On February 27, 1989, Valérie Tariote, twenty-two, a waitress at a cafe near the Toulouse-Matabiau station, was found in her flat gagged, her wrists tied and her underwear torn. She had been dead six days. The police called it suicide. The man who had killed her worked alongside her at the station buffet and had made himself her friend, and it would be more than eight years, and four more women dead, before anyone connected him to it.
Patrice Alègre was born in Toulouse on June 20, 1968, to Roland Alègre, a water meter reader who became a CRS riot policeman, and Michelle Salvy, a hairdresser who was seventeen when he was born. He was not a wanted child. He grew up in the Izards district and then Saint-Geniès-Bellevue with a father who beat his mother and beat him, and at thirteen he threatened to kill his father. He ran away more and more often, later telling psychiatrists he had been raped one night by two men who offered him drugs, and he was handed to his paternal grandmother, left school early and drifted into theft and drug dealing while his father tried to smooth over his offenses. His first arrest, at sixteen in April 1985, was for stealing a moped; he was not prosecuted, but his fingerprints were taken. That October, at the annual Toulouse fair, he sexually assaulted a schoolgirl and tried to strangle her. She did not report it.
He lived on dealing and night work as a bouncer, disc jockey and barman, including a spell at the cafeteria of the police station. In 1988 he met a secretary, Cécile C., and their daughter was born on July 23, 1989. The relationship was violent, as his parents' had been; he served eight months in 1994 for assault, and in February 1995, after he threw the child against a wall, Cécile had the police remove him from the flat.
On January 27, 1990, walkers found Laure Martinet, a nineteen-year-old student from his own village, strangled and sexually assaulted in a ditch at Bonrepos-Riquet. She had been hitchhiking. DNA was recovered from her body, and most of the men of the village gave samples; Alègre did not. On February 11, 1997, Martine Matias, twenty-nine, was found dead in her Toulouse flat after a fire. There was blood in the bathroom, on the carpet and on her bra, the fire had been started in two places and a magazine for a 7.65 mm pistol lay at the scene, and the investigating officer classed it as suicide. Her father, already ill, died soon afterward.
Ten days later, on February 21, 1997, Émilie Espès, twenty-one, met him in a Toulouse bar. They went to an electronic music party at Plaisance-du-Touch, and on the way back he raped her. She talked him out of killing her, let him believe strangers had attacked her, got a woman to take her to the hospital, and two days later went to the police. She was the only one of his victims known to have survived, and it was her complaint that put the gendarmes on his trail. She testified at his trial, and she took her own life in 2006.
He fled to the Ariège. On June 14, 1997, Mireille Normand, thirty-five, originally from Le Havre and living alone in a chalet at Verdun, offered him lodging in exchange for work in her garden. On June 19 she came home to celebrate a new job at the Maison des loups at Orlu; when she refused him, he killed her. The gendarmes found her buried in her garden on July 11. He had sold her television, video recorder and drill and taken nearly 4,000 francs. Witnesses identified him from photographs as the chalet's handyman, and he left France for southern Spain, where he befriended Isabelle Chicherie, a Parisian on holiday. He passed through Germany and Belgium and turned up at her flat claiming his car had been stolen. On September 4, 1997, he strangled and raped her and set her apartment on fire. Her age is given as twenty-eight in some accounts and thirty in others. The next day, September 5, a friend working with the gendarmes steered him to a meeting point at Châtenay-Malabry, and he was arrested there at 5:10 p.m. With Princess Diana dead a few days earlier, the press barely noticed.
He confessed to the Chicherie murder quickly, and a slip of the tongue at his first appearance, over another woman's name, led the police to reopen the Matias death; he admitted killing Valérie Tariote on December 2, 1997. His trial opened in Toulouse on February 11, 2002, on six rapes, five murders and an attempted murder. The early investigations were taken apart in court. The officer who had filed the Tariote and Matias deaths as suicides had written, in a 1997 summary, that the man could not be a murderer because he would not leave so many traces, and on the stand he admitted an error of judgment. Alègre himself barely spoke. The psychiatrists described an organized, psychopathic serial killer and offered displaced matricide as the explanation for the murders. On February 21, 2002, the Haute-Garonne assize court sentenced him to life, with a minimum term of twenty-two years.
By then the gendarmes' Homicide 31 unit, set up in 2000, had reopened old deaths around Toulouse, many of them written off as suicides, and he was placed under investigation for six more: Josette Legoy, sixty, in 1987; Edith Schleichardt, twenty-three, in 1990; Claude Martinez in 1991; Line Galbardi, twenty-eight, a Canadian prostitute killed in a hotel room opposite the station in January 1992; Patricia Gélis, twenty-nine, found in the Garonne in 1992; and Josette Poiroux, forty-four, killed in a fire in October 1992. In every one the case ended in a dismissal, on July 3, 2008, or, for Galbardi, on January 14, 2010.
The Galbardi file produced the affair that made his name in France. In early 2003 two former prostitutes, known in the press as Patricia and Fanny, told the gendarmes they had seen Alègre kill her, and then went further: that he had enjoyed police and judicial protection, and that sadomasochistic parties with torture and even killings had been held for Toulouse notables. In May 2003 the former mayor of Toulouse, Dominique Baudis, then head of France's broadcasting regulator, went on national television to say his name had been cited and to call it a diabolical plot. The Toulouse prosecutor general, Jean Volff, whose name also surfaced, was forced out. A male prostitute calling himself Djamel told TF1 and France 2 of murders at a chateau owned by the city. On May 30, 2003, Alègre told the investigating judge that he had killed Galbardi and Martinez and named Baudis and a former deputy prosecutor as having ordered one of the murders; on June 17 he wrote to retract it, blaming pressure from the judge and his own lawyers.
The accusations fell apart. Patricia admitted to the judge that she had lied and had pushed Djamel to do the same. Fanny withdrew her rape accusation against Baudis in September 2003, and Djamel died that month in a Toulouse clinic after an overdose. On July 11, 2005, the Toulouse appeals court confirmed the dismissal of the entire rape and organized pimping inquiry, and on March 26, 2009, the two women were convicted of false accusation and given suspended sentences of two and three years. Families of women whose deaths had been classed as suicides kept pressing, through the group Stop à l'oubli, for the old cases to be looked at again.
In prison he was moved several times, suspected of planning an escape, and asked to be isolated; five other inmates beat him at Lannemezan in May 2005. He was transferred to Moulins-Yzeure in 2007. When the twenty-two years ran out he applied for parole, on September 6, 2019, and his lawyer withdrew the application in March 2021 after the psychiatric experts reported against him. He was then held at Moulins, in the Allier.