Two survivors ended it. On May 1, 1987 police arrested Michel Peiry, a twenty-eight-year-old from Romont in the canton of Fribourg, born on February 28, 1959, on the strength of evidence from two people who had lived through his attacks. In custody he began to describe what he had done to the others, though he later took some of it back.
His victims were adolescents and young men, most of them between fourteen and eighteen, whom he picked up hitchhiking. He tied them up, tortured and raped them, killed them, and burned the bodies. The Swiss press named him le sadique de Romont, the Sadist of Romont, and the name has stayed with him for four decades.
The killings were not confined to Switzerland. By the account Swiss public broadcaster RTS gave in 2026, his first known murder was committed in 1981 on a trip to Florida, where he left the body in the Everglades. He went on to kill in the cantons of Valais, Ticino, Neuchâtel and Vaud and in Italy, and cases in France were also put to him. The count has never been fixed. He confessed to the murders of three adolescents in Switzerland and two abroad, and retracted three further confessions during the inquiry, sometimes withdrawing an admission when no body was found. Swiss reporting puts the total at about ten.
He was tried in Valais, before the Tribunal de l'Entremont, and in October 1989 was sentenced to life imprisonment. The judgment convicted him of multiple assassinats, the gravest form of murder in Swiss law, along with attempted murders, false imprisonment, abduction and indecent assault on children. Some accounts place the trial at Fribourg; the Swiss federal courts and press name the Entremont court.
Swiss law lets a life prisoner seek conditional release after fifteen years, and he first applied in 2002. By 2026 he had made twelve applications, and every one had been refused. The yearly reviews rested on the opinions of the cantonal commission that assesses dangerous offenders and on psychiatric reports, and all of them found a very high risk that he would kill or sexually assault again.
For most of that time he did not fight the refusals. That changed in 2025. The Valais authorities had turned down his request, made in 2023, for accompanied outings of a few hours, and on April 25, 2025 the Valais cantonal court upheld that refusal, finding that outside prison his fantasies and urges would come to the surface and that he had no strategy for controlling them. In September 2025 the same courts refused his twelfth parole application, along with his alternative request that the sentence be converted into institutional therapeutic treatment.
He took both decisions to the Federal Supreme Court and lost both. The outings ruling came in March 2026; the parole ruling, case 7B_518/2025, was published on August 13, 2026. It was the first time he had challenged a parole refusal before the cantonal courts, let alone the federal one. The court held that a life sentence does not breach the European Convention on Human Rights so long as it can be reviewed, as his is, and that the prospect of his ending his life in prison because of the gravity of his crimes and the risk he presents is not inhuman or degrading punishment. It found the risk that he would again attack the life and sexual integrity of minors still very high, and noted that preventing escape or reoffending on any outing would take considerable police resources. His request to have the sentence converted into therapeutic treatment was declared inadmissible because he had not put it to the cantonal judges. Any easing of his sentence, the court said, depends on his first coming to understand in therapy what led him to kill and developing ways to reduce the danger he would pose outside.
At sixty-seven, with thirty-nine years in custody, he is held in a closed institution whose location has not been made public. The case left a mark on Swiss law as well as on its memory: the national debate it began fed, fifteen years after his conviction, into the 2004 popular vote that approved lifelong internment for extremely dangerous offenders.