Guy Georges was born Guy Rampillon at Vitry-le-Francois on October 15, 1962, to a French mother and an American serviceman, and was placed in foster care as an infant. He attacked his foster sisters as a teenager and accumulated convictions for rape and assault through the 1980s, being released each time.
Between January 1991 and November 1997 he followed young women into the entrances of apartment blocks in eastern Paris, forced them upstairs at knifepoint, tied them, raped them and cut their throats. Pascale Escarfail, Catherine Rocher, Elsa Benady, Agnes Nijkamp, Helene Frinking, Magali Sirotti and Estelle Magd were killed. Several others survived and gave descriptions. The French press called him the Beast of Bastille, after the Paris quarter.
The press called him the Beast of the Bastille. The investigation was slowed by a long-standing division between the Brigade criminelle and the Paris judicial police, who did not pool what they had, and by the fact that a genetic profile existed from 1995 but was not systematically compared against the DNA of known sex offenders for two years. When it finally was, in 1998, it matched.
He was arrested on March 26, 1998. He confessed, then retracted, and at his trial in Paris in March 2001 he denied everything until, after days of evidence from survivors and from the mother of one victim, he admitted all seven in open court. He was convicted and sentenced to life with a minimum of twenty-two years. The case produced the French national genetic database, FNAEG, which was created in 1998 and extended largely because of it.