Near the end of his trial in Paris in the spring of 2001, Guy Georges, who had denied everything, stood up and admitted to the seven murders. "I will inflict pain on myself," he told the families. "I will never leave prison; you can live in peace. Whatever happens, I won't do it again. Even if you don't accept it, I ask for forgiveness." On April 5 he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of twenty-two years. That evening some of the families' lawyers were already worried about the day, after that minimum, when he could apply for release. "No, we do not forgive," one mother said outside the courtroom.
He was born Guy Rampillon on October 15, 1962, some records say October 10, to a French mother, Hélène Rampillon, and an African American father, George Cartwright, a cook at a NATO base. Her parents in Angers had raised her older son but refused to take in a mixed-race child. After six years moving between foster homes and his mother, he became a ward of the state and was placed with the Morin family, who had seven children of their own and thirteen foster children and had earlier cared for another Black child the authorities took back. In 1968 his surname was changed to Georges. His mother moved to California. As a boy he stole from the family's shop and went into the woods with a knife, calling himself Jo after Injun Joe in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. At fourteen he tried to strangle a younger foster sister who was mentally disabled, and at sixteen an older foster sister testified that he tried to strangle her with an iron bar. He was sent to a state orphanage.
The attacks on women that followed ran for nearly twenty years. From 1979 he tried to strangle, stabbed or raped a series of young women, several of whom escaped. In November 1981 he raped an eighteen-year-old, stabbed her and left her for dead; in June 1982 and February 1984 two more women were raped and stabbed and got away. He went in and out of prison.
The first of the seven was Pascale Escarfail, nineteen, raped and murdered in Paris on January 24, 1991. There followed Catherine Rocher, twenty-seven, on January 7, 1994; Elsa Benady, twenty-two, on November 8, 1994; Agnes Nijkamp, thirty-two, a Dutch woman, on December 9, 1994; Hélène Frinking, twenty-seven, also Dutch, on July 8, 1995; Magali Sirotti, nineteen, on September 23, 1997; and Estelle Magd, twenty-five, on November 16, 1997. All seven were attacked in the eastern districts of the city, around the Bastille, and tortured and raped before they were killed. The press called him the Beast of the Bastille and the East Paris Killer. In the same years other women survived attacks, among them Élisabeth Ortega in June 1995.
Matching DNA linked the Nijkamp, Frinking and Magd murders to the attack on Ortega, who described her attacker as North African; neither her description nor the composite sketch drawn from it looked like him. Hélène Frinking's mother, Anne Gautier, ran what she called a co-investigation of her own and, frustrated after the killings of Sirotti and Magd, went to the press to tell Paris that a serial killer was at large. She said the judicial police had not questioned her daughter's neighbors until twenty-three months after the murder, and that the Ortega sketch had been drawn twenty-eight months after the attack while other survivors' accurate descriptions were ignored.
France had no central DNA database, so there was nothing to compare the crime-scene profiles against. In March 1998 a judge ordered a manual search for a match through the DNA records of private laboratories, in breach of the usual rules. "Yes, we circumvented the law, and we didn't care," Martine Monteil, head of the Brigade criminelle, said in a 2021 documentary. Once he was identified, police realized he had already been questioned in another series of killings of women in parking garages, including those of Catherine Rocher and Elsa Benady. His name leaked to the press, and on March 26, 1998, officers on an unrelated stakeout arrested him outside the Blanche metro station in the ninth arrondissement. He was injured in the arrest and later said he was beaten in interrogation, which Monteil denied. He confessed to the police.
At the trial the advocate general, Evelyne Lesieur, called him inhumanity and absolute evil. His lawyer, Frédérique Pons, argued that the emotion visibly shaking him in court had brought him back into the world of human beings. Psychiatrists described him as a narcissistic psychopath. His twenty-two-year minimum ran out in 2020, and since then he has been entitled to ask for conditional release; in 2020 he was reported to be living quietly at the central prison at Ensisheim. In June 2024 franceinfo listed him among French serial killers now eligible to seek release. The case was the basis for the 2014 film SK1 and the 2021 Netflix documentary Les Femmes et l'assassin.