On August 9, 1988, gendarmes in Saône-et-Loire noticed a battered Volkswagen camper van parked at the end of a dead-end road near a high-speed rail line under construction at Bussières, and walked over thinking it might belong to protesters against the project. The man inside told them he was a noncommissioned officer using his leave to see the country. His papers showed that he was Pierre Chanal, assigned from 1977 to 1986 to the 4th Dragoon Regiment at Mourmelon, in the Marne. Through the rear window the second gendarme saw a man's head wrapped in a blanket. Freed from his bonds, the man turned out to be Balázs Falvay, a twenty-year-old Hungarian who had been hitchhiking at Chalon-sur-Saône the night before when Chanal picked him up. He said Chanal had kidnapped and raped him, and in the van police found sex toys and a camera holding pictures of what he described.
The name Mourmelon meant something to them. Since January 1980 young men had been vanishing from a triangle of roads around the camp there, many of them conscripts hitchhiking on leave: five soldiers between 1980 and 1982, a civilian on his way to the camp in 1985, and a soldier of the 4th Dragoons in 1987. For years the military authorities denied there was anything to explain and called the missing men deserters. Two bodies had been found. Olivier Donner, a 4th Dragoons soldier who disappeared in 1982, was recovered on October 31 of that year in a grove near Mailly-le-Camp. Trevor O'Keeffe, a young Irishman hitchhiking through France, was found on August 8, 1987, half buried in a shallow grave in a grove near Alaincourt in the Aisne, strangled with a cord. The eight were Patrick Dubois, Serge Havet, Manuel Carvalho, Pascal Sergent, Olivier Donner, Patrice Denis, Patrick Gache and Trevor O'Keeffe. After Gache disappeared, the serial killer Michel Peiry had been arrested, but nothing could be established against him.
Chanal was born at Saint-Étienne on November 18, 1946. From 1965 to 1977 he served as a sergeant with the 30th Dragoons at the Valdahon camp in Franche-Comté, and then became a chief warrant officer and instructor at Mourmelon, where his record was spotless and his superiors called his conduct exemplary. He ran fifteen kilometers every morning, was trained in hand-to-hand combat and loved parachuting. From January 18 to May 15, 1985, he served as a United Nations peacekeeper in Lebanon and was decorated for it.
On October 23, 1990, the Saône-et-Loire assize court sentenced him to ten years for the kidnapping and rape of Falvay. He said nothing at all during the trial or after it. In the prison at Dijon he asked to be held in solitary confinement, and he was released on June 16, 1995. The inquiry into the disappearances, meanwhile, had come apart through scattered files, contradictory expert reports, the army's denials and the slowness of the courts.
A new investigating judge revived it, and advances in forensic science supplied what had been missing. Among dozens of traces taken from the camper van, DNA from three of the missing men was identified, and soil on a shovel was found to be consistent with the soil around O'Keeffe's grave. On August 10, 2001, the judge sent Chanal for trial before the Marne assize court for the abduction and murder of Patrice Denis, Patrick Gache and Trevor O'Keeffe, and dismissed the cases of the other five. The court of appeal at Reims confirmed the order on July 5, 2002, on charges of abduction and premeditated murder. Chanal had said publicly that if he was put on trial he would kill himself.
On May 12, 2003, the eve of the trial, he tried to. The hearing opened the next day with the dock empty and was put off until October. It reopened at Reims on October 14, and Chanal appeared in court gravely weakened. That night, in the hospital at Reims where he was being held under close watch, he cut his left femoral artery with a razor blade, and he died on October 15, 2003. The autopsy found a widespread cancer that no one had detected; he never went to a doctor. His death ended the trial, and no court ever ruled on whether he had killed any of the eight.