CHAPTER 1: Murder In the Alps

The driver was a British engineer born in Iraq who worked on satellite systems in Surrey, and maybe that’s why he was dead and all the others were, too. On a Wednesday afternoon in September 2012, Saad al-Hilli drove his maroon BMW from a campground on the shore of Lake Annecy, in the French Alps, and into a tiny community called Chevaline, at the far edge of which the pavement slips into the trees. The path rising out of Chevaline is steep and pocked and hyphenated by tight bridges crossing a noisy froth of water. For three kilometers, there is nowhere to turn around and nowhere to go but up, and then there is nowhere to go at all. The public road ends at a small parking area, where Saad nosed his BMW to the tree line.

September 5 was a spectacular day, sunlight drizzling through foliage that twitched with the breeze. Saad, who was 50, stood with his elder daughter, 7-year-old Zainab, maybe talking to a local cyclist who’d pedaled up the mountain or maybe just absorbed in the scenery. It is impossible to say for sure.

Almost certainly, though, he didn’t see the shooter in the trees before he heard the ﬁrst shots.

Saad screamed at Zainab to get in the car. He quickstepped to the driver’s door, twisted into the seat. But Zainab hadn’t moved, just stood there, frozen. Saad probably didn’t realize that. What man leaves his daughter to get shot? He slapped the gearshift into reverse, cranked the wheel hard to the left, stomped on the gas. The BMW skittered backward in an arc, a jittery half circle. The shooter was out of the woods by then, standing in the center of the arc like a pivot point. The car completed the turn, the rear against the tree line, got stuck, wheels trenching divots into the loose soil at the edge of the forest.

Saad had clipped the French cyclist with the bumper, dragged him through the turn, left him bleeding in the dirt.

Most likely Saad already was dead. He was shot four times, twice in the head. His wife, a 47-year-old dentist named Iqbal, was dead in the backseat, also shot four times, also twice in the head. Her mother, Suhaila al-Allaf, was dead, too, shot three times, twice in the head. The cyclist was shot ﬁve times, including twice in the head. Zainab was still alive, though barely: She was shot once in the shoulder, then clubbed in the skull with the butt of the gun.

The shooter had ﬁred 21 times, mostly at a moving vehicle. Seventeen bullets hit people. None of them struck the frame or the doors or the fenders or any other part of the BMW. Eight of them were head shots.

Apparently he was a professional.

The EMTs arrived minutes after Zainab was found collapsed in the road by a British cyclist who happened upon the scene. The gendarmes, who are part of the French military and responsible for policing the rural districts, swarmed the mountain close behind them.

Uniformed officers closed off the road, the Route de la Combe d’Ire, and forensic technicians gathered shell casings and marked where they fell and photographed the blood and studied Saad’s BMW without disturbing any of the bodies. They did this with such delicacy that they did not notice for almost eight hours that Saad’s younger daughter, 4-year-old Zeena, was alive and physically unharmed, hiding beneath the folds of her dead mother’s skirt.

Investigators are not supposed to embrace reﬂexive theories in the moments immediately following a crime, and the prosecutor in Annecy insists they did not. “The only thing that came to mind,” Eric Maillaud says of all the blood and bodies, “is that we have someone who has no respect for human life.” He says this slowly, deliberately. Maillaud, who is 53 years old, has been a prosecutor for eleven years, ﬁve of them in Annecy, which is a small, serene city unaccustomed to spectacular spasms of violence. Only one or two people are murdered in a typical year, and those are routine as killings go: domestics or robberies or escalated arguments, single ﬂashes of rage. But this on the mountain? “There are very few people who are capable of killing so many people,” Maillaud says. “And to try to kill children?” He shakes his head slowly. “So we know we are dealing with savages. That is the only thing that comes to mind.”