Francis Heaulme was born in Metz on February 25, 1959, into a violent household. After his mother died in 1984 he took to the road, moving between hostels, casual building work and Emmaus shelters, criss-crossing France by train for years with no address and no routine.
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, ten; Aline Peres, forty-nine; Sylvie Rossi, thirty; Laurence Guillaume, fourteen; and Jean Remy, sixty-five.
The case was made by a gendarme, Jean-Francois Abgrall, 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, and then supply a detail only the killer could know.
He has been convicted of nine murders in a series of trials from 1994 onwards and is suspected of dozens. In 2017 he was convicted of the 1986 murders of two eight-year-old boys at Montigny-les-Metz, a case in which another man, Patrick Dils, had been wrongly convicted as a teenager and served fifteen years before being acquitted in 2002. Heaulme is serving life.