Chanal was born at Saint-Etienne on November 18, 1946 and was an adjutant in the 4th Dragoon regiment, based at Mourmelon-le-Grand in the Marne. Between 1980 and 1987 eight young men, most of them conscripts, vanished from the roads around the camps at Mourmelon and Suippes. Two bodies were recovered years later; the rest were never found.
Chanal came to attention in August 1988, when gendarmes stopped his van in the Var on an unrelated check and found a young Hungarian hitchhiker inside, drugged and bound. He was convicted of that offence in 1990 and served ten years.
The men who disappeared were Patrick Dubois, nineteen; Serge Havet, twenty; Manuel Carvalho, nineteen; Pascal Sergent, nineteen; Olivier Donner, twenty; Patrice Denis, twenty; Patrick Gache, eighteen; and Trevor O'Keefe, twenty.
He was charged over the Mourmelon disappearances and the investigation ran for fifteen years, held up by the absence of bodies and by long disputes over what the army had known and when. His first trial opened at Reims in October 2003. On the evening of October 14, before the evidence had been heard, he cut an artery with a razor blade in his cell and died the next day.
The prosecution therefore lapsed. Nothing against Chanal in the disappearances was ever tested at trial, and no verdict exists. The families, who had waited more than twenty years, were left without one, and their long campaign is what kept the case in the French news for a generation. The range of three to eight reflects the state of the file: eight disappearances in the series, two bodies, no convictions.
The entry is retained because the case is significant in France, and it should be read as an unresolved investigation rather than as an established series of murders.