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Nordahl Lelandais Admits Killing Corporal Arthur Noyer

Six weeks after admitting the death of eight-year-old Maëlys, the former army dog handler told judges in Chambéry he killed the soldier missing since April 2017.

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Illustration of press photographers and camera crews outside a classical stone courthouse in an Alpine town, snowy peaks behind. Not the actual courthouse.

Six weeks after he admitted the death of a little girl, Nordahl Lelandais admitted a second killing. On Thursday, March 29, 2018, at a hearing before investigating judges at the courthouse in Chambéry, in the French Alps, the former army dog handler acknowledged that he had killed Corporal Arthur Noyer, a 23-year-old soldier who disappeared in April 2017. Afterward he was taken, with his lawyer and the authorities, to Cruet, at the foot of the Bauges massif, where fragments of the young soldier's skull had been found.

He had already admitted part of the story. Questioned at length on February 5, Lelandais had said that he picked Noyer up as a hitchhiker outside a nightclub near Chambéry on the night he vanished, but he had denied killing him. The remains were found in September 2017 by a walker at Cruet, about 20 kilometers away, and three months later Lelandais was placed under formal investigation for murder, on the strength of telephone analysis showing that his phone had connected in the same places at the same times as the victim's. More bones had since been recovered there.

He was also under investigation over the disappearance of eight-year-old Maëlys de Araujo, who vanished from a wedding party at Pont-de-Beauvoisin, in Isère, on the night of August 26, 2017. A microscopic trace of the child's blood found in the boot of his car, which he had scrubbed after she disappeared, pushed him to talk, and on February 14 her remains were found in the Chartreuse massif from directions he supplied. He said he had killed her accidentally.

Neither the prosecutor's office nor his lawyer, Alain Jakubowicz, would comment on the new admission. That night Lelandais was returned to the secure psychiatric unit at Bron, near Lyon, where he was being held.

What this story covers. It draws on Le Journal du Dimanche's report of March 30, 2018, written with Agence France-Presse, which cites Le Parisien and a source close to the case; French investigating-judge hearings are not public, and no statement from the prosecutor exists to cite. Lelandais was under investigation, not convicted, when this was reported. He was later convicted of killing both Arthur Noyer and Maëlys de Araujo.

Sources