Paris Court Sentences Guy Georges to Life for the Rape and Murder of Seven Young Women
Georges, 38, who denied the killings until the second week of his trial, must serve at least 22 years. His DNA had been on file since 1995 while he went on killing.
Published
Guy Georges's DNA had been on file since 1995, and he killed two more young women after that. On April 5, 2001, a Paris court sentenced him to life for raping and murdering seven.
The Cour d'assises de Paris found Georges, 38, guilty of the rapes and murders, committed between January 1991 and November 1997, and of an attempted murder, a rape and an assault. It sentenced him to life in prison with a minimum term of twenty-two years before he could ask for any release, the punishment the prosecution had sought, and he nodded when the verdict was read. Experts had told the court that better use of his genetic profile could have saved two of the women.
The seven were Pascale Escarfail, 19, a student at the Sorbonne, killed in 1991; Catherine Rocher, 27, Elsa Benady, 22, and Agnes Nijkamp, a Dutch architect, all killed in 1994; Hélène Frinking, 27, in 1995; and Magali Sirotti, 19, and Estelle Magd, 25, in 1997. The killings were concentrated in eastern Paris, which is why the French press called him "the killer of eastern Paris."
Police arrested Georges in March 1998 as their chief suspect, and that May he confessed to every killing before the investigating judge, Gilbert Thiel. He then denied the murders for years, and kept denying them when the three-week trial opened on March 19, 2001, until he admitted them in court on March 27. In his last words to the court he asked the families for forgiveness. "Whatever happens now, I will never do it again, and even if you do not accept it, I ask forgiveness again," he said.
The psychiatrists who examined him found serious identity disorders and what they called narcissistic perversion, but they declined to consider him mentally ill. Abandoned as a small child and raised by a foster family near Angers, he had been convicted in 1984 of a violent rape in an underground parking garage in Nancy.
Crime+Investigation UK spells two of the victims' names Catherine Rock and Helena Frinking, while French accounts give Catherine Rocher and Hélène Frinking.
Sources
- Le tueur en série Guy Georges condamné à la prison à vie, La Libre Belgique (AFP)
- The making of a serial killer, The Guardian
- Beast of Bastille: Guy Georges, Crime+Investigation UK