A British man found dead alongside his wife at their rural France home was seen on security cameras buying a lottery ticket hours before their bodies were discovered.
Andrew Searle, 62, was seen buying two Euro Lottery tickets and a bar of chocolate from a tobacco shop in the French village of Les Pesquiès on Wednesday at around 6 p.m., according to The Sun.
The next day, at around 12:20 p.m., the Briton and his wife, Dawn Searle, 56, were found dead at their home.
Neighbors described the horrific conditions in which their bodies were discovered, according to The Telegraph.
Andrew — a former financial investigator — was reportedly hung inside the home and found with a gag in his mouth.
Dawn’s body was allegedly found naked outside their quiet countryside home with signs of head trauma and her jewelry scattered around where she was discovered.
No weapons have been recovered at the crime scene or around the property, police said.
The tobacco shop owner who interacted with Andrew hours before he was found dead, Isabelle Palazy, said the couple were “regular customers.”
“He would come in every day and buy Fortuna Blue cigarettes,” Palazy, 58, told The Sun. “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,” she said.
A neighbor also reported seeing Andrew appearing distressed while on a dog walk the day before the gruesome discovery.
“I saw them the day before they were found, they were walking the dogs and Andrew was on the phone,” the unidentified neighbor said, according to the outlet. “He was very agitated, and he was arguing in English, he just waved at me and then carried on.”
A friend of the Searle’s, Odile Marian, said the 62-year-old had been worried about finding his garage door opened in the days leading up to the couple’s deaths.
“He had seen the door of his garage was open, although he was sure he had closed it,” she told the outlet. “So he was looking for who opened his garage. And he didn’t find who did it. We don’t know if it’s connected/ Maybe it was him who left it open, but he was sure he had closed it?”
Police have speculated the couple may have been killed during a break-in.
However, the mayor of Villefranche-de-Rouergue, Jean-Sébastien Orcibal, said it was “clearly a homicide” and said he’s ruled out they were killed in a burglary “gone wrong,” according to the Scotsman.
Authorities have yet to release an official cause of death and are waiting for “the result of the autopsies” before they share any “tangible information,” Public prosecutor Nicolas Rigot-Muller said in a statement to the Scotsman.
“All leads remain under serious consideration,” Rigot-Muller said, including the possibility of a murder-suicide.
Andrew, originally from West Sussex, and Dawn, from Scotland, married in 2023 and lived in the region for the last 10 years.
The couple was reportedly popular amongst community members and was known to throw parties and travel across Europe together.
Andrew allegedly played a key role in taking down organized crime factions, uncovering terrorist money trails, and cracking down on sanctions busters linked to rogue states like Russia while working as a financial investigator before retirement, according to The Sun.
He described himself on his LinkedIn professional profile as being “Responsible for all Anti-Financial Crime matters in the UK & Europe function – providing an investigation service for the Group.”
Dawn’s son, Scottish-born actor Callum Kerr, posted a statement on Instagram over the weekend saying he and his sister Amanda Kerr were “grieving the loss of their mother” while Andrew’s kids Tom and Ella Searle were “mourning the loss of their father.”
“We kindly request that their privacy be respected during this difficult period. We will provide updates as appropriate,” he wrote.
Kerr has appeared in Netflix’s “Virgin River” and is also a country singer living in Nashville with his fiance.
