The Murder of Maëlys de Araujo

A disappearance during a wedding

Maëlys was attending a family wedding in Le Pont-de-Beauvoisin, a town in the Isère department near the border with Savoie. In the early hours of August 27, adults at the reception realized that she could no longer be found. Guests searched the venue and surrounding area before gendarmes were called. The disappearance quickly became a major criminal investigation.

Investigators questioned a large number of guests and reconstructed movements around the reception. One attendee, former soldier and dog handler Nordahl Lelandais, drew particular scrutiny because he had left the celebration during the relevant period and because his explanations changed as detectives compared them with physical and digital evidence.

Evidence points to Lelandais

Within days, investigators identified DNA belonging to Maëlys in Lelandais’s Audi. Contemporary reporting also described inconsistencies in his account and the fact that he had cleaned the vehicle after the wedding. He was placed under formal investigation in September 2017 for kidnapping and unlawful confinement, while he continued to deny having abducted or killed the child.

The inquiry continued for months without the recovery of Maëlys’s body. Investigators examined vehicle evidence, surveillance material, telephone data and traces connected to the car. The case remained a disappearance investigation in public view, but the evidentiary focus had increasingly narrowed toward Lelandais.

February 2018: admission and recovery of the remains

In February 2018, after forensic work identified a small blood trace belonging to Maëlys in the vehicle, Lelandais changed his account. He admitted causing her death and led investigators to a remote area where human remains were recovered and identified as Maëlys.

His explanation evolved over time. He initially described the death as unintended. At his 2022 trial, however, he ultimately acknowledged that he had voluntarily killed Maëlys. That admission was significant because it removed the central dispute over whether the fatal act had been intentional, although the precise motive remained less clear.

The wider criminal context

By the time of the Maëlys trial, Lelandais had already been convicted in a separate case for the killing of Corporal Arthur Noyer. The Maëlys proceedings also included charges involving sexual assaults against two of Lelandais’s young relatives. Those separate offenses formed part of the same trial but should not be conflated with unproven allegations concerning Maëlys herself.

The prosecution asked the jury to assess the kidnapping, confinement and killing on the evidence presented in court rather than on the broader public image that had developed around the defendant. The assize court found him guilty of the principal offenses relating to Maëlys and of the additional sexual offenses involving the two other children.

Trial and sentence

Nordahl Lelandais went on trial before the Isère assize court in Grenoble in January and February 2022. During the proceedings he acknowledged responsibility for Maëlys’s death and, after initially maintaining that he had not intended to kill her, admitted that the killing was voluntary.

On February 18, 2022, the court sentenced him to life imprisonment, accompanied by a 22-year safety period before ordinary eligibility for release measures. Reporting immediately after the verdict stated that he did not intend to appeal, leaving the conviction and life sentence as the operative legal outcome.

Timeline

What the verdict established

The verdict established Lelandais’s criminal responsibility for kidnapping, unlawfully confining and intentionally killing Maëlys. It also resolved the central legal question of intent after years in which the defendant had offered changing explanations. The court did not need to establish a single, fully articulated motive in order to convict him of murder.

Because the case generated intense public attention, a careful account should distinguish the proven offenses from speculation that circulated during the investigation. The strongest record is the one anchored in the forensic investigation, Lelandais’s eventual admissions and the assize court’s findings.

Current status

The murder case is adjudicated. Nordahl Lelandais remains subject to the life sentence imposed in February 2022, with the 22-year safety period attached to that sentence. Later legal proceedings involving him concern other conduct and do not alter the conviction for the kidnapping and murder of Maëlys de Araujo.

Maëlys’s case remains one of the most widely reported French criminal investigations of the late 2010s. Its enduring significance lies less in the notoriety of the offender than in the investigative progression from a child’s unexplained disappearance to forensic evidence, recovery of her remains and a final murder conviction.

Related France case files