It is more than a week since Andrew Searle called in to the shop near his home in rural France for the very last time.
Chatting in French to shopkeeper Isabelle Palazy with a breezy familiarity, he is silently captured on the store’s CCTV buying his customary pair of €3 lottery tickets and his favourite chocolate bars.
Mr Searle gathers up his purchases and, wrapped up in a thick fleecy jacket and warm hat against the bitter Gallic winter, pops back outside to where his Scots wife Dawn is waiting in their car.
Nothing about his movements in those few minutes shortly before 6pm on Wednesday, February 5, suggested to Madame Palazy that she would never see Mr or Mrs Searle alive again.
After all, the couple had become regular customers of hers in the years since they moved to Les Pesquiès, a quiet hamlet two hours’ drive north-east of Toulouse.
It had been their dream to move abroad, buy an old ‘doer-upper’ and drift gently into retirement.
They would walk their two hunting dogs, join in with local events, even host an annual barbecue for the 100-strong community to mark the end of those long, lazy summers.
The French have a phrase for it: ‘La vie en rose’ – that blissful state where everything seems a source of joy.
The bodies of Andrew and Dawn Searle were discovered by a neighbour in the hamlet of Les Pesquiès, north of Toulouse
The house where Dawn and Andrew Searle, 56 and 62, were discovered
Which only makes what unfolded in the hours after that footage was recorded even more troubling.
Shortly before half-past twelve the following day, a concerned neighbour discovered Mrs Searle’s lifeless body in the gardens of the idyllic rural home the couple had so lovingly renovated together.
The 56-year-old had suffered several severe blows from a ‘blunt and sharp object’ to the back of her head.
No murder weapon has been recovered, but the contents of a jewellery box were scattered around her and she was semi-clad in a pair of pyjamas. Inside, gendarmes called to the property would find 62-year-old Mr Searle’s body hanging from a radiator.
For this tiny community, dealing with the shock of these harrowing events was hard enough.
Among the lush meadows and deep forests of the Aveyron, crime rarely intrudes. But for the Searles’ many friends and neighbours, the truly baffling aspect was why this should have happened to them?
Well liked and well settled in their new life, on the face of it they scarcely seemed likely targets for such dreadful misfortune.
‘I just couldn’t believe it when I heard the news,’ Mme Palazy, 58, told the Mail. ‘[Mr Searle] would come in every day and buy Fortuna Blue cigarettes.
CCTV footage of Andrew Searle in a newsagent the day before the tragedy
That day he came in just before I was closing and he seemed perfectly happy, he was relaxed and he chatted and bought some chocolate and two lottery tickets.
‘Thinking that they were to die less than 24 hours later makes me go cold, I just can’t believe it.
‘They were a lovely couple, always happy and chatting and they spoke reasonably good French. He was working on his house, and he would come and buy chocolate bars here; KitKat and Kinder were his favourite.’
Mme Palazy was not alone in racking her brains for clues which might explain how the Searles came to harm.
Detectives have spent the past week and a half scrutinising the couple’s lives in forensic detail in a bid to solve the case.
The front gates to the home the Searles had painstakingly renovated together have remained sealed off with police tape, as a helicopter and drones have been heard overhead scouring the landscape for leads.
When prosecutor Nicolas Rigot-Muller confirmed that a murder inquiry had been launched, he said its purpose was ‘in particular to determine whether the tragedy is the result of a domestic crime followed by suicide or is the result of the intervention of a third party’.
In other words, for the prosecutor, only two nightmarish scenarios really pass muster: that Andrew Searle lashed out and killed his wife before taking his own life; or, that both were attacked in their own home by a violent intruder, raising the alarming prospect that a crazed killer is now on the loose.
Andrew and Dawn Searle had recently been to a family wedding in Goa
Tellingly, however, no appeal for witnesses has been made by investigators and no road blocks or active manhunt appeared to be in place around the scene in the immediate aftermath of the deaths last week.
Mr Rigot-Muller insisted that it was still too early to be sure what had taken place in the Searles’ property but post-mortem examinations on the couple revealed that Mr Searle ‘did not have any visible defensive wounds’.
As one police source told the Mail: ‘Most murders are carried out by someone who knew the victim and that is why the murder-suicide theory is gaining more probability.’
More than a week on from the tragedy, the friends and family of Dawn and Andrew Searle are bracing themselves to confront the unthinkable.
And yet, many questions still remain for detectives – not least, if this wasn’t murder, what could have proved the spark for a murder-suicide?
Delving into the minutiae of the Searles’ lives, detectives will have built a picture of a couple who found love for a second time after the break-up of their previous marriages.
Having lived in Musselburgh, near Edinburgh, they moved to France around ten years ago when Mr Searle took early retirement.
They decided to get married two years ago in a ceremony at Les Pesquiès town hall, attended by their four grown-up children. Mrs Searle, who was from Eyemouth, Berwickshire, was walked down the aisle by her actor son Callum Kerr, a former star of Channel 4 soap Hollyoaks now pursuing a successful country music career in the States.
A French Gendarme standing at the entrance of the house where the couple were found dead
The thought that marital harmony should have so quickly descended into fatal violence sits uneasily with their many friends.
One British expat couple in their sixties, who did not wish to be identified, told The Telegraph: ‘Us Brits, who knew Dawn and Andy very well, are certain this is not a murder-suicide because of financial difficulties or anything like that.
‘They weren’t flashy by any means, but they were definitely comfortable and had it good out here. They were always travelling. They recently went to a family wedding in Goa, they went to South America for their honeymoon.’
Another British couple who knew the Searles said simply: ‘Life was good, why would they want to kill themselves?’
Why indeed. But why would anyone else want to kill them? ‘We’ve got thousands of questions and very few answers,’ said Mr Searle’s grieving father, retired British Army major Fred Searle, 88, as he flew to France from his home in Littlehampton, Sussex.
Certainly, there seemed very little in Mrs Searle’s background that foretold her brutal demise.
The project manager loved travelling and doted on her two children from her previous marriage, Callum and Amanda Kerr.
Amanda runs a hair salon in Edinburgh, while Callum became known for his role as PC George Kiss in Hollyoaks, as well as appearances in Netflix’s Virgin River and drama Flowers In The Attic: The Origin.
Locals say that it is unlikely that the couple had been targeted by criminals at their home
He has also released a number of country songs and now lives with his family in the southern US state of Tennessee.
He previously shared images on social media of him walking his mother down the aisle to marry Mr Searle in 2023.
He wrote at the time: ‘Not many people can say they walked their own mother down the aisle.
What a pleasure! I love you mum. Congrats to Dawn and Andy on their wonderful wedding day and here’s to a tremendous life together for the happy couple.’
The family reunited last November for the wedding of Mr Searle’s son, Tom, in Goa, India, with his daughter Ella and her family flying in from their home in Portugal for the ceremony.
More recently, Mrs Searle posted pictures from the top of Table Mountain overlooking Cape Town during a holiday to South Africa.
Now, their shell-shocked families are in France trying to piece together what went wrong from the fragments of a supposedly happy marriage.
How can a happy picture turn so swiftly to despair? In the search for answers, French police zeroed in initially on Mr Searle’s background as a retired financial crimes investigator.
Originally from Steyning, West Sussex, Mr Searle studied fraud management at Liverpool John Moores University and worked in Edinburgh with Standard Life for more than 25 years before switching to Barclays.
He would work with police and the Serious Fraud Office in clamping down on global syndicates involved in crimes such as money laundering and investigating gangsters who may have been barred from dealing in the UK due to links with terrorists and rogue nations – including Russia.
If some disgruntled criminal had paid a visit to Les Pesquiès, police are confident they would have been picked up at some point by one of the scores of police, traffic and private cameras in the area.
The notion that the couple were preyed upon by fraudsters out for revenge was dismissed by fellow professionals.
One British-based colleague, who asked not to be named, told the Mail: ‘There is no way he could have been the target of a gangland hit.
‘Criminals just see the organisation, not the individuals in the teams or running the teams. They’d have a full-time job following through on vendettas.’ He said ‘everyone who knew Andrew’ was ‘in total shock’ at his death, adding: ‘He was a really nice guy, would chat to anyone. His plan was to buy a house in the south of France and do it up. He was excited about it. He was also bilingual, fluent in German and loved his dogs. He was not shady in any way.’
Prosecutors are said to be ‘unconvinced’ that Mr Searle’s work in finance holds the key, or that this was a break-in gone wrong despite finding evidence there had been a cursory search of the property and that cash was found in the couple’s bedroom.
Nevertheless, it seems increasingly likely that money does indeed lie at the heart of the matter.
Having taken early retirement in 2015, Mr Searle ran into money troubles, mainly to do with his UK pension, and reportedly took months to pay a bill of several thousand euros.
He had been seen crying in the nearby town of Villefranche-de-Rouergue in December after settling the debt, according to The Telegraph.
Publicly available financial documents in France also show that a rental business he set up in Les Pesquiès folded in December 2023.
Some locals had noticed a change in his mood lately. Antoine Da Silva, 63, a retired council worker who lives with his wife Emilie, 62, five minutes’ walk from the scene, said Mr Searle was too busy to stop and chat when he passed him the previous week, which he regarded as strange.
‘Then last Tuesday, I saw him on the phone. He said, “I can’t speak with you, I’m on the phone” and looked very worried and walked on immediately,’ said Mr Da Silva.
‘I knew him very well. He was someone calm and quiet and nice. But the last two times I saw him, he was very different.’
Investigators say the couple’s mobile phones are yielding a ‘mine of information’ and ‘vital clues’.
One neighbour, who did not wish to be identified, said that Mr Searle had been ‘arguing violently in English’ on a call while walking through the hamlet with his wife and their two dogs on the Wednesday afternoon. ‘He was very agitated,’ the neighbour added.
Close friend and neighbour Odile Marian said the idea of a ‘family drama’ was out of the question as the Searles had been planning activities with her.
However, she said he had become ‘very angry and irate’ that someone had opened the door of his garage.
On Wednesday, French newspaper Midi Libre said that a ‘marital crime’ was the preferred theory of investigators but Mr Rigot-Muller has so far refused to be drawn publicly, saying he would give an update ‘when [further] results were available or there was anything new to say’.
Meanwhile, the gates to the Searles’ home remained taped shut and a sign posted by local authorities offers counselling for those who ‘may have been affected by the tragedy’.
Tragically, those affected most, the couple whose dreams died alongside them in their rural idyll, are beyond help.
