Other Books in the Profiles in Crime Series

How to Catch a Killer—Katherine Ramsland

Killer Cults—Stephen Singular

Serial Killers of the ’70s—Jane Fritsch

Serial Killers of the ’80s—Jane Fritsch

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The text in this book contains graphic and disturbing depictions of murder.

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For Dr. Katherine Ramsland

INTRODUCTION: HUNTING HUMANS

The term “serial murderer” is relatively new, first used in print by German critic Siegfried Kracauer in 1961—and not, as is sometimes assumed, by FBI profiler Robert Ressler in the 1970s. Four years prior to Kracauer’s serendipitous turn of phrase, American criminologist James Reinhardt wrote of “chain killers” who murder repeatedly and compulsively, comparing their victims to links in a chain of madness. Before that, murderers who killed in series, such as London’s still unidentified “Jack the Ripper,” were simply branded “mass murderers” or “homicidal maniacs.”

Regardless of who takes credit for coining the term, serial killing is an act and fact as old as human history itself. In China, during the second century BCE, Prince Liu Pengli, sometimes named by scholars as history’s first documented serial slayer, replaced wild game with peasants in hunts staged for recreation. His body count exceeded 100 but Liu suffered no consequences: he died peacefully from natural causes in 144 BCE, leaving his five sons an estate including 532,000 pounds of gold ($13.1 billion today) and land of equal value.

Writing in middle age, Roman historian Titus Livius (64 BCE to 12 CE) described a group of matrons who murdered ninety-odd men with poisons procured from two patrician women who described their potions as “medicinal.” When forced to take their own medicine, both died, leaving 170 clients to face trial for murder, but all were apparently excused. Livius explained that “their act was regarded as a prodigy, and suggested madness rather than felonious intent.”

A spiritual heiress to those early killers, Locusta of Gaul, personal poison consultant to Empress Agrippina the Younger and a favorite of Agrippina’s son Nero, trained other silent killers and participated in the assassinations of Claudius (54 CE) and Britannicus (55 CE) before going rogue with personal projects. Galba, Nero’s successor, had Locusta executed in 69 CE, allegedly (perhaps apocryphally) in the Colosseum; she was first raped by a specially trained giraffe, then torn apart by wild beasts.

In fifth-century Yemen, wealthy pederast Zu Shenatir lured boys to his home in Aden with promises of food and money, then stripped and sodomized an estimated 100 victims, afterward tossing them to their deaths from an upstairs window of his opulent home. His reign of terror ended when the final victim, named Zerash in one account, stabbed his attacker in the rectum with fatal results.

LOCUSTA OF GAUL (RIGHT), A POISON CONSULTANT TO EMPRESS AGRIPPINA THE YOUNGER AND A FAVORITE OF NERO (LEFT), TRAINED OTHER SILENT KILLERS AND MAY HAVE BEEN AMONG THE FIRST RECORDED EXTREME KILLERS.

ALEXANDER “SAWNEY” BEAN WAS A 16TH-CENTURY SCOTTISH LABORER. HE AND HIS FAMILY WERE REPUTED TO HAVE KILLED AND EATEN MORE THAN ONE THOUSAND PEOPLE WHO WERE TRAVELING THROUGH SCOTLAND.

According to The Newgate Calendar, Alexander “Sawney” Bean was born in sixteenth-century East Lothian, Scotland. A laborer’s son, Sawney soon tired of honest work and fled to a seaside cave between Girvan and Ballantrae with “Black” Agnes Duncan, a reputed harlot and self-styled witch. Living in isolation for a quarter century, the couple produced an inbred clan of forty-five children and grandchildren who fed on the flesh of more than 1,000 hapless nighttime wayfarers. Their guerrilla tactics misfired when they preyed on a newlywed couple who were traveling armed. They killed the bride but could not overtake her groom, an armed veteran soldier who returned with searchers and discovered the cannibals’ lair. In custody, the tribe faced execution without formal trial: the males were emasculated, drawn, and quartered, while the women and girls were burned at the stake. Some modern scholars claim the clan was mythical, citing a dearth of formal documentation for their mass execution, but others disagree. In either case, the story survives, and inspired American film director Wes Craven’s franchise of The Hills Have Eyes films, together with author Jack Ketchum’s “Dead River” series of novels, set in modern New England (Off Season, Offspring, and The Woman).

Another frequently forgotten monster from times past was Crown Prince Jangheon of Joeson, Korea’s last and longest-ruling Confucian dynasty (1392–1897 CE). Born in 1735, Jangheon was heir apparent to his father, King Yeongjo, but suffered a mental breakdown after losing his mother and wife one month apart in 1757. Apparently deranged, he began beating palace eunuchs, decapitating one and displaying the severed head to others. He then embarked on a series of rapes and murders, exacerbated by an overwhelming phobia to wearing clothes, that decimated the royal household staff. In 1760–61, Jangheon crossed the final line of impropriety by publicly insulting his father, murdering his latest consort (one Pingae), and then attempting to kill him and his royal nephews. Finally, King Yeongjo ordered Jangheon’s execution in July 1762, locking him inside a chest of rice where he died eight days later. King Yeongjo posthumously changed his late son’s name to Sado, translated as “thinking of with great sadness.”

Modern crime writers disagree on the identity of America’s first serial killer. Candidates include racist gunman William “Wild Bill” Longley, slayer of thirty-two persons—mostly unarmed blacks and Mexicans—between 1869 and 1878, who was hanged for murdering a childhood friend; “Nebraska Fiend” Stephen Richards, slayer of at least six persons during 1878, hanged the following year; and swindler turned homicidal sadist Herman Mudgett, alias “Dr. H. H. Holmes.” Credited vaguely with “hundreds” of murders, Mudgett confessed to twenty-seven before his execution in May 1896.

In fact, none of those predators was the New World’s first serial killer. That dubious “honor” likely belongs to some unknown Native American or Viking explorer, but the apparent first on record was highwayman and river pirate Samuel Mason, slayer of at least twenty victims in the new United States and Spanish Louisiana between 1797 and 1803. Two of his protégés, also prolific killers, were Micajah and Wiley Harpe (née Harper), either brothers or cousins (reports differ). They impartially murdered strangers, their own common-law wives, and infant offspring (for the offense of crying), weighting their disemboweled corpses with stones for concealment in lakes and rivers.

The Harpes doubled Samuel Mason’s body count along the Natchez Trace before meeting their separate fates. Vigilantes captured Micajah (“Big Harpe”) in July 1799 and decapitated him along a Kentucky byway still known as Harpe’s Head Road. Wiley (“Little Harpe”) outran that posse but ironically ran afoul of justice in 1803, when he killed mentor Mason, presenting Mason’s head to a Kentucky court and trying to collect an outstanding bounty. Locals saw through Wiley’s alias of “John Sutton” and convicted him and an accomplice for murder. They hanged both in January 1804 and mounted their heads beside the Natchez Trace as a warning to future bandits.

Extreme Killers presents fifteen cases of serial murder wherein offenders were accused of and/or confessed to killing scores of victims. In all but two cases the estimated final body counts exceed 100. Of the two relative “slackers,” each was convicted of 49 slayings: one has confessed to claiming seventy-one victims, while the other—Canada’s most prolific serial killer to date—operated for nineteen years in rural conditions that defy a precise victim census, feeding human remains to hogs (and perhaps to neighbors).

The cases chosen were selected from a master list of fifty-two murderers who stretched the psychic envelope of recreational murder, each unique in certain ways, but hauntingly familiar when compared to one another. Time after time, authorities overlooked or turned a blind eye to clues that might have saved dozens of lives. No effort has been made to dramatize the selected accounts; no dialogue has been invented by “poetic license.”

The facts are grim enough.

And by this time next year, if not before, the list will certainly be longer.

1.

“BLUEBEARD”: GILLES DE RAIS

Millions worldwide know the tale of Bluebeard, penned by French author Charles Perrault in 1697. Many more have read its numerous literary imitators and seen the eight film versions released between 1923 and 2009. The story’s villain, known only by his nickname, kills successive wives until his last bride bares his secret and her siblings intervene. So well-known is the story that “Bluebeard” has long served as a tag for male serial slayers of wives and lovers.

Fewer persons realize that the story’s model—the first historical “Bluebeard”—was a real-life murderer whose crimes surpassed his namesake’s fictional murders, or that his scores of victims were boys.

Gilles de Montmorency-Laval, the Baron Gilles de Rais, was born on September 10, 1404, at one of his family’s several castles, the Black Tower at Champtocé-sur-Loire in western France. Maternal grandfather Jean de Craon arranged a political marriage between Guy II de Montmorency-Laval and Marie de Craon to increase his own fortune and prevent impending war between two rival clans. Gilles arrived nine months after that loveless union, followed two years later by his brother René de La Suze.

The boys lost their mother Marie to illness in January 1415. Eight months later, a wild boar fatally gored their father. Guy’s will barred father-in-law Jean de Craon from raising the brothers, but Jean fought that provision in court and won in 1416, proceeding to instruct his grandsons in the duties of French noblemen pursuing fame, power, and wealthy brides.

Gilles was barely twelve when Jean arranged his marriage to four-year-old Jeanne Paynel, orphaned heiress of Lord de Hambye of Normandy, but Parliament feared that family merger and blocked the wedding until Gilles attained legal majority. Ten months later, Jean betrothed Gilles to Beatrice de Rohan, niece of the Duke of Burgundy, but that engagement failed for reasons lost to history.

In 1420, Gilles pursued another bride, Catherine de Thouars of Brittany, heiress of La Vendée and Poitou, but she rejected him. He led a raiding party to abduct her, locking her up at Champtocé, where three would-be rescuers wound up in the castle’s dungeon. One died from fever, the others emerged in broken health. Catherine bowed to the inevitable and married Gilles on November 30, 1420.

Already famous at sixteen, Gilles joined the House of Montfort to liberate Brittany’s Duke John VI—who had been kidnapped by Olivier de Blois, Count of Penthièvre—and received generous land grants in return, which he quickly converted to cash.

Gilles de Rais was introduced at court in 1425, welcomed as a young, courageous soldier on the rise, and elevated to command of the royal army two years later. Meanwhile, France was engulfed in a civil war that threatened the power of all native nobles.

On May 21, 1420, King Charles VI signed the Treaty of Troyes, disinheriting his son, the Dauphin Charles VII, and naming England’s Henry V as legitimate successor to the French throne. That plan collapsed with Henry’s death on August 31, 1422, followed closely by Charles’s suicide on October 22. Charles VII claimed the throne, inheriting a kingdom riven by conflict, with much of France still occupied by English troops.

In 1427, Gilles besieged the Château of Lude on the banks of the Loir, personally slaying the English garrison’s commander. In March 1429, Gilles was with Charles VII at Chinon when teenage religious zealot Joan of Arc predicted a French victory at Orléans, besieged by English forces five months earlier. Joan persuaded Charles to give her an army of 10,000 men, with Gilles appointed as her general and primary advisor. They reached Orléans on April 28 and broke the siege nine days later. By that time, Gilles had grown a beard so black that it had a blue sheen in sunlight, prompting his famous nickname Barbe bleue—“Bluebeard.”

Charles VII’s coronation was delayed until July 1429, and even then he still faced opposition from a host of rivals. The war continued, but England was reeling and forced to concede in summer 1429. Charles followed his army to Reims, where Joan stood beside him at his coronation on July 17. Charles promoted Gilles to serve as Marshal of France, a seven-star general honored with permission to add a border of the royal arms, the fleur-de-lis on an azure ground, to his family crest. Gilles was now the highest-ranking general in France—and, some say, the country’s richest lord. A new father, with the birth of his daughter Maire that year, he was also one of four lords honored with assignment to convey the Holy Ampulla—a glass vial used to anoint French kings with sacred oil since 1131—from the Abbey of Saint-Remy to Notre-Dame de Reims.

Joan of Arc did not fare so well as the war with England dragged on. Georges de la Trémoille, Grand Chamberlain of France, feared that her influence over Charles might undercut his own. On May 30, 1430, Joan was captured at Compiègne, while battling Burgundian allies of England. La Trémoille saw his chance to be rid of her for good, and persuaded Pierre Cauchon, the pro-English Bishop of Beauvais, to indict her for heresy. Because that religious infraction was only punishable by death upon a repeat offense, Cauchon added a second charge of “cross-dressing” in men’s armor for battle. Despite protests from Pope Martin V, Joan was condemned and burned alive at the Vieux-Marché in Rouen, on May 30, 1431.

The Hundred Years’ War continued for another twenty-two years, but Gilles had no part in it. He retired to his various estates and devoted himself to a hedonistic life of debauchery and reckless spending that appalled his grandfather. At his death, on November 15, 1432, Jean showed his displeasure with Gilles by leaving his sword and breastplate to younger brother René. Finally freed from his domineering grandfather’s influence, Gilles was content to seek excitement on his own, without serving the state.

Somewhere along that road, he turned to murder.

After years of battling warriors, Gilles showed a predilection for young victims who he sexually violated, both before and after death. Some sources date his first murders to 1426, but Gilles, in his later confessions, said the crimes began at Champtocé-sur-Loire in the spring of 1432. Surviving transcripts state that “at Champtocé he killed children and had them killed in large numbers, how many he is uncertain. And he committed with them the sodomitic and unnatural sin.”

Later, Gilles moved his entourage to Machecoul, where the slaughter escalated.

Throughout his rampage, Gilles struggled to keep up appearances, leading a lavish lifestyle he could not afford. At Machecoul, he built a Chapel of the Holy Innocents where he presided over worship services in robes of his own personal design. He also wrote an epic play, “Le Mistère du Siège d’Orléans,” with 140 speaking parts and over twenty thousand lines of dialogue, plus some five hundred extras. Players wore six hundred costumes, then discarded them after each performance, while tailors labored to recreate them for the next. Spectators enjoyed unlimited food and drink, at Gilles’s expense.

Production of that spectacle proved so expensive that Gilles sold all his estates in the province of Maine, and all but his wife’s property in Poitou, to fund the extravaganza’s premiere in Orléans on May 8, 1435. Finally, it was too much for Gilles’s family. In June 1435, relatives petitioned Pope Eugene IV to disavow the Chapel of the Holy Innocents. His refusal sent them off to King Charles, with a plea to save their family’s dwindling fortune. On July 2, a royal edict branded Gilles a spendthrift and forbade sale of any further property. French subjects were banned from signing contracts with Gilles, and purchasers of the estates already sold were barred from reselling them.

Still bent on living the high life, Gilles borrowed money, using his books and manuscripts, clothing, and objets d’art as collateral. In August 1435 Gilles left Orléans littered with treasures used to secure loans, bound for Machecoul in Brittany. Duke Jean VI, still grateful for his rescue fifteen years earlier, rejected pleas from Gilles’s family to curtail his spending. With the Duke on his side, Gilles felt secure in continuing his pedophilic rape-and-murder spree.

The first child abduction linked to Gilles de Rais was carried out by his cousin, Gilles de Sillé, in 1432. Their victim was the twelve-year-old son of Jean Jeudon, kidnapped from Machecoul. In his biography of Gilles de Rais, author Jean Benedetti describes the boy’s fate.

He was pampered and dressed in better clothes than he had ever known. The evening began with a large meal and heavy drinking, particularly hippocras [wine flavored with spices], which acted as a stimulant. The boy was taken to an upper room to which only Gilles and his immediate circle was [sic] admitted. He was then confronted with the true nature of his situation. The shock thus produced on the boy was probably an initial source of pleasure for Gilles.

At trial, accomplice Etienne Corrillaut—commonly called “Poitou”—testified that Gilles raped the boy as he hung by his neck from a hook, then cut the child down and “comforted” him before sodomizing him again. Poitou could not recall if Gilles murdered the boy himself or had one of his servants do it. By the time he testified, there had been so many victims that he had trouble telling them apart.

Under oath, Poitou described methods of murder including slashed throats and decapitation, broken necks, and live dismemberment. Often, Poitou testified, victims were stabbed before Gilles sodomized them, taking double pleasure if they died during the rape. A necrophiliac, Gilles also enjoyed violating the small, still-warm corpses.

A DEPICTION OF GILLES DE RAIS AND SOME OF THE CHILDREN HE MURDERED.

Gilles’s own confession was even more graphic. With especially handsome boys, Gilles testified, he kissed their dead faces and “admired” their flaccid limbs. He had some victims disemboweled and “took delight” at the sight of their spilling entrails. A special pleasure for Gilles was sitting on the torsos of those gutted children, masturbating as they died beneath him.

Few victims lasted more than one night with Gilles. Once killed, accomplice Henriet Griart testified, most were cremated slowly to minimize the stench of burning flesh arising from the castles where they died. When flesh and bone had been consumed by fire, the ashes were dumped into cesspools or the castle’s stagnant moat.

The slaughter of innocents under Gilles de Rais was both a family affair and a group enterprise. Cousin Gilles de Sillé delivered the first two known victims, later joined as a procurer by another cousin, Roger de Briqueville. Over time, various other men and women joined the murder crew, some providing Gilles with fresh prey, others actively participating in the torture, defilement, and murder of victims. Some of those slain were only eight or nine years old.

Orgies of pain and death provided Gilles de Rais with some relief from his sadistic psychosis, but he still had pressing monetary problems. Barred from selling off more of his land, unwilling to part with the castles where his gruesome rituals would soon become routine, he cast about for other sources of income and was struck by sudden inspiration.

Why not turn to alchemy?

Alchemy aims to mingle chemistry with magic. From antiquity, alchemists have pursued two primary goals: creating the “philosopher’s stone,” a legendary substance capable of turning base metals into gold or silver; and producing an “elixir of life” that confers eternal youth.

Both prospects appealed to the cash-strapped Gilles de Rais, but money was his main concern.

Outwardly, Gilles remained a pious Catholic until the moment of his death. He knew that magic of all kinds was banned by church and state alike, but that did not divert him from his quest for gold through any means available. By 1438, he was employing alchemists who promised grand results, but most were charlatans and showmen who accepted payment for their services, then delivered only simple parlor tricks.

After several false starts, Gilles welcomed a renegade priest—Father Eustache Blanchet—to his castle at Tiffauges. Blanchet supplied Gilles with books on magic rituals and demonology—peculiar reading for a Catholic priest during the age of European witch trials—and traveled the countryside in search of sorcerers who claimed extraordinary powers.

Their early attempts were ludicrous. First, Blanchet introduced Gilles to a metallurgist who claimed he could transform silver into gold. Gilles met the practitioner at a local tavern, handing him a silver florin, and left him alone to perform his ritual. Returning later, Gilles found the hoaxer dead drunk. His only skill, apparently, was turning silver into wine.

The second try was more elaborate and more expensive. Blanchet hired Jean de la Riviere, a black-magic devotee who claimed he could summon Satan. Clad in white armor and armed with a sword, Riviere led Gilles and Blanchet into the woods, leaving them in a clearing while he went off to raise the Devil in private. Soon, clanging sounds echoed through the night, as if Riviere were striking his armor with his sword. After a time, Riviere returned, claiming he had conjured Satan in a leopard’s form. Delighted, Gilles and company repaired to the village of Pouzauges for a night of alcoholic revelry.

When they sobered up the next morning, Riviere announced his master plan. To raise Satan again and bind him to the will of Gilles de Rais, certain supplies would be required. The going price: twenty gold écus à la couronne. Gilles paid up, and Riviere promptly vanished with his loot for parts unknown.

Enraged, Gilles gave Blanchet one last chance to find a worthy sorcerer. In Italy, Blanchet met François Prelati, a twenty-two-year-old French expatriate, and persuaded him to try his luck with Gilles de Rais. The pair reached Tiffauges in May 1439, intent on raising a demon called Barron, but Prelati postponed the attempt until Midsummer’s Eve—June 23—when supernatural forces are said to be most active.

Near midnight on the appointed evening, Gilles gathered his crew—Prelati, Blanchet, Poitou, Henriet Griart, and Gilles de Sillé—in the lower hall at Tiffauges. Prelati drew a large circle on the floor, filling it with cryptic signs and symbols, surrounded by guttering candles. Once the stage was set, Gilles de Rais ordered his cronies to wait in his upstairs bedroom while he and Prelati summoned Barron. Gilles clutched a note to Barron, penned by Prelati for hand delivery when the demon appeared, but two hours of chanting produced no demon.

A second attempt allegedly succeeded. Working alone in the ritual chamber, Prelati claimed to have conjured a giant serpent, retreating in fear to warn Gilles de Rais. Gilles rushed in, armed with a crucifix said to contain a splinter from the True Cross, but by the time he arrived, the snake had vanished, presumably gone back to Hell.

A third attempt reportedly raised Barron, but once again Prelati acted on his own, behind a locked door. Gilles and company, huddled in the outer hallway, heard the demon beating Prelati, leaving him battered, winded—and alone—when he finally opened the door. Blanchet, increasingly skeptical, later testified that the beating sounded like someone punching a feather bed.

Though disappointed, Gilles still trusted Prelati. When the magician suggested that success might require a human sacrifice—specifically a child’s heart, eyes, and genitals—Gilles readily agreed. Since he was already raping and murdering children, why not mix business with pleasure?

Prelati’s recipe was neither unique nor original. Alchemy and magic generally—sometimes spelled as “magick,” to distinguish serious rituals from mere sleight of hand—often involve release of vital energy through sacrifice. Some practitioners believe orgasm is sufficient, either self-induced or through an act of copulation. Others call for blood, most commonly an animal’s, as in the rites of Voodoo and Santería. Darker variations on that theme, from Stone Age Europe to the Aztecs and Incas, prefer human subjects. In the African cult of Palo Mayombe, slow and agonizing deaths allegedly release more energy, increasing a sorcerer’s power over demons from the Other Side.

Why did Gilles persist in human sacrifice, when he was never privileged to meet Barron or Satan in the flesh and the wealth Prelati promised him never appeared? Some authors have suggested that he was infatuated with Prelati, an attractive man eleven years his junior, fluent in French, Italian, and Latin, charming and humorous when not engaged in bloody murder. Today, no one knows whether Prelati ever warmed Gilles’s bed. He may have been too old to satisfy his benefactor sexually, but in any case, Gilles never seemed to realize that the self-styled sorcerer was cheating him.

Prelati, for his part, was no more prescient. He did not realize they were all running out of time.

The disappearance of children spread fear through Machecoul, soon giving the town a dark reputation. Andre Barbe, one of the grieving parents who later testified against the murderers, recalled meeting a stranger from Saint-Jean-d’Angély at the height of the killing spree. Upon hearing that Barbe came from Machecoul, the other man recoiled, saying the town was filled with cannibals who fed on children.

By then, Gilles had an efficient death machine in operation. Aside from his cousins, Poitou, Henriet, Blanchet, and Prelati, he had acquired a female procurer, Perrine Martin, also known as La Meffraye (“The Terror”). Cloaked in black, she prowled outlying villages, offering apprenticeships with “a good master” to any amenable boys.

As the toll of vanishings mounted, agitation simmered in the streets of Machecoul. On one occasion, angry parents confronted Gilles de Sillé, demanding answers. Cornered, he admitted that some of the missing boys had been kidnapped, but he blamed King Charles VI, fabricating a royal scheme to furnish England with youngsters for training as servants. It was a transparent lie, but it saved de Sillé from a lynching.

What did Gilles de Rais’s family know of his ongoing crimes? Some modern historians speculate that René de La Suze had an inkling of his brother’s savagery. René had supported the earlier royal edict of 1435, preventing Gilles from selling off more lands and castles. Now, late in 1439, René announced his intent to occupy and secure Castle Champtocé. Gilles rightly feared that Castle Machecoul might be next in line.

Near panic, Gilles sent Poitou and Henriet from Château de Tiffauges to Machecoul, with orders to incinerate forty-odd corpses stashed in a tower there. Whoever did the grisly job, they missed at least two skeletons, discovered by members of René’s household three weeks later, when he and cousin Andre de Laval-Loheac occupied the castle.

But René did nothing.

Whether he feared scandal for his family or simply did not care about the fate of peasant children, René went through the motions of questioning Poitou and Henriet, accepting their false pleas of ignorance at face value. Thereafter, as Jean Benedetti observes, “A wall of silence was erected round the family.” It would not hold indefinitely, but for the time being Gilles was safe.

Until he crossed the Church of Rome.

Gilles de Rais was desperate by spring of 1440. On May 15, he stormed a church in Saint-Étienne-de-Mer-Morte and kidnapped Father Jean le Ferron, brother of Brittany’s treasurer, who had collaborated in the recent occupation of Gilles’s castles by brother René. He soon released the priest, but Bishop of Nantes Jean de Malestroit took the raid as a personal insult against God and himself, launching an investigation that exposed Gilles’s reign of terror.

The bishop aired his findings on July 29, citing affidavits from seven witnesses to prove that “Milord Gilles de Rais, knight, lord, and baron, our subject and under our jurisdiction, with certain accomplices, did cut the throats of, kill, and heinously massacre many young and innocent boys, that he did practice with these children unnatural lust and the vice of sodomy, often calls up or causes others to practice the dreadful invocation of demons, did sacrifice to and make pacts with the latter, and did perpetrate other enormous crimes within the limits of our jurisdiction.”

Gilles de Rais initially ignored the charges, confident that his authority and noble standing placed him above the law. Cousins Gilles de Sillé and Roger de Briqueville lacked his courage and fled from Tiffauges with funds they had saved for such a contingency, both vanishing forever from the public record. Accomplices Blanchet, Henriet, Poitou, Prelati, and Perrine Martin remained at Machecoul, trusting their lord to keep them safe—though Henriet would later say that he considered suicide.

In August 1440, Arthur de Richemont, Constable of France and brother of the Duke of Brittany, seized Tiffauges while awaiting warrants to arrest Gilles de Rais and his cohorts. That order came from Bishop Malestroit on September 14, and Richemont marched on Machecoul the next day, seizing the suspects and transporting them to Nantes. There, while his accomplices languished in dungeon cells, Gilles had more comfortable private lodgings.

Pierre de l’Hôpital, chief judge of Brittany, began interrogating witnesses from Machecoul on September 18. By October 8, the tribunal—including l’Hôpital’s prosecutor, friar Jean de Touscheronde, and Jean Blouyn, Vicar of the Inquisitor—had recorded testimony from seventy-five persons. One mother sketched a scene in which Poitou coerced her into giving up her ten-year-old son to serve under Gilles as a page. Poitou promised the boy an education and a comfortable life, but his mother had second thoughts the next morning, begging Gilles to relinquish the child. Bluebeard had treated her as if she were invisible, departing with the boy, who was never seen again.

On October 13, the court formally indicted Gilles on thirty-four charges of murder, sodomy, heresy, and violating the immunity of the church (for the May 15 raid). The indictment referred to 140 victims slain over fourteen years, including a son of Éonnet and Macée de Villeblanche, procured by Poitou as a page and slaughtered in August 1440. The charges also claimed that Gilles had several times expressed remorse for his crimes, once vowing to visit Jerusalem in search of absolution, but had never followed through.

When called before the court, Gilles refused to answer any of the charges lodged against him, declaring that he would rather be hanged on the spot than face interrogation by corrupt priests. On his fourth refusal, the Bishop of Nantes excommunicated Gilles and the hearing adjourned.

The shock of being exiled from his church gnawed at Gilles over the next two days. Denied communion and confession, he apparently believed that he was bound for Hell. At his next court appearance, tearful and repentant, Gilles apologized for his earlier outbursts, whereupon Jean Blouyn and the bishop absolved him, nullifying his excommunication.

Visibly relieved, Gilles confessed to murder and sodomy, but flatly denied invoking demons. He swore innocence of that charge on a Bible and volunteered for trial by fire to prove his innocence. Jean de Touscheronde was adamant, producing Henriet, Prelati, and Poitou to describe the various dark rites performed on Gilles’s behalf. After hearing their testimony, Gilles told the court he had nothing to add, but urged publication of the transcript “as a warning to heretics.”

Still unsatisfied, Touscheronde asked the court for permission to torture Gilles. Pierre de l’Hôpital compromised, agreeing that Gilles should be taken to the dungeon at La Tour Neuves prison for a close-up view of the Inquisition’s instruments. No stranger to torture himself, Gilles amended his confession on October 21, admitting attempts to summon Barron and Satan. Details of his confession, followed by further admissions from Poitou and Henriet on October 23, were so graphic that Pierre de l’Hôpital ordered some bits stricken from the record.

Verdicts in the case were mixed. Poitou and Henriet were condemned on October 23, followed by Gilles on the 25th. Perrine Martin and François Prelati were spared execution but sentenced to prison for life. In parting, Gilles told Prelati “Goodbye, François, my friend. Never again shall we see each other in this world. I pray that God gives you plenty of patience and understanding, and to be sure, provided you have plenty of patience and trust in God, we shall meet again in the Great Joy of Paradise.”

The court’s death sentence for Gilles, Henriet, and Poitou specified hanging, followed by cremation. Gilles asked to die first, setting an example for his cronies, and the court agreed. Pierre de l’Hôpital also granted Gilles’s plea for a final confession and interment at the monastery of Notre-Dame des Carmes in Nantes. The ashes of his cohorts would be scattered to the winds.

At 9:00 a.m. on October 26, guards led Gilles, Henriet, and Poitou to their execution site on the Île de Nantes, at the city’s center between two branches of the Loire River. Before meeting his fate, Gilles delivered a sermon to the spectators, lecturing them on “the evils of uncontrolled youth,” exhorting them to raise their children in strict adherence to Catholicism. At 11 o’clock, an executioner lit Gilles’s pyre and hanged him, then removed his corpse before it was seared, delivering it to “four ladies of high rank” for burial. Henriet and Poitou followed their master to the gallows and the flames.

Perrine Martin served her sentence and died in prison at Nantes, after confessing her sins to a priest. François Prelati, slippery as ever, escaped from custody, then foolishly returned to the life of an itinerant necromancer. Arrested and convicted of heresy a second time, he was hanged.

Following Gilles’s execution, his widow married wealthy Jean de Vendome, an ally of the Duke of Brittany. Her daughter with Gilles, Marie, married a French admiral but died childless in 1457. René de La Suze occupied Château de Champtocé until his death on October 30, 1473, leaving one child, a daughter, who also died childless.

Today, some historians regard Gilles de Rais’s conviction and execution as a political frame-up. Advocates of his innocence note that the Duke of Brittany coveted Gilles’s property, receiving title to most of it after the trial and dividing the spoils among friendly nobles. Anthropologist Margaret Murray, in her book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, speculated that Gilles was not a Satanist, but rather a witch and devotee of a fertility cult revering Diana, pagan goddess of the hunt, the moon, and birthing, now the feminist deity of Dianic Wicca.

In 1992, Freemason Jean-Yves Goëau-Brissonnière, Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of France, convened a “court” comprised of former French ministers, members of Parliament, and United Nations officials to review surviving transcripts and evidence from Gilles de Rais’s trial. Judge Henri Juramy, presiding, declared “The case for Gilles de Rais’s innocence is very strong. No child’s corpse was ever found at his castle at Tiffauges, and he appears to have confessed to escape excommunication. The accusations appear to be false charges made up by powerful rival lords to benefit from the confiscation of his lands.”

That verdict had no legal effect, and Gilles’s biographers generally agree that he was guilty as charged, some speculating that his final death toll may have exceeded the number cited in his indictment, perhaps rivaling the body count attributed to Hungary’s Countess Erzsébet Báthory in 1610 (see Chapter 2). Defenders of the original verdict note remains found at Machecoul and stress that peasant witnesses who testified against Gilles had nothing to gain—and much to lose—by lodging false charges against the powerful Marshal of France.