The suspect should be made to talkMissing Lyhanna (11) in France – how the police want to find her now

“No track found” – sniffer dogs were supposed to find missing Lyhanna

In order to find clues about Lyhanna's (11) whereabouts, the gendarmerie deployed a sniffer dog – at the suspect's and his family's house in Montestruc-sur-Gers, as the French news portal BFMTV reports. “You give the dog a reference smell, for example a shoe or a piece of clothing belonging to the little girl. You put it in a plastic bag and cover the dog's head with the bag so that he breathes in deeply and takes in the smell. (…) The dog handler then follows him on the leash, because it is the dog that gives the direction,” explains Gendarmerie General Jacques Fonbonne about the search in the BFMTV’s “Le Titre à la une” podcast.

What sounds promising, however, according to the gendarmerie general's assessment, did not achieve the desired success: The 30-minute search with the sniffer dog is said to have shown, “that he didn't find any trail“, says the expert. Otherwise the sniffer dog would have followed Lyhanna's scent. “In this case, he must have been running in circles for 30 minutes,” speculates Fonbonne and emphasizes: “If there was something, he would have forced him to find it.”

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River Gers comes into focus in Lyhanna search – why that is “not a good sign”.

In the search for the missing eleven-year-old Lyhanna, the Gers River also becomes the focus of the investigation. But the concentration on the river is “not a good sign,” as Gendarmerie General Jacques Fonbonne emphasized to BFMTV. “It means that they have already exhausted all search areas where the little girl would have been alive or her body would have been easy to find.”

The police would now work using the snail method: the search would begin in the immediate vicinity of the suspect's route and move further outwards. Since there are two hours between the time Lyhanna was spotted in his car and the time the suspect collected his own daughter, the search area is “extremely large,” according to the expert.

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The river again came into focus because it is “only a few hundred meters from the swimming pool” and this “version would be credible among the witnesses,” said Fonbonne. The suspect allegedly dropped Lyhanna off there.

However, the search in the river presents some hurdles, as the general reveals: Because of the current created by the waterfall above the search site, a “Body possibly drifted 100 meters, 200 meters or even a kilometer“The water is extremely cloudy and muddy. This means that the divers cannot see anything and have to rely on their sense of touch,” Fonbonne reveals.

GPS data, DNA etc. – the suspect's vehicle is examined for traces

The suspect's confiscated vehicle has been taken to the Specialized Institute for Criminal Research of the Gendarmerie (IRCGN) in Pontoise. “There will be two investigative approaches,” reveals Fonbonne. First: finding traces that indicate little Lyhanna's presence in the vehicle. Fingerprints, DNA and fibers as well as the placement of the traces could reveal the truth here.

The second approach is to evaluate the vehicle's on-board electronics, particularly the GPS data. These could reveal the suspect's exact route and, more crucially, possible stop times. “If he stopped for ten or 15 minutes, just long enough to hide a body, that changes the gendarmes' hypothesis“explains the general.

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Investigators are fighting for a confession! This is how you want to get Jérôme B. to talk

“In order to get him to talk, you have to find his weak point“Reveals Gendarmerie General Jacques Fonbonne in an interview with BFMTV. A special team would look intensively into his past and his environment. Their goal: to initiate a dialogue that aims at contradictions in his personality and in the facts.

A confession often only occurs when the person “has reached the end of its arguments or due to a psychological shock“, said the general. In the final step, the investigators hope that Jérôme B. will reveal information that only he can have: the exact circumstances, timing, where a possible body was dumped and the way in which Lyhanna was killed.

Sources used: BFMTV