Françoise Jakubowska took the 7:15 train from Villers-Saint-Paul every weekday morning to her job as a secretary in Paris. On January 6, 1976, walking along the railroad line at about seven o'clock, she was attacked. She was stabbed three times in the chest and then shot in the head with a .22 long rifle. She was twenty. Her body was found in waste ground near the station hotel, her clothing pulled up from her feet to above her chest.
She was the eighth and last. For seven years people in Nogent-sur-Oise and the towns around it had been shot dead at dusk or in the early morning, in the street or in open fields, inside an area of a few square miles. Most of the attacks came along the railroad line at nightfall. He undressed the bodies but did not rape them, and he took their handbags. Seven were women and one was a man. The French press called whoever was doing it le tueur de l'ombre, the shadow killer, because of the hours he kept.
The dead were Therese Adam, forty-nine; Suzanne Merienne, forty-four; Annick Delisle, twenty-nine; Eugene Stephan, twenty-five; Mauricette Van Hyfte, twenty-three; Josette Routier, twenty-nine; Julia Goncalves, twenty-nine; and Jakubowska.
Marcel Henri Barbeault was born at Liancourt on August 10, 1941, the eldest son of a steam-locomotive driver and a textile worker. He left school young without his primary certificate and at fourteen went to work as a riveter at Établissements Rivière in Creil. He joined the Young Christian Workers, entered the army on December 13, 1960 and served in the Algerian war as a stretcher bearer, then went back to factory work; accounts name Saint-Gobain and the Chausson plant at Creil. He boxed and did judo and wanted to be a paratrooper or a gendarme, but vertigo made him fail the tests eight times.
In 1964 he married a woman named Josiane, and they had two sons, Patrice in 1966 and Laurent in 1972. His mother, Micheline, died of breast cancer in 1968, reportedly in his arms, and was buried in the cemetery at Nogent-sur-Oise; his two brothers died after her. It was after these deaths that he began burgling houses and stealing guns. Some accounts say he had no criminal record when he was caught; others say he had already been sentenced for burglary, and it was a review of those burglaries that turned up a stolen rifle. To his neighbors he was a devoted husband and father, reserved and entirely ordinary.
What produced him was a divisional inspector named Daniel Neveu, newly posted to the judicial police at Creil, who would not leave the case, and an anonymous telephone call. The caller described a man of thirty-five, about six feet tall, married to a blonde, with two children and no driver's license, who had served in Algeria, boxed, and worked at Rivière. Commissioner Christian Jacob treated Barbeault as a suspect on that description.
Neveu's answer lay in a cemetery. The Nogent-sur-Oise cemetery sat in the middle of the triangle the killings made, and a young couple had been shot in the parking lot of the cemetery at Laigneville, a killing he read as opportunistic, by someone who was already there and perhaps came often. A .22 long rifle cartridge case turned up by a water tap hidden behind the church, a spot only a regular visitor would know. Neveu crossed the names from the letters of denunciation against the surnames on the graves and came down to thirty; one of them led to Barbeault, whose mother lay in that cemetery.
When police searched his home at Montataire on December 14, 1976 they found in the basement a sawed-off rifle fitted with a silencer, a raincoat and several caps, and ballistics tied the rifle to one of the killings. Another rifle he had stolen had been fired for practice by its owner in his garden, and casings recovered there matched some of the murders. The murder dates fell on his days off. He was arrested that day. Neveu, who wrote a book on the case, Le mort n'a pas le profil d'un assassin, in 2010, has since told Le Parisien that he believes Barbeault made the anonymous call himself, and that when the arrest came he was preparing another killing.
His trial opened at the Beauvais assize court on May 25, 1981. The prosecutor wanted death, but François Mitterrand had just been elected president on a promise to end the guillotine, and nobody expected a death sentence to stand. After a five-hour plea by his lawyer, Jean-Louis Pelletier, he was convicted on June 10, 1981 of five of the eight murders and sentenced to life. The other three were not proved against him, and the first, in 1969, is separated from the rest of the series by four years; that attribution is the weakest part of the case. Some accounts start the series instead on January 10, 1969, with an attempt to kill Françoise Lecron, the wife of a Saint-Gobain engineer.
He appealed, and on March 17, 1982 the Court of Cassation quashed the sentence. He was tried again, and in November 1983 the Beauvais court convicted him a second time and reimposed life imprisonment. That is why the record carries two trials two years apart, and why the conviction has survived both a full appeal and a retrial.
It rests on ballistic and circumstantial evidence. He has never confessed, and no motive has ever been established. There was no robbery. The families have never been told why.
He has been in prison since December 1976. Joseph Recco, who had been held longer, died in 2024, and Barbeault became the oldest and longest-held prisoner in France. He is at the central prison of Saint-Maur in the Indre, where he works as the prison librarian, and he is eighty-five.
Fifty years after the killing of Françoise Jakubowska, his release is a live question in French law rather than a theoretical one. A life sentence in France permits an application for conditional release unless the court imposed a whole-life term, which it did not here. In the early months of 2026 the criminal lawyer Sonia Kanoun told Le Parisien that the conditions might be met for the sentence-enforcement court to release him, given his age and his conduct, and the criminologist Corinne Herrmann pointed out that only a true whole-life term bars an application. What is reported to stand in the way is that he still denies the killings, which leaves nothing for a court to weigh as remorse, and the difficulty of assessing how dangerous a man of eighty-five remains.