SCANNING the desolate Alpine landscape, Christian Moller shakes his head grimly as he ponders the mystery of two-year-old Emile Soleil’s tragic final moments.
The boy’s tiny skull was discovered last Saturday in a wooded ravine, about a mile from his grandfather’s home, eight months after he disappeared.
I ask Christian, born and raised in the middle of those mountains, if he thinks the boy could have made that 25-minute adventure through this desolate landscape on his own.
The 74-year-old ski instructor revealed: “It was 30°C in the shade that day. For a two-and-a-half-year-old who is alone?Impossible. “
Emile’s disappearance last year from the rustic mountain village of Le Vernet, a few miles from Marseille, shocked France. Canadian media have drawn comparisons to Britain’s torment under Madeleine McCann.
Both angelic in appearance, the teenagers disappeared without a trace.
Then, last weekend, a hiker walking among the pines below Le Vernet came across a small human skull amid the foliage.
The woman, who probably couldn’t detect a phone signal in this remote wilderness area, violated a fundamental rule and disrupted a possible crime scene.
He retrieved his discovery, stuffed it in a plastic bag, and took it home before calling the police.
While it brings some comfort to Emile’s fervent family, the discovery of his remains has done nothing to solve the mystery of his death. Had he been murdered or kidnapped?
Or maybe it attacked through wolves roaming those rugged peaks?
Could Emile’s body have been hidden and then transported to his final resting place?
Perhaps he simply lost his before dying of thirst and hunger?
Prosecutors are keeping the investigation open and this week refused to rule out manslaughter or manslaughter.
The pain is set in a small town of 125 souls that has already witnessed too much pain.
Standing on the terrace of the Café Du Moulin, which offers a breathtaking panorama, Christian emerges onto a snow-capped peak that overlooks the village.
That’s Germanwings Flight 9525 that crashed into a mountainside with a suicidal co-pilot at the controls in 2015.
The youngest of the other 150 people to die was seven-month-old Julian Pracz-Bandres, who was returning home to Manchester with his mother Marina, 37.
A monument to the innocents stands on the outskirts of Le Vernet, less than 3 kilometers from the site of the disaster.
Christian said: “All the time we get other people in the village and they ask us, ‘Did you see the accident?Did you hear it explode?
The underground café also has a tragic history. In 2008, owner Jeanette Grosos was beaten to death by a customer.
It’s no wonder that Le Vernet suffers from what Christian calls “morbid tourism. “Some days, up to 40 motorists pass through its winding streets.
With a wave of his arm, Christian heads to Haut-Vernet, the upper part of the village, where Emile was last seen alive.
It was July 8, 2023, and the village is situated 4,000 feet above sea level, the heat was sweltering.
The devout Catholic Marie Soleil, 26, had left her son there the day before, coming from the space she shares with her husband, the 27-year-old engineer Colomban, in La Bouilladisse, near Marseille.
Emile, the eldest of her two children, will live with Marie’s parents, Philippe and Anne Vedovini, who bought a holiday home in the village in the early 2000s.
Framed by snow-capped alpine peaks, Haut-Vernet is truly idyllic.
Old farmhouses with honey stones and rickety shutters cluster together where a thick pine forest gives way to lush meadows.
We always call other people in the village and they ask us, “Did you see the accident?Did you hear it explode?
The Vedovini’s were having a family reunion with eight of their ten children.
Emile spent the morning building a log cabin with his young parents.
It was about five o’clock in the afternoon when the boy, who was playing in the garden, disappeared without his relatives seeing him, in the Haute-Vernet.
Around 5:15 p. m. , he saw through two witnesses, a teenager and a man in his sixties, walking about 20 meters from his relatives’ home. That was the last time she saw him alive.
With blonde hair and brown eyes, the outgoing boy said he was “always on the lookout for butterflies. “
Maybe he’d been looking for insects on that sweltering afternoon.
Very quickly, Vedovini’s relatives realized that he had disappeared and began to search frantically for the Haut-Vernet, which had only about thirty houses. Their desperate cries for little Emile went unanswered.
At 6:12 p. m. , the police were called. Soon, a helicopter inspected the area, while the police on staff, accompanied by 3 sniffer dogs, combed the village.
In the coming days, many people will join the search within a radius of 5. 1 kilometers, which will facilitate access to the place where Emile’s remains were finally found. Saint-Hubert’s dogs, endowed with a strong sense of smell, were brought to hunt Émile.
Gendarmerie General Jacques-Charles Fombonne said: “They have seen their trail in two places, within a radius of 20 meters around the house, and then nothing. This could possibly mean that the child has gotten into a vehicle. “
Mama Marie’s pleading voice was broadcast from speakers attached to a helicopter as drones equipped with infrared thermal imaging devices roamed the field.
But Emilio left. Prosecutors have opened an investigation into criminals.
Trolls and conspiracy theorists have warned that satanic sacrifices and organ trafficking could be the reasons for his death. And then came a shocking revelation.
It turned out that Emile’s parents were right-wing.
In 2021, both ran in the elections of the Reconquête party, led by convicted racist and Islamophobe Éric Zemmour.
Their slogans at the time called them “friends of Éric Zemmour”, who sought to “clean up the system”.
And in 2018, Colomban, then an activist linked to the neo-fascist Bastion Social and the far-right Action Française, was arrested for an alleged “assault on foreigners. “
Judges released him after claiming he had been involved in an attack on a young Muslim couple.
Then Grandpa Philippe’s career came into the spotlight. In the 1990s, he became a monk, known as Brother Philippe, and began running a Catholic school for troubled youth in Riaumont, northern France.
In 2014, the former academics were charged with physical violence and rape.
Although he never filed charges in the case, Philippe, 58, would have been an “assisted witness” in the investigation.
He denies any wrongdoing. As part of the investigation into Emile’s disappearance, his parents’ home in La Bouilladisse was searched in July.
Philippe and Anne’s homes nearby and in the Alps were searched.
As the months passed, hopes of finding Émile alive began to wane.
Then, on March 28, police reconstructed the day of his disappearance in Haut-Vernet, asking 17 other people to recreate his movements on the day of his disappearance, to refresh their memory.
Later, Sombre, Colomban, and Marie were seen walking away from the village.
Incredibly, two days later, Emile’s skull and teeth were discovered on a wooded road.
Tests revealed the head had never been buried and a prosecutor said “small fractures” and “bite marks” on the skull could have been caused simply by wild animals.
Emile’s T-shirt, pants, and shoes were strewn about 500 feet away.
The town’s mayor, Francois Balique, told The Sun that the site was “overgrown” and “narrow and steeply sloping on both sides. “
Earlier he had said: “The gendarmes could not have lost it with the dogs. “
It is not possible to say whether Emile’s body was already in the excavated area.
Today, locals speculate about what happened.
Gilles Thezan said, “I say that the little boy died and that we went there later. “
Prosecutor Jean-Luc Blachon cannot rule out this hypothesis, admitting: “We cannot say whether Emile’s body is already in the area sought. “
The Haut-Vernet remains cordoned off while police conduct new fingerprint searches, monitored by dozens of journalists from around the world.
Informed on Easter Sunday that their son’s remains had been found, Columbanus and Mary issued an account in which they recounted their “pain and sorrow. “
At least now, Emile will have a dignified burial, in this dark French valley that has witnessed so much suffering.
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