Downgraded cases
New Serie. The new judicial center dedicated to "serial killers" puts an end to French denial and revives hope in hundreds of cases.
Episode 1
The episodes
TextThierry Lévêque PhotoMourad Allili/Sipa Edited byFrançois Meurisse
The case of Nordahl Lelandais is yet another reminder of a grim reality that remains hopelessly under the radar in France. A category of citizens kill out of habit, without their social life suffering. This type of criminal hides and often presents between two murders a banal social face, deceiving even the very close entourage. How many people has Nordahl Lelandais, a 38-year-old former soldier, described as pleasant by his numerous female and male amorous conquests, killed? He is on trial in Chambéry, Savoie, from this Monday until February 18, for the kidnapping and murder of Maëlys de Araujo, 8, whom she met by chance in August 2017 at a wedding where he was not not invited. During the investigation, it was discovered incidentally that four months earlier, in April 2017, he had also killed Arthur Noyer, a young man also met by chance, at the exit of a nightclub. This case earned him twenty years of criminal imprisonment last year after a first trial – he faces life in the Maëlys case. The gendarmerie brought out 900 files of disappearances and unsolved crimes treated in a cell called "Ariane", to finally recommend the relaunch of the investigations on the Lelandais hypothesis in eighteen of these cases. The penal system takes a huge criminal career very seriously and therefore overlooks the entire path of the murderer. This in itself is a novelty.
To measure the denial long opposed by the French political and judicial authorities to the notions of serial killers and crimes, we must go back to the case of the disappeared of Mourmelon.
