Three lasting changes in France and Belgium followed from serial cases and not from legislation alone: the end of public executions, a national file of genetic profiles, and a reorganization of Belgian policing. A Versailles execution in 1939 was photographed and filmed before a crowd, and a decree a week later moved French executions inside prison walls. The arrest of a murderer in eastern Paris in 1998 came in the same weeks as a law creating the national DNA file, and Europe 1 describes the shock of that case as the origin of the shared database. The Dutroux case, according to Belgian reporting, sent some 300,000 people into the streets of Brussels in 1996 and led to a parliamentary inquiry and changes to the police and the courts. The cases run from a provincial assize trial in the Ain in 1862 to a verdict at Nanterre in 2023. They are told in the order in which they reached court, with the verdicts as the courts delivered them.
The older cases are assize trials in which the question was how much a jury could be asked to accept without a confession or a body. The cases of the 1970s to the 1990s turn on how police, prosecutors and hospital or church authorities handled what they knew. The cross-border cases of the 2000s turn on whether two countries could read one another’s files. The legal vocabulary is French or Belgian and exact: assassinat, meurtre, complicité, non-lieu, peine de sûreté, perpétuité. The wording follows what each court decided.
Martin Dumollard was a countryman of about fifty from the hamlet that gave him his surname, near Montluel in the department of the Ain, when he went on trial at Bourg in January 1862. The assize court heard him over four days. The prosecution put the crimes between February 1855 and May 1861. It listed the murders of Marie Baday in February 1855, of a young woman who was never identified in November 1858 and of Marie Eulalie Bussod before May 1861, together with attempted murder and robbery of a number of other young women in domestic service in Lyon. Most of those women survived.
The case turned on one night in May 1861. A young servant’s report to the magistrates gave a description that matched what the authorities had heard from other women in 1855. Magistrates questioned Dumollard about his movements on May 26, and his answers were evasive. He was taken into custody and brought to Trévoux, where the young woman identified him. His wife was arrested too and, according to the account later printed in Charles Dickens’s weekly journal All the Year Round, soon showed herself willing to talk. She told the magistrates that her husband had come in one night in 1858 with a silver watch and clothing and said he had killed a young woman.
Faced with the case, Dumollard produced a story that transferred the blame. In December 1853, he said, two men posing as farmers had given him wine in Lyon and hired him at forty francs a head, with a promised hundred thousand francs after twenty years. The writer in All the Year Round, a contributor who had come across the case while traveling on the Continent in March 1862, called the two employers inventions and compared Dumollard to Rush, the defendant in an earlier English case who had tried the same thing. The writer also noted that Dumollard had not confessed to all the women the court believed he had harmed.
The trial was a public event of the plain provincial kind. The sister of Marie Eulalie Bussod, called as the fifty-third witness, identified the dead woman’s clothing among the exhibits, and another sister identified Dumollard in the courtroom, weeping and blaming herself, and was carried out fainting. Both prisoners sat unmoved, according to the English account. The president of the court put to Dumollard that he used a password, "Hardi," at his own door when he came back in the small hours. He answered that he might have, but not in the sense the court meant. Asked about earlier convictions, he said there was only one; the president replied that the court had the record of at least two.
The jury returned 67 affirmative and 17 negative answers, the affirmatives covering all the material charges, as reported in 1862. He was sentenced to death. The Court of Cassation rejected his appeal on February 27, 1862, and the Emperor declined to pardon him. He was executed at Montluel in March 1862. His wife, printed in the trial reports as Marianne Dumollard, was sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment with hard labor.
The Dumollard case shows how a French provincial prosecution of the mid-nineteenth century worked outward from a single reliable witness: one woman’s identification at Trévoux, a wife who talked, and a defendant who tried to give the jury two imaginary employers. A weekly magazine in London published a long account of the investigation, the trial and the execution in 1862.
Henri Désiré Landru was 52 in November 1921, a married father of four with convictions for fraud going back to 1904, when the assize court at Versailles convicted him of murdering ten women and the teenage son of one of them. The killings were put between early 1915 and January 1919, while France was at war, at two rented houses west of Paris, one at Vernouillet and one at Gambais. Landru never confessed. No body was ever produced. The French press called him the Bluebeard of Gambais, after the wife-killer of Perrault’s tale, and he was executed at Versailles at dawn on February 25, 1922.
His record was long. The history magazine Herodote records prison terms for fraud in 1904, 1906 and 1909, and a regional account in Infosyvelines describes repeated convictions from 1900 onward for small frauds involving deposits, breach of trust and forged contracts. Connexion, summarizing the historian Richard Tomlinson, adds that in 1904 he faked a suicide attempt; the doctor who examined him judged him close to a worrying form of madness but responsible for his acts and fit to stand trial. The question of his sanity returned at his murder trial. By 1914 he was living under false names, more than ninety by the police count, with a family who, according to Herodote, believed he dealt in secondhand goods.
The war supplied his opportunity. He was 45 in August 1914, too old to be called up, and many women were alone and supporting themselves. RTBF, drawing on the historian Bruno Fuligni, says he chose women of modest appearance but comfortable means and checked their finances and how isolated they were before going further. The Criminocorpus notice on the case, a publication of the French museum of the history of justice, puts the number of women he dealt with between 1914 and 1919 at 283, and Actu-Juridique says nearly 300. The figure gave him a second press nickname, which France Bleu records: the man with 283 women. The Criminocorpus notice says he took 35,600 francs from the women in all.
The notebook is the center of the case. Landru bought train tickets for these journeys and wrote the purchases down. RTBF and Infosyvelines both note the entries that carried the greatest weight in court: a return ticket for Landru and a single ticket for the woman travelling with him. The names, ages and dates that survive are thin. Anne Collomb, 44, was a widow and an insurance-company secretary. Andrée Babelay was 19 and a domestic servant. Célestine Buisson was a widow who worked as a cleaner, and her sister would bring about his arrest. Louise Jaume was 38 and in the middle of divorce proceedings. Little more than their ages, work and dates is recorded. What they share, in the accounts that survive, is the loss of a husband to death, separation or divorce, and what Landru took from them: savings and belongings.
The police were slow. Tomlinson, in Connexion’s summary, says that officers at first showed little interest and that inquiries began only when relatives kept asking questions. He argues that Landru was caught mainly because of women who investigated him themselves, assembled what they knew and handed it to the police, and who later testified at his trial. The case reached Inspector Jules Belin of the mobile brigades, the elite force known as the brigades du Tigre after Georges Clemenceau, which RTBF describes as equipped with telephones and cars. On April 6, 1919, according to RTBF, Belin interviewed Mademoiselle Lacoste, the sister of Célestine Buisson, and left her his card with his telephone number. The arrest followed after the sister of a woman in the case recognized Landru in a shop in Paris.
On April 12, 1919, Belin arrested the man who called himself Lucien Guillet in Paris. Fernande Segret, his companion, collapsed. Herodote records that he was held first for fraud and breach of trust. Within a day, France Bleu reports, the false names Frémyet and Dupont and others had led back to Landru, a known fraudster. Belin took a small notebook; Herodote says it listed eleven names. RTBF describes notebooks that recorded dates and times matching those in the charges, together with ordinary expenses and the train tickets to Gambais. Infosyvelines calls the coded notebook the decisive piece of evidence. Actu-Juridique notes that the women’s property was traced to him, and Herodote reports that material evidence from the Gambais house was shown in court. The Criminocorpus notice says the means of death are unknown, because Landru never confessed.
The trial before the Seine-et-Oise assize court at Versailles ran from November 7 to 30, 1921. It ended with a death sentence on eleven counts of murder. No appeal to the Court of Cassation or petition for pardon has been recorded. On February 25, 1922, at 6:10 a.m. according to Infosyvelines, which names the executioner as Anatole Deibler, Landru was executed outside the Saint-Pierre prison at Versailles.
The Landru case was built without a body: a notebook, a pattern of money, the families' own inquiries and the testimony of women who spoke at the trial. Tomlinson stresses a limit as well. Police records he cites list 72 women in contact with Landru who were never traced, and he insists that this does not show that Landru killed them. Only eleven deaths are in the judgment.
Eugen Weidmann was a German career criminal who killed six people in and around Paris between July and November 1937. The French weekly Détective, which published a special issue within days of his arrest, gives his birth in Frankfurt am Main in February 1908. The French press of the time spelled his first name Eugène; German and English sources use Eugen. In France he used the names Karrer and, on the night of his arrest, Sauerbrei.
Détective traced a record that began at 16, with a theft on the day he passed his school-leaving examination, and went on through a period in Canada, where he was sentenced in about 1929 to three years in a penitentiary and expelled after one, and burglaries in Frankfurt that cost him five and a half years. A radio script from early 1938 in the papers of the American broadcaster Lowell Thomas says he had a criminal record in Germany and Canada. In prison at Frankfurt he met the three men who mattered in France: two Frenchmen, Roger Million and Jean Blanc, and a younger German, Fritz Frommer. He was released on June 15, 1937, and Million and Blanc came to collect him.
According to Hélène Molinari, writing in Actu-Juridique in 2024 about the trial, the group’s plan was to use the crowds of foreign visitors drawn by the Paris International Exposition of 1937 to take wealthy foreigners and demand ransoms. The first killing in France came in July 1937. The victims, in the order the press gave them, were Jean de Koven, an American dancer of 24 from Brooklyn; Joseph Couffy, of Levallois, the father of three; Janine Keller, of Strasbourg; Roger Le Blond, 23; Fritz Frommer, of Frankfurt; and Raymond Lesobre. A seventh killing, that of a man named Drouillard in October 1937, was raised by the press in January 1938 and denied by Weidmann; he was not tried for it.
Jean de Koven had landed at Cherbourg in early July 1937 with an aunt, Ida Sackheim. Euronews, reporting with Agence France-Presse in 2019, said she had come to see the World’s Fair. Her aunt received a letter on July 30 demanding 500 dollars, to be left at a Paris café; the money was never sent. Her traveler’s checks were forged and cashed, and her checkbook was later among Weidmann’s things. The Lowell Thomas script says her family went to the Sûreté and got little help at first, because officers assumed a romance. At the trial a police inspector described what the family had gone through in the months of not knowing, and Weidmann was seen to be shaken.
The arrest came on December 8, 1937, at La Celle-Saint-Cloud, in Seine-et-Oise, where the group had rented a villa that served as its base. Inspectors of the Sûreté took him; Détective’s special issue says he confessed within a day.
Weidmann was tried at Versailles with Million, Blanc and a young woman identified in the press by initials. The charges against Weidmann were murder, with theft and an attempt to extort ransom. Million faced charges of complicity in two of the killings and the murder of Le Blond; Blanc, harboring criminals; the young woman, receiving stolen goods, of which she was acquitted. Who carried out the killing of Le Blond was argued at the trial. Weidmann told investigators that Million acted first and failed and that he then acted himself; in March 1939 he told the court that Million had played the main part. Million admitted a part in the dealings with Le Blond, as Détective reported his position, but denied the killing. Weidmann’s lawyer Roger Planty argued, according to Actu-Juridique, that his guilt in Frommer’s death had not been proven.
On March 31, 1939, the jury refused extenuating circumstances and Weidmann was sentenced to death. His appeal to the Court of Cassation was rejected, and President Albert Lebrun refused clemency; on June 16, 1939, Lebrun commuted Million’s death sentence to life.
What the case changed was the manner of French executions. Weidmann was executed in public outside the Versailles prison on June 17, 1939, before a crowd. Photographs and film of the execution were published, and a week later, on June 24, 1939, a decree moved French executions inside prison walls. Euronews, reporting with Agence France-Presse in 2019, described the Versailles execution as the one that stopped public spectacles. He was the last person executed in public in France. The date was not planned as a turning point; it became one because of what the crowd did and what the cameras recorded.
In March 1944, during the German occupation of Paris, neighbors in the sixteenth arrondissement complained to the authorities about smoke from a townhouse. The police and the fire brigade went in. What followed became, in the words of the French Ministry of Justice in a history it published in 2020, the great media trial of the Second World War, comparable in its effect to the Landru affair after the First. The house belonged to a physician, Dr. Marcel Petiot. Two years later a Paris jury convicted him of the premeditated murder of 24 people, and on May 25, 1946, he was executed at La Santé prison.
The press called him "Docteur Satan" and "a modern Bluebeard." Petiot never admitted the murders he was convicted of. He told the court that he had killed 63 people, and that every one had been an enemy of France: Germans, collaborators, traitors.
The courts' finding was plain, as the Ministry of Justice states it. Petiot drew in people who wanted to leave occupied France, using a false resistance network as cover, killed them and took their belongings. No one who went to him reached South America. Le Quotidien du Médecin writes that clients were told to come at night with suitcases, money and jewelry to pay for the passage. The Ministry writes that most of those killed were Jews or petty criminals trying to hide from the authorities; Slate.fr counts twelve Jews among the 27 deaths charged, people who had been promised help in leaving the country. One family is named in the reporting: a boy, René Kneller, and his parents. The boy’s pajamas were among the clothes in Petiot’s possession, and Petiot could not explain how a child’s clothing came to be among the belongings of people he called traitors. Nor could he explain, Le Quotidien du Médecin reports, why people with no connection to the Germans were among his victims.
Petiot was born on January 17, 1897, in Auxerre, according to Britannica, Hérodote and the Argentine newspaper Infobae. Britannica describes a very intelligent child with serious behavior problems who was expelled from school several times. Britannica says that in 1917 he was tried for stealing army blankets and acquitted on grounds of insanity; Infobae reports that in September 1920 the army discharged him with a disability pension after psychotic episodes. He qualified in medicine in 1921. He set up practice in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne and, Britannica says, was elected mayor in 1926, suspended in 1930 after a fraud conviction and removed in 1931. Three unexplained cases from those years were later linked to him in the reporting; none was ever proved, and he was never charged over them. In 1933 the family moved to Paris.
The investigation had a strange early history. According to Infobae, the Gestapo in 1943 arrested the three men who brought clients to Petiot, and under interrogation they named "Docteur Eugène" as Petiot. Petiot himself was arrested in 1943, Infobae and Britannica report, on suspicion of helping Jews and the resistance; he was held for about eight months at Fresnes and released when the Germans established no link to the resistance. When the fire brigade was called in March 1944, the date is given as March 11 by the Ministry of Justice, Slate.fr, Hérodote and Infobae, and as March 10 by Le Quotidien du Médecin. Petiot arrived while the police were there. Le Quotidien du Médecin reports that he first introduced himself as his own brother, then told the officers the dead were Nazis. Salon, reviewing the American historian David King’s 2011 book, writes that he told the first patrolmen the house was a resistance outpost and the dead were "Germans and traitors," and that they let him leave.
The case went to the detective Victor Massu, who, Salon says, led the investigation from the start; Massu was later charged with collaboration, lost his job and was afterward fully cleared. A warrant was issued for Petiot. In September 1944 the newspaper Résistance published an article headed "Petiot, soldat du Reich" (Petiot, soldier of the Reich), according to Hérodote. Petiot answered with a long handwritten letter demanding a right of reply and telling the police that he was still in Paris, inside the resistance. He was arrested in Paris on October 31, 1944, after seven months in hiding. Slate.fr names the officer as Inspector Henri Soutif.
The trial opened before the Seine Assize Court on March 18, 1946. Twenty-seven murders were charged, with theft. The jury convicted him of 24 and he was sentenced to death on April 4, 1946. His own estimate stood at 63 killings; later reporting has put the figure higher, as high as 150, but none of these claims was proved. The conviction of 24 is what a court decided.
In February 1978 a Belgian nun known as Sister Godfrieda, the head nurse of the geriatric ward of a public institution in the Flemish town of Wetteren, confessed to killing three elderly residents in her care. She was 44. Police charged her with three murders. The case drew reporters and photographers from across Europe and beyond, while much of the Flemish press, closely tied to the Catholic Church, gave it little space, the Flemish journalist Tom De Smet writes.
The name appears in several forms. Time, reporting in March 1978 under the headline "The Nun’s Story," called her Sister Godfrida and gave her birth name as Cecile Bombeek. De Smet, who published a book on the case in 2023, spells it Cecile Bombeke, and her gravestone reads Sister Marie-Godfrieda, Cecilia Bombeke. She was born in 1933 in Wichelen, into a Catholic farming family.
She had become head nurse in 1967, De Smet writes, leading a small team on a ward that staff called "the Chronic." By 1977 the staff were worried. Money and valuables were unaccounted for on the ward, and it recorded 21 deaths in 1977 against an average of 13 a year. Time reported the same figure from a press conference at which Dr. Jean-Paul De Corte said that 21 of the 38 patients on the ward had died in one year: "When 21 out of 38 die in one year, it is too much." Some of the nurses had begun keeping a secret diary of each death and its circumstances. Over time, Time said, they saw that one person was common to all of it.
The institution’s response was quiet. Time reported that she was suspended in August 1977 and sent to a hospital in Ghent for a cure that failed. She returned to the institution in January 1978, VRT reported, and her return pushed the nurses to act. De Corte, a young general practitioner known for his discretion and, according to Time, a member of the hospital’s governing board, told the staff he needed proof. The first firm evidence concerned forged prescriptions, confirmed by an official who monitored the region’s pharmacies.
She was arrested on February 10, 1978, at first for forgery, and held in Ghent. Time reported that she was first accused of stealing more than 30,000 dollars from patients. In custody she confessed to killing three elderly patients, whom De Smet names as Irma De Backer, 79, Leon Matthys, 81, and Maria Vanderginst, 87. She said they had been "too difficult at night." Two of the three deaths, according to De Smet, came in the summer of 1977: Matthys on July 29 and De Backer on August 14. She later denied killing them on purpose and said she had only calmed them.
The judicial investigation, run from Dendermonde, tried to establish more. Time reported in March 1978 that a judge had ordered further examination of the deaths of five residents, the three she had confessed to and two others. De Smet gives a larger figure, and says that the investigating judge, Leo Tas, listed 17 people whose deaths she may have caused. The list was not made public until De Smet’s book appeared in 2023. VRT reported that a document from the investigating judge referred to 17 murders. De Corte had put the possible toll at 30 in 1978. None of these deaths led to a charge. They are suspicions, and no court has examined them.
She never stood trial. In 1980, De Smet writes, experts ruled her insane, and VRT summarizes the outcome as a declaration that she was not criminally responsible, followed by committal to an institution. She was interned in a psychiatric institution in Melle. She was released in 1990, returned to her convent in Wetteren and later lived with dementia in a care facility for the elderly. She died in 2019, aged 86.
De Smet argues that the finding suited many people: a public trial would have exposed the neurologist, her mother superior, the doctors and the chairman who sent the nurses away. VRT reports that he believes the investigation was not thorough and was sabotaged. These are De Smet’s conclusions; no court or official inquiry has tested them. What is documented is the outcome: three confessed deaths, three counts of murder, no trial, and a case that Belgium largely forgot until a book reopened it. It inspired an Italian film, Suor Omicidi, released in English as Killer Nun, De Smet writes.
Andras Pandy was a Protestant minister who served Hungarian refugees in Brussels and taught Protestant religion in Flemish schools. He was born in 1927 in Csap, in Subcarpathia, the Hungarian news site 444 reported at his death. Origo reported that he owned three houses in Brussels and was financially comfortable; his family lived in Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, VRT NWS says. Between 1986 and 1989, six members of his household ceased to be part of it: his first wife, Ilona Sőrés, in 1988; their two sons, Dániel and Zoltán, in 1988; his second wife, Edit Fintor, and her daughter Andrea in 1986; and a second stepdaughter, Tünde, in 1989. Their ages when they went have not been reported.
For years he gave explanations. He told the police his second wife had gone to Germany. Origo reported that in 1994 he bought a house in Hungary and obtained a divorce from Edit Fintor through a Hungarian court, although by the account later accepted at trial she had been dead for years, and that he paid young drama students to write letters from Hungary in the names of his children. In 1992 his eldest daughter went to the police and told officers that six family members were no longer part of the household; Pandy answered that she had joined a sect and was disturbed. The complaint was filed away. Origo says the file was reopened in 1996.
In the autumn of 1997 the police arrested Pandy and his daughter. The reports differ on the order: Origo says Pandy first, and 444 says the arrest followed her confession, which Reuters dates to November 1997. She told investigators that she had taken part in the killings of her mother, her two brothers, her stepmother and one stepsister. The prosecution’s case rested largely on that confession; Origo says the 48-page indictment was built mostly on information from her. The six have never been traced. Origo reported that investigators at first suspected Pandy of killing 15 to 20 women, a suspicion that was never proved in court and that no charge reflected.
The trial before a Brussels jury in 2002 lasted two weeks, Reuters reported. Pandy denied everything. He called the proceedings a "witch trial", compared himself to Alfred Dreyfus, and said that his relatives were alive in Hungary and that he was in contact with them "through angels." Shortly before the jury withdrew to consider the sentence he told the court that the trial represented the triumph of "fallacy" over "authenticity." The jury deliberated for seven hours and convicted him on six counts of premeditated murder, with other charges. He was 74. Under Belgian procedure, Reuters noted, the jury decides the sentence with the judge. He was sentenced to life in prison; BRF Nachrichten, the German-language Belgian public broadcaster, citing Belga, reported in 2013 that the life term was followed by a period at the government’s disposal. The presiding judge, Karel Demyttenaere, said that father and daughter both had dangerous, antisocial personalities and had shown no respect for their victims.
His daughter, then 44, was convicted of five of the six murders and sentenced to 21 years. Reuters reported that the lighter sentence reflected her account of the psychological pressure and abuse she had suffered from her father. She was released on June 15, 2010, VRT NWS reported, at the age of 50, with an electronic tag and a curfew, and she went to live with Dominican nuns in Bruges. Pandy died in prison in Bruges. BRF, citing Belga, reported his death on December 23, 2013, at the age of 86. He had never admitted the crimes.
No appeal has been reported. They describe a case that rested largely on a daughter’s confession, on a long series of false explanations and on the jury’s judgment of all of it.
Francis Heaulme was arrested in Bischwiller, in Alsace, on January 7, 1992, and has been in custody ever since. By June 2026 he was serving sentences for 11 murders committed between 1984 and 1992, according to Sud Radio and to AFP as printed by the Swiss outlet blue News. The French press called him the "routard du crime," the drifter of crime, because the killings followed his wanderings: from 1984 he moved through 37 French departments.
How he was identified is a story of one gendarme. Aline Pérès, 49, was killed at Brest in 1989, and her death brought the gendarme Jean-François Abgrall into the case and began the work that ended with Heaulme’s arrest in 1992, Lyon Capitale reported. The same outlet reported in 2014 that Abgrall had obtained confessions from Heaulme in other cases, including that one. Other killings on his record include that of Jean Rémy, which came up at the Montigny trial in 2017. Heaulme protested then that he was being smeared: "Vous me salissez, vous me salissez," Sud Radio reported. By the time the Montigny case reached court, the record stood at nine murder convictions and two life sentences.
The Montigny case is the one that made the file famous, and the one he has always denied. On September 28, 1986, two eight-year-old boys, Cyril Beining and Alexandre Beckrich, were killed in Montigny-lès-Metz. The police investigation that followed was later heavily criticized, and more than one person confessed. A warehouse worker, H. L., confessed twice in 1986 and retracted, and investigators judged the confessions not credible. In 1987 a 16-year-old apprentice cook, P. D., confessed in police custody, repeated the confession several times and then retracted it for good. He was convicted twice. A review procedure led to a third trial, and in 2002 the Rhône assize court in Lyon acquitted him. He had spent 15 years in prison. What weighed most in the acquittal was evidence that Heaulme had been in Montigny-lès-Metz on the day, Lyon Capitale reported. The physical exhibits from 1986 were gone by then. They had been destroyed lawfully in 1995, at a time when the authorities believed the culprit was already in prison, according to AFP reporting carried by Europe 1; Lyon Capitale wrote in 2014 that some of the destroyed items might have allowed DNA testing.
Heaulme was placed under formal investigation for the Montigny killings in 2006, and in 2007 the case against him was dismissed. The mother of one of the boys appealed, and her appeal led in time to the trial, Europe 1 reported in 2020. In 2013 he was sent to the Moselle assize court, and in June 2013 the Cour de cassation upheld the referral. The first trial opened in Metz at the end of March 2014. Heaulme, gray-haired, refused for the first time to be photographed or filmed in the dock. New testimony about H. L. arrived just before and during the opening days: a woman wrote that H. L. had confided in her, and a former railway worker said he had seen a man running along the line in 1986 in a red and white shirt. On April 1, 2014, at the request of the advocate general, who said the new accounts suggested serious and corroborating evidence against H. L., the presiding judge, Gabriel Steffanus, adjourned the trial. "L’entière vérité est à ce prix," he said: the whole truth comes at this price. All parties agreed. The father of one of the boys, speaking publicly for the first time, said he was disappointed and wondered whether he would live to learn the truth. A new judicial investigation of H. L. ended with his clearance, and Heaulme would be tried alone.
The second trial opened in Metz on April 25, 2017. Heaulme was 58 and, Sud Radio reported, had trouble speaking when he gave his identity. His lawyer, Liliane Glock, told the court the trial could no longer be fair because of the evidence destroyed in 1995 and asked for his immediate acquittal; the request was refused. As the presiding judge read the summary of the case, Heaulme stood up. "J’ai commis des meurtres, mais Montigny, ce n’est pas moi," he said: I have committed murders, but Montigny wasn’t me. Over the years he had given contradictory versions. In one he said he invented everything so that people would leave him alone. In another: "Des fois, je mens, des fois, je dis la vérité," sometimes I lie, sometimes I tell the truth. On the second day P. D. testified by video link from Bordeaux and was questioned for more than three hours. On May 17, 2017, the court convicted Heaulme of both murders and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The Yvelines assize court in Versailles upheld the sentence on appeal in December 2018, his third life term, and in June 2020 the Cour de cassation rejected his appeal, making the conviction final. The mother of one of the boys had died in October 2019, aged 75, without seeing the end of the case.
One case is still open. In June 2026 an investigating judge sent Heaulme to trial for the murder of Jean-Joseph Clément, 60, at Bédarrides, in the Vaucluse, on August 8, 1989. He was first placed under investigation for it in 1992, confessed and then retracted, and a judge in Reims dismissed the case in 2002. It was reopened in July 2023 on new evidence, and he was placed under formal investigation again in October 2023. In that case he is accused only, and is presumed innocent until a court rules. He was 67 in June 2026, held at the Ensisheim prison in the Haut-Rhin, and had spent time that spring in a secure hospital unit in Nancy.
Guy Georges was sentenced in Paris on April 5, 2001, to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 22 years for the murders, with rape, of seven young women between 1991 and 1997. French lawmakers and broadcasters call him "le tueur de l’Est parisien," the East Paris killer, after the part of the city where the killings took place; Newsweek reported that police called him the Beast of Bastille, after the Paris neighborhood. The seven, as Newsweek names them, were Pascale Escarfail, 19; Catherine Rocher, 27; Elsa Benady, 22; Agnès Nijkamp, 32; Hélène Frinking, 27; Magali Sirotti, 19; and Estelle Magd, 25. The National Assembly report of 2002 dates the first killing to January 1991.
He was born Guy Rampillon on October 15, 1962, in Vitry-le-François, and was raised in the French child welfare system. Newsweek reported that from 1979 he was involved in a series of assaults on young women, and that he served prison terms: one year in an Angers prison after offenses in 1980, 18 months after one in June 1982, and ten years after one in February 1984. A 2002 report of the National Assembly refers to an earlier conviction in 1985. Near the end of the ten-year sentence he was given day release and did not return to prison. He went to Paris instead.
The investigation was the failure that the Assembly later documented. The report says that the murders in eastern Paris and a separate series of murders were handled by two different investigative teams, and that no link was made between them. By then investigators held a DNA profile from the cases, known by the label SK1, and there was no national file to compare it with. His lawyer at the trial, Frédérique Pons, said in a 2015 interview with Europe 1 that in 1995 Georges presented himself to the police in connection with the inquiry, was cleared at first, and that his DNA did not match the profile attributed to SK1. The parliamentary report records that in August 1995 he was convicted of a sexual assault, and that no link was made then between him and the East Paris murders. The photographer Yan Morvan wrote in Vice in 2014 that from May to early July 1995 Georges, who went by the name Jo, worked as his photo assistant in Paris, and that a letter from an acquaintance in March 1998 told him the man named Guy Georges in the news was Jo.
The arrest came in March 1998. After the two killings that began in September 1997, the parliamentary report says, a composite sketch was made public, and the arrest followed the sketch and the recognition of his photograph by a young woman who had survived an assault. The report also records how the identification was made. The expert in charge of the molecular biology laboratory at the university hospital in Nantes checked the 3,500 files held in his own laboratory, one by one, until he matched Georges’s genetic profile to the profile from four of the murders. Jean-Paul Milland, who oversaw the forensic police at the time, described those years to Europe 1 in 2020: DNA comparisons were made case by case, each laboratory kept its own records, and a single shared file did not yet exist. Newsweek gives the date of the arrest as March 27, 1998, in Montmartre; he confessed after his arrest.
The legislative consequence came within weeks. Law no. 98-468 of June 17, 1998, on the prevention and punishment of sexual offences and the protection of minors added Article 706-54 to the Code of Criminal Procedure and created the Fichier national automatisé des empreintes génétiques, the FNAEG, to hold the DNA profiles of people convicted of listed sexual offences, the Interior Ministry told the National Assembly in May 1999. The ministry was answering a deputy, Michel Hunault, who had asked in November 1998 why no national file yet existed, citing the arrest of "the murderer of eastern Paris" through a genetic comparison. The decree that put the file into operation was published on May 18, 2000, two years after the law, Europe 1 reported on the file’s 20th anniversary. Its scope later widened from convicted sex offenders to many other crimes, and by 2020 it held the profiles of 3.3 million people. In December 2002 the finance committee of the National Assembly published a report on the FNAEG by the deputy Marc Le Fur. It opened its case with the Georges affair, saying that the developments in the case had shown the serious consequences of having no centralized DNA database of the kind Britain had had since 1995, and that a central file would have identified Georges more quickly and spared the lives of his last two victims.
The trial before the Paris assize court in March and April 2001 had its own turn. He had confessed to the police, but at trial he pleaded not guilty to all charges, Newsweek reported, and Pons said that when she first met him, two or three months before the trial, he maintained that he was not the killer. The turning point came from a small question, she recalled, and after it he confessed to everything. In March 2001, according to the National Assembly report, he admitted seven murders and four other assaults committed between 1991 and 1998. Psychiatrists who examined him judged him legally sane and fit to be tried, and described him as a "narcissistic psychopath," Newsweek reported. On April 5, 2001, the court convicted him and sentenced him to life with a 22-year période de sûreté. He became eligible to apply for conditional release in 2020, his lawyer said in 2015. Newsweek reported in September 2021 that he was 58 and held at the maison centrale of Ensisheim.
Patrice Alègre was 29 when police arrested him in Paris on September 5, 1997, at the end of a seven-month flight that took him from Toulouse to Spain, Germany and Belgium and back to Paris, as The Local, an English-language news site in France, described his route. In February 2002 the Haute-Garonne assize court in Toulouse convicted him of raping and murdering five women between 1989 and 1997, and of raping and trying to kill a sixth woman, who survived. He was sentenced to life, with a minimum term of 22 years before any release could be considered.
Reports on his life before 1997 are brief. The Local wrote in 2019 that he had lived in Toulouse and worked there as a handyman, a waiter and a barman at the city’s railway station. The Washington Times, reporting from his trial, called him a former doorman with a history of drug abuse and violence. He described a hard childhood: The Local reported that he spoke of a violent father who served in the CRS, France’s riot police, and psychologists who examined him for the trial told the court that his father’s regular violence had marked him as a child.
The court convicted him of five murders, each with rape. Infodujour.fr, which published a chronology of the case in 2019, gave the names, ages and dates. Valérie Tariote, 21, came to light in Toulouse on February 27, 1989, the first of the five. The others were Laure Martinet, Martine Matias, Mireille Normand and Isabelle Chicherie. The trial coverage gives little more about who these women were. The case broke open in February 1997, when a young woman he had met in Toulouse went to the police, according to the Washington Times account of her trial testimony. Infodujour dates the incident to February 22, 1997. The court later convicted him of her rape and attempted murder. Once she had gone to the police he fled; the Washington Times reported that he killed again while on the run, and Mireille Normand and Isabelle Chicherie died in those months, in June and September 1997. Police caught him in Paris on September 5, the day after his last killing. The arrest drew little international attention, The Local noted, because Diana, Princess of Wales, had died six days earlier.
He confessed. The Washington Times reported that he admitted the offenses after his arrest, and The Local wrote that he went on to confess to two more murders, with police describing him as cooperative and "friendly." Slate.fr, in a later account, wrote that he admitted five murders, one attempted murder and six rapes, and that he was also charged with four other murders. The Local reported that Toulouse police later reopened old investigations and linked him to three more deaths. None of those deaths was among the crimes tried in 2002.
The trial opened in Toulouse in February 2002 and lasted about ten days; Infodujour gives the dates as February 11 to 21. Alègre, then 33, sat between police officers wearing a bulletproof vest, nearly without expression apart from facial tics and the clasping and unclasping of his hands, the Washington Times reported. Families of the women asked him to explain what he had done, and he would not. In court he mostly answered "I don’t know" or "I don’t remember." Of his last victim he said, "I wasn’t in control of myself." The prosecutor, Marc Gaubert, told the jury that the crimes were premeditated and called him "a perverse psychopath." The psychiatrist Daniel Zagury testified that Alègre had built a "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" persona to shield himself from what he had done. The jury convicted him of all charges. Infodujour and Slate.fr give February 22, 2002, as the date of the sentence, and no appeal has been reported.
The convictions did not close the files on other deaths in the Toulouse area. In June 2000, Slate.fr reported, the gendarmerie set up a unit called Homicide 31 to go back over old cases that might be linked to him. Among them was the death of Line Galbardi, 28, in Toulouse in January 1992. Infodujour’s chronology lists other deaths from 1992 that came up in the later investigations, and reports that he received dismissals (non-lieu) in several cases, five murder cases in all. No court has attributed any of these deaths to him.
From the Galbardi file came the scandal that made his name a byword. In January 2003, according to Slate.fr, two women who had known Galbardi told investigators they had seen her killed. Their accounts grew. Infodujour reported that they alleged he had been protected by police and judicial officials and had supplied women for parties attended by public figures. Dominique Baudis, a former mayor of Toulouse who in 2003 was president of the Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel, the national broadcasting regulator, was among those named, along with a former Toulouse prosecutor. On May 18, 2003, Baudis went on national television news to say he would fight what he called slander and that he had never known Alègre. On May 22 a 23-year-old man appeared on television claiming to have attended the parties; Slate.fr reported that he was later taken into custody and admitted he had invented the story under pressure from the two women. Alègre joined in from prison. On May 30, 2003, he backed the women’s accounts, and on June 1 the presenter Karl Zéro read extracts from a letter by Alègre on the Canal+ program "Le Vrai Journal." Within weeks he withdrew his statements: Infodujour reported that on June 26, 2003, he retracted, saying his confessions had been coerced and financially negotiated, and Slate.fr wrote that he cleared Baudis. The accusations fell apart under investigation, and the episode is remembered in France as the "affaire Alègre."
Marc Dutroux was 39 when he was arrested at Marcinelle, on the southern edge of Charleroi, on August 13, 1996. Two days later two girls aged 12 and 14 were rescued alive. Within three weeks the deaths of four more girls and young women abducted in 1995 had come to light: Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo, both eight, and An Marchal and Eefje Lambrecks, 17 and 19. The death of a former accomplice, Bernard Weinstein, came to light as well.
Dutroux was born in Brussels on November 6, 1956, the eldest of five children of two teachers, according to an Agence France-Presse profile of 2013. People who knew him described him to AFP as a charmer and a manipulator who dominated weaker people around him. In 1979 he received the first of a series of convictions for theft, violent muggings, drug dealing and trading in stolen cars; AFP reported that the car trade helped him acquire at least seven houses. In 1989 he and Michelle Martin, a former teacher who had been his partner and later became his second wife, were convicted over offenses against girls, AFP reported. He was granted conditional release on April 4, 1992, after serving about three years, as AFP put it in 2023. VRT NWS has reported that the release followed a decision by the justice minister of the time, Melchior Wathelet. AFP described it as release under a government scheme meant to monitor offenders. He did not come to official attention again, AFP wrote, until 1996.
The first families to ask for help were those of Julie and Mélissa, who lived in Grâce-Hollogne, a suburb of Liège, and who were abducted on June 24, 1995. Their parents alerted the gendarmerie, which made little progress, and the families pressed for results at great personal cost, The Brussels Times wrote in 2021. Through the following months the two girls' faces looked out from posters in windows across Belgium, Belga recalled in 2025. When friends of An Marchal and Eefje Lambrecks raised the alarm in August 1995, one police officer told them the girls had probably spent the night at a boyfriend’s, VRT NWS recalled in 2026.
The failures were specific. In December 1995 officers visited Dutroux’s property in Marcinelle. A gendarme heard children’s voices but wrongly concluded they came from outside. Belga News Agency later summarized the episode: police had not checked the property thoroughly, despite his earlier conviction, and officers who heard children’s cries during a visit dismissed them. The parliamentary inquiry that followed examined how police and judiciary had conducted the investigation.
A witness’s note of part of the registration of a van led police to Dutroux in August 1996. On August 13, 1996, Dutroux, Martin and a third man, Michel Lelièvre, were detained. All three denied involvement at first.
The anger that followed brought some 300,000 people into the streets of Brussels in October 1996, according to Belgian reporting. It led to a parliamentary inquiry whose hearings were broadcast live, to the merger of the country’s police forces and to a series of judicial reforms. The inquiry’s supplementary report was filed with the Chamber of Representatives on February 16, 1998, under the title of the parliamentary inquiry into how police and judiciary had handled the "Dutroux-Nihoul and associates" case.
The trial opened in Arlon in March 2004 and ran until June 22. The jury answered 243 questions. On June 17, 2004, it convicted Dutroux of the murders of An Marchal, Eefje Lambrecks and Bernard Weinstein, of abduction and other charges, and held him responsible for the deaths of Julie and Mélissa; reports at the sentencing distinguished that finding from the killing of An and Eefje. On June 22 he was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a further ten years at the disposal of the government. He received five more years for an escape in 1998. Martin was tried with him at Arlon. Lelièvre was granted conditional release in 2019, BX1 reported.
The Brussels sentence-enforcement court refused electronic monitoring for Dutroux on February 18, 2013, RTBF reported. As of August 2026 he was held at Nivelles prison, Belga reported. In February 2026 VRT NWS, Belga and The Brussels Times reported a new investigation into possession of prohibited images at the prison; no decision on trial had been reported as of August 2026.
Michel Fourniret was convicted of eight murders: seven girls and young women killed between 1987 and 2001 in France and Belgium, and Farida Hammiche, a woman he killed in 1988 for a cache of gold. The Ardennes assize court at Charleville-Mézières sentenced him on May 28, 2008, to life imprisonment with no possibility of release, and the Yvelines assize court at Versailles gave him a second life sentence on November 16, 2018. The seven in the 2008 judgment were Isabelle Laville, 17; Fabienne Leroy, 20; Jeanne-Marie Desramault, 22; Elisabeth Brichet, 12; Natacha Danais, 13; Céline Saison, 18; and Mananya Thumpong, 13; the court also convicted him on other charges and of offenses against three girls or young women who survived. His wife, Monique Olivier, was convicted with him and later alone.
He was born on April 4, 1942, in Sedan, in the French Ardennes, and died on May 10, 2021, at the secure unit of the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, aged 79. In 1967, at 25, he received an eight-month suspended prison sentence, with an obligation to undergo treatment, for assaulting a girl in the Ardennes. On June 26, 1987, he was sentenced for offenses against about a dozen young women; a Belga report carried by VRT gives the sentence as five years, while Slate.fr says the Essonne assize court imposed seven years, two of them suspended. He was released in October 1987. From prison he had placed a personal advertisement; Monique Olivier answered it. When he was released she was waiting outside, and they settled in the Yonne.
The Hammiche case ties the couple to a Paris robbery crew known as the "gang des Postiches," the wig gang, which carried out bank robberies between 1981 and 1986. About 20 kilograms of gold ingots and coins from its loot had been hidden in the Val-d’Oise. Jean-Pierre Hellegouarch, a prisoner Fourniret had briefly shared a cell with, learned where it was, and in March 1988 his wife, Farida Hammiche, 30, contacted Fourniret at his request and asked him to help recover it, promising him 500,000 francs. Fourniret later told investigators he received nothing, or too little, and decided to help himself. Hellegouarch told the 2018 trial that the gold had never belonged to the gang but to an Italian fellow prisoner. Fourniret confessed to killing Hammiche. With the gold turned into cash, the couple bought the Château du Sautou at Donchery in the Ardennes, a house at Sart-Custinne in Belgium and two vehicles, according to AFP.
For more than 15 years the couple’s crimes were investigated, where they were investigated at all, as unconnected cases in different regions and two countries. They were connected only in June 2003, after an incident involving a 13-year-old girl in Ciney, in the Belgian province of Namur, on June 26, 2003, led Belgian police to Fourniret’s van. He was arrested that month.
The cross-border file grew afterward. In 2005 Olivier told Belgian police at Dinant that Fourniret had fixed his attention on Marie-Angèle Domèce and that she had helped him abduct and kill her; he disputed her account, and in February 2018 he admitted the killing. In February 2018 he also confessed to killing Joanna Parrish, whose case Olivier had first described to Belgian police in 2005. "I am the only one responsible for their fate," he said. Joanna’s father, Roger Parrish, then 80, told the court at Olivier’s trial in 2023: "Joanna’s story ended in May 1990." In the case of Estelle Mouzin, who was nine, Fourniret’s name was raised after his arrest, but he denied any involvement and was cleared because of an alibi, a telephone call made from Sart-Custinne, about 250 kilometers away. AFP reported in 2021 that detectives had first suspected him in 2006. The alibi held until November 2019, when Olivier told investigators she had made the call herself, at his request. On November 27, 2019, Fourniret was placed under formal investigation, and on March 7, 2020, the Paris prosecutor announced that he had acknowledged taking part. Estelle’s father, Éric Mouzin, called Fourniret’s death "anecdotal" and criticized the failures of the justice system in his daughter’s case. On December 22, 2020, Fourniret was also placed under formal investigation in the 1993 case of Lydie Logé, 29; Slate.fr reported that he admitted responsibility. He died five months later, untried.
Olivier was convicted in 2008 of complicity in four of the murders, with other charges, and received life with a 28-year security period; in 2018 she received 20 years for complicity in the Hammiche murder. On December 19, 2023, the Nanterre court convicted her alone of complicity in the abduction, confinement and murder of Domèce, Parrish and Mouzin and sentenced her to life with a 20-year security period; her sentence was reported in 2023 as not allowing release before 2035. The verdict concerns her, not him. Four cases never reached a verdict against Fourniret: Domèce, Parrish, Mouzin and Logé. The psychiatrist Daniel Zagury called him the most accomplished of French serial killers.
Set side by side, the cases show where French and Belgian justice was slow and what it did once it caught up. The older trials were built on witnesses and paper: a woman who identified Dumollard at Trévoux, a wife who talked, a notebook of train fares in Landru’s hand. Weidmann’s execution moved the practice of capital punishment inside prison walls, and the Ministry of Justice, looking back, called Petiot’s trial the great media trial of the Second World War.
Later cases turned on records that did not meet. In eastern Paris, two investigative teams handled related murders without linking them while laboratories held DNA profiles that no national file could compare, and the National Assembly cited the Georges case as proof of what the gap had cost. In Metz, a teenager’s confession in 1987 kept him in prison for 15 years before his acquittal in 2002, and Heaulme was convicted of the killings 31 years after they happened. In Belgium, officers who visited Dutroux’s property in 1995 dismissed what they heard, and the families' complaints were slow to be heard. In the Ardennes and Namur, two countries' files on one couple were joined only in 2003.
The courts decided less than the files suggest. Landru’s eleven counts stand against 283 correspondents, Petiot’s 24 convictions against 27 charged and his own claim of 63, Sister Godfrieda’s three confessed deaths against 17 on the judge’s list. The verdicts are what the courts decided; the rest remain suspicions.
• 1855 to 1861: the Dumollard cases in the Lyon region and around Montluel.
• January 1862: Dumollard convicted at Bourg; appeal rejected February 27; executed at Montluel in March.
• 1915 to January 1919: the killings attributed to Landru at Vernouillet and Gambais.
• April 12, 1919: Landru arrested in Paris.
• November 30, 1921: Landru sentenced to death at Versailles; executed February 25, 1922.
• July to November 1937: Weidmann kills six people in the Paris region; arrested December 8.
• March 31, 1939: Weidmann sentenced to death at Versailles.
• June 17, 1939: Weidmann executed in public at Versailles; decree of June 24 moves executions inside prisons.
• March 1944: Petiot’s townhouse brought to police attention; he is arrested October 31, 1944.
• April 4, 1946: Petiot sentenced to death for 24 murders; executed May 25, 1946.
• 1977 to 1978: deaths on the Wetteren ward; February 10, 1978, Sister Godfrieda arrested.
• 1980: Sister Godfrieda ruled insane; interned at Melle (released 1990; died 2019).
• 1986 to 1989: six members of Pandy’s household cease to be part of it; 1997, arrest; 2002, conviction in Brussels.
• September 28, 1986: two boys killed in Montigny-lès-Metz; Heaulme arrested January 7, 1992.
• January 1991 to 1997: Georges’s seven killings in eastern Paris.
• June 1995 to August 1996: the Dutroux abductions; August 13, 1996, arrest.
• October 1996: some 300,000 people march in Brussels.
• September 5, 1997: Alègre arrested in Paris.
• March 27, 1998: Georges arrested; June 17, 1998, law creating the FNAEG.
• April 5, 2001: Georges sentenced.
• February 2002: Alègre convicted in Toulouse.
• 2003: the "affaire Alègre"; Alègre retracts on June 26.
• June 2003: Fourniret arrested in Belgium.
• June 2004: Dutroux convicted at Arlon; June 22, life imprisonment.
• May 28, 2008: Fourniret convicted at Charleville-Mézières.
• May 10, 2021: Fourniret dies in custody.
• December 19, 2023: Monique Olivier convicted at Nanterre.
• June 2026: Heaulme sent to trial in the Bédarrides case.