I thought I found clue that would catch little Emile's killer... but police ... trends now
The solo rambler who found the skull of missing French boy Émile Soleil has spoken of her shock and anguish at becoming a prime suspect in the mysterious case.
In her first interview since the remains of the two-year-old were discovered in the Alps, the woman said she ‘did not expect’ police to search her home.
They initially spoke to her for nine hours after her fateful walk, and then confiscated all her electronic devices.
Referred to by the BFM TV news channel as Manon, a woman in her 60s, she recalled on Wednesday setting off on a mountain path close to the isolated hamlet of Haut-Vernet, near Grenoble, on March 30th.
She knew that Émile had gone missing from the isolated hamlet, where he had been staying with his grandparents, eight months before, in July,
‘It was a time to stay under the duvet, because there was a lot of wind,’ she recalled, but instead she set off on a hike without a phone or a watch.
Émile Soleil's (pictured) skull was found by a walker on March 30 'on a path between the Church and Chapel' of the rural Alpine village of Haut Vernet in southeastern France. The woman who found it has spoken of her shock at becoming a prime suspect
An entrance of the French southern Alps village of Le Vernet, near the Haut-Vernet where two-year-old Emile went missing while staying with his grandparents
She could not recall how long she has been walking when she came across the macabre remains that she now calls ‘the thing’.
Expressing ‘amazement’ that police search parties using sniffer dogs had not seen it earlier, she said: ‘I found it in the middle of the path.
‘It was white, and very clean, There were only the top teeth…I cried, and then I calmed down.’
Unable to call anyone, Manon decided to put the skull inside one of two plastic bags she normally used to cover her feet when it was wet.
‘I could have left [the skull] but then, by the time I went back, it would no longer have been there,’ she said.
‘That’s why I picked it up, I know that on days with weather like this, if you wait, the mountain is no longer the same.’
Manon said that she took care not to touch the skull with her bare hands, but she ‘did not know’ if her DNA had transferred on
