Update about Lucie Roux. The report dates from September 2022, and is the most recent that I can find.
Apparently, Nordahl Lelandais has been ruled out in her case, but a crimiminal offense remains a possibility.
Disparition de Lucie Roux en Savoie : dix ans de mystère et toujours de multiples pistes
Disappearance of Lucie Roux in Savoie: ten years of mystery and still multiple possibilities
The gendarmerie continues to investigate the disappearance of this forty-something woman, in September 2012, in Savoie. Although the Nordahl Lelandais hypothesis has allowed to relaunch the procedure in 2018, it now seems abandoned. But the criminal scenario has not been ruled out.
An investigation relaunched three times, a decade of mystery: when will the disappearance of Lucie Roux finally be resolved? This is what the relatives of the woman, who disappeared in 2012 in Savoie, are hoping for. The investigation was reopened in 2018 in the wake of the Nordahl Lelandais case to verify a possible link with the killer of little Maëlys and Arthur Noyer, and closed again in autumn 2019. The procedure has been active again since 27 October 2021 and has been assigned to the Regional Security of Chambéry. It is the voluntary work of the ARPD (Assistance and Research for Missing Persons) that this time has enabled new leads to be found.
The enigma began on 16 September 2012 in Bassens, near Chambéry. The 43-year-old woman from Savoie was living in therapeutic accommodation at the hospital, where she was being treated for social phobia, while benefiting from leave of absence. According to one of the two patients who shared this house with her, she left the premises around 4pm. When he asked her where she was going, she replied: "I don't have to tell you." No one will ever see her again.
The gendarmerie investigation got off to a bad start. It was launched late and missed a possible piece of evidence: her mobile phone. Lucie Roux left without taking it with her. The device was recovered by a nurse, placed in a box at the hospital... and misplaced. Could there have been a trace of interesting contacts or a possible appointment in her data? We won't know.
However, the investigators have traced part of her life. The day before, Lucie Roux made a curious trip. A taxi took her to a DIY shop where she bought plywood boards and nails. Then the taxi dropped her off on the heights of Chambéry, on the route de Saint-Saturnin, about a kilometre from her therapeutic home. Did she have an appointment? Was she doing some exploring? Was there a link with the institute for the disabled at this location? We don't know yet.
"After so much time, all hypotheses remain possible in this case: suicide, criminal case, accident or voluntary disappearance," Bernard Valézy, the vice-president of the ARPD, says.
Lucie Roux's personality almost logically points to suicide. She was suffering from serious psychological problems and could spend hours in her room without speaking to her roommates. She also had a complicated relationship with her own family, her father had died several years earlier. Seven months before she disappeared, she had spent a few days at her mother's house in Bonneval (Savoie) and had attempted to commit suicide by swallowing drugs before cutting her arm. Many theories have been put forward by observers of the case about the boards bought by Lucie Roux the day before her disappearance. Did she want to build her own coffin? In reality, the size of these boards corresponded to the size of the shelves in her home," explains Bernard Valézy. Perhaps she simply wanted to replace the missing ones.
The Roux family's lawyer, Christian Saint-André, also nuances the psychological portrait: "She was concerned about her appearance, she had had plastic surgery. It was because she had physical qualities that the salesman in the DIY shop still remembered her years later. The downside was that she could be subjected to a lot of unwanted attention and her social phobia was related to this problem."
Harassed to the point of being assaulted? It is this scenario that re-launched the investigation in 2018 with Nordahl Lelandais as a suspect. Especially since another patient from Bassens, Rachid Rammeche, disappeared in June 2009. In 2018, while the former soldier is implicated for two murders (Maëlys and Arthur Noyer), a witness claims to have already seen, in the refectory of the hospital of Bassens, Lelandais and Lucie Roux discuss together. But these revelations were finally deflated.
No hospitalization of Lelandais in this unit appears in the medical file of the criminal, a file that Marianne was able to consult.
If justice seems to have closed this door, the lawyer Christian Saint-André continues to wonder: "Lelandais had lived with his partner at the time in Chambéry, 800 metres as the crow flies from the psychiatric hospital. He could very well have gone to walk his dogs in the large garden next to the centre. A testimony collected by the ARPD describes the regular presence, around 2012, in this green space of a man with "short and shaved" hair accompanied by two Malinois, strongly reminiscent of Lelandais. But according to our information, the sexual predator had signed the inventory of condition to end the tenancy of his home in Chambéry one year before the disappearance of Lucie Roux. And although he had occasionally worked as an ambulance driver, this was three years earlier, in 2009.
The weakening of the Lelandais hypothesis does not, however, rule out the criminal scenario. The ARPD noted a point in the file that could undermine Lucie Roux's known schedule. According to the testimony of her roommates, the forty-three- year-old had indeed left the house on her bicycle. However, the bike was returned to its point of departure, and recovered by the family of the missing woman. Did Lucie Roux vanish later on? Did a third person bring the bike back?
Another disturbing detail: a roommate of Lucie Roux said that the day after her disappearance, her phone left in her room would have vibrated and a name would have appeared on the screen: "Jesus". According to a nurse who confided in Lucie's mother, Lucie sometimes went "to meet Jesus in the woods". A phrase that she had initially interpreted as a further sign of her daughter's strong faith. But was there really a Jesus in her life?
A faith that leads to another theory, that of a voluntary flight. Described as "mystical" by her mother, Lucie Roux would have contacted a religious congregation based in Saône-et-Loire in the hope of joining her. However, the date indicated by Lucie Roux corresponds to 17 September 2012, the day after her disappearance. It is true that in an e-mail, the congregation refused to accept her request, but she never consulted this reply. Did she try to go there in haste? Did she seek refuge in another abbey? In any case, no bank transaction was recorded on the account of Lucie Roux, who had left with a backpack and little money.
The last possibility is an accident in this region with its many cliffs. The DNA of Lucie Roux has been collected by the investigating services in order to be able to cross-check it with a possible unidentified corpse, just in case. To date, nothing has come of it.
So many questions still remain unanswered, highlighting the weaknesses of the investigation. "A gendarme assured me that the BlueStar [which allows the chemical detection of traces of blood thanks to a blue light, editor's note]
had been used in the house," lawyer Christian Saint-André observes.
"But this analysis does not exist in the file. They didn't do it! From the outset, justice has refused to carry out certain investigative acts. If it hadn't been for the ARPD, the case would still be closed..."
BBM
