BBC News
For the last 15 KM (9.3 miles) trips from Toulouse to the Season of Les Pequiès, you travel narrow winding roads through hilly, thick forests. Without a reliable GPS system you can get lost very quickly, especially at night.
I was expecting the home of Andrew and Dawn Searle, British couple found dead earlier this monthto be away. This is a proposal from photographs of the crime scene I saw. But I was surprised when I arrived to find him well within the shout of a distance from several homes.
This is an important detail because Dawn’s partially naked body was discovered in front of the front house on Thursday morning last week. The prosecutor in charge of the case, Nicolas Rigot-Muller, said he had severe wounds from the head caused by a blunt weapon. Every scream would hear very clearly neighbors.
Her husband’s body was found hanging in the back of the house. The prosecutor says No weapons foundthat there is no obvious sign of burglary or evidence that Andrew faced, nor a sex crime.
A friend discovered Dawn’s body when she came to the house with her dog. The couple had two big dogs, and they often walked with a friend or several other dog owners I spoke with in quiet Hamlet.
One woman, Bénédicte, said the couple was “absolutely cute, we would often meet so simply walking our dogs around the village.”
“We are very shocked, of course we are,” she said.
Lydie, butcher, sells his products in local markets with his wife. Their estate looks at Searle’s home, only the field separates them.
“They were a great couple who smiled a lot and since I lived in England once, I managed to talk to them in English,” she told me. “They were well integrated and every year they invited everyone to the party.”
But not all I approached wanted to talk. Their appearance gives this a very difficult moment for this rural community in a glittering criminal investigation.
The railway crossing near the village has no security obstacles, just a sign of stopping, which tells you how little traffic is usually here. You can now feel the presence of gendarmeriers, a French army branch running an investigation.
As I provided live coverage for BBC Scotland, a large car with darkened windows passed by me, within four officers from Kamenjar from Toulouse murder and organized crime branches.
There is no question that the locals are scared. Several officers from the gendarmeriers photographed our car and asked to see our identity cards and invited us to be discreet. They said the residents were scared and that their presence was partly to convince them.
There is a bright yellow ribbon gendarmerie tied to the front door of Searle’s house. The dogs are gone, and their pool has a blanket over it. Two large candles were lit at the driveway, and the door leaflet has a telephone number for anyone who thinks they need psychological counseling or moral support, provided by local social services. The same leaflet was shot in the Community Committee in the center of a hamlet.
The Searle couple withdrew to this region five years ago, and other postal boxes in the hamlet indicate that they are not the only emigrants in the region. This is not surprising: no official statistics, but at a time when I was headquartered in Toulouse, the Staff of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs told me at different times to believe that about 30,000 Britons live a full -time working time in the southwest, making it the greatest British population of emigrants in France outside Paris.
On top of that, tens of thousands more have a holiday home in this region, called Occitanie, which is one of the fastest growing areas of France, attracting people not only from the UK, but Belgium, the Netherlands and Paris.
What attracts them here is the quality of life, wide open spaces, a relatively cheap property and painfully beautiful rural and architecture.
In the nearby town of Villefranche-De-Rouergue has one of the most beautiful medieval stone arcadic central squares in the region full of them. In the summer, the outdoor market is full of festive manufacturers, including many Britons, who carry weave baskets filled with local products.
Different conspiracy theories circulate that the couple died – I was asked about countless French national TVs and Radio media. But all we know for sure is that the prosecutor and his team are still trying to determine how he repeated me on Wednesday night, “whether the tragedy is the result of a domestic crime, followed by suicide or included a third party.”
Ever since I spoke with the prosecutor who was running the case, who revealed to me at the end of this week that he had handed over the investigation to a higher referee in Montpellier with more available funds.
I asked him if that meant he leaned against the idea that the Searle couple had been killed.
He replied that he was not excluding anything. He added that if they were killed, and to go to the trial, he would be led by the Prosecutor’s Office.
Dr. Remy Sevigne, a psychologist who responds to the phone line from the list, told me that about a dozen people had so far called him for some kind of support. Everyone was local, he said, and all the couple knew personally.
Everyone was scared or shocked, he said.
