A secret affair, a bloody crime scene and the hunt for the killer of British expat Karen Carter: Now the Daily Mail can reveal startling new details about her final moments that could finally solve this Dordogne murder mystery…

Out of season, the French village of Trémolat is ghostly quiet. Summer’s tourists have long since departed. Gites in this bucolic corner of the Dordogne have been locked up for winter.
The house where Karen Carter once lived – and where she was brutally murdered last April – is silent aside from the creak of a broken drainpipe and the cawing of crows in the skeletal trees.
But a new yellow police cordon stretched across the overgrown driveway, and police seals across the locks of the front door, serve as stark reminders that whoever killed the 65-year-old is still at large.
Eight months after Karen was stabbed to death in a frenzy of violence moments after arriving home in her car, the Gendarmerie Nationale has launched a fresh appeal for witnesses, asking for testimonies which ‘could prove crucial to the progress of the investigation’.
As I discovered when I returned to Trémolat last week, hundreds of local men have already been called in for questioning about their links to the mother of four.
Among them are British expat friends of the dead woman as well as three local workmen – a gardener, a pool maintenance man and a roofer.
Some of those interrogated told me that they were asked by police if they had found Karen attractive and if there had ever been anything sexual between them.

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Karen Carter with her puppy, Haku, three days before her murder
More, in a moment, of these unsettling questions as well as new evidence now exclusively revealed to the Daily Mail about the final moments of Karen’s life.
French investigators remain convinced that her murder was deeply personal, but forensic samples taken from dozens of locals have so far failed to show any match with evidence found around the crime scene where Karen was stabbed eight times in the chest, groin, arm and leg.
According to an investigation source: ‘This appears to point to an outsider visiting the village and carrying out this brutal crime.’
What is painfully clear is that Karen was a woman who was keeping secrets in the weeks before her brutal murder; not least from her 65-year-old husband in South Africa. Alan Carter, who only discovered his wife was having an affair after her murder, described the shock discovery as ‘a feeling of complete betrayal’.
In the months leading up to her death, Karen had quietly embarked on a discreet relationship with 75-year-old retired French business executive Jean-Francois Guerrier, who also lives in Trémolat.
While trying to keep their affair under wraps within their close-knit community, it had inevitably become common knowledge and Karen told friends she was planning to divorce her husband.
In recent years, the couple had largely lived apart with Alan remaining at their home in South Africa while Karen, who had dual British and South African nationality, spent increasing amounts of time in France.

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Karen was a woman who was keeping secrets in the weeks before her brutal murder; not least from her 65-year-old husband, Alan Carter, in South Africa (pictured with his wife)

Ironically, she told friends she felt safer living there than at the gated home she once shared with Alan in East London, a coastal city on the edge of the Indian Ocean in South Africa’s Eastern Cape.
Alan, however, has told me that the divorce was ‘not a fait accompli’ and that, at the time of his wife’s death, he still hoped they could find a way to make their marriage work.
Several of her friends say that Karen appeared tired in the days leading up to her death. One of them, who was among the 15 people who attended a wine tasting in Trémolat with Karen on the night she was killed, said: ‘On our way home in the car that evening, my wife commented that Karen hadn’t been wearing any make-up. It was very unusual because she was a glamorous woman. She looked tired and pale.
‘We didn’t think too much of it at the time but, afterwards, knowing what happened, it is impossible not to wonder if there was something on her mind.’
Karen was the last to leave the wine tasting, held at the secluded hill-top farmhouse belonging to her French lover, on Tuesday, April 29 this year.
Guests had been given a talk by a representative from a local chateau in this wine-rich region and offered the chance to purchase discounted bottles from its vineyard.
Karen left at around 10pm, setting off in her Dacia Duster car with her new puppy, Haku, on the back seat. Mr Guerrier, a retired Fujitsu executive, stayed behind to lock up before coming to join her at her 250-year-old home on the other side of the village of around 600 residents.
It is a journey of around only eight minutes by car, following the road which hugs the Cingle de Trémolat, the serpent-like curve of the Dordogne river, before descending into the village.

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Ironically, Karen told friends she felt safer living in her home in Trémolat than at the gated home she once shared with her husband in East London, a coastal city on the edge of the Indian Ocean in South Africa’s Eastern Cape

She would have driven past Cafe Village, the community cafe-bar where she volunteered and spent many happy evenings with her friends, eventually turning left into Route de Soulaleve and driving for another mile before she reached Les Chouettes – The Little Owls.
She pulled up, as she always did, on the short gravel driveway, just a couple of metres from her door.
According to previous media reports, her attacker struck as soon as she got out of her car.
But in recent days a source has passed an extraordinary new piece of information to the Daily Mail about what happened in the moments after Karen arrived home.
After switching off the engine, she got out from the driver’s seat in the left-hand-drive car, before closing the car door and walking a few steps to the house.
She put her key in the lock, opened the door and switched on the interior lights inside before going back outside to fetch her puppy. She had just opened the rear passenger door to reach inside for Haku when she was ferociously attacked.
This new detail has left some of Karen’s friends speculating as to why the killer didn’t strike the moment she got out of the car or as she put her key in the front door.
‘Why the delay?’ said one who spoke to me. ‘Was the killer an assassin hiding in the darkness or was it actually someone she knew? Maybe Karen didn’t realise in that moment that her life was in danger.’

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In the months leading up to her death, Karen had embarked on a discreet relationship with 75-year-old retired French business executive Jean-Francois Guerrier

That theory might also explain why Karen’s closest neighbour, who was watching the UEFA Champions League match between Arsenal and Paris St Germain on TV, heard nothing that night.
‘There was no scream or cry for help. Nothing at all,’ Christophe Pultier told me.
‘The first I realised something was wrong was when I saw blue flashing lights outside my window and went out to see what was going on.’
It was widowed Mr Guerrier who found Karen dying on the driveway less than half an hour after she’d left his house. She was lying face down on the drive by the open rear car door, bleeding profusely.
He called the emergency services before turning her over and trying in vain to resuscitate her. He told a friend later that what he saw was ‘just gore’.
When Karen’s cleaner turned up to work the following morning, she saw a scene ‘like something out of a film’.
‘The drive was cordoned off and behind it were men in hazmat suits and a pool of blood. I was in shock,’ she said.
According to police, the killer used ‘exceptional violence’ to kill Karen with what they will only say was a ‘sharp object’.
One of the eight blows pierced Karen’s aorta. Others penetrated her liver, kidney, spine and almost severed one of her arms. The injuries, said the autopsy report, indicated ‘the desire to kill’.
In the immediate aftermath of the murder, Mr Guerrier was taken in for questioning and his clothes, covered in blood after his desperate resuscitation attempts, were taken away for forensic examination but detectives quickly excluded him from their investigation.

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The road to Karen’s house hugs the cingle de Trémolat, the serpent-like curve of the Dordogne river, before descending into Trémolat

The arrest, just hours later, of Karen’s neighbour, 69-year-old divorcee, Marie-Laure Autefort – widely known in the village to be passionately in love with Mr Guerrier – then raised the prospect that Karen’s death might have been a crime of passion.
Madame Autefort was held for 48 hours but released after a search of her car and her house, and even a cave in the grounds of her home, failed to throw up any direct evidence against her.
The murderer’s brutal determination, and the fact that forensic evidence taken from the crime scene has so far failed to match with any of the locals tested, means that investigators have begun leaning towards the theory, as one puts it, ‘of an outsider
visiting the village and carrying out this brutal crime’.
This has led to widespread speculation that Karen was the victim of a cold-blooded professional hit, an idea being given some credence not least because of the sighting of a suspicious man spotted near Karen’s home just three days before she was killed.
In August, the Daily Mail was the first newspaper to be told of this potential suspect – described as black, tall, thin and muscular – who was reported to police in the immediate aftermath of Karen’s murder but has never been traced.
Back in South Africa, Karen’s grieving husband Alan says that the lack of progress in the case is ‘frustrating’.
‘It’s such a small village. Surely there must be prime suspects,’ he said.
He is aware of the ‘contract killer’ rumours and believes that speculation has been fuelled by gossip and conflicting stories about his marriage to Karen.
Friends in Trémolat insist it was over. But according to Alan, the last time he saw Karen, just a month before her murder, she told a family member that she didn’t want to go through with the split.
‘I was always hopeful,’ he said. ‘We’d talked about it a lot over the last year or so.’
Karen had travelled to South Africa on tour with Les Reines du Foot, the over-50s football team she played for, before extending her visit to see her family.
Alan had no idea that before travelling home to East London, Karen had been accompanied by Mr Guerrier, although her footballing friends say they displayed no affection at all in public and stayed in separate hotel rooms.

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Karen and Alan bought their property in Trémolat shortly after their first visit to France in 2008. They renovated the cottage and barn and ran them as holiday lets during the summer season

According to one: ‘She was very discreet and careful not to be photographed with him. She didn’t want anything to appear on social media.’
Alan admits he was concerned about the amount of time his wife was spending with Mr Guerrier and asked Karen ‘many, many times’ if she was having an affair with him but that her answer was always ‘absolutely not’.
‘Obviously there was something going on but there was nothing I could do about it. The family only found out after she died. We were very upset about that,’ he said.
He and Karen had four adult children together, two daughters (Liz and Katy) and two sons (Jonathan and Nick) who live in the UK, America, Australia and South Africa.
During a wake in Karen’s honour organised in South Africa, her family paid tribute to a joyful woman who lit up any room she entered.
Her Lancashire-born parents, it was said, liked to tell how she was conceived on board the ship that carried them from England to South Africa where they eventually settled. Her father and Alan’s were both Rotarians. Their families were close long before she and Alan fell in love.
‘It was in the early 1990s that our stars collided,’ Alan told the wake. ‘We started seeing each other, we fell in love and we got married.’
Karen and Alan bought their property, Les Chouettes, in Trémolat, shortly after their first visit to France in 2008. They renovated the cottage and barn and ran them as holiday lets during the summer season.
Before she was murdered, Karen was also in the process of buying a one-bedroom cottage to live in while earning a rental income from her holiday properties.
Her new puppy, say friends, was yet another clear sign that she saw her future in France.
But divorce, of course, is rarely straightforward. It’s not impossible that Karen was torn about separating from her husband and that any secrets she kept were down to her conflicted feelings, a desire not to hurt her family, including her children and her elderly mother, who was ill at the time and has since passed away.
Who, then, might have wanted to kill her? Some of the questions put to those interrogated in recent months certainly make clear that investigators are still not ruling anything out.

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It’s not impossible that Karen was torn about separating from her husband and that any secrets she kept were down to her conflicted feelings and a desire not to hurt her family

One British expat, questioned at the Gendarmerie in the nearby market town of Lalinde, told me: ‘I was asked if there was ever anything more than friendship between us, which of course there wasn’t.’
Two others also said they were asked if their relationship had ever been sexual.
One of Karen’s close friends insists: ‘She wasn’t someone who would have entered into a casual love affair. Aside from Jean-Francois, I would have known if there had been anyone else.’
The new police appeal for witnesses and fresh information has brought the shock of Karen’s death back to the surface of this close-knit community.
When they meet at Cafe Village, the converted butcher’s shop in Trémolat which is now a popular meeting place for locals, Karen’s friends go over and over the weeks leading up to her death in the hope that they will stumble across some as yet unobserved clue which will point them towards her killer.
At times, they glance towards the wall where a framed photograph of Karen, taken just two days before her murder, hangs in her memory. She is holding Haku, the beloved puppy she had collected only a few weeks earlier which is now being cared for by Mr Guerrier.
In the days ahead, they will gather in front of the village’s mairie [town hall] for carol singing, chestnuts and mulled wine, mindful that, had her life gone to plan, this would have been Karen’s first Christmas in Trémolat.
As one of them puts it: ‘It was a period of great change for Karen. She was excited about the life ahead. She was such a lovely person, bright and optimistic, always glass half full, but all that was taken away from her.
‘We need to find who did this. We can’t move on until we do.’