In January 1999 a six-year-old girl named Wendy was collecting old coins outside her house in the Lille area when she asked a passing man if he had any. He said he had some at home, took her by the arm, and led her to an abandoned factory in Fives. When she fought him he threatened her with an electric baton and told her he had already killed little girls. He raped her, followed her out telling her he would kill her if she talked, and left her crying in the street, where a passing driver found her and took her to the police. Wendy remembered his green jacket with a triangle on the back. Shown six photographs, she pointed without hesitation to a man the investigators had not suspected at all: Denis Waxin, a thirty-year-old gas station attendant with nothing on his record but shoplifting.
Summoned by a note in his mailbox, Waxin came in on January 20, 1999, and before anyone explained why, blurted that he was guilty. Wendy picked him out of a lineup, and a search of his apartment turned up the jacket with the electric baton in a pocket. He was charged with her rape and held at Loos prison. Then, as a matter of routine, his DNA was compared with the semen found on the body of Nadjia Thebib, a four-year-old killed in 1992. It matched.
Nadjia had been playing with other children outside the run-down building in Moulins where her grandmother, Meriem, lived, on the late afternoon of July 23, 1992, when a man picked her up and walked off with her. Because she made no sound, people assumed he was an uncle. Her aunt Anissa ran after him, stumbled and lost him, and described a red T-shirt, sneakers and white sweatpants with red stripes. Six days later three boys playing on the edge of Ronchin found her body under a tarp in the brush, her clothes folded beneath her. She had been raped, stabbed in the neck and suffocated with a plastic bag within hours of being taken.
Charged with her murder on July 12, 1999, Waxin admitted it but refused to sign, saying he wanted to see a judge about two more. The next day, before the investigating judge Christophe Ingrain, he confessed to the rapes and murders of Cathy Monchaux and Nathalie Hoareau. Cathy, nine, had been playing in the garden of her family's home in Wazemmes on October 8, 1990, when he offered to buy her candy; he took her to an abandoned soccer field, and when she tried to escape he stabbed her fourteen times. Her father had just called her in. She was found the next day by a man walking his dog.
Nathalie, seven, had been sent by her mother on the late afternoon of November 22, 1985, to buy cigarettes and bread in the Biscottes quarter of Lille. Waxin, then seventeen, offered to show her his shack, led her to a vacant lot, raped her, tried to strangle her with the candy necklace she was wearing and stabbed her twice in the heart. She was found that night in a bush, naked, with the pack of cigarettes and her mother's shopping list beside her. Rain had washed away most of the semen, and no genetic profile could be made.
He was born Denis Georges Waxin on June 26, 1968, in Loos, and grew up in Wattignies, one of five children, with a mother who was always at work and a father who gambled and did not speak to him. His one close tie was an older brother, Dominique, and he fell into depression when Dominique left home in 1985, the year of the first killing. He trained as a carpenter, did military service in Germany, and after the second killing married and settled in Moulins, where he called his wife Mom and was known as helpful and charming; he lost a job at a service station after threatening to set fire to it. In November and December 1993 he raped two boys, aged seven and ten, in Moulins and Lambersart. He offered investigators a string of explanations, that he had been drunk, that he had been raped by a homeless man at twelve and wanted revenge, then withdrew the rape story as an invention meant to win leniency. He also claimed three further rapes of girls for which no record was ever found.
The trial for the murders of Cathy and Nadjia and the rapes opened before the cour d'assises at Douai in May 2002. Psychiatrists described him as a perverse egocentric who had sexualized a hatred born in early childhood. He described Nadjia's death at length and without visible emotion, and said he remembered nothing of Cathy's. On May 31, 2002, he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of thirty years. Because he had been seventeen when he killed Nathalie, that case was tried separately that September, and he received twenty years. On appeal at Saint-Omer in 2003 the Hoareau sentence was upheld, and at the second appeal that November he broke down on the stand and asked the families for forgiveness; the court again imposed life, with a minimum of twenty-nine years. By the accounts of that ruling, he could not seek release before January 2028.
The victims' names appear in several spellings in French reporting: Hoareau and Hoarau, Monchaux and Moncheaux, Nadjia Thebib and Nadja Tebib.