We’ve spent a lot of time talking about the Rey Rivera episode of Unsolved Mysteries, but there’s another case nestled in the first six episodes of the Netflix revival that really spooked us. It’s an international murder mystery; a French patriarch of noble birth seemingly murdered his entire family—in a very meticulous manner, at that—and then fled the scene.
Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès has been missing since 2011, after the bodies of his wife and four children were found buried in the garden of their Nantes home. But tracking him down has proved difficult, as his plain features make him indistinguishable from any average man. According to Terry Dunn Meurer, the co-creator of the original series and an executive producer on the Netflix reboot who recently spoke with Nerdist, people have “spotted” Xavier all over the globe.
“It’s actually kind of funny how people have seen him at the gym in Argentina, or at the local market in Switzerland,” Meurer said. “The leads have come in from all over the world because he looks so much like any man.” In a separate interview, Meurer said he may have recently been spotted in Chicago.
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Of all the mysteries presented in the first six episodes of the new season (six more are set to air later this year—two of them international, according to Meurer), the disappearance of Xavier seems the “easiest” to solve. Meurer believes he’s still alive, “because it’s just hard to believe that he would have gone to the lengths that he did to then just turn around and kill himself,” she said. But where could he be?
According to Meurer, the official tip line for the series— Unsolved.com—has received many promising leads since the episodes dropped. But it’s Xavier’s disappearance that has amassed the most concrete possibilities, at least in terms of reports the show’s producers have received directly and not the FBI. “We don’t have a count from the FBI for the Alonzo Brooks case or the Georgia Bureau investigation for the Patrice Endres case,” Meurer said, referencing two other mysteries from the first six episodes.
So what happens if they do catch Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès—or solve any of the other new mysteries, for that matter? In the original version of Unsolved Mysteries, episodes featured “update” segments. Will new episodes offer footnotes about solved cases?
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The streaming element of the Netflix reboot challenges that. “With broadcast, we would air a story and sometimes it would get solved that night and then two weeks later we would produce a quick update with new information,” Meurer explained. “But we were broadcasting 22, 24 shows per year, so we could kind of get a cadence going with that. In this case, if we were to put an update at the end of the episode, we would have to ask the audience to go back and re-stream that episode or else fast-forward to the end.“
Instead, Meurer says they plan to push any updates to social media, because “the news is going to hear about them sooner than anyone. Sooner than we could get an update out there.“
Let’s hope we get an update on the true whereabouts of Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès, and every unsolved case, so the survivors can finally find peace. That’s always been the intent of Unsolved Mysteries, after all—putting this information into the ether so audiences can help producers and authorities find answers. With the international element, we can now help solve global mysteries together.
Featured Image: Netflix