Bernard Pesquet

Victims
6 - 2 separate convictions: one murder in 1941, when he was nineteen, for which he served a long sentence, and the later deaths of 1974 to 1976, for which he was sentenced to life on October 8, 1982
Years active
1941 / 1974-1976
Location
Rouen/Paris, France
Method
Not established in the accessible record
Status
Convicted of murder in 1941 at the age of nineteen and served a long sentence. Tried again over the deaths of 1974 to 1976 and sentenced to life imprisonment on October 8, 1982. No release, death or later record has been located; he would be over a hundred if living, so the absence of a death year here reflects a gap in the sources rather than a belief that he survives.

Pesquet was born in 1922. In 1941, aged nineteen, in German-occupied France, he killed his closest friend, Julien Quivel. He was convicted and served a long sentence.

Between 1974 and 1976, living near Rouen and in Paris, he killed his wife Christiane Ruaux and four elderly people: Henri Francqui, sixty-eight; Emile Bergaud, seventy-three, and his wife Elizia; and another. The motive in each case was money: savings, property, pensions he continued to collect. He concealed several of the bodies by encasing them in cement in the staircase and cellar of his house, which is how they were eventually found. Their maid, Alfia Borgioni, died with them.

He gave an account of the deaths that the investigating authorities did not accept, and he was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment on October 8, 1982.

The accessible sourcing is French press material and summary entries; the individual deaths are not documented in detail in anything available here. What is clear from the record is the shape: a killing at nineteen, a sentence served, and a second series beginning more than three decades later against victims chosen for what they had.