Louis was born at Pontigny in Burgundy on January 21, 1934 and drove a bus for a company in the Yonne. Between 1975 and 1979 seven young women disappeared: Madeleine Dejust, Chantal Gras, Bernadette Lemoine, Christine Marlot, Martine Renault, Jacqueline Weiss and Francoise Lemoine. All were in their late teens or early twenties, all had learning disabilities, and all had been in the care of institutions in the department. Most had used his bus.
They were called the disappeared of the Yonne, and the reason the case became a national scandal in France is what happened to the files. Reports were taken and closed. The women were recorded as having left of their own accord or as runaways. A social worker, Christine Villemin, and later a magistrate pressed for years to have the cases reopened and were obstructed. An internal inquiry eventually found that the original investigation had been closed without being conducted, and the state was held liable for the failure.
Louis was arrested in December 2000, after the cases were finally reopened following the campaign by the families and by the association set up for them. He confessed, led investigators to remains, and then retracted. He was tried at Auxerre and convicted of the seven murders on November 25, 2004, and sentenced to life with a twenty-year minimum. He was separately convicted in 2006 of the rape and murder of his stepdaughter.
He died in prison on October 28, 2013. He denied the killings after his retraction and to the end. The convictions are firm; what the case is remembered for in France is the twenty-one years in which nobody looked.