Maëlys de Araujo was a French child who was last seen alive in the early morning of 27 August 2017 at a wedding in the Chambéry region of south-eastern France. Her remains were found on 14 February 2018 when Nordahl Lelandais, who admitted to killing her, led investigators to the area where he had disposed of the body.
Investigation
Maëlys de Araujo was last seen at a wedding in Le Pont-de-Beauvoisin, Isère at approximately 3:00 am on 27 August 2017. After a DJ working at the wedding announced that she was missing, guests immediately started looking for her, and after an hour of searching, a police report was filed. In the months that followed, police interviewed 250 wedding guests. Along with local volunteers, they also searched the dense woodland around the area. , an ex-soldier who attended the wedding, was taken into custody in September 2017 after traces of De Araujo's DNA were found in his Audi A3 car. Two police dogs fell seriously ill after searching the car. Lelandais had reportedly used a strong detergent to clean it a few hours after De Araujo disappeared. A car washCCTV camera recorded him cleaning the car for more than two hours. CCTV footage showed Lelandais leaving the wedding venue with a "small, frail figure in a white dress" in the passenger seat of his car shortly before De Araujo was reported missing. Lelandais' mobile phone was in airplane mode around this time, and then reconnected after 39 minutes, when he returned to the wedding alone. On 14 February 2018, Lelandais admitted to killing De Araujo, and led the police to where he had hidden her body. He told prosecutors he had killed her "involuntarily" but refused to elaborate further. The post-mortem established that the girl had suffered a fractured jaw, possibly from a violent blow to the face. Lelandais has been held in custody since 16 February 2018, in a psychiatric unit in a prison in Bron, just outside Lyon.
Link to other cases
Prosecutors investigating De Araujo's death suspected that Lelandais is a serial killer. On 21 December 2017, he was charged with the killing of Arthur Noyer, a 23-year-old soldier who vanished after hitchhiking from a disco in Chambéry on 12 April 2017. Investigators found that Lelandais's mobile phone had been in the same area at the same time as Noyer's. Lelandais's Audi A3 car was identified in the area on surveillance cameras. An analysis of his computer found he had searched for "decomposition of a human body" on the internet two weeks after Noyer disappeared. Lelandais admitted having given Noyer a lift but first denied any involvement in his death, before eventually admitting the killing on 29 March 2018. Other cases that may be linked to Lelandais include those of Jean-Christophe Morin and Ahmed Hamadou, who vanished from a festival in Fort de Tamié in 2011 and 2012 respectively.
