Gendarmes refuse to speculate over Annecy killings

Quiet hamlet of Chevaline in profound shock as police admit to no leads yet on shotgun deaths
Gendarme Lt Col Benoit Vinneman in Annecy
Lieutenant Colonel Benoit Vinneman at a press conference in Annecy, on Thursday, covering the killings of a French cyclist and British family. Photograph: Lionel Cironneau/AP

On the dusty, narrow Route de la Combe d'Ire leading up to the Alpine beauty spot celebrated in local guidebooks as a tourist must-see, a sign reads "Dangerous Road" in French, English and German.

For the British holidaymakers who ventured up this single lane of ragged asphalt on a sunny late afternoon on Wednesday – and the ill-fated French cyclist who followed moments later – the warning was to prove prophetically true in ways nobody could have imagined.

On Thursday, this picturesque corner of France where the cows outnumber local people by two to one was in a state of profound shock at its transformation from rural idyll to international crime scene. "Nothing happens here. Nothing," said one local woman, holding her face in her hands, before turning away visibly upset.

Chevaline may be in the guidebooks, but few in the outside world will have heard of it until this week. The hamlet, population 150, puts the somnolence into sleepy. Just off the district road that flanks Lake Annecy, visitors, even those armed with maps and guides, have to go looking for it. La Route de la Combe d'Ire, which twists and turns from the lush fields below up into the forested mountains, requires extraordinary curiosity.

In winter, this is ski territory. In summer, it is a magnet for hikers, cyclists who like a challenge and paragliders who throw themselves off the surrounding mountains to swirl and swoop like modern-day Icaruses high over the water.

Nobody knows what drew the British family to this particular spot on that particular day. Police say they were wearing "city clothes" and certainly were not dressed for serious walking. Perhaps, police officers suggested, they had fancied the idea of a "pleasant stroll" in the woods.

"Just because they weren't dressed for hiking doesn't mean they weren't going for a family walk with the children. It's a lovely, agreeable spot," said public prosecutor Eric Maillaud with a certain insistence.

The family had set off sometime on Wednesday from Le Solitaire du Lac, a summer camping ground surrounded by grazing Abondance cows, for which the Haute Savoie is famous, where they had booked a family caravan, complete with rust-coloured awning, from 3 September for what detectives described as a "short break".

The adults chatted in English with fellow campers; the girls played outside. They were, to all appearances, a perfectly normal family enjoying a perfectly ordinary late summer holiday.

Police said there were bags and suitcases in their BMW estate car when they left, but they were certainly planning on returning and the caravan, which was neat and tidy, showed no signs of being abandoned.

Some time on Wednesday, the family left the campsite and drove along the busy two lane route that follows the western perimeter of Lake Annecy, France's second largest lake whose breathtaking beauty has earned its reputation as the "Venice of the Alps".

From the moment they turned off the winding route around the lake into the hills, shortly after 3pm, however, what happened becomes as hazy as the ethereal mist rising off the vast lake on Thursday yesterday morning.

Less than 24 hours after the gruesome discovery of four dead bodies, a critically injured girl and a terrified four-year-old at the top of the Combe d'Ire, a posse of local gendarmes stood guard by the "Dangerous Road". At the Saint-Jorioz campsite, the atmosphere had lost something of its bucolic charm as staff attempted to keep out the nosy and inquisitive. "Sorry, you can't come in. Sorry, we can't say anything. Sorry," said a French girl on the gate.

It was hoped the press conference at the Palais de Justice in Annecy, just 10 miles as the crow flies, but considerably longer by road, might clear the fog of rumour that had the family gunned down by drug barons or on the orders of mafia dons, or victims of a rabid madman picking off English tourists. But police and prosecutor stuck to the facts.

"If we had found something suspicious in the car, I can tell you I would not tell you," said Lt Col Benoît Vinnemann, head of the local gendarmerie.

Maillaud went through what was known step by step, by turns impatient and incredulous at journalists' demands for the most minute detail.

"A British cyclist was making his way up the road around 3.50pm. There was a climb so he was going at his own pace when he was overtaken by another cyclist. He carried on up the hill and arrived at a forest parking spot popular with holidaymakers as the start for forest walks and hikes. When he arrived he found a vehicle, a powerful BMW family car, with the motor still running. The first thing he saw was a little girl by the car, clearly still alive. He went to her aid and put her in the rescue position then alerted the emergency services.

"He then saw the cyclist that had passed him on the ground, clearly dead. The cyclist's bike was abandoned a little way away. He broke the driver's side window – it was a British car so this was the right hand window – to cut the ignition. When he did so he saw three dead people in the car – one man in the driver's seat and two women behind, one of them a certain age and one younger."

The British cyclist, a former member of the RAF was "as you can imagine, profoundly shocked".

"It was he who found the little girl first. She had suffered very serious head fractures from being beaten very badly and had been shot in the shoulder. She was hit extremely violently," Maillaud said.

Both he and the gendarmes, who immediately sealed off the area until a forensics squad arrived from Paris, insisted they had no idea a second child was still in the car. "We didn't touch the bodies, and this enabled the second girl to hide. There was nothing that led us to believe there was anyone else in the car apart from the three dead people.

"It was only when a neighbour at the camping site who had spoken to the family and told investigators there were two children and not one, we were alerted. In any case there was only one car seat in the vehicle. It wasn't until around 23.00 we became aware there was a second child.

"She was hiding under the legs, under the skirt and amid the bags of the women in the back. She was completely invisible and completely silent."

Terrorised and unable to tell helpers from attackers, Maillaud said, she had remained paralysed with fear and mute.

"She was clearly happy when she was taken into the arms of the gendarme who brought her out of the car. She smiled and started to speak in English. He spoke back to her in English. Almost straight away she asked where was her family," Maillaud continued.

Lt Col Bertrand François, of the Haute Savoie gendarmerie, added: "We did not search for survivors because there was never any indication there was a living person in that car. The girl was small and hidden and did not show up on a heat detector."

While refusing to speculate, Maillaud admitted that the modus operandi of the killer had been "strange".

The gunman had used a semi-automatic pistol, requiring the trigger to be pulled for each shot, and not a shotgun as previously reported. The car had not been sprayed with bullets, but the killer had specifically targeted the windows, leaving the bodywork unscratched. The driver, the elderly woman in the rear of the car – thought to be the children's grandmother – and the passing cyclist, who appears to have had no connection with the family, had all died from shots to the head. It was not yet known how the younger woman – believed to be the children's mother – had died.

There was no evidence of theft and no obvious motive. "At the moment we know strictly nothing," Maillaud said. "All hypotheses are being explored but right now we have no idea. It's impossible to say who was killed first or what exactly happened."

Vinnemann said the beauty spot at the top of Route de la Combe d'Ire was not known as a haunt for delinquents or drug dealers, nor was there a problem with guns in the area.

"We have a profusion of ideas and lots of hypotheses, all of which have to be looked at. We don't, at the moment, have any leads," Vinnemann said. "I have been a gendarme for a long time and have seen some things, but I have never come across anything like this."

Maillaud insisted he wanted to "stick to the facts", but allowed himself a moment of pessimism.

"My biggest worry is that we will not find the killers and we will never know," he said, adding that one of his principle concerns was for the two orphaned girls.

"They are now our greatest concern. Clearly we will try to speak to them but we will have to do so gently, with care and humanity. Can you imagine? That four-year-old child sat silent and still for eight hours next to a dead body. I don't know how many four-year-olds any of you know, but just imagine that."