On January 11, 1866, a man attacked a woman in the rue d'Erfurt in Paris. She bit him and screamed for help, a neighbor tripped him as he ran, and he was held down on the pavement. He was Louis-Joseph Philippe, a former soldier of thirty-four, and on his arm he had a tattoo that read Né sous une mauvaise étoile, born under an evil star. Witnesses to a string of murders in the city had described exactly that tattoo. Five days earlier a woman had been found almost decapitated at 54 rue de la Ville-l'Évêque, in a building whose ground floor housed the district police station.
Philippe was born on October 1, 1831, at Velleminfroy, in the Haute-Saône. He served in the army, including in the African battalions, and after his discharge in 1860 settled in Paris and took whatever work he could find; English papers later called him a warehouse porter. From the early 1860s women working as prostitutes were found murdered in their rooms in several quarters of the city, above all the sixth arrondissement, strangled and then slashed across the throat so deeply that they were almost beheaded. One victim was killed together with her small child. "I first strangle them, then I cut their throats," he is reported to have said.
How many he killed was never settled. Seven women are usually counted, and accounts run to ten or more; the presiding judge at his trial said the court could proceed only on the bodies found, but that he considered them only part of what the prisoner had done. The prosecution confined itself to the four cases where the evidence was overwhelming. On Monday, June 25, 1866, he was tried for the murders of a young woman named Robert, of Julie Mage and her child, and of Marie Bodeux. The defense pleaded homicidal mania brought on by erotic epilepsy. The jury convicted him, and he was sentenced to death.
He was guillotined in front of La Roquette prison in Paris on July 24, 1866. Twenty-two years later, in October 1888, during the Whitechapel murders, London newspapers revived his case as that of a man who had done the same thing in a European capital and been caught. The Evening News ran his life and trial on October 12, 1888, and in French he has since been called the Parisian Jack the Ripper.