Yellow police tape still surrounds Karen Carter’s honey-coloured stone cottage on the outskirts of Trémolat, a small village east of Bordeaux. It looks forlorn now, sags where once it was taut, and has faded slightly in the heat, just like the flowers left in tribute. Among them, a posy laid by her husband Alan.
Opposite, a road sign warning ‘DANGER’ urges drivers to slow down to avoid cumbersome farm vehicles – though one might argue that a more present ‘danger’ in this slow-moving, rural idyll comes from a killer still at large.
In the dying light of April 29, he or she lay in wait for Karen, a British mother-of-four, in a walnut grove alongside the 250-year-old property she rented to holidaymakers here in the Dordogne.
If she had guests, Karen stayed with friends elsewhere in the village but it was out of season and the killer, it seems, knew she would return here.
As the former teacher pulled into her gravel drive and exited her car, her assailant sprang out, stabbing her eight times in a savage, ‘premeditated’ attack before she had a chance to scream.
In the following days it was widely felt this was a case investigators would wrap up quickly.
There was much talk of a crime of passion, a love triangle, of how French prosecutors believed the killer may have harboured a grudge against either 65-year-old Karen or Jean-François Guerrier, 74, a charming Frenchman to whom she grew close while her husband lived 7,000 miles away at their home in South Africa.
Yet more than six weeks have now passed and it seems Karen’s murder remains a mystery.
British expat Karen Carter, a 65-year-old married mother-of-four, was found dead outside a property she ran on the outskirts of Trémolat, a small village east of Bordeaux
Her best friend Beverly Needham says: ‘Everyone who knew lovely Karen here, every single one of us, has been interviewed now. Has there been a breakthrough in the investigation? We just don’t know. There is a feeling that it might never be solved.’
French investigators rarely supply public progress reports and it was unusual for them to go as far as venturing the murder was premeditated.
And yet, as The Mail on Sunday has discovered, there does appear to have been some notable recent developments in this most intriguing of cases.
Before the murder, Trémolat enjoyed a reputation as something of a crime-free haven where few – if any – of its 600 or so residents took even the most rudimentary security precautions. There is no CCTV or a single doorbell camera anywhere in the village. Homes are rarely locked, except at night.
It is easy to imagine, then, the shock caused in these parts by a second attack on a woman just four weeks after Karen was killed. Whether it has a bearing on her murder is unclear.
Details are sketchy, but a 28-year-old woman was walking her dog close to her home in the village one evening when she was ‘stalked from behind’ and knocked unconscious.
‘She did not have time to look round or take defensive action,’ says a source in the prosecutor’s office in the nearby town of Bergerac.
Police tape at the cottage where Karen Carter was stabbed eight times as she got out of her car
Floral tributes have been left for Karen Carter outside her cottage in the Dordogne
When she came to, she later told police she sensed that her attacker had run at her from behind. She was unable to provide a description and ‘no connection has been established between the two crimes’.
Still, following so soon after the murder, it has sharpened already-heightened anxiety in the village, where anything remotely out of the ordinary is now viewed through a suspicious lens.
Investigators seem more exercised by evidence of the killer’s movements near Karen’s cottage – in particular, tyre tracks left in a grassy field that may yet hold the key to their identity.
This newspaper can reveal that attention has focused on a car that was parked at the edge of a wood half a mile away. From here, it is a six-minute walk – along a faint path sandwiched between the wood and a barley field and down through the walnut grove – to the crime scene.
After attacking Karen, the killer is thought to have returned to the car and sped across the field – leaving tyre marks – before joining an isolated road, Route du Plateau, which leads out of the village.
‘Police with dogs and forensic investigators were all over the field examining the tracks and where they think a car was parked next to the wood,’ says a French woman living nearby. ‘The tracks have disappeared now because the grass was cut a few days ago but they were quite clear.
‘I wasn’t here at the time of the murder and nor were many others. These are holiday homes. The guy next door is from England and he’s not due to come with his family until July. It is quiet now but was even more so when this horrible event happened.’
Beyond the field, there is little to denote human existence save a barn and a smattering of hay rolls. Silence is interrupted only by buzzing flies and birdsong.
Jean-Francois Guerrier pictured at his home in Trémolat. It was Guerrier, who lives ten minutes away from Karen’s cottage in a hilltop farmhouse, who found her and tried to resuscitate her
Karen with her husband Alan, who has said he was unaware of the relationship with Guerrier until it was announced by French authorities and has described ‘a feeling of complete betrayal’
It is easy to see how the killer would have moved undetected here, particularly at dusk.
Where the tyre track clue will lead investigators is anyone’s guess. For now, locals seem inclined to measure the progress of this murder inquiry in arrests and little else.
Investigators have briefly held and released only two people: Guerrier, a retired Fujitsu executive, and MarieLaure Autefort, 69, a divorced mother-of-two who lived nearby and made no secret of her love for Guerrier.
Concerned about ‘finger pointing’, Madame Autefort has not been seen in the village since the murder and is staying with family in Paris.
Physically weak and afraid of the dark, nobody here suspects she is capable of such a frenzied attack. In any case, she had a solid alibi. It was Guerrier, who lives ten minutes away in a hilltop farmhouse, who found Karen and tried to resuscitate her.
Investigators say they have no reason to suspect Guerrier, who lived for several years in Camberley in Surrey while working in London.
Above all others, it is with this man – Karen’s ‘confidant’ and a popular figure in the village – that sympathies lie.
Until now he has spoken only to declare Karen ‘a lovely lady’.
Indicating the depth of his loss, he sent Beverly – originally from Manchester but who has lived four decades in France – a poignant text message ahead of her meeting with me. ‘We were happy being happy,’ he wrote. ‘This has left a giant black hole.’
On the night before the murder, Karen shared a meal with Beverly at the latter’s home.
‘She brought wine, she always did, and I can’t bring myself to move the bottle from where she left it in the kitchen.’ That night Karen spoke of having served divorce papers on her husband – something he has subsequently denied, though Beverly has ‘no reason’ to doubt her friend.
She was at a crossroads and had resolved to begin a ‘tranquil’ new life in Trémolat. To that end, she was selling another property she owned on the coast and had agreed terms on a one-bedroom cottage in the village. ‘She adored it here and was beginning a new chapter,’ says Beverly.
With Guerrier? Who knows, she says. ‘Karen was always very discreet and sensitive to gossip in the village. I teased her about her relationship with Jean-Francois but she didn’t talk in detail. It was her business.’
Her husband has said he was unaware of the relationship until it was publicly announced by French authorities and has described ‘a feeling of complete betrayal’.
Karen had many friends in this enchanted enclave. They describe her as charismatic, kind, elegant and with a rare zest for life. Beverly says: ‘If you suggested doing something, anything, she always replied: ‘That will be fun!’ That was Karen, whether it was going out walking or going for a drink. She wanted everything to be fun.’
Beverly was not among the six or so guests, including Karen, who attended an informal wine tasting evening at Guerrier’s home on the night she died.
But by all accounts, she says, her friend was on typically ebullient form, if a little tired.
At around 10pm, as the gathering broke up amid overlapping cries of ‘goodnight’, it is said Guerrier asked Karen to let him know when she returned home safely.
The sleepy village of Trémolat looks across the Dordogne river. Karen had had resolved to begin a ‘tranquil’ new life here, according to her best friend Beverly Needham
Was this simply old-fashioned courtesy or did it suggest an uneasy presentiment? Karen lived close by, after all.
Beverly, though, disputes these words were ever spoken and suggests the reason he turned up at Karen’s home sometime later was not because he hadn’t heard from her but perhaps because he had been invited to spend the night.
He found her lying in a pool of blood. Now, as he grieves, he looks after Karen’s newly acquired cross-breed puppy Haku.
How the horror must haunt Guerrier, suggested a neighbour. Better, she says, that Guerrier summon memories of happy times. When, for instance, he once danced with Karen to Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive outside the Café Village, a community hub in Trémolat where they volunteered behind the bar and over which a photograph of Karen now hangs.
What next for this investigation? Far from scaling down the inquiry, it is now in the hands of a judge in Périgueux who has greater powers than local prosecutors.
It is evident, say some, that investigators are leaning towards the possibility the killing was not the work of a local but an outsider.
‘Who knows?’ said another of Karen’s friends. ‘We can only hope they find this person soon. For Karen’s sake, for her family’s sake, for all of us.’
