Guy Georges was sentenced in Paris on April 5, 2001, to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 22 years for the killings of seven young women between 1991 and 1997. French lawmakers and broadcasters call him "le tueur de l'Est parisien", the East Paris killer, after the part of the city where the killings took place. Newsweek reported that police called him the Beast of Bastille, after the Paris neighborhood.
He was caught in March 1998 only after investigators compared crime-scene DNA, by hand, with records held in laboratories that did not share their files. In June 1998 Parliament passed the law that created France's national DNA database, and in 2002 a parliamentary report said that a working central file would have identified him sooner and spared the lives of the last two women he killed.
He was born Guy Rampillon on October 15, 1962, in Vitry-le-François, in eastern France, according to a 2021 Newsweek account. He grew up in the French child welfare system. A 2021 Europe 1 radio series on the case, made with the journalist Patricia Tourancheau, summed up his early years as abandonment by his mother, a father he never knew, and a foster family that raised him without loving him.
Newsweek, drawing on earlier accounts, reported that as a teenager in his foster home he attacked two of his foster sisters, in 1976 and 1978, and was moved to another placement.
From 1979, Newsweek reported, he attacked a series of young women. Some of the women escaped; the others survived. He was arrested and released, then served a one-year sentence in an Angers prison after attacks in 1980, an 18-month sentence after an attack in June 1982, and a ten-year sentence after an attack in February 1984. A 2002 report of the French National Assembly refers to an earlier conviction in 1985.
Near the end of the ten-year sentence, according to Newsweek, he was granted day release. On the evening of January 24, he did not return to prison. He went to Paris instead.
The National Assembly report dates the first killing to January 1991. Newsweek identifies the first victim as Pascale Escarfail, a 19-year-old student, and places her death on the night he failed to return from day release. He was formally released from prison on April 4, 1992, Newsweek reported.
The six women killed after her were, in the order Newsweek gives them, Catherine Rocher, 27; Elsa Benady, 22; Agnès Nijkamp, 32; Hélène Frinking, 27; Magali Sirotti, 19; and Estelle Magd, 25.
The parliamentary report describes the same method in each killing: the young women were sexually assaulted and then killed with a knife. The report groups the killings as the murders of eastern Paris. The last two came after September 1997.
For most of the 1990s the killings were not treated as the work of one man. The National Assembly report says that the murders in eastern Paris and other murders committed in car parks were handled by two different investigative teams, and that no link was made between them. His lawyer at the trial, Frédérique Pons, made the same point in a 2015 interview with Europe 1: for years investigators had looked at the crimes as possibly separate cases.
By then investigators had a DNA profile from the crime scenes, which became known by the label SK1. There was no national file to compare it with. In 1995, Pons said, Georges presented himself to the police in connection with the inquiry, was cleared at first, and his DNA did not match the profile attributed to SK1. The parliamentary report records that in August 1995 he was convicted of a sexual assault, and that no link was made then between him and the East Paris murders.
The photographer Yan Morvan, writing for Vice in 2014, said that from May to early July 1995 Georges, who went by the name Jo, worked as his photo assistant in Paris. Morvan wrote that a letter from an acquaintance in March 1998 told him that the man named Guy Georges in the news was Jo.
After the two killings that began in September 1997, the parliamentary report says, a composite sketch of the attacker was made public. The report describes the arrest of March 1998 as following the sketch and the recognition of his photograph by a young woman who had survived an attack. It also records how the identification was made. The expert in charge of the molecular biology laboratory at the university hospital in Nantes checked the 3,500 files held in his own laboratory, one by one, until he matched Guy Georges's genetic profile to the profile found at the scenes of four of the murders.
Jean-Paul Milland, who oversaw the forensic police at the time, described those years to Europe 1 in 2020: DNA comparisons were made case by case, and each laboratory kept its own records. A single shared file did not yet exist.
Newsweek gives the date of the arrest as March 27, 1998, in the Montmartre district of Paris. He confessed after his arrest, Newsweek reported.
The case was still under investigation when France legislated. Law no. 98-468 of June 17, 1998, on the prevention and punishment of sexual offences and the protection of minors, added Article 706-54 to the Code of Criminal Procedure and created the Fichier national automatisé des empreintes génétiques, the FNAEG, to hold the DNA profiles of people convicted of listed sexual offences, the Interior Ministry told the National Assembly in May 1999. The ministry gave that answer to a deputy, Michel Hunault, who had asked in November 1998 why no national file yet existed, citing the arrest of "the murderer of eastern Paris" through a genetic comparison.
The decree that put the file into operation was published on May 18, 2000, two years after the law, Europe 1 reported on the file's 20th anniversary. Europe 1 described the shock of the Guy Georges case as the origin of the shared database. Its scope later widened from convicted sex offenders to many other crimes, and by 2020 it held the profiles of 3.3 million people.
In December 2002 the National Assembly's finance committee published a report on the FNAEG, written by the deputy Marc Le Fur. It opened its case for the file with the Georges affair, saying that the developments in the case had shown the serious consequences of having no centralized DNA database, of the kind Britain had had since 1995. A central file, the report said, would have allowed Guy Georges to be identified more quickly and would have saved the lives of his last two victims. The report also cited the case to show the cost of a rule that kept people who had only been charged out of the file.
The trial was held before the cour d'assises in Paris in March and April 2001. He had confessed to the police, but at trial he pleaded not guilty to all charges, Newsweek reported. Frédérique Pons, his lawyer, told Europe 1 that when she first met him, two or three months before the trial, he maintained that he was not the killer. She called the first week of the hearing very difficult.
The turning point came from a small question. Asked whether he was left-handed or right-handed, Pons recalled, he mimed holding a knife, and after that he confessed to everything. In March 2001, according to the National Assembly report, he admitted seven murders and four other attacks committed between 1991 and 1998.
Psychiatrists who examined him before trial found him legally sane and fit to be tried, and described him as a "narcissistic psychopath", Newsweek reported.
On April 5, 2001, the court convicted him of the murders, with rape, and sentenced him to life imprisonment with a 22-year période de sûreté, a minimum period during which he could not seek release. Pons said in 2015 that he became eligible to apply for release in 2020.
Pons defended her role in later interviews. Everyone has the right to a defense, she told Europe 1, and what matters is the case file and what can be argued from it. She said she did not believe in the popular image of him and compared him to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. She said a psychiatric hospital might have been a better place for him than a prison, and that although an expert had given him only a slim chance of rehabilitation, she still hoped for it. Asked whether she would defend him again, she answered, "Je recommencerais," I would do it again.
He has served his sentence in the French prison system since 2001. Newsweek reported in September 2021 that he was 58 and held at the maison centrale of Ensisheim. Under his sentence he has been entitled since 2020 to apply for conditional release, his lawyer said in 2015.
The case was the basis of the feature film SK1, which was in French cinemas when Europe 1 interviewed Pons in January 2015, about 14 years after the sentence. In 2021 Netflix released the documentary Les Femmes et l'assassin (The Women and the Murderer), co-directed by Mona Achache and Patricia Tourancheau, which told the hunt through the accounts of a senior police officer and a victim's mother, Newsweek reported. In November 2021 Europe 1 broadcast a three-part episode of Hondelatte Raconte on the case, with Tourancheau as guest, covering his childhood, the manhunt and the trial. Tourancheau is the author of the book Guy Georges, la traque.
Proven by the 2001 judgment: the murders of seven women, with other offences, for which he was sentenced to life with a 22-year minimum term.
Admitted: at trial he confessed to seven murders and four other attacks, according to the National Assembly report. Newsweek reported that he had attacked at least 13 other women; that figure does not come from a court finding.
Points on which accounts differ:
The arrest. Newsweek places it on March 27, 1998, in Montmartre. The National Assembly report links the arrest to a composite sketch and a survivor's recognition of his photograph, while describing the DNA match as made by hand in a Nantes laboratory.
Which crime scenes the DNA matched. The parliamentary report says four of the murders, without naming them. Newsweek names the cases of Pascale Escarfail, Catherine Rocher, Elsa Benady and Agnès Nijkamp.
The 1995 contact with police. His lawyer said he was cleared after a DNA comparison that did not match; the parliamentary report says only that he was convicted of a sexual assault that year and that no link was made.
His earlier convictions. Newsweek reports a ten-year sentence after an attack in February 1984; the parliamentary report refers to a conviction in 1985.
October 15, 1962: born Guy Rampillon in Vitry-le-François.
1976 and 1978: attacks on two foster sisters, as reported by Newsweek.
1979 to 1984: attacks on several young women; prison terms, the last of ten years.
1985: an earlier conviction, recorded by the National Assembly report.
January 1991: Pascale Escarfail, 19, is killed in Paris after he fails to return from day release.
April 4, 1992: formal release from prison.
1991 to 1997: six more women are killed in Paris.
1995: questioned and cleared, by his lawyer's account; convicted of a sexual assault in August.
From September 1997: the last two killings; a composite sketch is published.
March 1998: identified by a manual DNA comparison in a Nantes laboratory and arrested in Paris (Newsweek: March 27, in Montmartre).
June 17, 1998: Law no. 98-468 creates the FNAEG.
May 18, 2000: the decree putting the FNAEG into operation is published.
March 2001: trial in Paris; he confesses to seven murders and four other attacks.
April 5, 2001: sentenced to life with a 22-year minimum term.
December 18, 2002: National Assembly report cites the case as the reason for a central DNA file.
January 2015: the film SK1 is released.
2020: the 22-year minimum term ends; he may apply for conditional release.
2021: the Netflix documentary Les Femmes et l'assassin; Europe 1's three-part series in November.
September 2021: reported held at Ensisheim, aged 58.