In the early hours of August 27, 2017, eight-year-old Maëlys de Araujo disappeared from a wedding reception in a village hall at Pont-de-Beauvoisin, in the Isère department of southeastern France. She was there with her parents and her older sister. One of the guests was a 34-year-old former soldier who had been invited at the last minute and had never met her before that night. His name was Nordahl Lelandais. Within a week he was in jail as the main suspect in her disappearance, and within four months he was under investigation for the death of a young soldier who had vanished in April. It took six months, and a speck of blood that he had failed to scrub away, before he admitted what he had done.
Lelandais was born on February 18, 1983, in Boulogne-Billancourt, on the western edge of Paris. When he was seven his family moved to Savoie, in the French Alps, and he went through school there without notable trouble. He started a vocational certificate in mechanics and did not finish it. A personality investigator who studied his life for the court in 2022 found no major difficulty in his childhood or adolescence and described a family that was close and supportive. His mother, Christiane, remembered a quiet, gentle boy who loved nature, fishing and walks in the woods.
The army was the one thing he said he had really wanted. He signed up in 2001, at 17 and a half, and served with the 132nd Dog Handler Battalion at Suippes, in the Marne. The career did not last. He was injured in one eye by a dart, he was caught by a superior in French Guiana with cannabis, and he was declared unfit and struck off the army's rolls in 2005, leaving as a corporal. He went back to live with his parents at Domessin, a Savoie village about 30 kilometers from Chambéry, and drifted between short jobs, sick leave and periods without work. One of his closest friends later said he had an aversion to work. A lawyer who followed his case said he had also worked as an ambulance driver.
Before 2017 his only criminal conviction, his lawyer told the court, was for arson in 2008. Women who had longer relationships with him described a man who could be very tender and also a liar and a manipulator. He told one partner he had been French Thai boxing champion and that his father was a doctor; neither was true. Psychologists who examined him after his arrest wrote of emotional deprivation and a constant search for stimulation through alcohol, drugs and sex. In court in 2022 he said that he had "lost" himself in late 2016 and early 2017. His father was seriously ill at the time, and his mother said she had been absorbed in caring for him. Asked by his own lawyer to describe a typical day in early 2017, Lelandais answered that he got up late, anywhere from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., and then had coffee, cigarettes, cocaine and pornography websites.
Arthur Noyer was 23, a corporal in the 13th Alpine Infantry Battalion, a chasseurs alpins unit of the army's mountain troops, based at Barby, just outside Chambéry. He came from Bourges, in the Cher department of central France. His comrades told the court that he was kind and easygoing, always ready for a night out, and never aggressive when he had been drinking. One of his best friends called him "a real gentleman." His mother said that one of the friends who used to visit him in Bourges had just had a son and had given the boy the middle name Arthur.
On the evening of April 11, 2017, he went out with friends from the battalion, moved through several bars in central Chambéry and ended the night at a nightclub. Someone tried to steal his phone in the street, and police officers were called. A bar manager and a police officer later said that he had been drinking but was calm and spoke clearly; a woman who saw the attempted theft said he was very drunk. Security camera images showed him lying on his back on the ground outside the club. He was last seen hitchhiking in the early hours, trying to get back to his barracks at Barby, about 5 kilometers away. He did not arrive. His unit listed him as missing, and his parents, Cécile and Didier Noyer, began eight months of waiting. His mother later told the court that she slept with her phone switched on every night.
On September 7, 2017, a walker found fragments of a skull on a path in the forest of the Col de Marocaz, above Cruet, a small village near Montmélian, about 20 kilometers from Chambéry. They were identified as Noyer's. More bones were found at the site in January 2018.
Maëlys de Araujo was born in November 2008 and lived with her family in the Jura, in eastern France. Her parents were Joachim de Araujo, whose family is of Portuguese origin, and Jennifer Cleyet-Marrel, a night nurse at the hospital in Pontarlier. She had a sister four years older. At her funeral her sister said that Maëlys had wanted to be a farmer, or a footballer like Cristiano Ronaldo. Her father called her joyful and full of life.
On Saturday, August 26, 2017, the family went to a wedding in the village hall of Pont-de-Beauvoisin, a town of about 3,500 people on the border of Isère and Savoie. Maëlys wore a white dress. Lelandais, a friend of the groom, had been invited late. During the evening several guests saw him talking with Maëlys, and he showed her photos of his dogs on his phone. At around 3 a.m. her mother realized she could not find her. Guests searched for about an hour before the gendarmes were called. Three tracking dogs all stopped at the same spot in the parking lot, which suggested she had got into a car.
On August 28 the prosecutor at Bourgoin-Jallieu opened an inquiry for abduction. Investigators quickly focused on Lelandais. He had left the reception at around the time Maëlys disappeared, his phone had been switched to airplane mode for 39 minutes, and he had come back to the hall without joining the search. The day after the wedding he had spent hours cleaning his car, an Audi A3, at a garage, including with industrial products. Investigators believed a former army dog handler would know how to defeat a tracking dog. He said he had agreed to sell the car, and the would-be buyer confirmed it.
He was taken into custody on August 31 and released, along with a friend held on September 1. On September 3 he was arrested again after a trace of Maëlys's DNA was found in his car. He was placed under formal investigation for kidnapping a minor and jailed. His explanation was that Maëlys and a little boy had climbed into his car in the parking lot to see whether his dogs were inside, and that both children had gone back to the hall. His first lawyer, Bernard Méraud, said he had left the party only to go home and change shorts stained with wine.
Ten gendarmes of the Grenoble research section worked on the case full time. Divers searched lakes and ponds; teams combed forests across the region. Maëlys's parents spoke publicly only once, in late September, to ask the suspect to say everything he knew. On November 5, her ninth birthday, family and friends released balloons. Colleagues at the Pontarlier hospital donated hours of leave to help her mother.
By late September Lelandais had a new lawyer, Alain Jakubowicz, one of the best-known criminal defense lawyers in Lyon. He found that Lelandais's first four police interviews had not been video-recorded, as French law requires in a criminal case, and on November 30, 2017, the appeals chamber in Grenoble annulled them. The setback was small. Enhanced analysis of a security camera in Pont-de-Beauvoisin showed Lelandais's car leaving the hall just after Maëlys was last seen, with what the Grenoble prosecutor, Jean-Yves Coquillat, described as a small, frail form in a white dress in the passenger seat. The footage of the car's return did not show it. The plates were not visible, but stickers on the car identified it. Coquillat put the likely time of the killing between 2:45 and 3:24 a.m. Lelandais was placed under formal investigation for murder. His father told reporters he was certain his son was innocent.
The Savoie investigators who had been looking for Arthur Noyer compared notes with the Maëlys team. Phone analysis showed that between about midnight and 4 a.m. on April 12, Lelandais's phone and Noyer's phone had connected to the same cell sites at the same times, moving together, and not toward the barracks at Barby. Lelandais was questioned about Noyer on December 18, 2017, and on December 20 he was placed under formal investigation for premeditated murder. The prosecutor publicly asked whether he might be linked to other disappearances. He continued to deny everything, and his requests for release were refused in January and February 2018.
In February 2018 investigators found a tiny trace of Maëlys's blood in the boot of the car he had cleaned so thoroughly. On February 14, 2018, he asked to be taken to the area where he had left her and admitted that he had killed her, which he described as accidental. Despite snow, rain and fog, the gendarmes found her skull and a long bone in the steep Chailles gorges near Saint-Franc, in the Chartreuse massif. The next day, with search dogs, a mobile laboratory and about 20 specialists from the gendarmerie's forensic institute, they recovered almost all of her skeleton, her clothes and a shoe. Lelandais said he wanted her body found first and would explain later. Two days after confessing he was admitted, at his own request, to a secure psychiatric unit at Le Vinatier hospital near Lyon.
Arthur Noyer's parents wrote to him in a public message. They had lived eight months of anguish, they said, and his silence had made it worse. "Our family needs a trial. We must know. We will know." They asked prison and hospital staff to watch him closely so that he could not escape his responsibilities by suicide.
On February 5 he had admitted to the judges that he picked Noyer up hitchhiking. On March 29, 2018, before the two investigating judges in Chambéry, he admitted that he had punched Noyer several times in the face in a fight and that one blow had knocked him down, after which he found him dead. He was taken that day to the Col de Marocaz. He had also given the Grenoble judges an account of Maëlys's death on March 19: according to what was reported in April, she had panicked in the car, screamed and asked to go back, and he had slapped her. The prosecutor in Chambéry said he admitted only to violence causing death without intent to kill.
Maëlys was buried on June 2, 2018, after a funeral at La Tour-du-Pin, in Isère, where the family had ties. Several hundred people attended, and Arthur Noyer's parents came. "Nine months that our lives have been broken," her mother said. A year to the day after she disappeared, several hundred people marched in white through Pont-de-Beauvoisin behind a banner that read "Taken hostage. Truth for Maëlys."
The gendarmerie set up a seven-person unit, called Ariane, to compare Lelandais's life and movements with unsolved cases. By February 2019 it had checked about 900 files from about 20 departments and identified about 40, mostly disappearances in the Rhône-Alpes region, where a link could be considered. None formally implicated him, and the files were returned to the investigators in charge. He was ruled out in the disappearances of Estelle Mouzin and of a Belgian cook, Adrien Mourialmé. Prosecutors in Valence examined the disappearances of Eric Folay and Nelly Balmain.
One family kept pressing. Lucie Roux, 43, disappeared at Bassens, near Chambéry, on September 16, 2012, after time at the psychiatric hospital there. Her family's lawyer, Christian Saint-André, attended the Noyer trial to gather details of Lelandais's life. He said witnesses had reported seeing Lelandais at the Bassens hospital and that a woman Lelandais lived with from early 2013 had an apartment about a kilometer from it. Investigators said Lelandais had not been a patient there at the same time as Lucie Roux, and her case was closed again at the end of 2019. No evidence has linked him to her.
The inquiry also turned up crimes against children in his own family. Investigators found videos on his phone showing him sexually assaulting two young cousins while they slept in the summer of 2017, one during a family stay in the Gard and the other six weeks later, when the second family stayed at his parents' home in Domessin. Those charges were joined to the Maëlys case. A third cousin, 14, said he had groped her and threatened to kill her at a family funeral at Vouziers, in the Ardennes, on March 16, 2017; she filed a complaint in July 2019.
The Noyer case came to trial first. It opened before the Savoie assize court in Chambéry on May 3, 2021, with about 120 journalists accredited. The investigating judges had dropped premeditation for lack of proof, so the charge was murder, carrying up to 30 years. On the first day the court annulled a recent psychiatric report because one of its authors had spoken about the case on television in 2018. "Yes, I caused Arthur Noyer's death, but I never wanted to cause his death," Lelandais said.
According to the judges' summary, on the night of April 11 he had just been turned away by an occasional sexual partner and had driven back and forth through central Chambéry for hours, probably looking for a sexual encounter. His own account was that Noyer flagged him down almost in the middle of the road and asked to be dropped at Saint-Baldoph, a suburb south of Chambéry. There, he said, Noyer got out, forgot his phone, accused him of stealing it when he brought it back, and struck him first. He said he punched Noyer until he fell unconscious, put him in the boot of his gray Audi and drove about 20 kilometers before leaving the body by a small mountain road. The prosecutor general, Thérèse Brunisso, pointed out that Noyer knew nobody in Saint-Baldoph. The real question, she said, was how Noyer reacted when he saw he was not being taken to Barby.
Former partners testified. One woman, known in the press as "Karine," described him as an abuser and said she was frightened of him; the prosecution itself noted that her complaints had been dismissed, and the defense read out one of his love letters to her. Another described a violent breakup and threats. A friend who spent an evening with him on April 13, about 36 hours after Noyer's death, said he had been cheerful and flirtatious, then turned to the dock and said, "You owe them the truth, Nordahl." He wept and called the evening a shell. A former cellmate claimed Lelandais told him he had hit Noyer with a stone after being refused sex; the man's account had changed so often that all parties treated it as worthless.
The forensic evidence settled little. A forensic doctor found fractures of the nose and left jaw that had occurred around the time of death. With almost no soft tissue, the experts could not say what killed him; one said that if there was a fight, a neck injury was most likely. The court watched videos of a 2019 reconstruction in which Lelandais punched a dummy. Psychiatrists disagreed on whether he had a personality disorder. One panel found a severe antisocial, borderline and narcissistic personality disorder and a significant danger; another found no mental illness but a risk of depressive collapse. All agreed that he lied and concealed.
On May 6 and 7, Noyer's family testified. His father called Lelandais a "social predator." His mother told him, "You killed Arthur, you got rid of his body and you went on living as before. You stole his life." Jakubowicz pressed his client in open court to tell the truth if his version was false. Lelandais did not move: there was nothing sexual, he said, and it had been a fight.
Brunisso conceded that without a crime scene or a body there could be no irrefutable proof, but argued that the extreme violence of the blows showed an intent to kill, and asked for 30 years. She suggested a sexual motive, which the defense rejected. Jakubowicz asked for a conviction of violence causing death without intent, which carries 15 years. On May 11, at about 11:30 p.m., after about seven hours of deliberation, the court found him guilty of murder and sentenced him to 20 years, two-thirds to be served before any release, plus a 15-year weapons ban and 10 years of socio-judicial supervision. In its written reasons the court relied on his switching off his phones soon after the killing and his search for a place to hide the body. It found that Noyer, who had been seen staggering and collapsing in the street, was vulnerable and not in a state to fight, and it did not adopt the sexual motive. French law allowed either 30 years or 20 or less; the court cited his lack of prior violent convictions and good behavior in custody in choosing 20.
"What we wanted was for everyone to recognize that it was a murder," Didier Noyer said. Throughout the trial the Noyer family had approached Lelandais's mother, and on the last day she came to them. Jakubowicz announced that there would be no appeal.
The second trial opened before the Isère assize court in Grenoble on January 31, 2022, presided over by Valérie Blain, and lasted three weeks. More than 250 journalists were accredited, an overflow room was set up, and the jurors were offered psychological support. The case file ran to 23,000 pages. The family brought a large painted portrait of Maëlys and left it at the courtroom door. That week Jennifer de Araujo published a book about her daughter. On the first day Lelandais, holding back sobs, said he had caused Maëlys's death but had not wanted to, and apologized to her family.
Over the first week the court examined his life. His half-sister said she still loved her brother. His mother said that since 2017 she had been rejected and insulted everywhere. His brother, Sven, asked to be excused, and the president ordered him found. On February 2, Lelandais was questioned for five hours about the army and the years after it. "Before, I was lost. After, I was completely lost," he said of the night he killed Noyer. On February 4 a former girlfriend testified, and he told her that if she had answered a text he sent her that night, he would have left the wedding and "the little girl would still be here." Lawyers for Maëlys's family called the remark indecent.
On February 7 the parents of the cousins testified. The court watched the videos of the assaults, and for the first time Lelandais admitted pedophilic urges, while denying any sexual intent toward Maëlys. That afternoon Maëlys's parents, now divorced, spoke. Her mother addressed a portrait of her daughter: "I couldn't protect you from the bad people." Her father described himself as a father lost at sea, and a friend said he had lost 25 kilograms. Her sister, then 16, questioned Lelandais directly. "Did you rape my sister?" she asked. He said no. She asked why he had let the family search for months without saying where Maëlys was. He did not answer.
On Friday, February 11, after more than five hours of questioning, he changed his account. He said that Maëlys had come to his car of her own accord while he was leaving to buy cocaine, that he told her to get in so she could see his dogs, that she began to hiccup and cry on the road, and that in a moment of panic, with Arthur Noyer's face in his mind, he struck her three times. He left her body first near a railway line, went home to change, returned to the wedding to give himself an alibi, and later moved the body to the forest. Then, at his lawyer's urging, he said: "I acknowledge all the facts of which I am accused." He did not change his denial of any sexual motive. A psychiatrist told the court the claim of seeing Noyer's face had been invented.
On February 17, a lawyer for Maëlys's mother read a letter from Arthur Noyer's parents: "Stop using Arthur." The advocate general, Jacques Dallest, called him "an absolute social danger" and a "destroyer of happiness" and asked for life with a 22-year minimum. Jakubowicz asked for 30 years so that he could keep a distant hope. "With infinite pain, infinite punishment? No, a thousand times no," he told the jury. In his last words Lelandais apologized again and said the families would never accept his apologies.
On February 18, 2022, his 39th birthday, after about seven hours of deliberation, the jury found him guilty on all counts and sentenced him to life with a minimum term of 22 years and ten years of socio-judicial supervision with compulsory treatment. Joachim de Araujo had called the apologies "a form of comedy." That evening Jakubowicz said there would be no appeal, since it would be unworthy to prolong the family's ordeal.
After his arrest Lelandais was held in isolation at Saint-Quentin-Fallavier prison in Isère. In 2022 he was caught having sex with a female visitor in the visiting room there. In June 2022 he was moved to the high-security prison at Ensisheim, in Alsace. In late 2023, according to Le Parisien, as reported by France 3, he became the father of a son with that partner after visits in a family unit. Maëlys's mother called it sickening; Arthur Noyer's mother said that her son and Maëlys would never know the joy of being parents. In November 2023 he took his mother's name and is now legally Nordahl Périnet.
On January 12, 2024, the criminal court at Charleville-Mézières sentenced him to one year in prison for the sexual assault of his 14-year-old cousin at Vouziers in March 2017 and for threatening her so that she would not complain. He denied it. The Reims appeals court upheld the sentence on March 26, 2025. On September 19, 2025, the criminal court at Colmar, sitting in closed session, sentenced him to another year for violence against his partner in front of their 19-month-old son in the Ensisheim visiting room. He was barred from contact with the child for three years and lost parental authority. As of October 2026 he is at Ensisheim, serving his life sentence.
Two murders are proven and final; he did not appeal either verdict. Much else is not. In both cases the prosecution and the families argued for a sexual motive, and in both cases he denied it. A rape charge in the Maëlys case was dropped during the investigation for lack of evidence, and the Chambéry court did not adopt a sexual motive for Noyer. His accounts of both nights changed repeatedly, and the courts found them unreliable: the Chambéry court rejected his fight story, and he himself abandoned the claim that Maëlys's death was an accident. The former cellmate's story of a stone was discounted by every party. The roughly 40 cases flagged by the Ariane unit are not accusations, and despite the early fears that he was a serial killer, no other killing has been charged.
February 18, 1983: Nordahl Lelandais born in Boulogne-Billancourt.
2001 to 2005: Army service as a dog handler; discharged as unfit in 2005.
March 16, 2017: Sexual assault of a 14-year-old cousin at a funeral in Vouziers.
Night of April 11 to 12, 2017: Corporal Arthur Noyer, 23, disappears after hitchhiking in Chambéry.
Summer 2017: Sexual assaults on two young cousins, filmed on his phone.
Night of August 26 to 27, 2017: Maëlys de Araujo, 8, disappears from a wedding at Pont-de-Beauvoisin.
August 31, 2017: Lelandais taken into custody; released.
September 3, 2017: Rearrested after Maëlys's DNA is found in his car; jailed.
September 7, 2017: Noyer's skull found on the Col de Marocaz above Cruet.
November 30, 2017: First police interviews annulled; investigation widened to murder.
December 20, 2017: Placed under formal investigation for Noyer's killing.
February 14 to 15, 2018: Confesses to killing Maëlys and leads investigators to her remains in the Chartreuse.
March 29, 2018: Admits killing Noyer in what he calls a fight.
June 2, 2018: Maëlys's funeral at La Tour-du-Pin.
February 2019: Ariane unit reports about 40 cases where a link could be considered.
May 3 to 11, 2021: Noyer trial in Chambéry; 20 years.
January 31 to February 18, 2022: Maëlys trial in Grenoble; life with a 22-year minimum.
November 2023: Changes his surname to Périnet.
January 12, 2024: One year for assaulting his 14-year-old cousin; upheld on appeal March 26, 2025.
September 19, 2025: One year for domestic violence in the Ensisheim visiting room.