/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/D5DUX3MRJ5A4RBZA3VKHJMXB3U.jpg)
The news had the whole of France in suspense on Friday night of October 11. The police claimed to have arrested Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès in Glasgow. Eight and a half years of intense hunting for one of the country's most wanted criminals ended. Finally, the question that so many French people asked themselves since the grotesque discovery in a family home in Nantes in 2011 was going to have an answer: What led a wealthy family man to shoot his wife and four children to death. bury them in the garden of your house and disappear without a trace?
Almost a year later, France remains unanswered. The detainee in Scotland was not Ligonnès, but a pensioner who lives on horseback between the outskirts of Paris and Scotland. The error brought out the colors of a police officer who has been following false leads for years and, also, of a press that launched itself in a whirlwind on what seemed the news of the decade. Since then, silence. Until a new investigation by the French magazine Society , which appeared shortly after Netflix aired an episode of the American show Unsolved Mysteries dedicated to Ligonnès, this summer relaunched the XDDL affair , as the French call their most famous fugitive by its acronym. The country is once again hooked on a history with too many old and many new questions.
55 Boulevard Robert Schuman in Nantes has been for sale for eight years. Impossible to get rid of this single-family house of 122 square meters and 300 more of garden. For the French, it remains "the house of horrors." In the garden, on the morning of April 21, 2011, under a layer of cement, five human corpses and those of two dogs were found, all wrapped in large plastic bags and with several gunshot wounds. The agents guess what the autopsy confirms shortly after: they are Agnès Dupont de Ligonnès, 49, and her children Arthur (20), Thomas (18), Anne (16) and Benoît, 13. The police were looking for the family since mysteriously disappeared earlier in the month. Only one member of the Ligonnès clan is still missing, Xavier, the father, aged 50. Is he just another victim or the perpetrator ?, asks a country devastated by such a sinister crime.
The reconstruction of the events and the trail left soon open up a disturbing suspicion. The mother and three of the children died on the night of Sunday, April 3-4, after having gone, with their father, to the cinema and to dinner at a restaurant. That Monday, Ligonnès visits his son Thomas, in Angers, where he studies, and also dines with him, as if nothing had happened. He lures him to Nantes one day later and kills him that night, two days after massacring the rest of the family. During all this time, Ligonnès continues to send messages to relatives and friends with the mobile phones and social networks of his wife and children. Meanwhile, he is deleting digital files that can allow him to follow his trail. On April 9, family and friends receive a strange letter announcing that the family is going to the United States, protected by the anti-drug agency DEA due to a large drug trafficking case.
"From April 5 to 10, Ligonnès does everything possible to reinforce the thesis of a departure abroad and to clean, with extreme precision, the smallest details of his life", sums up Society in a 70-page report in two issues. In this, rather than looking for the whereabouts of Ligonnès, a detailed investigation is made of that family that seemed "the normal neighbor next door", but turns out to be full of shadows, explains in a telephone conversation one of the journalists who has dedicated four years to the XDDL case , Pierre Boisson. Ligonnès, who comes from a noble but impoverished and deeply religious family - his mother is suspected of leading a Catholic sect in Versailles - does not succeed in making any of the businesses he undertakes take hold. In 2011, he is drowning in debts with creditors, family, friends and even lovers, with whom he cheats on a wife over whom he exercises sinister control. Nothing to do with the bcbg family ( bon chic, bon genre , as the bourgeois and conservative families are called in France) projected by the Ligonnès.
The father leaves the house on April 10 and, after several nights in hotels, his trail is permanently lost on the 15th. By the time the police find the bodies six days later and issue an international search warrant, it is too late. The track has cooled down.
The interest of the French, no. In France "each decade has its successes and they are not necessarily the most tortuous or bloody, but the ones that have no answer, the mysterious ones", explains Boisson, given the fascination for this case. In the eighties, he recalls, it was that of little Grégory Villemin, the four-year-old boy found dead, tied hand and foot, on the bank of a river in the Vosges, a crime that was always attributed to the family environment but that continues without resolving. In the nineties it was that of Jean-Claude Romand, the false doctor who for almost two decades led a double life and ended up killing his closest relatives. The murderer, who inspired Emmanuel Carrère to write The Adversary , served 26 years in prison, but "there has never been an explanation" for his actions, recalls Boisson. "Something similar happens with Ligonnès, it raises many questions, that is what arouses the interest of society."
For almost a decade, the police have not stopped receiving calls of alleged sightings of Ligonnès in multiple parts of France, but also in Tunisia, Las Vegas or, since Netflix aired the chapter dedicated to the French murderer, Chicago. A year before the Scottish fiasco, police searched a monastery in southeastern France in January 2018, but the man several people had identified as the parricide turned out to be a monk of reasonable resemblance to Ligonnès. It is not even known if the murderer is still alive or committed suicide after the massacre. The police themselves are divided on this issue, Boisson notes. Even so, the search continues. And France continues to devour any track. Despite having doubled its circulation to 130,000 copies, Society has once again flown off the newsstands and the two issues of the summer are sold online for up to 35 euros, five times their price.
