four years after the death of Maëlys, “his gaze is everywhere” in Pont-de-Beauvoisin

“You have to imagine that four years ago, you could see the guests through the foliage.” From its terrace, Florence still distinguishes the multipurpose hall of Pont-de-Beauvoisin (Isère). On the evening of August 27, 2017, she was seated with her daughter, then a teenager, while below, Eddy G. and Anne-Laure M. celebrated their wedding with some 180 guests. The party’s sound systems weren’t particularly loud. Children were playing in front of the room. The next morning, the music had given way to the barking of the dogs of the investigators who had come to inspect the neighborhood, then the Florence garden. During the night, around 3 a.m., Maëlys, 8, who had come from the Jura with her parents to attend the wedding, had disappeared.

After six months of investigation, Nordahl Lelandais, resident of Domessin (Savoie) whose trial opens Monday, January 31 in Grenoble, admits having killed the child. The body of Maëlys is found, on his instructions, in a mountainous area of ​​the town of Attignat-Oncin (Savoie), a few minutes by car. At the time, Florence was immersed in a book-investigation on the “red sweater” affair. Gilles Perrault tells the story of the disappearance of Marie Dolorès Rambla, 8 years old, kidnapped in front of her parents’ building, in Marseille, in 1974. “And suddenly, in my reality, the same thing is happening”, breathes the inhabitant, still marked by the crime. “It was disturbing.”

The murder of Maëlys interfered in each of the 3,500 inhabitants of the commune. To manage the trauma, talking is important, but not with just anyone. “Back then I listened to the old women crying in my barsays a Pontois, who collects this pain. It’s every day that we think of her, that we have a heavy heart.” Installed at the counter, Mathieu adds: “The shrink is going to take 50 bullets from you, and then what? It won’t bring Maëlys back.”

Since the child’s death, the party no longer resonates in the neighborhood. “No one wants to get married in this room anymore” forever associated with the disappearance of Maëlys, confirms Edwige Comte, caterer in Pont. The young woman cooked there well for a wedding in 2021. The first in three years. “When I went there, there was apprehension. Of course, we think about it.” At the entrance to the room, a banner always asks “the truth for Maëlys” with this message: “We won’t let go.”

“His gaze is everywhere in the city”, confirms Luc Bassette, president of the Union of Pontois merchants and craftsmen. In the small town, “there are people who knew the family, who were at the wedding”, so “it’s an event that will be remembered for a long time to come”.

“Not a week goes by without mentioning Maëlys.”

Luc Bassette

at franceinfo

In the city center, a rather noisy group of young people chain cigarettes. At the time of Maëlys’ disappearance, these childhood friends were not yet 14 years old. “After the story, I no longer wanted to return to Pont-de-Beauvoisin”, confides Jérémy, in a vocational high school in the town. come back to him “fucked the blues.” Since then, young people have had time to reclaim their city, its bars and places to hang out. “We live with it, but it’s still weird”, declares Lorenzo, a young electrician looking for a job, in a voice that he would like assured. Everyone wants to leave Pont-de-Beauvoisin, “but not because of Lelandais”.

Pascal, he does not plan to move away. In the hands of his hairdresser, Guy, installed for thirty-five years, he regrets a city center which is becoming deserted thanks to the industrial zone and the damage of the health crisis in the town. “We are in peripheral France and we are in a city that is in crisis. Not much is happening here”, unrolls the fifties whose eyebrows are trimmed with scissors.

“Leaving, to go where?” Still wonders a former truck driver. “Horror is everywhere, it’s not just in Pont-de-Beauvoisin that dramas happen. Heavenly places don’t exist.” After the death of Maëlys, the man felt the need to refocus on his family. “My daughter and my two granddaughters are everything to me. This is my whole life.” You also had to block sadness, find the right distance, empathize without being overwhelmed.

“I didn’t go to see Maëlys’ family so as not to impose myself. So I made myself useful: I stuck posters on my car.”

A resident of Pont-de-Beauvoisin

at franceinfo

The research ended in 2018 with the confession of Nordahl Lelandais, but, four years later, some windshields still display these small signs.

In everyone, the sense of security has withered. “I have a 6-year-old daughter-in-law. When I’m with her, I don’t trust anyone anymore. Especially not the neighbors… You never know people”, swears Elodie, manager of the restaurant at DD’s burger, on the Savoy side of the agglomeration. The perimeter of children’s freedom has shrunk, no more unsupervised outings. Unlike their parents at the same age, the children here do not come home from school alone.

To be reassured, we also monitor the surroundings. In 2018, the small town of Isère had a video surveillance system installed. A total of 24 cameras film the inhabitants daily. All regulated by the municipal police officer of Pont-de-Beauvoisin. But Eric Philippe, security assistant, assures him, this has no connection with the death of Maëlys. “This was a campaign announcement during our election in 2014.”

After the tragedy, mistrust also won Nour-Eddine Ghaoui: “I had geolocation sensors put on my daughters aged 6, 11 and 12. What happens to others is warnings. There is no trust now.”

The man, who lives a few kilometers away, organized a citizen search in Pont-de-Beauvoisin a week after the disappearance of the little girl. Several thousand people, sometimes coming from afar, had divided the sector, in search of Maëlys. Without success. Since then, this Isérois regularly finds friends he met during the hunt. “This drama is not just blood and tears”deduces the president of the Union of traders and craftsmen.

In cafes, in hairdressing salons, the Lelandais family, often seen in Pont-de-Beauvoisin, continues to animate the conversations. In four years, the altercations between the inhabitants and the brother of the accused have multiplied. “He comes there, in the shops, he provokes”launches a Pontois. “The mother helped me a lot when I lost my husband, weighs the neighbor of Lelandais. His son Nordahl, we saw him sometimes, but I didn’t know he had all these behavioral problems, nobody had told me. In the neighborhood, it doesn’t gossip too much”, she relates to her portal, before cutting the conversation short.

In Domessin, the Lelandais house, where part of the drama of the Maëlys affair took place, has neither gate nor low wall. Plastic geese and hens sit alongside Christmas decorations in the driveway. Is it uninhabited? For sale or for rent ?

Its future crystallizes the attention of a population inhabited by the memory of the victim and the stigmata of the presence of the executioner. And, implicitly, the fear that all this is not over. The fear also of discovering other victims of a man already condemned to twenty years of criminal imprisonment for the murder of Arthur Noyer. For the murder of Maëlys, Nordahl Lelandais is tried from January 31 at the assizes of Isère. And “when he gets out of prison, let him not have fun coming back here, he will be well received”warns a resident.