It’s another assize court, another victim, but the accused hasn’t changed. At the opening of the trial of Nordahl Lelandais for the murder of Maëlys de Araujo, Monday, January 31, in Grenoble (Isère), it is difficult to ignore the trial which was held eight months earlier in Chambéry (Savoie). The 38-year-old former military dog handler had been sentenced there to twenty years’ imprisonment for the homicide of Corporal Arthur Noyer in April 2017. For this new judicial meeting, housed in the imposing courthouse with gray facades from the capital of the Alps, the accused wears the same style that had brought down the fantasy of the serial killer in a Pepe Jeans T-shirt: impeccable blue shirt, beard and neat salt-and-pepper hair.
His words also echo those he had spoken on the first day in Chambéry. Invited by President Valérie Blain to react to the new charges against him, Nordahl Lelandais pauses, ostensibly tested: “I will turn to the family if you allow me.” The magistrate firmly invites him to look at the court, the face-to-face is premature. “I would like to apologize to them, tell them that I did kill Maëlys, that I did not want to kill him.” To Arthur Noyer’s parents, he had said: “Yes I killed Arthur Noyer but without wanting to kill him. (…) I apologize.”
The record is the same but the tone is more humble. It bends under the weight of the file, materialized by the many volumes lined up on the tables on the side of the civil parties. He is weighed down by his previous conviction and the emotional charge of this case. Nordahl Lelandais is here prosecuted for having kidnapped, kidnapped and killed an 8 and a half year old girl, met at a wedding in Pont-de-Beauvoisin on August 26, 2017. He is also tried for having sexually assaulted two little cousins little time before the facts. The choice was made to split the criminal course of a man into two trials.
The smiling photo of the young 23-year-old soldier killed that same disastrous year, which faced him at the assizes of Savoy, was replaced by that of little Maëlys. The face discovered four years ago by the whole of France is tight, in its frame, right up against its mother, Jennifer de Araujo. A larger portrait, in the form of a painting, remained outside the room, like an image displayed at the entrance to a funeral.
Before the opening of the hearing, the photographers lingered on a book placed prominently on the benches of the lawyers of the civil parties, The enigma of serial killers, by expert psychiatrist Daniel Zagury. If there is nothing to confirm that Nordahl Lelandais is a serial killer, it remains an enigma. This was not resolved in the Noyer case. Will it be this time around? The court worked hard on this, examining the defendant’s curriculum vitae from the first day of the trial.
The personality investigator, who had already filed last May, unrolls childhood without asperities in a rapid flow, “calmed down”, in “joy and love”, between a commercial attaché father in pharmaceutical products, admittedly a little “absent”, a mother radiology assistant, “caring”, and an older brother and half-sister. Small, Nordahl Lelandais is “not very talkative”, somewhat brooded and attached to “the order”. Nothing to predict the “seesaw”, weaving the link between “the child who succeeded in everything he touched”, according to his mother, and the teenager left the school system without any diploma. The court comes up against the same questions, as Laurent Boguet, lawyer for Joachim de Araujo, Maëlys’ father, points out.
“Neither in the school setting nor within the family unit, we do not identify a traumatic event.”
Laurent Boguet, lawyer for Joachim de Araujoin front of the Assize Court of Isère
There is indeed this sudden stop of his course in sport-studies at the college of Châtelard, “baseball and show jumping option”. “Something happened but he never wanted to tell me about it”, his mother had testified at the first trial. The investigator sticks today to the version of Nordahl Lelandais: he put an end to it “because of the distance”. There is also his failure in the army, “a real vocation”. Nordahl Lelandais is reformed P4 before the end of his five-year contract with the canine battalion of Suippes, in the Marne. In question, according to him, a story of a dart received in the eye from a superior.
Can these two episodes explain the professional and sentimental wandering that followed? Establish a bridge between the one who chained the ruptures and the individual accused of two murders, including that of a little girl? The testimony of his half-sister Alexandra, heard in the afternoon, will not enlighten the jurors. This 44-year-old woman, rat hair, wrapped in a big black scarf and a burgundy coat, bag slung over her shoulder, is no more talkative than the last time. She portrays the brother from before, “protective”, helpful, “playful”. And the next brother, “posed”, Who “knows what to expect”, a “life in prison”. Between the two, a chasm of incomprehension.
“I know a part of him and with the media, we discovered a facet of my brother that we did not imagine.”
Alexandra, the half-sister of Nordhal Lelandaisin front of the Assize Court of Isère
Alexandra may love her “always” this brother, despite the“horror”, she “gives the impression of wanting to run away” of this bar, as slips him the lawyer of the mother of Maëlys, Fabien Rajon. She is not the only one, it seems, to want to avoid questions from the court. Several former friends and ex-companions of Nordahl Lelandais, who had made the trip during the first trial, did not respond to the summonses of justice. At the risk of jeopardizing the manifestation of the truth. For some, the president ordered that they be sought.
It is not easy to have been close to the accused. Even less to have been his mother. “I don’t have the right to live, I just have the right to die!” moved Christiane Lelandais, heard at the end of the day. This little woman with a blonde bob and a pink coat found herself, once again, in the uncomfortable position of one who perhaps hasn’t done enough. Or overdone. During this famous year 2017, “I took great care of my husband who was sick”, she says.
“I saw that my son was not very well, I put that down to loves and dislikes.”
Christiane Lelandais, mother of Nordahl Lelandaisin front of the Assize Court of Isère
His son’s lawyer, Alain Jakubowicz, hands him a perch. “There is one thing that is acquired: Nordahl killed a little girl. We try to understand. He does not have the profile of an abandoned child who has been raped, beaten, abandoned. We try to understand … Do you have an explanation? Christiane Lelandais sees only one: “Alcohol and drugs. (…) It was this crap that drove him crazy.” The psychiatric experts who examined Nordahl Lelandais did not subscribe to this analysis. The jurors have three weeks to form an intimate conviction.
At the end of this long first day, the floor is again given to the accused. Above all, he wants to rectify a point in his career. If he left the sports-study section, he says, it’s because“there was no biathlon”. The president is taken aback. “Why this point there?” “That’s the first point you brought up.” For the rest, we will have to wait for the continuation of the debates.