Nordahl Lelandais admitted on Friday during his trial for the murder of little Maëlys having struck him “willing blows”, but categorically denied having wanted to sexually assault or kill him.
“It’s time to explain to you, you have the floor,” President Valérie Blain told him in the introduction to this long-awaited first interrogation on the facts, at the end of the second week of his trial for the murder of the child preceded by abduction and sequestration.
But the 38-year-old ex-soldier did not reconsider his previous positions, denying having “voluntarily” kidnapped the girl, as well as any pedophile motive towards her, while he is also on trial before the Grenoble assizes for sexual assaults against two little cousins aged 4 and 6 that same summer of 2017.
Standing in the box in a light shirt, Nordahl Lelandais began by telling his version of the facts, often with tears in his eyes, acknowledging that he had very often lied to the investigators.
“Whatever I say, I will not be believed”, he said sorry several times, while ensuring to say “the truth today”.
Returning to the night of August 26 to 27, he admitted crying that “the blows were voluntary, it was not an accident. But I had no intention of killing” Maëlys.>- “She opens the door” –
Then President Valérie Blain bombarded him with questions for almost three hours while he multiplied the evasions of the type “I don’t know (…) It’s very complicated”.
According to Lelandais, the eight-year-old child, met at a wedding party in Pont-de-Beauvoisin (Isère), had a few brief interactions with him during the evening about dogs, then joined him from willingly in the parking lot as he was about to drive off to look for cocaine.
“And stupidly, I tell her + go up + and she opens the door”. “I had no bad intentions,” he says. “I tell myself that it will make him happy to see my dogs,” he says to explain the presence on board of this little girl whom he did not know a few hours earlier.
“There on the way, it does not happen at all as it should have happened unfortunately”, he continues. “She started hiccuping.”
Nordahl Lelandais says he then felt the same “fear” as the night of April 2017 during which he killed young Corporal Arthur Noyer. “I had killed a man before, it was something that was on my mind constantly and I turned my head and felt completely crazy,” he says. “I don’t know if I can speak the word hallucination”. He turns to her and deals “three blows”.
Having tried in vain to take the pulse of the inanimate little girl, he ends up dropping her off in a first place near a railway line before going home to change and return to the wedding to have “a form of alibi” . He will later transport the body to a forest “to hide (his) crime”.
“I don’t know what happened. But it was me, of course it was me who did it,” he said, once again offering his “apologies” to the family. “Shame, remorse, guilt, I will have all my life,” he says.
The accused, on the other hand, categorically rejects any pedophile motive. “We would like me to say that it is a sexual crime but not at all,” he added. “I was not at all in this sexual perspective, far from it”.
The statements of the accused are “an insult and a spit in the face of my clients”, reacted to the press the lawyer for Maëlys’ mother, Me Fabien Rajon. “He is someone who has no respect, no consideration for the families of the victims”, he was indignant.>- “They are bluffing” –
In the morning, the former prosecutor in charge of the investigation at the time of Maëlys’ disappearance, Jean-Yves Coquillat, now retired, had described the accused and his lawyers as “excellent poker players (who ) wait to see the other’s play (and) bluff”.
As for Lelandais, he is someone “extremely dangerous”, “a liar, a boaster, a dissimulator, a seducer”, he had estimated.
His presentation was brutally interrupted by defense lawyer Me Alain Jakubowicz, who said he had “never seen such a direct attack” against the defense and demanded in vain that the session be interrupted.
Already sentenced in Chambéry in May 2021 to 20 years’ imprisonment for the murder of Arthur Noyer, the accused faces life imprisonment for the murder of Maëlys.