Case of missing people from Vaud, Switzerland
Alessia Vera Schepp and Livia Clara Schepp are twin sisters from Saint-Sulpice, a suburb of Lausanne in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland who were last seen on January 30, 2011. Matthias Schepp, their father, picked up his twin daughters from his ex-wife's home in St-Sulpice; they never returned. The body of Matthias was later found in Italy, where the authorities presumed that he had committed suicide. The disappearance of the six-year-old girls led to an unsuccessful search across Switzerland, France and Italy.
Background.
Alessia and Livia were twin sisters, born on October 7, 2004, the only children of Irina Mayme Lucidi Schepp, an Italian-born Swiss lawyer, and Matthias Kaspar Schepp, 43, a Canadian-born Swiss engineer. The parents married in July 2004 in Ascoli Piceno, Italy, where they both worked for the tobacco company Philip Morris.
A year before the girls disappeared the couple had split up, living in separate homes the same village.
Timeline.
The following timeline is based on a Swiss Police publication:
Possible murder by Matthias Schepp.
In February 2011 police investigators said that Schepp sent a letter to his wife suggesting that he had killed the children. The letter was not released to the public. According to CNN, the Italian newspaper "Corriere della Sera" was allowed to publish a single sentence from the letters which said "The children rest in peace, they have not suffered". A search of Schepp's computer showed that in the days leading up to the trip, he searched for information about firearms and poisons, along with the timetables for the ferry.
Novelization.
In 2015, Italian journalist and writer Concita De Gregorio published a novel, "Mi sa che fuori è primavera", based on the girls' disappearance, written from the point of view of Irina Lucidi. De Gregorio received a Brancati Prize for the book in 2016. It was published in English in 2022 as "The Missing Word". 