It is an unprecedented psychiatric expertise that was carried out at the very end of the investigation into the murder of young Maëlys.
In their report filed in December 2020, two specialists in the analysis of the psyche of the killers, professors Bensussan and Rouillon, paint the chilling portrait of a man with deviant sexuality.
“Nordahl Lelandais suffers from antisocial personality traits and (...) a disorder of sexual impulse control, assert experts.
Despite the subject's denials, the study of the file brings many arguments in favor of a diagnosis of pedophilia (attraction to prepubescent children) with the particularity that it would be non-exclusive.
"The two doctors also insist on his" dangerous state in the psychiatric sense ", recalling that Lelandais had made" the choice of an unknown child ", by targeting Maëlys during a wedding in Pont-de-Beauvoisin (Isère) in Paris. summer 2017.
Maëlys was 9 years old when she was kidnapped during a wedding on August 27, 2017 in Pont-de-Beauvoisin (Isère).
DR
And yet, after three and a half years of investigation, no charge of sexual violence against the girl was finally brought up by the prosecution.
In a final indictment dated March 18, the Grenoble prosecutor's office calls for the indictment of the former 37-year-old dog handler before the Assize Court for the sole facts of "murder preceded by kidnapping and sequestration" .
For the public prosecutor, who castigates “the lies and alleged amnesias” of the suspect during the investigation, it is established that the former soldier led Maëlys in his car before killing her voluntarily, and not accidentally as he maintains.
But what would be the motive for the kidnapping?
Mystery.
Failing to convince the investigating judge to indict the suspect for "rape", despite multiple requisitions to this effect last fall, the prosecution reluctantly renounces to dismiss Nordahl Lelandais for this qualification.
The civil parties were however also convinced of the thesis of sexual violence.
"Objective elements leave us to fear that Maëlys was the subject of such abuse", declared Me Fabien Rajon, lawyer for the parents of Maëlys.
Compulsive consultation of child pornography
On reading the 48-page prosecution's indictment, the question of Nordahl Lelandais's sexuality is indeed omnipresent.
The representative of the prosecution does not hide his opinion on the initial intentions of the suspect: "The context of sexual attraction for little girls, the diagnosis of pedophilia noted by psychiatric experts, the repeated consultation of child pornography sites, his acting out on his grand-cousins shortly before the marriage (...) allow us to consider that the facts may have taken place concomitantly with sexual offenses against Maëlys (...) and thus explain the passage to the act of Nordahl Lelandais ”.
From the start of the investigation, the gendarmes of the Grenoble research section gathered a certain number of elements on the inclinations of the alleged killer for children.
There is the hearing of this former companion, who claims to have found at Nordahl Lelandais "a post-it mentioning a website which gave access to videos of a child pornography".
There is also the exploitation of the suspect's phone, which revealed nearly 300 images of very young girls, including a photo listed as child pornography by Interpol, on a secret application allowing content to be concealed.
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Not to mention the history of his Internet browsing which highlighted a compulsive consultation of child pornography with equivocal keywords.
On Instagram, under the pseudonym Jimwest973, the former dog handler, for example, was only subscribed to 41 accounts, but all of them published "photos of young women, adolescents, even prepubescent children in light clothing. gymnastics or in a bikini, in suggestive poses ”.
Killer out of sexual frustration?
Above all, the investigators discovered a disturbing similarity with the Arthur Noyer affair: the day of the death of this young corporal, whom he also admitted to having killed in the spring of 2017, like that of the death of little Maëlys, Nordahl Lelandais systematically requested, in vain, a sexual relation with one of his many conquests: one declined, the other was not reachable.
Does the ex-dog handler turn into a killer out of sexual frustration?
The investigations have in any case established that the thirty-something had filmed practicing sexual touching on two little-cousins, barely a week and a month and a half before the murder of Maëlys ... A context that raises questions.
Nordahl Lelandais admitted to the murder of Corporal Arthur Noyer in March 2017. DR
During his final interrogation on October 6, 2020, Nordahl Lelandais rejected any link between these attacks and the death of the girl, without denying his pedophile inclinations.
“No actually, I don't have an attraction for little girls, but I have had passages of attraction.
It's not something that obsesses me, ”he explained to the judge, assuring that only his little cousins bore the brunt of this period of deviance.
Nordahl Lelandais indicated too late where he had buried Maëlys for it to be possible to determine whether she had been sexually abused.
But for a long time, the gendarmes wondered about the reasons that led him to delete from his phone a video taken at 1:49 am, the evening of the wedding in Pont-de-Beauvoisin, as well as photos a few minutes later.
But also to throw another device in the lake of Bourget three days after this fatal evening.
Could it be a matter of removing compromising elements?
"His criminal course amply demonstrates the path of crime, with the common thread of a certain sexual intention and pedophile behavior, as illustrated in particular by the attacks on his grand-cousins", underlines Me Caroline Rémond, lawyer for the two young girls victims .
Seven psychiatrists and three psychologists
Finally, there are these intriguing confidences that Nordahl Lelandais would have made to a cell neighbor in the prison of Saint-Quentin-Fallavier (Isère).
Questioned several times by the examining magistrate, the latter assured that the alleged killer had told him to have "tried to rape Maëlys in the back of his car, that he had penetrated her with his fingers, but did not had failed to get a sufficient erection due to his alcohol and cocaine use ”.
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The ex-soldier firmly denied having entrusted such a story to this fellow inmate.
However, this witness also reported another detail that had never been made public, mentioned by Nordahl Lelandais during a single psychiatric examination: when hitting Maëlys, he explained that he had the impression "that the devil was in him ”, that he“ saw Arthur Noyer's face again ”and that he had the impression that the girl was“ attacking ”him.
Despite this aporia around the mobile, the many psychiatrists - seven - and psychologists - three - who have looked into the case of the alleged killer all come to the same conclusion: Nordahl Lelandais is obsessed with sex.
Experts have thus noted "a violently aggressive and impulsive behavior in a context of sexual frustration", describing a "sex addict (...) in addictive search for new experiences, mostly heterosexual, but also homosexual, domination-submission and without pedophile doubt ”.
"In all the acts alleged against Nordahl Lelandais, sex has a predominant part," supports Yves Crespin, lawyer for the associations l'Enfant bleu and la Voix de l'Enfant.
The notion of sexual violence was not retained and it is damaging, because it undoubtedly explains why he took Maëlys into his car that night.
And maybe also why she was killed… ”The lawyer of Nordahl Lelandais, Me Alain Jakubowicz, did not wish to speak.
