The Annecy Shootings

On the afternoon of 5 September 2012, an attack took place just off of the Route Forestière Domaniale de la Combe d'Ire, a quiet mountain road in southeastern France, near Lake Annecy. In the years since, investigators have probed the four victims' backgrounds in hope of finding a cause, but have been left empty-handed. The working theory is that the culprit was a "lone psychopath" who committed the crime for no real reason... 

Annecy is a small city in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region in southeastern France, quite close to the borders of both Switzerland and Italy about 22 miles south of Geneva. Sometimes known as “the Pearl of the French Alps,” the city lies on the northern tip of Lake Annecy, and is surrounded by the gorgeous mountains of the French Alps - an idyllic location that unsurprising has become a rather popular tourist destination for both the French and foreigners alike.

Even if it weren’t for the gorgeous natural surroundings, the city itself is quite beautiful. The “Vieille Ville,” or “Old Town” section of the city dates back to Roman times, and the canals that wind through this area of the city have earned it another nickname, ‘the Venice of France.” Surrounded by vibrant nature and centuries of history, Annecy isn’t the type of place you’d associate with violent crime - unfortunately, however, since 2012, Annecy and the surrounding area has been associated with ‘The Annecy Shootings,’ of one of very few random gun attacks in modern French history.

This attack resulted in the deaths of 3 British tourists - 50-year old Saad al-Hilli, his wife Iqbal, age 47 at the time, and her mother Suhaila al-Allaf, age 74, as well as French cyclist Sylvain Mollier, age 45. Saad and Iqbal’s two young daughters thankfully survived the attack.

In the near 10 years since the attack, many leads have been followed and many theories have been proposed as to who did this and why - however, to this day, no one has been found guilty of the crime, and investigators still have no working theory to explain the motivations behind these killings. While it’s of course possible that this was the work of a lone psychopath who truly had no motivations beyond simply killing for the fun of it, the lack of suspects combined with the fact that Saad al-Hilli’s job back in the UK apparently involved “sensitive topics” have led to a number of speculations, rumors, and actual theories alike swirling around this tragic story. Today, we’ll dive into the many theories and speculation surrounding this horrific crime - however, first, let’s backtrack and take a look at what exactly happened on September 5th, 2012, in Annecy, France.

The attack took place at a rest area on the side of a mountain road known as the Route Forestière Domaniale de la Combe d'Ire at approximately 3:45pm on September 5th, 2012. While this case is most commonly known as “The Annecy Shootings,” they technically took place in the tiny town of Chevaline, located on the southern tip of Lake Annecy. Local authorities described the area the shooting took place in as a “picnic spot,” a place where people often went for walks.

As this was a relatively open and public space, it’s no surprise that the scene of the crime was discovered shortly thereafter. Brett Martin, an ex-Royal Air Force pilot who was residing in France at the time, came across the ghastly scene while out riding his bike - although he arrived shortly after the shooting took place, he hadn’t heard the gunshots, likely because he was still across the river from the location of the shooting when it took place - water, as it turns out, can mask the sound of gunshots quite well.

When Brett came across the scene, the Hilli’s seven-year old daughter, Zainab, who had been shot and critically injured but not killed, was stumbling in the middle of the road, and collapsed in front of the family’s car. It was later found that she had been shot in the shoulder, beaten, and had suffered head fractures - thankfully, she was able to recover from her wounds.

The victims - Saad al-Hilli, Iqbal al-Hilli, Suhaila al-Allaf, and the French cyclist Sylvain Mollier, were all shot in the middle of the head, a fact which immediately led to fears that this may have been a contract killing. Initially, Zainab was seemingly the only survivor - however, 8 hours after the shooting took place, Saad and Iqbal’s younger daughter, age 4, was found hiding underneath the bodies of her dead relatives. The only thing this poor young girl was able to publicly say about her recollection of events was there “there was noise, and she was scared.”

Investigation of the crime scene turned up very little helpful information. The family’s BMW had been sharply reversed into the side of the road prior to the attack, to the point where visible marks were left on the road. When it was found, the car was still running, and the doors were locked, indicating that the family was ambushed suddenly and didn’t have enough time to react until it was too late. The shooter had specifically targeted the windows of the car, leaving the bodywork virtually unscratched.

Investigators were able to positively identify the weapon used in the attack, as the attacker had used the gun to club Zainab across the head, and a piece of it had broken off. Ballistics analysis would reveal that the gun used in the attack was a Luger P06 semi-automatic pistol - a gun which you may recognize if you’ve ever seen a film set during one of the World Wars.

Although the Luger P06 was sold commercially in the US, and was adopted by various militaries in Europe during the 20th century, nowadays it’s mainly considered to be a collector’s item. While not considered to be a very powerful gun, it is reliable and accurate up to 50 yards.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, investigators were left baffled. There was no sign of theft, and no other immediately obvious motive. The route where the shooting took place was not known as a “sketchy” area at all, nor was there a problem with gun violence in the area. Evidence at the scene of the crime simultaneously seemed to point to this being done by a professional, and the exact opposite - the methodical execution-style murders, the precision of the shooting, and the hardened resolve needed to even attempt to kill a child in cold blood all point to this being the work of a professional, but at the same time, the killer left 21 shell casings on the ground, and used an antique collector’s item as their weapon of choice, neither of which seem like things a professional or experienced killer would do.

Shortly following the incident, public prosecutor Eric Maillaud said in a press conference:

"I won't say it was professional, what I will say is it was tremendous savagery. And what is certain is that somebody wanted to kill."

The theories based around this case can essentially be divided into two camps - the “lone psychopath” theory, and the “targeted assassination/contract killing” theory. Generally, the theories revolving around this being a targeted assassination paint Saad al-Hilli as the main target, with his family being mere collateral, and the French bicyclist Sylvain Mollier being an unfortunate bystander who was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. In fact, this was the main line of thinking for quite a while - after all, looking at the puzzle pieces and adding in a splash of bias and common assumptions, a targeted attack against Saad al-Hilli would likely be the first thing to come to mind for many. What we have here is four people dead, an extremely unusual crime, to say the least, for Annecy. One of them is a French national, the other 3 foreigners, one of whom was an Iraqi engineer who supposedly had access to sensitive information, and they’d all been shot twice in the head executioner-style. The conclusion seemed obvious - Saad had gotten got, the others, especially the unrelated Sylvain Mollier, were simply unlucky enough to be there when Saad’s past caught up with him.

So, working under the assumption that this was a targeted attack, and that Saad al-Hilli was the main target, we can look to his background to see what the potential motivation for these murders could have potentially been.

Saad al-Hilli, along with his wife Iqbal, were both Iraqi-born British nationals, who had been living in the UK for over 20 years - according to a family friend named James Matthews, Saad had told him that his family had moved to the UK in the 70’s after their mechanical engineering business was viewed “unfavorably” by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party.

Reports from neighbors and family friends all unanimously report Saad al-Hilli as a kind man and a loving, involved father to his daughters. Saad’s neighbor, Jack Saltman, described Saad and Iqbal in an interview as such:

“He was a very tactile loving father. He loved to gather the girls up and cuddle them .... they would go running at him and he'd catch them in his arms and kiss them .... He adored them. His wife was very quiet.. she wasn't as gregarious as Saad. But she would always stop for a chat particularly with my wife. . .She was a wonderful housewife and mother as far as I could see. . . My wife had a hip operation and the first card we got wishing her a good recovery, this was only five or six weeks ago, was from Saad's wife... They were just nice people. It's just profoundly heart breaking.”

Another of Saad’s friends, James Matthews, also described Saad as a very loving father. James and Saad had met through their children, who had attended the same playgroup, and had apparently become pretty close. James said that Saad had helped him fix his car up, and that they had both worked together to build the workshop in Saad’s garden. During an interview with reporters, James also dismissed the rumors of conspiracy around Saad and his family’s deaths, saying “I think if there had been something bubbling up like that (a conspiracy) I would have known it.”

Publicly available information about Saad’s line of work is somewhat nebulous - he apparently worked as a freelance computer-aided design engineer, and helped with designs for the Airbus A380 aeroplane. His accountant, Julian Stedman, said he ran a company called Shtech Ltd, registered to his home address. Online records show that Hilli was also a director of a Swindon-based company offering "business services, aerial photographers and surveys services". He also apparently had links with Guildford-based Surrey Satellite Technology.

In short, rumor was that Hilli worked around some sensitive topics - that, combined with (unconfirmed) reports about the family’s past links to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and his political party, led to speculation that the murders were contract killings carried out by members of the fallen Hussein regime. Indeed, mere months following the attack, the respected French newspaper Le Monde released a report claiming that Saad had access to a Swiss bank account that belonged to Saadam Hussein’s political party, known as Ba’ath. This report apparently originated from the German secret service, and potentially linked Saad with Saddam Hussein’s missing fortune.

Diving further into the family’s background, the supposed links to Saddam Hussein come more through Saad’s father, Kadim, rather than through Saad himself. Kadim had been a successful businessman in Iraq, both before and after Saddam’s party, the Baathists, seized power. He initially worked as a lawyer, but eventually branched out into selling building materials - bricks and cements, and further down the line, tissue paper and even poultry. Kadim decided to move his family to the UK in 1971, after his brother was arrested by the Mukhabarat (the Iraqi intelligence agency) and disappeared for a year. When he reappeared, he had clearly been tortured, with permanent brain damage and slurred speech to show for it - one can hardly blame Kadim, then, for wanting to move his family to a different country after seeing a loved one go through that.

After moving to the UK, Kadim returned to Iraq in 1974 to oversee his business, which is a fact that conspiracy theorists pointed to as suspicious - however, Kadim did in fact own a business that was located in Iraq, and dictatorship or no dictatorship, the economy was still chugging along and businesses still needed to be run. Either way, Kadim retired and returned to England in 1982.

After hearing this background, you’re probably thinking - these supposed “links” to Saddam Hussein seem to amount to nothing more than the fact that Saad and his father were both of Iraqi origin, and Saddam Hussein is of course also Iraqi, and that Kadim returned to Iraq for a while after moving to the UK. And if you had that thought, you’re probably exactly right - the “links” are tenuous, to say the least, and seem to be rooted more in prejudice than in fact. The Swiss bank account that supposedly was linked to Saddam Hussein’s political party does in fact exist, but is very likely nothing more than the bank account of a successful businessman.

Unsurprisingly, the Saddam Hussein link was quickly denied by French authorities - The head of the murder investigation, Gendarmerie Colonel Benoit Vinnemann, said quite plainly:

“This is false. No intelligence service from any country has given us any information of this kind.”

Following this report, Annecy prosecutor Eric Maillaud expressed frustration at the reporting around this case. Since, officially, the investigation was meant to be kept under wraps, there was a severe lack of official information being released from investigators to the press. In the absence of official information, however, any and all leaks - some accurate, some false, and often taken out of context - were taken as true and reported as such, allowing theories such as the Saddam Hussein link to be reported as fact without official confirmation.

The other main theory based off of the idea that Saad was the main target is much closer to Earth, and involves one of the most common motivations for murder - family disputes and inheritance money.

At the time of Saad’s death, he and his brother Zaid hadn’t spoken in about a year, except through lawyers and solicitors helping them to sort out their late father Kadim’s affairs. Kadim had left behind over a million dollars in a Swiss bank account - the one rumored to be linked to Saddam Hussein - a house in the town of Claygate, south of London, and an apartment in Spain. Both brothers, naturally, were in disagreement over who should get what. Zaid, however, claimed that he believed he and Saad were civil about their disagreement, claiming whatever “feud” there was was fought via letters and file briefs from their respective lawyers, rather than anything even remotely physical or even verbal.

Zaid also found the rumors about his brother being the victim of a hit ridiculous - not only did he not believe that Saad’s work was anything near classified and important enough to justify killing him over, but he also pointed out the logistics behind arranging a hit on someone while they were on vacation in a different country - wouldn’t it have been simpler to just kill him at home, where he presumably had a routine, not to mention a house he went back to at the end of every day?

Imagine Zaid’s surprise then, when, 23 days after the murders on Friday, September 28th, the police came to Zaid’s door with a warrant to search his apartment.

See, in early September, police had searched the Hilli family home and found something they found suspicious - a taser. Now, while tasers might not be out of the ordinary in some countries, in the UK, citizens owning tasers is actually illegal, and in fact Saad was risking prison time by having it in the house. Although this could have been as simple as a woman still carrying pepper spray in her bag even in places where it’s illegal, due to a simple abundance of precaution weighing more than the concern of getting in legal trouble, police thought that it pointed to Saad believing that his life and his family’s lives could be in danger. Add to that the fact that the taser was capable of jolting someone with 50,000 volts and the fact that Saad had actually been killed by an unknown assailant, also suggested that him owning this taser certainly wasn’t nothing.

Police reported that recordings of phone conversations between Saad and Zaid pointed towards their relationship being more volatile than Zaid painted it. They also spoke to other family members who claimed that Saad was frightened of Zaid. Zaid, thus, became a prime suspect for a time - although nothing was found during that initial search of Zaid’s apartment, the investigation into him continued.

He was questioned on and off continuously over the next 7 to 8 months, with some interviews lasting up to 8 hours. In June 2013, 9 months after the murders, French authorities presented Zaid with a summons ordering him to appear in France as a witness - Zaid refused, claiming he didn’t trust them or their reasoning for summoning him to France. However, later that month, detectives showed up at his door to arrest him for conspiracy to commit murder- the suspected motivation, of course, being that Zaid wanted Saad out of the way so that he could have the entirety of their father’s estate.

However, like seemingly every other theory in this investigation, the case against Zaid fell apart quite quickly. Zaid was released the next morning on bail, and throughout the next few months of investigations, no evidence for Zaid’s guilt ever surfaced. Police were forced to lift Zaid’s bail conditions in January 2014, leaving them once again starting from scratch.

Zaid, for his part, fully maintained his innocence throughout the entire ordeal, and continues to insist that there was no reason for Saad to be the victim of a targeted killing. Instead, he claimed that the only reason investigators latched onto Saad as the prime intended victim was simply due to his race, saying:

“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. . . On the one hand, 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.”

What Zaid was suggesting, of course, was that if there was an intended target, it was the French victim, Sylvain Mollier, not the foreigners on vacation who didn’t normally spend time in Annecy. Furthermore, he suggests that the reason French investigators brushed Sylvain’s potential as the intended target under the rug was to make it seem as though this horrific crime originated outside of France, rather than being a local problem.

But is there any reason to believe that Sylvain Mollier could have been the killer’s real target?

Sylvain Mollier was 45 years old, divorced, and the father of three children - two with his ex-wife, one with his current girlfriend. At the time of his death, he had until recently been employed at a factory in the town of Ugine, not far from Annecy. This factory is owned by a company called Cezus, a subsidiary of AREVA, which just so happens to be one of the largest suppliers of nuclear components in the world. The factory in Ugine primarily crafted components for nuclear reactors.

And so here we are again, with one of the victims potentially being linked to some sort of sensitive information that could have been the reason behind his murder - in this case, nuclear secrets. Given that nugget of information, it’s not difficult to spiral it out into a tale that ends in Mollier’s murder, with the Hilli family in this case being the unfortunate bystanders. However, the tales of Saad al-Hilli having access to sensitive secrets that led to his death turned out to be mildly exaggerated, to say the least - is the same true of Sylvain Mollier?

In the weeks following his death, Mollier’s job at the Ugine factory was described in various terms ranging from senior production manager to some sort of nuclear technician. If this were the case, knowing how many organizations or even nations that are willing to deal in nuclear secrets, it’s not that hard to imagine that Mollier perhaps could have gotten involved and gotten in well over his head. Some even speculated that perhaps Saad and Mollier - the supposed nuclear technician and satellite engineer - were in cahoots, and that it wasn’t coincidence that they ended up on that same mountain road together on that day. Perhaps, they both got killed because they were in fact, working together?

However, while it’s interesting to speculate on the role Mollier’s work could have played in his death, as well as potential connections between Mollier and Saad, public prosecutor Eric Maillaud sums up this line of thinking quite well in one simple phrase: “For a novelist, it’s an amazing story.”

Indeed, when looking further into Mollier’s background, any theories regarding this case being related to his work fall apart almost instantly - for one, Mollier’s actual job at the Ugine factory was as a welder, and he had absolutely 0 access to anything resembling nuclear secrets, and it seems unlikely that the relatively small Ugine factory holds such secrets anyways. Additionally, there was no evidence of Saad al-Hilli and Sylvain Mollier ever coming into contact with each other prior to that fateful day on the mountainside road.

Still, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Sylvain couldn’t have been the intended target for some other reason. As Eric Maillaud put it, many murders can be linked to one of two motives - sex or money. Is there any evidence to suggest someone had a motive for killing Sylvain due to one of those reasons?

Sex, it seems, could be dismissed - although Mollier had a bit of a reputation as a playboy in his younger days, he had been settled with his girlfriend for over two years, and there didn’t seem to be any jealous boyfriends or husbands lurking in the sidelines who would have reason to slaughter Mollier and four other innocent people. But what about money?

Three months after the murders, British tabloids reported that Mollier’s girlfriend Claire Schutz, had recently become a “paper millionaire” after ownership of her father’s pharmacy had been transferred over to her. The Schutz family, the papers reported, was growing increasingly irritated by Mollier’s mooching off of his girlfriend’s money without contributing anything in return - he had recently taken a 3-year leave from his job at the Ugine factory, after all.

This theory, however, was also dismissed by Eric Maillaud - the British tabloids, it appears, had gotten some key facts wrong about Claire’s millionaire status, namely that she didn’t actually yet have ownership of her father’s pharmacy at the time of his death, but was instead in the process of buying it. What the prolificness of this theory in Britain made clear was that each country - France and Britain - wanted the problem to have originated in the other country. Again, from Maillaud:

“It was not conceivable for many English people, including English journalists, that the problem originated in Britain . . . I think that the Hundred Years’ War is not yet over.”

And so that’s where we’re left when looking into the background into the two most likely intended targets in this case, Saad al-Hilli and Sylvain Mollier. At first glance, there are several potential angles - but looking further into them reveal no evidence at all, just mere speculation and exaggerations that have been spun out into stories that better fit into a crime novel than in real life.

Maillaud’s one real potential suspect besides Zaid was a motorcyclist spotted by some forestry workers on the day of the murders. These workers had gotten a good enough look at him to give information to an artist who created a sketch of the mysterious motorcyclist. This sketch was released to the public in October 2013, but in March of 2015, even this wild card suspect was ruled out - the motorcyclist was identified as a businessman from Lyon who had no criminal record nor any connection to the victims. Brett Martin, the man who discovered the bodies, was also briefly considered a suspect, but his story and background were investigated and nothing suspicious came up.

So, no suspect, no motive, and 4 people - 3 of whom were tourists - dead on a normally quiet mountain road in a relatively crime-free town. To put it bluntly, what gives? If all the potential suspects and motivations for killing either Sylvain Mollier or the Hilli family can be eliminated, what are we left with?

The answer to that question is the “lone psychopath” theory, the theory that’s become the most popular with investigators in recent years. Lone psychopaths are, to put it frankly, incredibly rare - the vast majority of murders are committed for a reason well beyond ‘random person feels like killing a stranger for no particular reason.’ Random killings do happen, however, and given the fact that every other lead in this case led to a dead end, this theory has to be considered. One of the biggest pieces of evidence that the lone psychopath theory could be legitimate in this case is quite simply, that neither Sylvain Mollier or the Hilli family had any intention of being up on that mountain road that day.

Saad al-Hilli hadn’t rented a car in France - rather, he had put his family car on the ferry and carted it over to France the week before the murders. Security cameras at the ferry terminal, as well as at gas stations and along the highway that the family had taken down to Annecy, as well as in and around Annecy itself, were scoured for any signs that the family was being followed, but no vehicle or motorcycle ever appeared more than once in the footage alongside the Hillis, indicating that they indeed were not followed. While it’s technically not impossible that someone tailing them managed to remain outside the field of vision of every CCTV camera along the Hilli’s path, it is incredibly unlikely.

On the day of the murders, Saad had asked his daughter Zainab what she wanted to do that day - go shopping in Annecy, or go for a walk in the woods. Zainab chose to go for a walk in the woods. Saad took suggestions from a local man as to where to go, but it seems as though the family got lost somewhere along the way, and once Saad was on the Route Forestière Domaniale de la Combe d'Ire, he had no way to turn around until he reached the parking area about 3 kilometers up the road. In other words, there was no indication that the Hilli family was being followed, and they had no particular reason to be on that road, at that time, on that day - it was pure chance.

Similarly, it seems likely that Sylvain Mollier had also gotten a bit turned around during his bike ride that day. His girlfriend’s father had suggested a biking route to him, but Maillaud says this route more than likely involved taking an easily-missed sharp left at the base of the mountain (perhaps the same turn that the Hilli family had been meant to make), rather than biking straight up it. Either way, Sylvain Mollier also had no plans and no reason to end up on that particular mountain road on that day. And if this was a planned killing, regardless of which victim was the intended target, wouldn’t the killer have chosen a time and place where they had good reason to believe their target would be?

If this is all true - that no one was following either the Hillis or Mollier, that no one had any reason to believe any of them would be in that particular place at that particular time, then we’re left with the answer to this baffling case being that it was the rarest of crimes, the true stuff of nightmares - it was a completely random slaughter, committed for no real reason, by someone who had no motivation besides feeling the urge to kill, and who got away with it. The lone psychopath, in other words. While again, incredibly rare, this type of murder is by far the most difficult to solve - after all, if you leave no traces at the crime scene, and have no connections to the victims, how are the police meant to find you?

The police, in this case, certainly did try to pursue this lone psychopath theory. Assuming that the perpetrator must have had some experience with firearms, they cross-referenced military records with psychiatric hospitals, but didn’t find anyone who fit the bill.

However, something interesting happened in April 2014. While working their way through a list of just about everyone Sylvain Moller’s girlfriend, Claire Schulz, had ever known, police stumbled across a man named Patrice Menegaldo, who they called in and interviewed for about an hour as a tangential witness - just someone who maybe might have known something about Sylvain that police hadn’t already found out. Patrice was 50 years old, he lived in Ugine (where the factory Sylvain previously worked at was located), and he was a former paratrooper in the French Foreign Legion.

Two months later, Patrice shot himself in the head. He left a letter behind, in which he wrote that he “couldn’t handle being a suspect in a murder.” This was curious, because Patrice hadn’t, in fact, been a suspect in a murder - he had been in effect a character witness. The detectives had never accused him of being complicit in the murders, he was never in custody, and there was no evidence whatsoever connecting him to the crime. As a former military man who it seems, perhaps had some mental issues, he could fit the profile of the ‘lone psychopath’ that the police were searching for - it was Patrice, in the woods, with the gun, who then committed suicide under the weigh of his own guilt and the misplaced belief that the police were on to him.

Still, not every piece quite fits. If this was true, why wait until two months after the interview to commit suicide, rather than in a panic right afterwards? Patrice Menegaldo also left behind a 7-page suicide note, of which the part where he claimed he couldn’t handle being a suspect in a murder was only a small part - investigators haven’t released the remaining contents of the note, likely for privacy reasons. It’s very tempting to pin it on Patrice Menegaldo, given what is publicly known, but there’s still no hard evidence placing him on that road, on that day.

So, to sum up: no reason to believe anyone knew that the Hilli family or Sylvain Mollier would be where they were on that day, no particular reason to believe that anyone would target them, and no other leads in this ‘lone psychopath’ theory. Where does that leave us?

Before we wrap this up, there is, believe it or not, one final angle to consider, in a case that has so many angles to consider that it sometimes feels like an infinitely reflective prism. This information was first reported in July 2014, nearly 2 years after the murders took place. Like all of the other many angles considered in investigating this crime, there’s a very high likelihood that it’s absolutely nothing at all, just yet another dead end - and yet, even if it’s nothing, it’s still an interesting coincidence.

A mere 7 hours after 4 people were murdered in the French Alps, a man who lived in Natchez, Mississippi by the name of James Thompson told a friend that he wasn’t feeling well. James was a former cop and oil field worker, and had once been married to a woman by the name of Iqbal - the same Iqbal who later moved to England and married Saad al-Hilli, and who was murdered in the Alps that day. After Iqbal and James were married in 1999, they split up only a few months later.

Iqbal didn’t tell many people about her first marriage - even her brother-in-law Zaid was unaware until this piece of information was announced by French investigators. It was unusual, especially in the 90’s, for Iraqi Muslim women to marry Americans, and would have been controverisal on both sides at the time - as Maillaud put it, “people have exploded families for less than that.”

After James Thompson drove off from work that day, the same day his ex-wife was mysteriously killed thousands of miles away across the ocean, his truck slowed down and went off the road - James Thompson had died behind the wheel due to a massive coronary. Given his general health (he was overweight, had high blood pressure, he smoked), this news wasn’t exactly what one would call “shocking.” It’s the timing that gives some people pause - what are the chances of a secret ex-husband dying of a coronary mere hours after his ex-wife was killed in a still-unsolved crime with no apparent motive behind it and no clear suspect? A coincidence? Most likely. James himself of course couldn’t have been at the scene of the crime, and no evidence has arisen that he hired someone to go after his ex-wife, or that perhaps someone who disapproved of their relationship had decided, years later, to enact revenge. But like most things in this case, it’s a coincidence that raises yet more questions and invites yet more speculation, and answers absolutely nothing.

It’s nearly 10 years later now, and investigators are no closer to locating the perpetrator than they were on September 5th, 2012. The crime is a sort of scar, marring the beauty of this picturesque mountain town. Some have taken to calling it “the perfect crime” - somehow, someone managed to murder 4 people in the middle of the day on a public road and get off scot-free for 9 years and counting.

To this day, the stories of Saad al-Hilli, Iqbal al-Hilli, Suhaila al-Allaf, and Sylvain Mollier remain unresolved.

Episode Information

Episode Information

Research & writing by Olivia Paradice

Hosting & production by Micheal Whelan

Published on December 26th, 2021

Music Credits

Original music created by Micheal Whelan through Amper Music

Theme music created and composed by Ailsa Traves

Sources and other reading

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/09/07/french-alps-shooting-dead-father-saad-al-hilli-known-to-security-services_n_1863530.html

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-23975138

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/23/alps-victim-had-family-feud-over-1m-inheritance-says-brother

https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2012/10/29/tuerie-de-chevaline-le-pere-d-al-hilli-lie-au-parti-baas-selon-bild_1782780_3224.html

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/sep/10/french-alps-shootings-single-weapon

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/sep/10/alps-shootings-police-hilli-home-live

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-23031076

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03fgstr

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/15/french-alps-shootings-victims-brother-no-further-action

https://www.france24.com/en/20121005-swiss-bank-link-alps-murders-annecy-chevaline-claygate-shooting-al-hilli-investigation

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/18/alps-murders-former-policeman-arrested-village-shootings

​​https://www.gq.com/story/alps-murder-chevaline

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/09/06/french-alps-shooting-francois-hollande-police-utmost_n_1861895.html

https://www.connexionfrance.com/Archive/Chevaline-murder-police-seize-guns

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-19506853

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/sep/06/french-alps-shooting-live