Francis Heaulme was born in Metz on February 25, 1959. His father beat him until he was seventeen; he drank, tried to kill himself, adored his mother and was close to his younger sister. His mother died of cancer when he was twenty-three. He has Klinefelter syndrome, an extra X chromosome, which went untreated. In his late twenties he left home and took to the road, on foot, by bicycle, hitchhiking and riding trains without a ticket, sleeping in Emmaus shelters, psychiatric wards and detox centers, working now and then as a mason or a metalworker and spending what he earned on drink, sometimes mixed with tranquilizers.
He killed as he went, between roughly 1984 and 1992, mostly people encountered by chance near stations, campsites and waste ground: women, men, and children. The bodies turned up in different departments, years apart, with no connection between them. French reporting called him the criminal backpacker, after the way he moved around the country.
Those named in the record are Lyonelle Gineste, seventeen; Annick Maurice, twenty-six; Ghislaine Ponsard, sixty-one, and Georgette Manesse, eighty-six; Joris Viville, a boy whose age is given as eight or ten; Aline Peres, forty-nine; Sylvie Rossi, thirty; Laurence Guillaume, fourteen; and Jean Remy, sixty-five.
Some of the killings were not his alone. Joris Viville was killed at Port-Grimaud and his body moved more than twenty kilometers by car, and Heaulme did not drive; at trial, shown five possible accomplices, he named each in turn and then said he would not be a scapegoat, and he alone was convicted. Laurence Guillaume, fourteen, was killed near Metz after he met her cousin at the fair there less than an hour earlier; the cousin was convicted of rape and complicity in her murder and sentenced to eighteen years. For the killing of Aline Peres on a crowded beach at Brest, in daylight, he received twenty years. He was acquitted of the murder of a retired legionnaire at Courthézon, and of the killing of a young conscript, Laurent Bureau, in the Dordogne, where the court could not decide whether he or his companion, Didier Gentil, had struck the blows.
The case was made by a gendarme, Jean-François Abgrall, whose inquiry into the death of Aline Peres first put him on the trail, and who interviewed Heaulme in 1989 over an unrelated matter, was struck by his oblique way of describing killings as things he had witnessed, and spent years afterwards building a chronology of where Heaulme had been and matching it against unsolved deaths. Heaulme would speak about a murder as a story about someone else, calling it a snag, and then supply a detail only the killer could know. "It's when you ask him nothing that he says the most," Abgrall said, and: "He doesn't lie. He never makes anything up. But he deliberately covers his tracks by mixing the crimes, dates and locations." Abgrall arrested him at Bischwiller in Alsace on January 7, 1992.
The convictions came in a series of trials from 1994 onward. In May 1997 the Assizes of the Var imposed life imprisonment with no parole for twenty-two years. On December 16, 2004 he received a further thirty years, with no parole for twenty, for three murders in the Marne in 1988 and 1989. By then nine murders stood against him.
Montigny was the case that would not close. On September 28, 1986, by most accounts (some give the 29th), two eight-year-old boys, Cyril Beining and Alexandre Beckrich, were killed with stones on a railway embankment at Montigny-les-Metz. Patrick Dils, sixteen at the time, was convicted of their murders in 1989 and served fifteen years before his acquittal in 2002. Heaulme accepted that he had passed along the line twice that day. A 2007 non-lieu in his favor was reopened largely through the persistence of Chantal Beining, Cyril's mother, who died in October 2019 before the case ended.
On May 17, 2017 the Moselle Assizes convicted him of both murders and imposed a third life sentence. The Yvelines Assizes confirmed it on appeal on December 21, 2018, and the Cour de cassation rejected his final appeal in June 2020. He has always denied Montigny, repeating at trial "Montigny, c'est pas moi," Montigny wasn't me. That made eleven murder convictions.
Another cold case followed. Jean-Joseph Clément, a sixty-year-old repairman of farm machinery, was found dead, his face bloodied, at Bédarrides in the Vaucluse on August 8, 1989. Heaulme had been implicated early in that investigation and then cleared by a non-lieu. When the case was reopened he was charged again, in October 2023, and on June 16, 2026 an investigating judge of the Nanterre cold-case unit ordered him to stand trial before the Assizes of the Hauts-de-Seine. He appealed the referral. Clément's daughter, Christine, has sued the state for gross negligence and denial of justice over the years her father's case lay idle.
He has been held at Ensisheim prison in the Haut-Rhin since 2006. At the end of March 2026 he was admitted to the secure hospital unit for prisoners at the Nancy-Brabois university hospital, his health reported to have seriously deteriorated. In September 2026 Christine Clément wrote to the prosecutors at Versailles asking that his appeal be heard quickly, because his condition was getting worse. As of September 2026 he was alive and the appeal was pending.