A woman’s body was discovered Wednesday in Champéry (VS) in the car of the mother suspected of having killed her three children the day before in Taninges, in Haute-Savoie. Checks are underway to determine if it is indeed her.
According to information transmitted by the Swiss police to French investigators, it is indeed this 45-year-old woman, actively sought since Tuesday, two sources close to the case told AFP, confirming information from Dauphiné Libéré.
The body was found in Champéry, a Valais commune located approximately 70 km from Taninges.
He was ‘in the vehicle usually used by the mother of the three children,’ said Bonneville prosecutor Boris Duffau in a press release Wednesday evening.
‘The precise circumstances of the death are not yet known; an autopsy has been ordered by the canton of Valais public prosecutor’s office. Checks are still underway to ensure with certainty the identity of the deceased,’ he said.
Contacted by Keystone-ATS, the attorney general of the canton of Valais, Beatrice Pilloud indicates that she has ‘for the moment no request for international assistance from the French authorities’.
The autopsies of the three children confirmed that they died from stab wounds, he added, stressing that the investigation was continuing to ‘determine the exact circumstances of the commission of the facts’ .
Two boys aged 2 and 11 and a girl aged 13 were found dead on Tuesday in the house of this blended family living in Taninges. A flagrant investigation into ‘voluntary homicide’ was opened and their mother, a teacher described as depressed, had been wanted since the discovery of the bodies.
The search mobilized on Tuesday and Wednesday around sixty members of the police and a helicopter to search the massifs surrounding this small mountain town close to the Swiss border.
Divers from Aix-les-Bains, Valence and Evian were also sent to the site to probe the water points. The device was coordinated by the Bonneville research brigade and the Chambéry research section.
In Taninges itself, the police again blocked access on Wednesday to the dead end leading to the vast chalet with a garden with barbecue and swings where the family lived, at the foot of the mountains, AFP noted.
‘Idyllic setting’
The hamlet where the family resided, located away from the village, has only 11 inhabitants and the three young victims were the only children living there, a neighbor in a long vest told AFP from her doorstep. .
“They often rode bikes, they were cheerful,” she added, declaring herself “stunned” by these “inconceivable” murders.
These homicides caused strong emotion in this mountain town of 3,500 inhabitants in the Giffre valley, approximately 50 km east of Geneva, where a medico-psychological emergency unit was set up at the town hall.
‘It was a couple who lived in a hamlet (…) a little bit far from the town in a somewhat idyllic setting,’ mayor Gilles Péguet told AFP. ‘They felt good there, they had their parents, grandparents who were right next to them,’ he continued, describing a family that is now ‘devastated’.
The mother was a teacher in a primary school in a village near Taninges, the rectorate of the Grenoble academy, which oversees five departments in the region, including Haute-Savoie, told AFP.
Two establishments where she had worked received a visit from a representative of the rectorate on Wednesday morning and a ‘listening unit’ was set up. “The resources are put in place so that staff and students can feel supported in this tragedy,” we explained to the rectorate.
/ATS
