BBC
France gripped by 'perfect family' murder hunt France has been transfixed by an appalling human drama - the murder of a mother and four teenagers, shot dead in chillingly clinical fashion, seemingly by the children's father.Murders happen all the time, but now and then there are murders that, by their extraordinary circumstances, by the eccentric character of their perpetrator, or by the social context in which they are set, somehow command our attention in a different way. As his name suggests (the "de" is the clue) Xavier Dupont de Ligonnes comes from old French nobility. His ancestors lived in a southern province called the Rouergue and included a sister of the 19th Century poet Lamartine.He married a young woman whom he had met in Versailles called Agnes. They had four children - Arthur, who was 20 and a student; Thomas, 18, a gifted musician; Anne, 16, and Benoit, 13, who were both still at school. Photographs show an attractive, happy family. There is a particularly poignant one of Xavier holding his daughter Anne. They are looking at the camera and she is giggling. Last December, Xavier Dupont de Ligonnes began attending a shooting club outside Nantes.
He told the club's owner that he had inherited a rifle from his father who had recently died and he wanted to learn how to use it. At the start of April, Xavier went to the club to practise four days in a row. He also bought a silencer. With the .22 rifle and the silencer, the family were shot dead one by one, probably as they slept. The two family Labradors were also shot.
t appeared he had planned an abrupt departure - writing to the children's schools to say that the family was emigrating.
His financial situation was catastrophic. He had various internet-related businesses and they were failing.
He had spent his wife's inheritance and had borrowed money from a lover in Paris, who was now demanding it back.
It is the tale of an upper-middle-class French family caught at a juncture between a prosperous, reassuring past and an uncertain, unsettling future.
At the centre of the story is a man who fails to find his way in this changing world and apparently makes his own wife and children pay the price. Above all - where is he? He was seen in southern France in the days after the killings, but since then nothing.
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