Michel Peiry

Victims

4 CONVICTIONS, all four killings tried together at Fribourg in 1989. Further disappearances of young men in the region were attributed to him at the time and none was ever charged; the four convictions are the established count

Years active

1981 - 1987

Location

Romont, Fribourg, Switzerland

Method

Hitting with a hammer and rocks

Status

Arrested on May 1, 1987 after the killing of a fourteen-year-old in Vaud, and confessed to killing four boys and young men between 1981 and 1987. Convicted at Fribourg on October 31, 1989 of four murders and SENTENCED TO LIFE IMPRISONMENT, with the court declining to order psychiatric internment in place of prison. Swiss life sentences may be reviewed for conditional release after fifteen years, from 2004; HE HAS REMAINED IN CUSTODY AND HAS BEEN REFUSED, with successive expert assessments finding the risk of reoffending too high. In 2012 the Fribourg cantonal court ordered that he remain detained under the post-sentence measures for dangerous offenders introduced in 2007. He has been held for long periods in the high-security unit at Bochuz and later at Curabilis in Geneva, the Swiss institution for offenders with psychiatric disorders. No release has been reported.

Peiry was born on February 28, 1959 and lived at Romont in the canton of Fribourg. He picked up young men and boys hitchhiking on the roads of the canton and neighbouring areas, assaulted them, and killed them with a hammer and with rocks. The Swiss press called him le sadique de Romont.

Between 1981 and 1987 four are established as killed, and further disappearances were attributed to him. The killings were in Switzerland. Swiss reporting called him the Sadist of Romont.

He was arrested on May 1, 1987 and sentenced to life imprisonment on October 31, 1989.

He has remained in custody continuously and is one of the small number of Swiss prisoners held under indefinite detention on grounds of continuing dangerousness, a regime that was reinforced by a 2004 referendum on lifelong custody for extremely dangerous offenders. Applications on his behalf have been refused.

He is generally described in Switzerland as the worst serial killer in the country's modern history, which says more about Switzerland's rarity of such cases than about the scale of this one. Four victims are established; the higher figure reflects attribution.