Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès

Status:

Open

Jurisdiction:

Procureur De La R Publique De Nantes Nantes Prosecutors (OFFICE)

Missing From:

Nantes, France

Summary:

Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès is a French fugitive accused of killing his wife and four children in 2011. The bodies of 48-year-old Agnès Dupont de Ligonnès and her four children were found under the house's patio, wrapped in sheets and covered in quicklime, along with the family's two Labrador dogs. As of 2026, he has still not been captured.

Vital Statistics

Circumstances of Offense:

Investigators believe that Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès murdered his wife and three of his children on the night of April 3 to 4, then murdered his son Thomas on the evening of April 4. The children had reportedly been drugged with sleeping pills before being shot. They had been dead for around two weeks, placing the killings at between April 3 and 5. Autopsies revealed that Agnès and the four children were all killed by gun shots to the head, fired by a .22 rifle in what was described as a "methodical execution". A note had been placed on the mailbox stating that the family had moved to Australia. On April 21, 2011, police discovered the bodies buried in their garden. He was last sighted on April 15, 2011 (a week before his family's bodies were discovered) at a hotel in Roquebrune-sur-Argens in the Var. His car was found the following Friday in the car park of a cheap hotel on the French Riviera, where he is thought to have spent one night in mid-April. Xavier checked out of the hotel but abandoned his car there – leaving the hotel in the southeastern town of Roquebrune-sur-Argens on foot with what looked like a rifle case on his back.

Additional Details:

Xavier inherited the count title after his father's death in January 2011, three months before the murders. He also discovered the title came with no money. Investigators have consistently located the motive framework in the gap between the name's weight and the reality of his financial collapse. He closed the lease on the house, terminated the family's bank accounts, and settled the final payments with the childrens' schools. He also went through a fair bit of effort to obtain a rifle and bullets - unlike in the United States, getting one's hands on a gun in France can be quite a chore. On May 10th, 2011, an international arrest warrant was put out for Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès. A man believed to a French fugitive accused of killing his wife and four children in 2011 was arrested in Scotland Friday only to be later released in what appears to be a case of mistaken identity. In all, police have received more than 1,850 tips related to Dupont de Ligonnès and his disappearance since the 2011 murders. A police officer who worked on the case claims in a new book that the suspect boarded a flight from Nice airport using fake ID documents, and has been hiding across the Atlantic ever since. As of March 2026, the Brewster County Sheriff's Office in Texas issued a public appeal for information after a reported 2020 sighting of Dupont de Ligonnès in south Brewster County.

Case Last Updated:

Jul 27, 2026