctor Yves Godard is alive and well”
In October 1999, a month after the disappearance of the Godards, the Norman gendarmes received an anonymous letter claiming that Doctor Godard and his children were still alive. “Doctor Yves Godard is alive and well, said the letter. He lives on the Isle of Man. take it seriously.” Without waiting, the police rushed to the small British island. On the spot, several witnesses confirmed seeing the doctor and his children in a hotel, but the latter remained untraceable.
Three weeks later, as the Isle of Man trail closed, the crow reiterated. A new letter has been sent to France, this time claiming that Yves Godard and his children have found refuge in the Hebrides region, south of the Scottish Sea. Again, the French investigators had followed the indications of the crow. But once again, Yves, Camille and Marius Godard had slipped through their fingers.
Nobody ever found out who the author of these letters was. Was it Yves Godard, who would have sought to put the investigators on false tracks, or a well-informed stranger who would have really sought to direct the police? These questions will undoubtedly remain forever unanswered, especially since the Godard affair took a sinister turn a few months later. In June 2000, the skull of little Camille was fished out by a shellfish collector in the bay of Saint-Brieuc. His father’s tibia and femur were in turn six years later, in 2006. As for the bodies of Marius and Marie-France Godard, these were never found.