On Tuesday, December 1, 1987, Commissaire Francis Jacob was standing in the street a few yards from the police station at the Porte Saint-Denis, in the tenth arrondissement of Paris, talking to shopkeepers with a composite sketch of a killer in his pocket, when a young man walked past who matched it. For three years someone had been following old women home in the north of the city, forcing his way in behind them, and beating, suffocating or strangling them for the cash and jewelry in their apartments. The sketch had been drawn from the description of a woman who survived. Jacob stopped the man. He was Thierry Paulin, twenty-four, and within the forty-three hours of questioning that followed he admitted to more than twenty killings.
Paulin was born in Fort-de-France, Martinique, on November 28, 1963, raised largely by his maternal grandparents, and brought to the Paris region by his mother in 1977. He left school at sixteen and went into the city's night life, working as a waiter and as a performer and spending heavily on cocaine and clothes. His lover, Jean-Thierry Mathurin, born in Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni in French Guiana in 1965, had worked at the Paradis Latin cabaret.
The first killings, between October 5 and November 9, 1984, were committed by the two men together. The women were old, lived alone and were mostly in the eighteenth arrondissement around Montmartre, and the sums taken were often tiny. One victim was made to drink drain cleaner containing caustic soda. After the pair separated, Paulin went on alone. The press called him the Monster of Montmartre and the killer of old ladies, and elderly Parisians were afraid to go out. In 1986 he was jailed for violence connected with drug dealing, and after his release in 1987 the killings resumed. On November 25, 1987, Rachel Cohen, seventy-nine, was found murdered in her home. The police later acknowledged that there had been no means at the time of passing such data from one police station to another, and that a system for doing so would have let them catch him after the first killings in 1984.
In custody Paulin admitted twenty-one crimes, which the investigators counted as nineteen murders and two attempts. Pressed by Inspector Bernard Laither about the woman forced to drink drain cleaner, he said that had not been him, and named Mathurin, who was arrested the next morning, December 2, at an address on rue Vercingétorix. On December 3 and 4 both were charged with assassinats accompanied by torture and acts of barbarity, and with aggravated theft. The examining magistrate, Philippe Jeannin, retained eighteen murders against Paulin and ordered further inquiries into three more.
He never came to trial. He had learned that he had AIDS, and in early 1988 his health began to fail; within a year he was nearly paralyzed and suffering from tuberculosis and meningitis. He died during the night of April 16, 1989, in the hospital wing of Fresnes prison, at twenty-five. Mathurin, who admitted taking part in eight of the 1984 murders, was tried alone before the Paris Assize Court in December 1991 and on December 20 was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of eighteen years. He was granted day release in January 2009 and freed in January 2012.