Update: turns out the BBC investigative journalism programme Panorama released an update documentary ten days ago. It’s up on youtube for now, watch it before it gets taken down….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZXPwVd5v_M
Even more unanswered questions come to light, it’s very hard to know who to believe.

As of December 2017 the police now have a suspect in this case, but it does not fill me with confidence. There have been a string of unsolved crimes within a 50 mile radius of Chevaline/Annecy, along a stretch of towns that border a national forest. A couple of them seem to be linked by circumstantial evidence but I get the impression police are trying to shift some cold cases off their desks with a scapegoat. The majority could well be the work of a single killer, but the Araujo murder and Al-Hilli murders don’t fit the general pattern.
The suspect is Nordahl Lelandais, who came to light after becoming the prime suspect (now successfully convicted) kidnapper/murderer of 9 year old Maëlys de Araujo in Pont-de-Beauvoisin, August 2017. Once on police radar, he has been linked to the following :
– murder of Arthur Noyer, September 2017,Chambéry (near the Araujo case). The link to Lelandais is that his mobile phone was in the area around the time Noyer went missing, and ISP logs of his phone show he searched about cadaver decomposition in the days following the suspected murder date.
– Adrien Mourialmé, missing from Annecy since July 2017. No specific evidence to link at this time.
– Ahmed Hamadou, missing from La Bridoire (near Chambery) since September 2012.
– The Al-Hilli murders – aside from being in the same area, an interesting point about Lelandais is that he is an ex-soldier. This would fit with the police assumption that the killer was a professional or even an assassin. However, this would mean that Lelandais has switched between child abduction/murder, adult male abduction/murder, and a seemingly random ‘lovers’ lane’ style shooting.
Prior to 2012, there are are a further 15 cases of unsolved disappearances (all ages and sexes). Being on the edge of a mountainous national forest area it is likely a number of these are natural accidents.

Although he was in the Army, I can’t picture him as being the shooter at Chevaline, that’s not his MO at all. Right now he’s our (French) most recent serial killer candidate with Jean-Marc Reiser so a lot of unsolved cases are being re-investigated through the prism of his whereabouts for the last few years. Clearly he’s more a "kill & hide" type of killer, plus he’s been cleared from the Chevaline investigations late last year. It’s more likely the cyclist was the primary target and the Al-Hilli family was at the wrong place at the wrong time.

I agree entirely, Lelandais seems to be a convenience to whom they can pin inconvenient cold cases. I think he is a good suspect for the Noyer disappearance as it’s one hell of a coincidence for him to be in the same cellphone triangulation point on the day he went missing, and then to search online for cadaver decomposition. This in turn could put him on the suspect list for the other missing men.
With the exception of Noyer there are no bodies (excluding poor little Maelys de Araujo but that’s an outlier on this list in many ways), so we have no MO or signatures to go on. Even with Noyer they don’t have enough of the skeleton to work out what happened.So it does seem odd that the police are linking a few missing men cases to a case in which someone shoots 3 adults and a child in a layby.
Claypooles, it can be quite hard getting recent information on this case as the UK press lost interest in the last couple of years – is the cyclist angle still to do with his girlfriend’s family? I believe at one point there was talk they wanted to get rid of him for some reason but that seemed a bit far-fetched to me. I would be very interested to hear about any developments with that lead.

I may have said a little too fast that the cyclist was the primary target in that shooting. Investigations didn’t show much about him, his life, etc. I can’t recall hearing/reading anything about his girlfriend or anybody else. Looks like he was your everyday guy.
The Al-Hilli family, on the other hand, had interesting stories. Saad Al-Hilli (the father) had beef with his own brother about the inheritance from their father. Also, the day before he and his mother and his wife were killed, he was seen having a heated conversation with a man. Turns out he felt he and his family were in danger, as reported by his neighbours in England, but he never clearly said why and from whom.
The shooter was most certainly a collector who was well-trained to shoot, or even a professional killer, could go both ways. The gendarmes found 25 casings, which means he had to reload his gun twice, in what seems to have been a very quick attack. Also, he hit his targets 18 times! Plus he put a bullet in the head of the 3 adults in the car, so that really looks like a professional job. What looks less professional, though, is that he ran out of bullets and tried to "finish" the older girl by hiting her head several times with the stock of his gun (he hit her so hard that a piece of the stock was found on the ground). And the last element that could prove that the shooter did not know his victims, or at least the Al-Hilli family, is that he didn’t look for the second little girl, who hid under the long skirt of her grandmother in the car. I think if it was the work of a professional, or if the Al-Hillis were killed by a relative for family reasons, the guy would have know how many kids should have been there and would have looked for the younger girl in the car.

Interstingly, there is another case of murder committed in France very near to the Swiss border with a very old shotgun (a rifle this time), also formerly used by the Swiss Army, just like the Luger P06 used to kill Sylvain Mollier and the Al-Hillis. Xavier Baligant was shot multiple times from close range one night in July of 2011 on a highway rest area, just 200 kilometers from Chevaline.
Could the same man be the author of both attacks?

I forgot an important element! The second cyclist, who discovered the crime scene, crossed two vehicles on his way up to the place of the attack: a black right-hand drive SUV, and a motorcycle. He produced a composite of the biker, who had an old open helmet. Gendarmerie made it known nationally that they were looking for this biker and the driver of the SUV but it was only after almost 3 years that they could find the former. The man had nothing to do with the attack and everything was normal when he passed the small parking lot where the victims were shot, which shows the attack was very quick. The driver of the SUV was never identified, but the presence of an english car near the scene is quite interesting.

There is another unusual murder being linked to the Al-Hilli crime by a private investigator. This is the case of Lorraine Glasby and Paul Bellion, who were cycling through Brittany in 1986 when they somehow ended up being tied back-to-back and shot in the head in the middle of a corn field. The suspect in question has already served time for trying to murder members of his own family with a shotgun, so there’s definitely the ability there. But Brittany is about as far as you can get from Annecy in France so it seems like another shot in the dark really (pardon the pun).
Some more info on this case:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/12076524/French-policeman-battles-to-solve-1986-Briton-couple-murder-mystery.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3382611/Gunman-tried-kill-three-members-family-new-suspect-French-Alps-murder-mystery.html

I can’t see the striking similarities here. Was the British couple shot with an old firearm, for instance?

There’s not much available online about the 1986 case – it sounds like it was mismanaged from the start. But it is clear they were killed with a hunting rifle, which is very different from the Luger handgun used in the Al Hilli case. I can’t really see any logic behind the connection other than the guy is a known murderer, so I guess he’s more of a suspect than the average French citizen.

One more twist I found, looks like the wife also had a secretive prior life to her marriage to Saad Al Hilli, and her ex-husband died in Mississippi on the same day they were shot. His family say it was murder….
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10955151/Alps-murder-wife-had-a-secret-ex-husband-who-died-on-the-same-day.html

So as it stands we have every adult victim as the potential prime target. A very unusual case.