Xavier Dupont de Ligonn&es: Family Murdered, Father Vanishes

 

Xavier met his wife Agnes when was 18, the year he began to drive around in the Triumph Spitfire. However, the two went their separate ways and Xavier began a one-year stint in the army, which was mandatory for young French men at the time. According to Le Point, Xavier was obliged to enter the army directly out of high school because his father failed to pay for his university studies. Despite his noble lineage, Xavier entered and left the military as an enlisted man and did not achieve the rank of an officer.

Xavier's professional life after the army consisted of a series of on-and-off-again low-skill jobs, including working as a sales clerk for a garden equipment company. At the age of 23 in 1984, he found himself unemployed and alone in the Var region of France, not far from where he would disappear over two decades later after his family was murdered.

Xavier eventually moved back in with his mother in Versailles where he became involved with Agnes again. But things were a lot different than when they were boyfriend and girlfriend in high school: Agnes had become pregnant by another man and was the mother of a baby she named Arthur, whom Xavier later adopted. Still, Xavier eventually married her and the young family soon left the bourgeois enclave of Versailles.

Xavier's married life did not motivate him to change his professional situation much in the early years of his marriage. The family eventually settled in the Ardèche region in the southeast of France in 1993. There, Xavier worked in a garden supply shop for three years — his longest period of employment. But after that job did not work out, Xavier resumed his restless life of moving to different towns after working for a while, collecting unemployment, then moving again. Unlike before, he now had a family in tow.

The family lived in several towns in the southeast of France, not far from the Cote d'Azur, including Draguignan, Lorgues, Sainte-Maxime, and Vaison-la-Romaine. During this time, Agnes gave birth to Thomas, Anne, and Benoît, according to media reports. The family made its way to western France in 2002 before settling in the house in Nantes in 2003 where the tragic events would later take place.