Murder of Maëlys de Araujo

Maëlys de Araujo (5 November 2008 – 27 August 2017) was a French child who was last seen alive in the early hours of 27 August 2017 at a wedding in Le Pont-de-Beauvoisin, in the Isère department of south-eastern France. After a DJ working at the event announced that she was missing, guests began searching for her, and a police report was filed about an hour later. Investigators went on to interview 180 wedding guests and, together with local volunteers, searched the surrounding woodland.

In September 2017, Nordahl Lelandais — an ex-soldier who had attended the wedding — was taken into custody after traces of De Araujo's DNA were found inside his Audi A3. Two police dogs became seriously ill after searching the vehicle. Lelandais had reportedly cleaned the car with a strong detergent a few hours after De Araujo disappeared, and closed-circuit television at a car wash recorded him doing so for more than two hours. Separate CCTV footage from the wedding venue showed Lelandais leaving with a "small, frail figure in a white dress" in the passenger seat of his car shortly before De Araujo was reported missing. His mobile phone was in airplane mode during this period and reconnected 39 minutes later, when he returned to the wedding alone.

According to a wedding guest, Lelandais had initially been invited only to the reception before being asked to the later party; another guest had asked him to bring cocaine, which he did, and he arrived shortly after midnight.

On 14 February 2018, Lelandais admitted to killing De Araujo and led police to the location where he had hidden her body. He told prosecutors he had killed her "involuntarily" but declined to elaborate further. A post-mortem examination found that De Araujo had suffered a fractured jaw, possibly caused by a violent blow to the face. Lelandais was subsequently held in a psychiatric unit within a prison in Bron, near Lyon.

On 17 February 2022 — his 39th birthday — Lelandais was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a minimum term of 22 years, for the kidnapping and murder of De Araujo.

Investigators separately examined whether Lelandais could be connected to other unresolved disappearances in the region. On 21 December 2017, he was charged with the killing of Arthur Noyer, a 23-year-old soldier who had vanished in April 2017 after hitchhiking from a nightclub in Chambéry; phone records and surveillance footage placed Lelandais's phone and car in the same area at the same time as Noyer. Lelandais initially denied involvement in Noyer's death before admitting to the killing on 29 March 2018. That case is documented separately from De Araujo's.

Two further references — contemporaneous coverage from BBC News and The Telegraph — appear in that article's citations.