Pierre Chanal was born on November 18, 1946, in France and built a reputation early in adulthood as a disciplined, highly capable career soldier. By the late 1970s, he had risen to the position of chief warrant officer and instructor at Camp de Mourmelon, a major French military base located in the Marne region.

Chanal’s military record was, by all accounts, exemplary. He developed a reputation for physical endurance and self‑discipline, running roughly 15 kilometers every day and maintaining a rigorous training routine. He was skilled in hand‑to‑hand combat, practiced skydiving, and conducted himself with professionalism that earned the praise of commanding officers.

His service included a 1985 deployment to Lebanon under United Nations authority, lasting from January 18 to May 15, during which he was awarded a UN service medal.

Between January 1980 and 1987, a pattern of unexplained disappearances emerged around the Mourmelon region. The victims were primarily young military conscripts, many of whom vanished after hitchhiking or traveling near Camp de Mourmelon while on leave. Their disappearances were initially dismissed by military authorities as desertions, a stance that would later be heavily criticized as evidence of institutional denial and reputational protection.

In total, at least eight young men disappeared in a triangular zone surrounding the camp. Among them were five soldiers who disappeared between 1980 and 1982. Another conscript vanished in 1987. A civilian traveler heading toward the base also disappeared in 1985. The cases gained further urgency when two bodies were later recovered:

• Olivier Donner, a soldier from the 4th Dragoon Regiment, found dead on October 31, 1982 near Mailly‑le‑Camp.
• Trevor O’Keeffe, a 21-year-old Irish tourist, discovered on August 8, 1987 in a grove near Alaincourt in the Aisne region, partially buried.

For years, these disappearances remained unsolved. The lack of action by military authorities deeply embarrassed the French government and frustrated families who refused to accept official claims that their sons had simply abandoned their posts.

The break in the case came on August 9, 1988, when two police officers in Saône‑et‑Loire encountered a suspicious Volkswagen Type 2 microbus parked on a dead‑end service road for a TGV construction site. They approached the vehicle, expecting to find environmental activists opposed to the new train line. Instead, they found Pierre Chanal inside. When questioned, he claimed to be a non‑commissioned officer on leave.

One officer noticed a man’s head partially hidden beneath a blanket in the back of the van. The man was 20-year-old Hungarian hitchhiker Balázs Falvay, who had been picked up the previous night. Falvay appeared traumatized and quickly told officers he had been kidnapped, restrained, and raped. Inside the vehicle, police found sex toys and a camera containing images consistent with Falvay’s account.

Chanal was arrested immediately.

On October 23, 1990, the Saône‑et‑Loire Assize Court convicted him of kidnapping and raping Falvay and sentenced him to 10 years in prison. Throughout the trial, he refused to speak, maintaining total silence. He was released on June 16, 1995 on probation after serving five years.

Even after his release, investigators and families of the Mourmelon victims regarded Chanal as the prime suspect behind the decade‑long series of disappearances. His psychological profile, his consistent presence at Camp de Mourmelon throughout the years in question, and his method of selecting a hitchhiking victim in 1988 all aligned with patterns suspected in the earlier cases.

In the early 2000s, as the cold cases were reinvestigated with renewed urgency, Chanal was formally accused of murdering at least three of the missing men, including Irish tourist Trevor O’Keeffe. He was taken into custody and placed on trial.

However, before the trial could conclude, tragedy and frustration struck again. On October 15, 2003, while in his prison cell, Pierre Chanal committed suicide. Using a razor blade, he severed his femoral artery. Despite attempts to save him, he died from massive blood loss. His death abruptly ended the trial and left many questions unresolved, including whether he acted alone or whether all of the disappearances could be definitively linked to him.