The Dupont de Ligonnes family was the embodiment of the modern-day bourgeois French household in the eyes of the community. With a large house in the chic and expensive part of Nantes, France, the four children attended local private schools where upper-crust families from the coastal city sent their families. But Xavier, the father, was more than a member of the city’s upper-middleclass elite; he was as also an aristocrat, with a direct linage to French nobles dating back prior to the French Revolution in the 18th century.
Xavier had to spend a lot of time away from home to manage his business ventures, which his circle of friends, relatives, and acquaintances thought were flourishing. Xavier did not have to worry about his children’s care when he was away on business. His wife, Agnes, whose job as a catechism teacher at the local Blanche-de-Castille Catholic high school never kept her from being there when the children were home sick, needed someone to fix their meals, or anything else that required motherly attention.
Xavier, when he was home, led an active social life with his wife, and they both seemed to enjoy each other’s company when seen in public. They often dined together with the rest of the family at a local pizzeria on Sundays. When Xavier was in town, he and his wife would occasionally take square dancing classes with other couples, who admired how happy the husband and wife seemed.
Neighbors saw the four kids running and laughing with the family Labradors in the yard. The house also served as a popular and welcoming place where the mother would serve snacks to friends her children invited over after school.
The first sign of trouble came when close friends and relatives received a letter from Xavier saying that he was an undercover agent for the U. S. Drug Enforcement Agency and that the family had to move away to an undisclosed location under the witness protection program. Friends and relatives were stunned. Xavier was gone a lot for his work, but no one knew that he had ties to undercover police, much less DEA agents in the United States.
But then, very bad news followed after Xavier sent the mysterious email. When police were called to investigate the family’s disappearance, investigators dropped a bombshell: the mother, the three sons, and the daughter were found dead, individually rolled-up in sleeping bags and buried underneath the patio in the backyard. Autopsy reports would later reveal that they had been drugged before they were shot, except for Agnes, who was probably shot first.
Expecting to find Xavier’s body nearby the crime scene, investigators soon learned that Xavier was alive and well and had driven to southern France where credit card records revealed that he had stayed at a chic hotel for a few nights. Then, less than two weeks after his family was found murdered, Xavier abandoned his Citroen C5 near a cheap hotel almost 700 miles away from Nantes near the French Rivera. Then he vanished.
An international arrest warrant was issued for Xavier, who officials said could be anywhere. French investigators then began making inquiries about Xavier’s background in hopes of uncovering clues about where they might be able to find the man whom the French press called the “Most Wanted Man in France.”
The first truth to emerge was that Xavier was not an advertising executive, which the press initially reported. And he certainly was not a successful businessman, either, as investigators quickly unraveled a web of deceit and lies Xavier had crafted to maintain appearances of wealth and affluence while drowning in financial ruin.
Xavier was raised in Versailles, a fitting locale for Xavier’s aristocratic background that was once France’s capital and the seat of its Kings for centuries. At a very early age, Xavier exhibited behavior that showed that he was not entirely happy with the Catholic Church.
Xavier’s mother, who was deeply religious, was unable to convince her son to embrace the devout catholic life as enthusiastically as she did. While he attended mass regularly and dutifully went to catechism classes as a child, Xavier knew from a very young age that he did not share his mother’s deep faith. He expressed his early disenchantment with the church decades later on a French forum devoted to Catholicism called www.cite-catholique.org, not long before his family was murdered. He described in his forum posts how memorizing masses in Latin and French and getting up at six in the morning to go to mass before school just wasn’t for him when he was growing up.
But while Xavier was not particularly religious, the macabre elements of the catholic faith intrigued him as an adult. In one chilling post on the site www.cite-catholique.org that vaguely foretold of the horrible events yet to transpire, Xavier described how he was both repulsed yet fascinated with certain morbid aspects of the catholic religion. He was particularly interested in the concept of sacrificial rite ceremonies, which he wrote was a “bedrock concept” in the Catholic faith. Bloody or not, human or animal, which extends to even plant life, the sacrifice is an intrinsic part of all religions, especially ours,” Xavier wrote. “Mass is about the sacrifice of Christ, which continues as part of the ritual of worship.”
Xavier’s father was not especially religious and was known for being somewhat of a playboy. He left the family home when Xavier was 10 and headed for Africa. While he did tentatively keep in touch with his only son by sending very occasional letters, they were seldom reunited in person, Le Point reported.
The father bought Xavier a vintage Triumph Spitfire sports car for his 18th birthday, in which the young Xavier would proudly drive around the streets of Versailles. Xavier also inherited an automatic .22 caliber pistol from his father, who had died just a few months before Xavier’s family was killed. The same pistol served as the murder weapon.
Xavier met his wife Agnes when was 18, the year he began to drive around in the Triumph Spitfire. However, the two went their separate ways and Xavier began a one-year stint in the army, which was mandatory for young French men at the time. According to Le Point, Xavier was obliged to enter the army directly out of high school because his father failed to pay for his university studies. Despite his noble lineage, Xavier entered and left the military as an enlisted man and did not achieve the rank of an officer.
Xavier’s professional life after the army consisted of a series of on-and-off-again low-skill jobs, including working as a sales clerk for a garden equipment company. At the age of 23 in 1984, he found himself unemployed and alone in the Var region of France, not far from where he would disappear over two decades later after his family was murdered.
Xavier eventually moved back in with his mother in Versailles where he became involved with Agnes again. But things were a lot different than when they were boyfriend and girlfriend in high school: Agnes had become pregnant by another man and was the mother of a baby she named Arthur, whom Xavier later adopted. Still, Xavier eventually married her and the young family soon left the bourgeois enclave of Versailles.
Xavier’s married life did not motivate him to change his professional situation much in the early years of his marriage. The family eventually settled in the Ardèche region in the southeast of France in 1993. There, Xavier worked in a garden supply shop for three years — his longest period of employment. But after that job did not work out, Xavier resumed his restless life of moving to different towns after working for a while, collecting unemployment, then moving again. Unlike before, he now had a family in tow.
The family lived in several towns in the southeast of France, not far from the Cote d’Azur, including Draguignan, Lorgues, Sainte-Maxime, and Vaison-la-Romaine. During this time, Agnes gave birth to Thomas, Anne, and Benoît, according to media reports. The family made its way to western France in 2002 before settling in the house in Nantes in 2003 where the tragic events would later take place.
The move to Nantes coincided with a change in Xavier’s professional ambitions. After moving to Nantes along France’s western coast, the birthplace of Jules Vernes, Xavier stopped working at low-skill jobs and started a business. Xavier created SELREF, a company that audited the quality of services that different hotels offered business travelers. The idea was that businesses that held off-site seminars or sent executives to different hotels in France needed unbiased reviews of the locations beforehand. Posing as a guest, Xavier would travel to different French hotels and report back to his clients.
According to statistics from the French National Commerce and Business Register (Registre National du Commerce et des Sociétés), SELREF had its ups and downs revenue-wise. The company generated 86,200 euros in revenues in 2007 but that relatively good year compared to a paltry 6,000 euros the company saw in sales in 2005.
No longer working low-level jobs as a sales clerk or collecting unemployment, Xavier was now his own boss and had established a small business that was making modest revenues. The problem was that SELREF never made a dime in profits. It had also accumulated a lot of debts, with creditors who soon began knocking on the door of the family house, often with court orders demanding tens of thousands of euros.
Agnes held down a couple of jobs while the family lived at Nantes, but the pay was far from enough to sustain the household’s bourgeois lifestyle and expenditures on clothes, cars, and private schools. For a while, Agnes was a babysitter and then worked as a school assistant at the Blanche de Castille, a private school near their house in Nantes. She had also inherited 80,000 euros, according to Le Point, but that disappeared into Xavier’s business affairs. All told, Xavier and his wife declared 5,351 euros in 2009 and 17,658 euros in 2010, according to Le Point. Xavier’s business was just not generating enough for the family to even subsist on, much less pay for the comforts of a French, upper-middleclass lifestyle.
Left alone much of the time to drive kids to activities and doctors appointment and struggling to pay the bills with over extended credit, Agnes was an unhappy woman. She sought solace in online forums where she lamented about the sad affair of the family’s finances during the years and months leading up to the murders. In www.octissimo.fr, a popular French forum devoted to “health and well being topics,” Agnes wrote about how her husband’s business failings. Xavier “hadn’t moved fast enough in order to not lose all of his money,” she wrote.
But what seemed to trouble her the most was the difficulties in their marriage. Agnes poured out her heart on forums about how unhappy she was. She complained about her workaholic husband who was gone on business much of the time and was very difficult to live with when he was home.
Xavier was “too critical, cold, and rigid” and tried to lord over the household like a military drill sergeant, Agnes wrote. Xavier would return home from a business trip and lock himself up in the basement, which served as his home office. When he wasn’t locked away in his home office, he hardly spoke of anything else other than how overworked he was or about his business projects.
In one particular chilling post that would reflect the horror scene to follow months later, Agnes wrote that Xavier had spoken of how it would not be tragic if the entire family were to die. Agnes wrote that Xavier had once said “If we all die all at once, then everything would be over. We would no longer miss anything.”
As Agnes poured out her heart about how unhappy she was on forums a couple of years leading up to her murder, Xavier sought solace from his unhappy marriage by having an affair with a woman he had once dated in high school. The woman, who has insisted on keeping her identity secret out of concern for her safety, was a successful businesswoman and loaned Xavier 50,000 euros for another one of his ill-fated business ventures.
A few months after receiving the loan, Xavier was asking for more money. In an email that Xavier had sent to his mistress just over a year before the murders that the French radio station RTL obtained and published on its Website, Xavier was obviously a desperate man.
Xavier’s obvious intention in the email was to both offer an explanation to his mistress about what happened to the 50,000 euros she had loaned him and why he needed to borrow more money. But in the first lines of the message before going into business matters, Xavier bared out his soul, in an awkward sort of way like an adolescent boy trying to woo a girlfriend:
Dear XXX:
Before anything else, I would love for you to understand what is going on inside my head. I want you to know what really inspires me and I don’t want you to take me for a manipulator, a con artist, or a hypocrite, nor for a liar or a crook.
Xavier then described his ill-fated scheme in which he lost the 50,000 euros his mistress had loaned him. His “business plan” involved buying and then reselling coupons for free drinks, but it was not clear to whom he was selling the “Tickets Crystals,” as he called them, nor how much they cost. He also explained that the project once had the potential to generate “tens of thousands of euros per day” in profits, but a recent cut in the French sales tax had destroyed any margins the sales of the tickets might have made. He also alluded to problems he was having with the French government’s fraud prevention agency, although he did not go into detail about that.
Xavier used the next part of his email to vent his woes. “I am in financial ruin and at the end of my rope like I have never been before,” he wrote. He then described how he was four months behind on the rent for the family home, he couldn’t come up with the money to pay his son’s high school tuition, and his car had broken down. He wrote that he even had to borrow money from his mother to buy his children Christmas gifts, which he said he had to pay back, and was hounded by tax authorities for money he owed in social taxes.
The family would be evicted from their house at the end of winter (French eviction laws forbid foreclosures or evictions during the winter months), but before then, Xavier wrote that he only had 500 euros to pay for food until the end of the month. He described how he needed 15,000 euros within 15 days to keep the family functioning and 10,000 euros so that his Tickets Crystals scheme could finally work.
Xavier’s ruminating then took a morbid and potentially homicidal turn, offering police evidence that he murdered his family.
“I don’t sleep anymore and lay awake with morbid ideas, such as burning down the house after giving everyone sleeping pills or throwing myself under a truck so that Agnes would get 600,000 euros [from a life insurance policy],” Xavier wrote. “I have an anxiety attack every day when I first wake up in the morning that sometimes lasts until noon to the point that I have trouble breathing and suffer from heart palpitations.”
Towards the end of the email, Xavier wrote that his message was a “plea for help” and that he absolutely needed her assistance. His pride was hurt, Xavier wrote, but he said he could not face his challenges alone. He closed the email with: “I love you, my [her name remains undisclosed].”
Xavier’s mistress was apparently unmoved by Xavier’s plea for help in his email. Not only did she break off the affair, but began legal proceedings against him to recover the money she had loaned him.
After the murder of his family, Xavier sent his ex-mistress one last email. Police officials did not disclose the exact content of the message, but said it contained both direct and indirect threats, including Xavier’s claim that his former lover “would live in hell on earth for the next 30 years.” Fearing for her life, she contacted the authorities and told them everything she knew.
Xavier hardly did a good job of trying to disappear immediately following the murder of his family. He used his credit card to withdrawal less than 100 euros at an ATM on his way to the south of France during the days following the murders. He eventually checked into a posh five-star resort in southern France called the Auberge de Cassagne, which is located near Avignon, not far from France’s famous Provence region. There, according to news reports, witnesses said he had a calm demeanor and was a polite and seemingly refined guess.
During the days that Xavier was in the region, the body of Colette Deromme, a 50-year-old mother, was discovered near the town of Lorgues, which is in the same region of the hotel in which Xavier stayed. Police have not been forthcoming with details about how she died, but they confirmed that she was murdered and that her body was found under a pile of rocks.
Investigators say there may be a link between Colette Deromme’s murder and Xavier due to the fact that he was in the Var region when she disappeared. There is also another strange coincidence: Xavier and his family lived in Colette Deromme’s home town of Lorgues in 2003. However, investigators have not publicly disclosed direct evidence linking Xavier to Colette Deromme.
As far as Xavier’s whereabouts in the region during the days after Colette Deromme’s murder, police only know that Xavier spent a few nights a the Auberge de Cassagne and that he paid his bill with a credit card that was not refused. Xavier then drove over 100 miles to Roquebrune-sur-Argens where he abandoned his small Citroën C5 and left behind his cell phone battery.
In southern France during the weeks after the murder, Xavier’s wanted poster was plastered on trees, sign posts, and walls in and around hundreds of villages. Residents in southern France inundated local police with panicked calls claiming they had seen Xavier, although the vast majority were erroneous. Public officials eventually had to issue bulletins to calm those that claimed a mad killer was looking to strike in the region again.
The murders as well as Xavier’s disappearance has also been etched into France’s collective consciousness where national French TV, radio stations, newspapers, and Web outlets have fed the interest of millions about the case in France as well as in neighboring countries in Europe during the past months.
But despite Xavier’s notoriety, Xavier has continued to elude the police, that is, if he is indeed alive. Given Xavier’s feckless history of failed business ventures and a limited education, he hardly seems like someone who would be crafty enough to elude the French equivalent of the FBI as well as Interpol agents abroad. Some media reports have speculated that Xavier probably killed himself and that hunters will stumble on his body in the countryside of southern France in fall or winter. But in the meantime, Xavier’s exact whereabouts remain unknown.
Bibliography:
Dancoing, Lucie. “Xavier Dupont de Ligonnes ‘Est-il Coupable ou Victime’?: Rappel des Faits:” Paris Match, October 16, 2011.
Desnos, Marie. “Nantes: Un lien avec la disparue de Lorgues?,” Paris Match, April 22, 2011.
Quenet, Marie. “Affaire Ligonnes: ‘Et si Xavier Avait Ete Assassinee;..”
Journal du Dimanche, Oct. 15, 2011.
Sgherri, Marie-Sandrine and Zemouri, Marie-Sandrine. “Xavier Dupont de Ligonnes, L’homme aux Multiples Visages,” Le Point, April 28, 2011.
“Nantes: L’ex-maitresse du Pere a Recu une Lettre de Menaces,” RTL. FR, April 25, 2011.
“Tuerie de Nantes: Un e-mail Premonitoire du Pere?” RTL. FR, June 8, 2011.