The Méchinaud Case. Part 2: A New Inquiry

Fast forward to 2011: Jean-Paul Méchinaud contacts the chief prosecutor in Angouleme to inform him of a problem. The family want to sell a piece of inherited land, but with Jacques still missing and never having been officially declared dead the sale cannot proceed. Jean-Paul is surprised by the response he receives - in addition to allowing the sale to proceed, prosecutor Nicolas Jacquet also proposes re-opening the inquiry into the 1972 disappearance, including new searches using the latest technologies available to the gendarmerie.

Search at 45 Rue de Port Boutiers in 2011

And so, in November 2011 the river beds and ponds were again swept, this time by sonar and underwater metal detectors. An abandoned property on the north bank of the Charente in Port Boutiers was also searched and ground penetrating radar used to scan for any sign of human remains - with the new searches coming only months after France was gripped by the Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès case, the possibility that Jacques had murdered his family before fleeing was prominent in the public imagination, though this location may also have been suggested by an anonymous letter sent to the mayor of Boutiers in 2003.

Abandoned and partially flooded underground quarry workings in the nearby town of St-Même-les-Carrières, where Pierrette Méchinaud grew up were also searched by divers, but to no avail. Some cars and large boats were recovered from the river - notably a local man was reunited with his stolen Porsche, but otherwise the searches new revealed nothing. 

Sonar scan of the Charente in 2011

Inevitably, as in 1973 after some time search activity decreased. But the 2011 operation was not entirely without success, albeit indirectly; as a result of renewed media interest in the case a new witness appeared. Denise Grall, a resident of La Couronne near Angoulême contacted Jean-Paul Méchinaud offering to pass on photos of Jacques and Pierrette taken when they holidayed together at a leisure resort in Brillac, near Confolens. After first meeting there in 1966 as a result of their children playing together, the couples regularly met up again in the years up to 1972. 

According to Denise, the last contact she had with Jacques and Pierrette was a card from them shortly before Christmas 1972, inviting her and her husband to visit Boutiers to swap holiday photos. But in the 39 years since their disappearance she had not come forward nor, surprisingly, had she apparently been sought out by the inquiry. And it is through Denise Grall that we come to a curious development which at the time appeared to promise a breakthrough.

Pierrette Méchinaud, Denise Grall and Jacques Méchinaud

After the 2011 searches were concluded, there continued to be occasional flurries of activity relating to chance discoveries: in 2012 human bones of what appeared to be a man and a child were found in woods 20km north of Boutiers by a mushroom hunter - but DNA tests showed no match to Jacques Mechinaud's siblings. In 2014 several skeletons were unearthed in a garden in Cognac; tests showed them to date from at least ninety years earlier.

But in October 2013 a maroon Simca 1100 matching that in which the Méchinauds disappeared was pulled out of the Charente near the Pont de Basseau to the west of Angoulême - 50km from the Méchinaud house in Boutiers, but less than 2km from where the Grall family were living in Saint Michel in 1972. Had Jacques Méchinaud, or perhaps the whole family been sheltered by the Gralls, dumping the car in the river before fleeing onward? Such questions were short-lived - when the registration and chassis number of the recovered Simca were checked, they were found not to match the Méchinauds' car. Another dead end.

Pont de Basseau, Angoulême

And this remains the situation after nearly 46 years. Officially the inquiry remains open under the name 'Operation Bruneri' (a contraction of the names of the two boys) and an email address is maintained in the hope that members of the public might still provide some new information. It is said that debate is still ongoing locally as to whether the family died on the night they went missing or fled to a new life abroad, but there is also a sense that possible indicators either way were not followed up by the initial inquiry: Denise Grall was not sought out; Maurice Blanchon claimed that Jacques was obsessed with Australia and pestered a colleague who had lived there with questions about the country - the colleague was never identified. Similarly, Blanchon claimed that Jacques made a trip to visit a friend in the Vendée on 18th December 1972, days before the family's disappearance. Again it appears that this was not followed up.

And so the mystery remains intact. At this stage it would seem that any breakthrough is most likely to come through a new chance discovery: human remains or the maroon Simca 1100 (reg 544 JV 16) found rusting under a dustsheet in a barn. But that said, as has been seen already in this case and others, it's not entirely unknown for new witnesses to come forward after decades of silence. If by any chance you are that witness, you can still contact the inquiry by email at bta.cognac@gendarmerie.interieur.gouv.fr including the term "Bruneri 47" in the subject line.

In part 3, a closer look at some of the theories and the rumours which surround the case.