'It didn't have to end this way': How the police search for Norah and Remy Carpentier took a wrong turn

Melted ice cream, a single sandal left behind on the floor of the car, and footprints found near the scene of an abandoned car: those were the clues that Norah and Romy Carpentier, sisters aged 11 and 6, had been in the vehicle with their father when Martin Carpentier had an accident near Saint-Apollinaire, Que., on a warm night in July 2020.

Carpentier didn't wait for help. Instead he fled into the woods, his daughters in tow.

The first police officers to arrive on the scene of the accident on Highway 20 just southwest of Quebec City didn't realize a tragedy was about to unfold.

Eighteen hours later, Carpentier would kill both girls before killing himself. The children's bodies would be found three days later; their father's, nine days after that.

Their deaths shocked Quebecers.

The provincial police force, the Sûreté du Québec (SQ), claimed they'd jumped on the case of the missing girls quickly and that nothing more could have been done to save the Carpentier sisters.

But individual police officers, some now retired, offered Radio-Canada's Enquête a different assessment of how the case unfolded.

They say had the search not been so disorganized, less time might have been lost, and mistakes made early in the investigation cost them precious hours that might have made the difference between life and death.

"Personally, I think we botched it with the 24 hours we lost," said André Bernard, a former SQ ground search specialist.

Now retired, Bernard agreed for the first time to speak publicly about the case that marked the end of his police career.

It was Bernard and his team who found the bodies of the two girls after three days of searching near Saint-Apollinaire, on July 11, 2020.

"I really thought we could have made a difference," he told Enquête. "It didn't have to end this way."

At 9:20 p.m. on July 8, the night of the girls' disappearance, 911 operators began getting calls about an abandoned vehicle that had been in an accident on Highway 20. In the recordings obtained by Radio-Canada, witnesses described what they'd seen.

"It just happened," said the first.