CHAPTER 1: Murder In the Alps
The driver was a British engineer born in Iraq who worked on satellite systems in Surrey, and maybe that’s why he was dead and all the others were, too. On a Wednesday afternoon in September 2012, Saad al-Hilli drove his maroon BMW from a campground on the shore of Lake Annecy, in the French Alps, and into a tiny community called Chevaline, at the far edge of which the pavement slips into the trees. The path rising out of Chevaline is steep and pocked and hyphenated by tight bridges crossing a noisy froth of water. For three kilometers, there is nowhere to turn around and nowhere to go but up, and then there is nowhere to go at all. The public road ends at a small parking area, where Saad nosed his BMW to the tree line.
September 5 was a spectacular day, sunlight drizzling through foliage that twitched with the breeze. Saad, who was 50, stood with his elder daughter, 7-year-old Zainab, maybe talking to a local cyclist who’d pedaled up the mountain or maybe just absorbed in the scenery. It is impossible to say for sure.
Almost certainly, though, he didn’t see the shooter in the trees before he heard the first shots.
Saad screamed at Zainab to get in the car. He quickstepped to the driver’s door, twisted into the seat. But Zainab hadn’t moved, just stood there, frozen. Saad probably didn’t realize that. What man leaves his daughter to get shot? He slapped the gearshift into reverse, cranked the wheel hard to the left, stomped on the gas. The BMW skittered backward in an arc, a jittery half circle. The shooter was out of the woods by then, standing in the center of the arc like a pivot point. The car completed the turn, the rear against the tree line, got stuck, wheels trenching divots into the loose soil at the edge of the forest.
Saad had clipped the French cyclist with the bumper, dragged him through the turn, left him bleeding in the dirt.
Most likely Saad already was dead. He was shot four times, twice in the head. His wife, a 47-year-old dentist named Iqbal, was dead in the backseat, also shot four times, also twice in the head. Her mother, Suhaila al-Allaf, was dead, too, shot three times, twice in the head. The cyclist was shot five times, including twice in the head. Zainab was still alive, though barely: She was shot once in the shoulder, then clubbed in the skull with the butt of the gun.
The shooter had fired 21 times, mostly at a moving vehicle. Seventeen bullets hit people. None of them struck the frame or the doors or the fenders or any other part of the BMW. Eight of them were head shots.
Apparently he was a professional.
The EMTs arrived minutes after Zainab was found collapsed in the road by a British cyclist who happened upon the scene. The gendarmes, who are part of the French military and responsible for policing the rural districts, swarmed the mountain close behind them.
Uniformed officers closed off the road, the Route de la Combe d’Ire, and forensic technicians gathered shell casings and marked where they fell and photographed the blood and studied Saad’s BMW without disturbing any of the bodies. They did this with such delicacy that they did not notice for almost eight hours that Saad’s younger daughter, 4-year-old Zeena, was alive and physically unharmed, hiding beneath the folds of her dead mother’s skirt.
Investigators are not supposed to embrace reflexive theories in the moments immediately following a crime, and the prosecutor in Annecy insists they did not. “The only thing that came to mind,” Eric Maillaud says of all the blood and bodies, “is that we have someone who has no respect for human life.” He says this slowly, deliberately. Maillaud, who is 53 years old, has been a prosecutor for eleven years, five of them in Annecy, which is a small, serene city unaccustomed to spectacular spasms of violence. Only one or two people are murdered in a typical year, and those are routine as killings go: domestics or robberies or escalated arguments, single flashes of rage. But this on the mountain? “There are very few people who are capable of killing so many people,” Maillaud says. “And to try to kill children?” He shakes his head slowly. “So we know we are dealing with savages. That is the only thing that comes to mind.”
Savages was perhaps the first thing to come to mind, but other thoughts—obvious and understandable thoughts—surely followed in quick succession. Detectives, no matter how well trained and dispassionate, are plagued by the same instincts and bias toward common sense as any layman. There were four dead people in the forest, a crime heretofore unimaginable in Annecy. One of those people was a local man known to be an ardent cyclist. The other three were strangers, foreigners, the patriarch of whom was an Arab engineer with technical data and complicated schematics—the matériel of spies and terrorists—on laptops and thumb drives in his camper by the lake.
They’d all gotten two in the head, the way special ops and assassins are trained to do it.
It all seemed so obvious three years ago, exactly what happened. Saad al-Hilli got whacked. He was stupid enough to have his family with him, so they got killed, too. The Frenchman? Poor bastard just had the miserable luck of being in the wrong place at the worst time.
What other explanation could there be?
Zaid al-Hilli found out his brother was dead the day after the murders, on September 6. He learned this from a friend whose wife had seen it on television, a quadruple murder in the French Alps being the kind of story that gets a significant amount of attention in the European press.
He went to his local police station, in Esher, England, that afternoon to ask for details, but neither the officers there nor a detective in major crimes knew any more than he did.
The next day, the police came to his flat to officially tell him his brother was dead. There was a swarm of reporters on the sidewalk out front, so the officers kindly escorted him out and put him up in a barracks—”like a little hotel room, really,” Zaid says—first in Surrey, then in Sussex. The English detectives asked Zaid to account for his whereabouts between August 25 and September 5, and they asked for his mobile phone and his laptop. After two weeks as a guest of the local constabulary, after the press had finally dispersed, Zaid went home.
English investigators had been assisting their French counterparts from the beginning, which is a matter of routine in international homicides. To figure out why someone was murdered, it is useful to understand who that person was—to know his routines and habits, his skeletons and foibles. So the French came across the channel, Maillaud among them, to ask questions and pull records and request searches. They were convinced, just days after the killings, that someone wanted Saad al-Hilli dead. “Without a doubt,” Maillaud told reporters near London on September 13, “the reasons and the causes have their origins in this country.”
Zaid had no idea what those reasons and causes might be. Nor did he know his brother had been in France. He knew he liked to travel, towing a Bürstner camper behind his BMW, and he knew Saad owned a broken-down ruin of a house in Burgundy he thought he might rebuild someday. But Zaid had never known him to go to Annecy, except for that one time when they were children on holiday in Geneva. Zaid remembered being on a boat beneath a smudgy gray sky, but little else. And it was slightly peculiar, he thought, Saad going camping with the girls so late in the summer, when the school year was beginning.
Truth is, Zaid didn’t know much of anything Saad did anymore. The brothers hadn’t spoken in almost a year, since October 2011, except through solicitors sorting out their late father’s estate. There were more than a million dollars in a Swiss account and a house south of London in Claygate and a small studio in Spain and considerable disagreement about who should get what. It was contentious and sad, but Zaid believed they were civil about it, he and his brother. “There was no feud,” he says. “We weren’t riding around on horses shooting at each other.” They let their lawyers write letters and file briefs instead.
He knew that Saad worked on satellite systems. But he found the theory that intrigued the French and delighted the tabloids—that Saad was killed, and got everyone else killed, because he was selling secrets—preposterous. Zaid was certain his brother was not a spy, industrial or otherwise. Saad was a freelance mechanical engineer. He wasn’t involved in classified optics or encrypted communications technology; he had no secrets, nor access to them. And anyway, he would have made a lousy spy. “Saad is outspoken,” he says, “and outspoken people aren’t capable of anything like that.”
Eric Maillaud was wrong, then. Zaid believed that, too. The reasons and causes of four murders in the Alps did not have their origins in England. Why would they? Even if someone had wanted Saad dead, it would have been much simpler to kill him at home. Why go all the way to France and slaughter his family, too? To Zaid, this was plainly logical: Saad and his family were in the wrong place at the wrong time, casualties of a local killing, not the other way around. Surely the authorities would quickly figure that out.
Twenty-three days after the murders, on Friday, September 28, the police knocked on Zaid’s door again. They had a warrant to search his flat.
CHAPTER 2: The Iraqi Connection
Saad al-Hilli’s house, the Tudor in Claygate, had been searched on September 9. Television-satellite trucks lined the street and reporters watched from behind blue-and-white police tape until they were pushed back 200 yards and all the houses nearby were evacuated and the Royal Logistics Corps’ bomb-disposal unit was summoned. There was something suspicious—“potentially hazardous,” the police said—in a garden shed behind the house. The police never announced what it was, but it turned out not to be dangerous. The bomb squad left, and nothing more was said about what was or wasn’t found in Saad al-Hilli’s house.
But not quite a month later, in early October 2012, the Annecy prosecutor, Eric Maillaud, released two curious details from the search. One was that Saad recently had changed the locks. The other was that police had found a Taser, which was illegal for Saad to possess. He risked prison just for having it in the house. Maillaud seemed to temper the significance. “It could be like a woman who carries tear gas in her bag,” he told reporters, “more as a precaution than because of a specific concern.” But the fact that the weapon was capable of jolting a man with 50,000 volts, and the fact that Saad was dead, certainly suggested otherwise.
There still was no evidence connecting Saad’s work to his murder. Nor had the search of Zaid’s flat turned up anything of immediate interest. So after six weeks of official police investigation and unofficial tabloid sleuthing, with two theoretical wells running dry, another motive was leaked.
Two European newspapers—Bild in Germany, Le Monde in France—both citing anonymous German-intelligence sources, reported that Saad and Zaid’s father had smuggled cash out of Iraq for Saddam Hussein and stashed it in a Swiss account. It was a deliciously dark theory—Saad assassinated for trying to get a dictator’s gray-market cash out of a Geneva bank. ALPS MURDER VICTIM HAD SADDAM ACCOUNT LINK, The Daily Telegraph announced, which was restrained compared with The Daily Beast’s almost giddy interpretation: NEW EVIDENCE SUGGESTS THAT SAAD AL-HILLI AND HIS FAMILY WERE KILLED OVER SADDAM HUSSEIN'S SMUGGLED FORTUNE.
Kadim al-Hilli, Saad and Zaid’s father, did indeed leave cash when he died in 2011, and it was held in a Swiss bank. Saad had planned to drive to Geneva, only forty minutes east of Annecy, to inquire about that account and possibly others. Except he got killed first.
The idea that a quadruple homicide in the French Alps involved Saddam Hussein—who himself had been dead for almost six years by then—dropped from the headlines almost as abruptly as it had appeared. The only connection between Kadim and Saddam apparently was that both were Iraqi. But it is a point upon which Zaid is particularly agitated. He is a slight man with delicate, almost bird-like features, and he has the soft-spoken temperament of an accountant who keeps the books at a local golf club, which he does. He seems physically incapable of full-throated anger, but his voice hitches and he clips his sentences when he is annoyed.
His father, Kadim al-Hilli, had been a prosperous businessman in Iraq both before and after the Baathists seized power. He was a lawyer who began selling building materials, bricks and cement and such, and when that was successful he diversified into tissue paper and, finally, poultry; Zaid remembers, as a small boy, going to his father’s hatchery in the fields outside Baghdad.
But Kadim moved his family to the London suburbs in 1971, and the reason, in Zaid’s telling, matters greatly: Kadim’s uncle, who was only five years older than Kadim (the two were as close as brothers), was arrested by the Mukhabarat and disappeared for a year. When he reappeared, his brain was permanently damaged and he spoke in a slurry garble. “Of course, he was tortured,” Zaid says. The uncle fled with his family to England in 1970, and Kadim followed with his wife and children less than a year later. “So to be accused of being part of that horrible regime...” That is one of the sentences Zaid clips.
Kadim returned to Iraq in 1974 to oversee his interests, Zaid says, but so what? Kadim’s wealth, everything he’d built, was still in his homeland. Iraq was a dictatorship, but it still had a functioning economy, still required building materials and tissue paper and chickens and the businessmen to supply them. Why should Kadim abandon what he’d created? To survive as a merchant did not make one complicit in the crimes of the regime.
In any case, Zaid says, Kadim retired and returned to England, with his money, in 1982. That was 30 years before his son was murdered.
Yet Zaid considers that leak a piece of a whole, one of a series of fanciful speculations and calibrated whispers intended to make his brother responsible for his own death and all the others, too. He believes, in fact, that the investigation was racist—that the gendarmes, and especially Eric Maillaud, instinctively assumed three dead Arabs on a lonely mountain trail were by definition involved in something nefarious. Why else would they be there, they would have told themselves, and why else would they be dead?
“To be honest with you, I don’t think there was an investigation,” Zaid says. His voice is calm again, as if he is reciting facts no more or less obvious than the color of the carpet or the day of the week. “I think this was a declaration of war against us. I think they hoped these Arabs would be terrorists or drug dealers. I think we were manna from heaven for them.” How much easier, he says, for the French to look across the English Channel, not to find answers to a terrible crime in their own country but to avoid them. This, too, appears plainly logical to Zaid.
“On the one hand,” he says, “they say they don’t know what happened. In the next sentence, they say it had nothing to do with the French cyclist. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Well, those two statements contradict each other, you know, at least 50 percent.”
That 50 percent is critical to Zaid’s thinking. It is the difference between his brother being an unfortunate casualty or a stalked target, between Zaid being a suspect or a mourner. What if it had nothing to do with Saad? What if it had everything to do with the French cyclist?
CHAPTER 3: The Cyclist
The French cyclist was Sylvain Mollier, 45 years old, divorced, and the father of three children, two with his ex-wife and one, an infant daughter, with his live-in girlfriend. He was an avid cyclist, but he still appeared out of place on the road rising up from Chevaline, pedaling an expensive bicycle wholly unsuited for the ruts and dents of Route de la Combe d’Ire. “It was a little bit surprising to see someone on a racing bike, because racing cyclists tend to look after their bikes,” a British man also riding through Chevaline that day told the BBC. “Wheels are easily damaged on potholes and things.”
Mollier, until very recently, had been employed at a factory in Ugine, a little city a few miles southeast of Lake Annecy. The factory is owned by a company called Cezus, which is a subsidiary of AREVA, one of the largest suppliers of nuclear components in the world. In the Ugine plant, zirconium and hafnium and titanium and tantalum are melted into alloys and then forged into ingots and blanks and billets, which are crafted into components for nuclear reactors, primarily the housings for fuel rods. But Mollier, on the day he died, was unemployed, having negotiated a three-year leave of absence.
He was shot five times, more than anyone else, and also twice in the head. Mollier was also, in one possible chronology, the first person shot, two rounds in the chest.
In the weeks after he was murdered, Mollier was variously described as a metallurgist or as a senior production manager at Cezus. It was not difficult, then, to arrange the cursory descriptors of his life—divorced, unemployed, nuclear technician—into a plausible theory. There are many organizations and even some nations—Iran, say—willing to buy nuclear secrets. And there are other nations and organizations—Israel and the Mossad were mentioned most often—that would very much prefer such technology not proliferate. Killing a renegade French technician would effectively stop a black-market deal he might be brokering; killing three other people and trying to kill a little girl... Well, sometimes these things get messy.
Or perhaps Saad didn’t just happen to be there. Maybe the French metallurgist and the Iraqi-born satellite engineer were in cahoots. Maybe they all got killed because they were all working together.
Eric Maillaud nods as those theories are sketched, his mouth close-lipped and gently curved in a way that is either weary or bemused. “For a novelist,” he says finally, “it is an amazing story.”
He smiles. His office looks out over the water, late-spring sunlight bleeding through a wall of windows, Mont Veyrier rising to the left and La Tournette, snowcapped and craggy blue-gray, hulking in the distance. But even here, in a medieval town cut by canals at the head of one of the cleanest and clearest lakes in Europe, murder is more two-paragraph tabloid than literature. Before l’affaire de Chevaline, as it has come to be known, killings were no different from those in Cleveland or Atlanta or Albuquerque. “Murders,” Maillaud says, like cops and prosecutors everywhere, “are about either sex or money.”
It has been, on this particular afternoon with Maillaud, two years, six months, and 18 days since the al-Hillis and Mollier were murdered. In that time, investigators of course looked into Mollier’s work. The novelistic theory fell apart almost immediately, because one of the presumed details was incorrect: Mollier was neither a metallurgist nor a senior production manager. He was a welder. He had no access to nuclear secrets, and the Ugine plant probably holds none anyway: Its activities are explained, in great detail and rather proudly, on its website. (It specializes in “arc melting in a vacuum.”)
Nor, it turned out, did Mollier know Saad al-Hilli. There is no evidence the two of them had ever spoken, no record of a phone call or a text message or an e-mail. True, Maillaud concedes, they could have communicated via untraceable and disposable phones, but that notion wanders back into the pages of a paperback spy story. Besides, all of the dead had their mobile phones with them.
In those years of investigation, Maillaud also has come to agree with Zaid’s assessment of Saad: He was no more a spy than Mollier. His work wasn’t classified, and Saad most likely had his laptops and thumb drives with him because he was looking for a job. He liked the area and had been there several times before—not just the one time with Zaid and his family as a boy. “He was considered exceptionally proficient, an engineer of renown,” Maillaud says. “It wouldn’t be unusual at all for him to find work here.”
So maybe the motive was more mundane, no different from those in almost every other murder? What if it was sex? Or money?
Maillaud knows that Mollier reportedly had a reputation as a coureur de jupons. A skirt-chaser. Maillaud says this with a shrug. It’s France. It happens. Maybe husbands get jealous, but enough so to slaughter four people and try to kill a child? “That doesn’t seem very realistic,” he says. Anyway, Mollier’s friskier days, if they existed, and near as the investigators could determine, were in his past. He’d been with his girlfriend, a pharmacist named Claire Schutz, for more than two years, and they’d just had a baby.
That leaves money. Three months after the murders, a British journalist reported that Claire Schutz, in the fall of 2011, “had become a paper millionaire” when her father’s pharmacy had been transferred to her. SLAIN ALPINE CYCLIST IN FEUD OVER LOVER’S FORTUNE, the headline in The Sunday Times announced on December 16, 2012. According to the story, the Schutz family was increasingly displeased with Mollier sponging off of Claire. (A contention for which we’ll have to take _The Sunday Times’_s word. The Schutz family, through Claire’s very firm attorney, declined to talk. One of Mollier’s brothers hung up, and another, Christophe, stayed on the phone only long enough to say he wasn’t close to Sylvain and was tired of reporters pestering him.)
Maillaud hasn’t been able to read everything published about l’affaire de Chevaline, but he’s aware of the basic theory: that Claire Schutz’s family had Mollier whacked for being a lout, and the al-Hilli family simply got in the way. Maillaud listens as it is explained again; then he shakes his head. This was investigated and dismissed long ago, he says. Claire was not yet a millionaire, on paper or otherwise, he says. She was buying the pharmacy from her father, albeit with a no-interest loan, and Mollier had no current or potential legal interest in it because the two were not married. And again, who massacres strangers over a theoretical future financial entanglement? But he’s not surprised the story played well in the papers, especially in England.
“It was not conceivable for many English people, including English journalists, that the problem originated in Britain,” Maillaud says. Then he laughs. “I think that the Hundred Years’ War is not yet over.”
Perhaps. But it also was not conceivable for many people, English and otherwise, that dozens of detectives couldn’t figure out who killed four people on a forested mountain in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon. Nor, really, was it conceivable to Maillaud. Annecy is a tourist town, the villages and campgrounds dependent on holiday travelers, on hikers and cyclists and paragliders over the lake. Such people do not typically get shot to death. When they do, there must be—there needs to be—a person who did it.
And there needs to be a reason why.
CHAPTER 4: The Arrest
There was a man riding a motorcycle on the mountain that day. Two forestry workers had stopped him above the parking area, where motor vehicles are not permitted. They shooed him away, and then that man rode down the Combe d’Ire. The British cyclist, the same one who’d noticed Mollier and his racing bike in Chevaline, passed him on his way up.
A few minutes later, the Briton found the bodies, Saad’s engine still running, tires spinning in the dirt.
The forestry workers had gotten a good enough look at the motorcyclist for an artist to sketch his face. He had a goatee and a heavy brow, and he was wearing a dark helmet. It appeared to be a model that had been issued a decade ago to French police officers. Only 8,000 had been made in black.
A man in a police helmet near the scene of a quadruple murder could be, at the very least, an important witness. He could also be the killer, maybe a cop gone rogue, a gun for hire. Considering he did not voluntarily come forward to assist his brethren in a highly publicized crime, it was not unreasonable to assume the latter.
Nor was it unreasonable, then, that the sketch of his face was not released to the public, not printed in the newspapers or aired on the television news: So far as the man on the motorcycle knew, he’d gotten away clean. There was no sense in letting on that there were witnesses left behind, no sense spooking him, driving him off the grid, underground.
In the months after they searched his flat, through the fall and into the winter, British detectives asked Zaid al-Hilli more questions. He doesn’t say exactly what those questions were, but it’s safe to assume that at least some of them involved his father’s estate and bank accounts in Switzerland. (The English police declined to say anything as a matter of policy and privacy laws.) At various points, a Swiss prosecutor alleged that Zaid had tried to get an unauthorized bank card to draw on his father’s Geneva account; a BBC program accused him of essentially forging a will; and Eric Maillaud flat out called him—and Saad and Kadim, too—a cheat. “No matter what,” Maillaud told me, “we’re looking at a family that tried to defraud the British system and each other.”
All of those accusations, Zaid says, have been investigated by the British authorities and found to be baseless, and he has not been charged with any such crimes. Still, finances would have been a legitimate line of inquiry, considering the brothers’ strained relationship. After Zaid’s wife died in 2009, he moved into the house in Claygate where Saad lived with his family. Their father had left it to both of them, and, according to Zaid, Saad wanted him to sign over his half. Zaid declined. It’s unclear if that was the only point of contention—Saad can’t tell his side, obviously—but it culminated in October 2011 with a physical altercation and Saad pinning his brother on a bed.
Zaid moved out, and they never spoke again.
In April 2013, after seven months of questions and statements, British detectives summoned Zaid for another interview. It lasted eight hours. He answered all the questions he’d answered before; there was nothing new to ask, and there was nothing new in his answers. Still, the police called him back again two weeks later. That interrogation lasted two hours.
On June 6, a French officer, accompanied by an English one to interpret, presented Zaid with a summons ordering him to appear in France as a witness. Zaid refused to accept it. “I don’t trust them,” he says now. “To be honest with you, if the French authorities told me the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, I would think they were lying.” What if the French snuck a smear of his DNA from a tissue or a soda can? Zaid didn’t want to leave his DNA in France.
For almost three weeks, he heard nothing more about appearing in France. He knew the French couldn’t force him to go unless they got an order from an English court—and he was certain an English court, looking at the evidence and the lack thereof, would never issue such an order.
But then, at seven thirty in the morning on the last Monday of June 2013, two female detectives knocked on his door. “We’re here to arrest you,” they told him, “for conspiracy to commit murder.”
CHAPTER 5: The Journalist and the Murder
Zaid’s arrest was no more than a hiccup in the investigation, another promising plotline—like espionage and adultery and Saddam before—that collapsed under the slightest weight. I’d followed each development (none of which developed into much of anything) for more than eight months by the time Zaid was locked up, and I would continue to do so for almost two years after. Unsolved murders are not uncommon—there are thousands in the United States every year, for instance, and serial killers only manage to become serial killers because they get away with the first two or ten or twenty. But you would think that quadruple homicides, particularly those involving middle-class professionals on vacation, would get sorted out fairly quickly. That scores of detectives and gendarmes hadn’t managed to do so suggested either epic incompetence or criminal brilliance.
I went to see Zaid last spring, in March. Reporters don’t pester him much anymore, but his name had been inked into so many headlines and chyrons following his brother’s murder that his reputation had fossilized. “Yeah, yeah, those people on holiday,” a London cabbie remembered when I mentioned a murder in the Alps. “Awful. The brother did it, right?”
Zaid lives a couple of stations south of Waterloo, in a flat walking distance from the train. He served tea and biscuits, and later we had lunch at the fish shop across the street. He was pleasant, if emotionally reserved, which he had discovered is not an advantage when police and reporters are asking about one’s slaughtered family. “They think I should have reacted a different way,” he said.
Like, cry, maybe?
He blinked twice. “I am who I am. I hate pretending.”
It wasn’t so awful, despite the indignity, being arrested for conspiring to kill his brother and three other people, as well as the attempted murder of a niece he adores. Zaid knew he didn’t do it, and it did not appear the British police believed he was a dangerous criminal, let alone a mass murderer. The detectives who arrested him waited while he showered and shaved and dressed, and they smiled at a small joke: It would have been more convenient, Zaid told them, if they’d waited a day so he could finish payroll at the golf club. They did not handcuff him, and they’d parked discreetly at the end of his block, so as not to make a spectacle. They did not release his name, nor even officially confirm that he’d been arrested.
Zaid spent a single night in a surprisingly comfortable cell—“it had a little button you could press if you wanted tea, like room service”—and the jailers allowed him a couple of mild sedatives, as Zaid has difficulty sleeping in unfamiliar places. He was released the next morning on bail, but that was far less dramatic than it appears. In the United States, bail in such a serious crime would be set by a judge after a hearing, and it would be substantial, requiring enough cash or a big enough bond to assure the accused returned to court. In Surrey, Zaid was simply sent home with a form instructing him not to bother any potential witnesses and to continue living in his flat in Chessington. He posted no surety, and he did not surrender his passport; indeed, he traveled to Borneo and Hong Kong in the fall of 2013, when his bail conditions still were in effect.
For all that, Zaid didn’t know anything more about the crime or the investigation than any careful reader of the more reputable press.
So I went to France. Annecy is a pleasant train trip southeast from Paris, and the station is at the edge of the Old City, a short walk from the lake and the cafés anchored to the rims of the canals. Chevaline, where everyone got killed, is a pretty twenty-minute drive south along the lake.
There is a single main road through Chevaline, which is all a village of 207 people requires. It runs past a monument to the local boys killed in the war, and then a small church and its cemetery and, on the other side, a crumbling stone wall where a dozing cat startled at the sound of my Fiat. There is a big cattle barn at the end of the village and one last, thick pasture, and then the road climbs into the forest.
Snow lingered on the Combe d’Ire in late March, smears of slush and, higher up, wide patches of dirty white crusted with crystals that crunched under the tires. Tree limbs leaned into the road, crowded the pavement until, at the foot of a bridge, fallen branches blocked it completely. The only way to the top was on foot, meandering through the white noise of the river pouring over rocks and mossy boulders.
In the village hall, an ochre building marked by the war memorial, I asked the clerk if a storm had blown through recently, torn the trees, and cluttered the road.
No, she said.
But would the road be cleared?
Yes, she suspected it would be. Eventually. But there was no rush, she said. “Practically nobody” ever drove that way.
She did not ask why I wanted to know. She did not ask if I wanted to drive up that road. She was very pleasant, but not at all curious. She had long ago tired of foreigners with notebooks asking her questions.
The Gendarmerie Nationale were no help at all. A “non-communication” had been put in place on all things Chevaline, and a spokesman in Paris didn’t foresee it being lifted anytime soon. That order did not apply, however, to Annecy prosecutor Eric Maillaud, who was happy, or at least willing, to meet. (He was also the only person close to the case willing to talk to me.) He was patient and thorough, and he answered every question or, regarding a few minor details, explained why he couldn’t. And everything he told me, all of it, amounts to this: He does not know who killed those four people, or why, or even who was the target and who got in the way.
There is no reason to believe this is because of incompetence or conspiracy.
So that leaves criminal brilliance. Or a very bad person with very good luck.
The question is, which is more disturbing?
Two days before he was murdered, Saad al-Hilli pulled his BMW with the Bürstner camper on the hitch into Le Solitaire du Lac, a campground on the western shore of the lake. In early September, there would have been shade beneath leafed-out trees planted in a long double row stretching toward the water. In late March, the limbs are all pollarded away, and the trunks stand like gnarled gray fists poking up from the grass. A man is playing with his dog in a parking area, but no one else is around. There are no campers or tents, and the little box cottages are all empty. No one answers the bell at the office.
Eventually a small utility truck putters around a corner. The driver, a man with a ruddy face and gray hair and a pitchfork, gets out, walks toward us, my interpreter and me. He is not pleased.
“I’ve never let a journalist come in,” he says, “and I won’t let you come in, either.”
Yes, but this is where the al-Hillis stayed, right?
“I’ve never authorized the media to be here.”
Do you remember them?
A pause. His face darkens. “Yes,” he says. “Unfortunately, yes.”
More than a year after the murders, in October 2013, French authorities finally released the sketch of the motorcyclist. The risk of sending him off the grid by then seemed less disastrous than never finding him—either the key witness or the killer—at all.
Dozens of investigators had followed every conceivable lead. The Briton who’d seen Sylvain Mollier and the motorcyclist was, briefly and as a matter of course, a suspect. His name is Brett Martin, and he is a retired Royal Air Force pilot with a holiday home in Lathuile, a village south of the lake. He was on his own meandering ride that afternoon when he found the blood and the bodies.
An English family and a French cyclist are killed by a precision shooter, and the first person on the scene is a former English military man with a home in France? What are the odds? The technicians swabbed him for gunpowder residue, and the detectives checked and rechecked his story. When Martin swore he never heard 21 gunshots fired less than 200 meters from where he was pedaling, investigators conducted acoustic tests. They discovered that, indeed, between the tumble of the river and sound tending to bounce up and the human brain simply not recognizing a volley of pops in an Alpine forest as gunfire, Martin would not have heard anything.
The investigation plodded on. Every satellite company in Europe, Maillaud says, dug through its archive of images from September 5, 2012, and detectives studied those for any clue—tire tracks, vehicles, an unaccounted person—buried in the pixels. There were two bits of unmatched DNA on the al-Hillis’ car, but a search of every known DNA database in Europe couldn’t identify them. (Probably meaningless, anyway: One is a few skin cells on the front bumper, as if someone brushed against it in a parking lot, and the other, under the floor mat on the driver’s side, was likely left by a detailer.) The day of the murders, more than 4,000 cell phones had pinged the nearest tower, and every one was being tracked down to identify potential witnesses or, assuming the shooter had been sloppy enough to make a call, the killer.
In February 2014, gendarmes knocked on the door of a man named Eric Devouassoux, a 48-year-old in Lathuile, whose mobile number was one of the 4,000. He sort of looked like the motorcyclist in the sketch, and in the weeks leading up to September 5, 2012, he’d applied for a permit to carry a firearm and gotten sacked from his job as a policeman because of his temper. But there was nothing to connect him to Mollier or al-Hilli or put him on that road on that day. Unfortunately, though, he had a collection of guns, including some World War II–era weapons, which is neither unusual—the Haute-Savoie region was a center of the French Resistance, and heirlooms get passed down—nor illegal, as long as they’re declared. His were not, and there were enough of them that he was charged with arms trafficking. (Maillaud shrugs when he explains this, which translates easily into Sucks to be Eric Devouassoux. Enough so, apparently, that Devouassoux hung up on me, too. The charges, however, were later dropped.)
The only thing possibly left outstanding, other than a motive and a killer, was a gray BMW 4x4 that might or might not exist. It was described by only one person, a different forestry worker, and one who fancies BMWs.
“There’s an old saying,” Maillaud says. “One witness is no witness.”
Maybe it had been there, and maybe it would turn up someday. But more months passed, then a second full year. No new clues, no new suspects. Only Zaid had been arrested, and then immediately released.
“We have tried everything possible,” Maillaud told reporters on the second anniversary. “But perhaps we’re in the presence of the perfect crime.”
CHAPTER 6: The Perfect Crime
Saad al-Hilli drove onto a ferry in Dover and then o≠ again at Calais on August 30, 2012, the week before the murders. There are security cameras at the terminal, and more cameras at toll plazas and gas stations and along the highway. The gendarmes pulled thousands of images from those cameras, and they scoured them for the maroon BMW with UK plates pulling a white camper. Then they compared those photos with each other, looking for another car or a motorcycle that appeared in several or at least more than one. They did not find one.
“We’re quite sure they weren’t followed,” EricMaillaud says now. “We can’t be completely sure”—it is possible, though vanishingly improbable, that someone was clever enough to remain outside the field of vision of every single CCTV lens across the length of France—”but you never see the same vehicle twice. Not even one time do you see the same vehicle.”
That is: No one tailed the al-Hillis to Le Solitaire du Lac.
On the family’s second morning at the campground, September 5, Saad asked his daughter Zainab what she would like to do that afternoon. He could take her shopping in Annecy, or they could go for a walk in the woods. Zainab said she wanted to walk in the woods.
Saad knew the general area, but not the best paths into the wilderness. He asked the man at the campground, the one with the ruddy face and the gray hair and the pitchfork, where he should take his family. The campground man might have suggested the narrow road climbing out of Chevaline or he might have suggested Saad take a hairpin left at the bottom. It’s easy enough to miss. Or he might have suggested somewhere else entirely; he wouldn’t say. In any case, once Saad started up the mountain, he had no choice but to continue to the parking area three kilometers on.
“We know,” Maillaud tells me, “and this is a certitude, that when they found themselves at the top of the Combe d’Ire, it was not the father’s choice.”
It was Zainab’s choice, and perhaps a navigational misstep.
Saad passed Sylvain Mollier on the way up. He, too, apparently had gotten lost. His girlfriend’s father had suggested a route, and Maillaud wonders if maybe Mollier was supposed to have taken that same sharp left at the bottom. But he started pedaling up a mountain instead, and he could have turned around, but some people would rather keep going. “An athlete,” Maillaud says, “is stubborn.”
Not far from the parking area, his mobile phone rang. It was Claire. Mollier was out of breath, panting. He told her he had to get to the top, and he’d call her back.
He got o≠ his bike near where the al-Hillis were parked. Saad was probably talking to him. Saad was always the outgoing one, Zaid says, chatty and friendly. Most likely he was asking about Mollier’s bike. Saad liked bikes.
Then the shooting started.
An early report said blood splatters on the soles of Saad’s shoes indicated Mollier was shot first, already bleeding before Saad got into the BMW. But Maillaud is firm that investigators do not know the order of the targets. That is a narrative detail, he says, that will need to be explained. “Until we find the killer,” he says, “we won’t know.”
There was only one gunman. Maillaud is sure of that. The precision of the shooting, the two rounds in each head, suggests he is a professional; the number of bodies suggests he was experienced; and the attempted murder of a child suggests a hardened e∞ciency. Yet he left 21 shell casings on the ground, which a professional probably would not have, and he used an antique 7.65-millimeter Luger issued by the Swiss army more than 60 years ago, which a professional probably wouldn’t do, either. The investigators are certain of the weapon, because a piece of the butt broke o≠ when the shooter fractured Zainab’s skull with it. They think he clubbed her because he ran out of bullets, which also is not professional.
Beyond that, Maillaud is sure of nothing. He has found no reason for anyone to kill either Sylvain Mollier or Saad al-Hilli. In early March 2015, even his anonymous wild-card suspect, the man on the motorcycle, was ruled out. He’d been discovered to be a businessman from Lyon who’d been paragliding in the area. Maillaud won’t release his name but insists he has no criminal record of any kind and no connection to any of the dead.
“Objectively,” Maillaud concedes, “it is more and more improbable that Zaid did this.” This is not a conclusion he o≠ers gracefully. “Just because they hated each other, which they did,” he says, “and just because they wanted to take each other’s money, which they did, that doesn’t mean he would kill everybody.”
Well, yes. But there’s also the part about no one knowing Saad al-Hilli would be at the top of Combe d’Ire that afternoon. Objectively, then, it’s closer to impossible than improbable.
It is stillpossible, if remotely and implausibly, that Mollier was the target and Maillaud and all the others—dozens of investigators and magistrates and judges—know it. But that’s an enormous amount of people to keep a horrifying secret, and Maillaud can’t be that good a liar or that monstrous a person.
All of which leaves this: Neither al-Hilli nor Mollier was the target. They all were in the wrong place at the absolute worst time.
Maillaud refuses to rank investigatory theories in a hierarchy. But that is semantic caution. The target, he says, “was one, the other, or neither.” If there is no evidence for one or the other—and there isn’t—there is only neither.
So that leaves a lone nut. A sociopath who, for reasons known only to him or her, loosed 21 rounds into five strangers. That would be the rarest of crimes, the stu≠ of campfire stories and ghost legends. But what else is there, except a monster in the forest? What had seemed so obvious—a purposeful, if sloppy, hit on a foreigner involved in something sinister—had dissolved into the most terrifying ambiguity, a random lunatic on a random day slaughtering random people with the tactical precision of an assassin.
Investigators cross-checked military records with those of psychiatric hospitals. They found no renegade patients, no one recently released with homicidal tendencies and excellent marksmanship. But in April 2014, while working through an extensive list of anyone Claire Schutz remembered ever knowing, detectives summoned a former soldier for a routine interview. His name was Patrice Menegaldo, he was 50 years old, and he lived in Ugine. He’d been a paratrooper in the French Foreign Legion, an elite fighting force composed partly of misfits and ru∞ans running away from something else; Legionnaires are not, by temperament or training, fragile men. He was asked questions for an hour and then sent on his way.
Two months later, Menegaldo shot himself in the head.
“He wrote a letter saying the reason was ‘I could not handle being a suspect in a murder,’ ” Maillaud says. He arches an eyebrow. “That doesn’t sound very believable. It doesn’t make sense that a Legionnaire would kill himself after an hour in a police station.”
No, it doesn’t sound believable at all. Especially since Menegaldo was interviewedas a tangential witness. No one considered him a suspect.
Except, maybe, Menegaldo.
But why would he feel like a suspect? The detectives did not accuse him. He was never in custody. There was no evidence connecting him to the crime or to anyone involved, except for Claire’s memory of having peripherally known him.
He did it. It was Menegaldo in the woods with the gun. That’s what we’re supposed to believe, or what we’re supposed to want to believe. “He corresponds,” Maillaud says, “with the profile of a crazy gunman.” It’s an easy leap, then, a lunatic driven to suicide by the staggering weight of his guilt. He can’t deny it now, can he?
But why wait two months after his interview to blow his brains out? And 21 months after he would’ve tried to beat a little girl to death? And there’s this: Why would he leave a seven-page suicide letter, the details of which Maillaud will not release?
Maybe he was just a depressed old soldier with seven pages of reasons. There’s still nothing tangible, or even reliably speculative, that puts Menegaldo on that mountain at that time.
So Maillaud is no further along on the third anniversary than he was at the second or the first. Perhaps he truly is in the presence of a perfect crime.
He considers this. Afternoon sun pours through his windows, glints o≠ the lake, carves shadows on the mountains. Annecy is beautiful in the early spring.
“I don’t like,” he says after a moment, “perfect crimes.”
There was one final angle. It popped up in July 2014, about the time reporters would have been preparing stories about the second anniversary of an unsolved quadruple homicide. It didn’t get a lot of attention beyond the first day or two, and maybe it didn’t deserve to. But here it is:
Seven hours after the murders in the Alps, a man named James Thompson told a friend he felt nauseated. He asked for some aspirin, left an antiques shop he ran in Natchez, Mississippi, U.S.A., and climbed into his truck.
Thompson was a former cop and an oil-field worker. He also was divorced, amicably, from an Iraqi dentist he married in 1999, apparently as a favor. They split up a few months later. She moved to England, where she met an engineer named Saad al-Hilli. They courted for three months, got married, had two baby girls who were now 4 and 7. They vacationed in a white Bürstner camper towed behind Saad’s maroon BMW, the last time to the shore of a cold, clear lake high in the mountains of eastern France.
Iqbal al-Hilli kept her first marriage a secret. Not even Zaid knew, until French investigators announced it. “She seemed to be this nice Muslim woman,” Maillaud says now, “and here she married an American. People have exploded families for less than that.”
Thompson pulled into the street. His truck veered to the right and rolled to a slow stop in the road. He had his foot on the brake, and the rest of him was slumped over the wheel. Dead.
He was overweight, and his blood pressure was high, and he smoked cigars, and he’d just turned 60. That James Thompson would have a massive coronary was not startling. That he would su≠er one seven hours after his secret ex-wife was shot twice in the head in an unsolved crime with no motive and no suspects is almost certainly a coincidence. So far as anyone can tell, at least, which isn’t very far at all.
Sean Flynn is a GQ correspondent.
Read More by GQ’s Sean Flynn: "Is he coming? Is he? Oh God, I think he is." | The Vanishing
