A Story of a Murder, No Traces, and Nothing to Report

Abstract

This chapter details how the gendarmes in Godiya dealt with a criminal case that they had never seen before. The case was about an investigation into the murder of two little girls in Tsaga. On their first visit to Tsaga, the gendarmes had “nothing to report”; there were no traces, no witnesses, just the two dead girls' bodies. Eventually, they caught the perpetrator and they interrogated him. Contrary to interim brigade commander Chef Tahirou's initial assumption, the perpetrator was not a Nigerian organ trafficker and the murder weapon was not a machete but an axe. Ultimately, the exceptional quality of this case pushes aspects of the gendarmes' work to the fore that were central to everything they did but would certainly get lost in the description of the trivial everydayness of their usual workdays.