Nordahl Lelandais Gets 20 Years for the Murder of Corporal Arthur Noyer
A Chambéry jury rejected his claim that a fight went wrong and convicted the former soldier of murder, his first conviction for a killing.
Published
After seven days of trial and seven hours of deliberation, the Savoie assize court in Chambéry found Nordahl Lelandais guilty on the evening of Tuesday, May 11, 2021, of murdering Corporal Arthur Noyer, and sentenced him to 20 years in prison. He must serve two-thirds of the term before any release can be considered. Lelandais, 38, a former soldier who had been in custody for nearly four years, sat with his hands clasped in a white shirt and did not react.
Arthur Noyer was 23, a soldier with the mountain infantry, the chasseurs alpins. He vanished from the center of Chambéry on the night of April 11 to 12, 2017, after leaving a nightclub. Lelandais had admitted killing him in the early hours of April 12, after picking him up as he hitchhiked. He was not linked to the case until December 2017, when he was already being held over the disappearance of eight-year-old Maëlys de Araujo.
The question for the jury was intent. Lelandais told police the two men had stopped in a parking lot, that Noyer struck him first, and that the fight ended when Noyer was knocked out. His lawyer, Alain Jakubowicz, asked for a conviction for violence causing death without intent to kill, which carries 15 years, and told the jurors to put aside the "myth" of a serial killer. "He had no reason to kill Arthur Noyer," he said.
The prosecutor general, Thérèse Brunisso, acknowledged that with no crime scene the investigation had not produced irrefutable evidence. But the "extreme violence" of the blows, she said, showed "the intention to kill." She asked for 30 years, the maximum. Searching for a motive, she suggested that Lelandais had been looking for a sexual partner that night. Jakubowicz dismissed the theory.
Before the jury withdrew, Lelandais turned toward Noyer's family and offered his "most sincere apologies," repeating that he had never wanted to cause the soldier's death. The court convicted him of murder and imposed the two-thirds minimum term the prosecution had asked for, but not the maximum sentence.
It was his first conviction for a killing. Lelandais had also confessed to killing Maëlys de Araujo, who disappeared from a wedding near Chambéry in August 2017, and in February 2018 he led investigators to her remains. That case was set for trial in Grenoble in 2022.
What the record does and does not say. On May 11, 2021, Lelandais stood convicted of one murder. He had confessed to killing Maëlys de Araujo but had not yet been tried for it, and he maintained that both deaths were unintended. The two cases led investigators to reopen several unsolved disappearances in the region to check for any link to him; no further charge had followed by this date. English-language wire reports carried the verdict under a May 12 dateline; it was delivered on the evening of May 11.
Sources
- Meurtre d'Arthur Noyer : Nordahl Lelandais condamné à 20 ans de prison (Arthur Noyer murder: Nordahl Lelandais sentenced to 20 years), France 24 (with AFP)
- Frenchman accused of child's murder jailed for second killing, AFP, via Malay Mail