The Chevaline Killings: Finding the Missing Piece

September 5th, 2012. A parking spot on an Alpine forest road, a few kilometers from the village of Chevaline. An English family and French cyclist are found dead, brutally murdered. A young girl has survived and is rushed to hospital. The killer has left her for dead after having battered her head. The gendarmerie cordons off the scene of the crime and searches carefully for any traces the killer.

The English family murdered on the parking spot has been identified: they are the Al-Hilli, English residents of a comfortable upscale suburb of London. Nothing seems to have marked them out for such a fate. But the investigators soon discover a family quarrel that might explain the tragedy: Saad, the victim and his brother Zaïd's father died a few months earlier.

When everything indicates that the answer is to be found in the UK, and that the brother may have been able to hire a killer, new elements complicate the case. Saad went to Baghdad to recover a family house and made enemies in Iraq. Hard drives concealed in the family van are found, with a considerable amount of data concerning Saad's satellite company.

Sylvain Mollier, the French cyclist found dead on September 5th, was long considered a collateral victim in the Chevaline murders. Those who may have wished him harm are examined one after the other. The small village of Ugine becomes the epicenter of an investigation that mobilizes a hundred police officers. Sylvain Mollier was living in a menage à trois.

After years of investigating, the gendarmes are still faced with an enigma. They are back to square one. A new prosecutor tries to find the odd murder weapon: an old Swiss knife that dates back to World War I. Even though it was a limited edition, the search for the weapon is painstaking work, over several months in several countries.

All the suspects' alibis hold up to scrutiny, but there is still one unknown variable: the identity of the motorcyclist that all witnesses claim to have seen in the vicinity of the murder on the big day. The investigators' last hypothesis involves that biker. He may be the killer. And if he isn't, he must have seen the perpetrator or is protecting him. A composite sketch makes the rounds.