Inside The Mind Of A Killer

by Jean-Francois Abgrall

  They were added to the samples taken on the beach from under the victim’s fingernails. Had she scratched her attacker? Did we know the killer’s blood group? It was still too early to tell, but these were the first clues.

  16 May 1989, the date of the autopsy at the Kerfautras forensic medical institute in Brest – not an attractive place. At 2 p.m. the procession of investigators and magistrates crossed the huge cemetery giving access to the morgue. We were shown into a small room with a high ceiling. There were about ten of us standing round the metal table on which the victim’s body lay. The only sound was the tinkling of the coroner’s instruments. There was a general awkwardness; everybody avoided looking at the body, their eyes drawn instead to the wall charts informing us of the average weight of a man’s liver, or that of a woman’s or a child’s brain. And yet there was something powerful about the presence of this body, as if it held the key to the mystery.

  Aline Pérès had graduated from victim to prime witness.

  Methodically, the coroner examined every mark, every detail, and explained them. He was surprised at the violence and precision of the stab wounds. The main injuries were on the neck, the sternum and the lower back. Right from the start the one on the neck had caught my attention, but the doctor told me that it hadn’t been fatal. The wounds showed that the weapon used was very sharp. The coroner noted a slight abnormality in these cuts. He inferred that they had been made by a small knife with a damaged blade. The victim had not put up much of a struggle. She had died from a blow to the heart. In addition to the stab wounds, I was surprised to see three scratch marks on the neck.

  I tried to imagine the grip … It was difficult, and I said so to the coroner. He slowly moved his hand and superimposed his fingers over the marks. With his other hand, he mimed the action of the knife, imitating the movements of the murderer. I was gradually able to visualise the scene. The murderer had grabbed Aline Pérès under the chin with his left hand, and slit her throat with his right hand. So he had stood facing her. This movement was surprising: the attacker had twisted his left hand over, the thumb facing outwards, to grab his victim’s neck. As a result, his fingerprints were reversed. An extremely unusual hold. I had never seen such a movement. I knew at once that the murderer was not a run-of-the-mill criminal. And finally the coroner pointed out that the little bruise on the top of her forehead was the result of a blow from a very tall person.

  The examination ended with samples being taken for anatomical and pathological tests. There we were, faced with all the available data.

  Samples were also taken from the victim’s wounds. They probably contained particles of metal from the murderer’s knife. To find out, I travelled to the village of Plouvorn, a few kilometres from Brest, where there is a small electron microscope laboratory. Through circumstance, this place had become our local crime institute. The technician showed me into a tiny room full of equipment where the human tissue was taken out of the sealed bags with extreme caution to avoid contamination.

  Under the electronic eye of a scanning microscope, the samples yielded their secret in less than half an hour. The murderer’s knife was made of iron, pure iron, no alloy. It was a simple blade, not chromium-plated or treated. That immediately eliminated throwing knives, fighting knives and professional chef ’s knives. This was useful information.

  There was a man who could perhaps help me narrow down my search: the gunsmith at the bottom of Rue de Siam, in Brest. The bladed weapons were displayed on the back wall of his shop, between the gun rack and the boxes of pistols. There were knives and daggers of all kinds, all of them deadly. Instinctively, I pictured the murder weapon among them.

  ‘You’re looking for a knife with an iron blade?’ he asked in surprise. ‘Look in the display case to your right.’

  To my surprise, he was pointing to a range of Opinel knives, plain knives with wooden handles and a metal ring to lock the blade. These ‘little knives’ did not look dangerous, and I said so. The dealer then picked one up at random, opened out the blade and slowly cut a sheet of paper, as if with a razor.

  He added, ‘These are the only knives with an iron blade that you’ll find on the market.’

  Was the murder weapon such ahumdrum object? I felt dubious.

  9 p.m. Back at the gendarmerie in Le Relecq-Kerhuon, we held a review. We sat in the main room. It was hard to fit everyone in. I summed up the results of the tests and my visit to the gunsmith, and then it was Jean-Claude and Jean-Paul’s turn to report on their day. They had been to Brest regional hospital where the victim used to work. They were already calling her Aline, as if they had known her well. This is common among investigators who get involved in the subject’s life. The evidence of her colleagues and of the director of the hospital was unequivocal: they all declared that Aline Pérès had been an excellent nurse. She was calm and energetic, and had worked in casualty for several years. She was used to emergencies and knew exactly how to handle them. A woman of experience then, not easily caught unawares. And yet …

  A third investigator went on:

  ‘A man telephoned in answer to the appeal for witnesses in the press. He’d photographed some boats in the marina at 5 p.m. He didn’t see anything, but came forward just in case.’

  Of no apparent interest, but who could tell? Another team signalled a stabbing that had taken place on the evening of the murder, near Brest castle. The victim, a man of around forty, had his face badly slashed with a knife. The attacker, a stranger, had fled. The wounded man was currently being treated at the naval hospital. Look into that.

  Other information had been gathered by the rest of the team: the site of the murder was a popular haunt of junkies and vagrants, and a few local voyeurs and flashers who tended to hang out on this beach had been identified.

  Faced with this wealth of information, we decided to interview all the drifters as a matter of urgency. Jean-Claude and Jean-Paul were given reinforcements and detailed to go and interview the Pérès family. Meanwhile, I was to meet the three people who had discovered the body, a fifty-two-year-old woman and her adult son and daughter who had come to lunch that Sunday.

  ‘After coffee,’ she explained, ‘we decided to go for a little walk, it was such a lovely day. The Sables Rouges headland is pleasant and it’s sheltered from the wind. Besides, it’s not far from our house.’

  Offering a spectacular panoramic view of the port of Brest, the headland was easily accessible. They had set out at 4.45 p.m., making their way among the rocks, unwittingly approaching the scene of the murder 600 metres away. It was the woman’s twenty-year-old son who remembered the most details. He had probably not been paying attention to his mother and sister’s conversation. In any case, he clearly recalled the woman of around fifty who was sunbathing in a secluded spot between two rocks, well hidden from view.

  ‘Then I noticed a man, of around fifty,’ he went on. ‘He was wearing a thong. When we walked past him, he got up and went for a swim. Then a boy aged about twelve or fourteen arrived alone. He was wearing fluorescent green shorts and a T-shirt. He stopped to play in a rock pool.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘As we neared the car park I noticed two people lying down. The first was a man listening to a transistor radio. The second, a woman, aroused my curiosity. She was lying the wrong way to sunbathe. Then I looked at my mother and sister. We all had the same thought. We went up to her and that’s when we discovered the body covered in blood. We immediately called the police from the phone booth nearby. It was four minutes past five.’

  This was a valuable lead, even though it didn’t tell us anything about the two men other witnesses had seen near Aline Pérès at 5 p.m. I noted that in fact there hadn’t been many people on that side of the headland. Perhaps the murderer had scrambled up the rocky slope and fled along the coast road.

  I hoped that the photos taken from the jetty would bring me more specific answers. Bertrand had traced the amateur photographer.

  ‘He’s certain he used
his camera at 5 p.m.,’ he told me, ‘he remembers looking at his watch.’

  I examined the photos, but there was nothing very exciting.

  Clearly, there were key witnesses at either end of the beach at the time of the murder, but none of them was looking in the right direction. In spite of everything, we were determined to get these photos to speak. The negatives measured 2.4 by 3.6 centimetres.

  A photographic laboratory in Le Relecq-Kerhuon offered us the use of an enlarger and we spent the evening projecting the negatives. One by one, we pored over each shot. Only number six was of interest. It showed a corner of the Sables Rouges headland, but from so far away … It was probably unusable.

  The lab technician offered to work on that part of the negative, which was about a quarter of the size of a postage stamp. The next day, an A3 format enlargement was on our desk. The amorphous mass of coloured pixels bewildered us. It was hard to make out the objects but we tried to interpret this fuzzy picture once our eyes had grown accustomed to it. With the aid of a magnifying glass, we managed to identify the witnesses present on the beach.

  The three little splodges side by side, a mix of grey, green and yellow, were the three people who had found the body, the mother and her son and daughter. The white patch with two red lines was the woman sunbathing. The boy in fluorescent green was there too. We also pinpointed the man in swimming trunks and the witness listening to the radio. Gradually, Moulin Blanc beach emerged as it had been at the time of the crime. Unfortunately, the photo stopped just before the place where the victim was, and, fatally, her murderer. We were bitterly disappointed. For the time being, Aline Pérès’s murderer kept his secret.

  Over the next few days the first people were brought in for questioning. There were several squats around Moulin Blanc beach. Vagrants, junkies and the sexual deviants who hung around with them were interviewed. A fringe world full of weird characters, like the flasher dressed in the traditional raincoat and a pair of trousers cut off halfway up his thigh and held up solely by two pieces of string acting as braces.

  These leads soon petered out – the interviewees wanted to be helpful, but they had nothing new to tell us. The incident prompted many of them to up and leave. We set off in pursuit. We soon put names and then faces to the transient population of Moulin Blanc beach.

  A few checks on hostels for the homeless enabled us to track down these witnesses one by one. We worked fast, but many of them had lost all sense of time. Sometimes, their conversation would take a worrying turn, like that of a man nicknamed Cheyenne.

  ‘Since I got out of prison, I haven’t been near Moulin Blanc … I do carry a penknife which I use for eating. I also carry a Stanley knife. I found it in a squat. So far, I’ve only used it to cut the bottoms off Sparrow’s trousers because he’s got his leg in plaster.’

  The knife in question did not have a nick in it and was not made solely of iron. Another red herring.

  The statements of two other vagrants finally led us to the Emmaüs hostel* on the clifftop at Le Relecq-Kerhuon, just a few hundred metres from Moulin Blanc beach. The stretch of beach where Aline Pérès’s body had been found was a popular haunt of the homeless from the Emmaüs community. This information corroborated local people’s statements. Accompanied by a colleague, I paid the community a visit. It was a large property, surrounded by a high grey concrete wall. It was impossible to get inside without being seen by the porter sitting in reception. The director made his way across the little garden towards us. Introductions were rapidly made. He seemed quite relieved to see us.

  ‘Everybody here was shocked by the incident too, and several members of the community wanted to leave the day after the murder. They didn’t want to come into contact with the police and become suspects.’

  That was understandable, but it didn’t help.

  ‘Besides, on 14 May, most of them were out of the area, they’d gone to an inter-community meeting in another town. Only the sick, the elderly and the new arrivals stayed here. Twelve people in all,’ he added. ‘Now there are only two of them left in our community.’

  We asked to see them. The two men who joined us had closed-up faces that bore the scars of the hard lives they had led.

  Watching them walk, I recalled the description of one of the witnesses, ‘They were shabbily dressed, but not dirty, they weren’t tramps.’ The men told us how they had spent their Sunday. In the early afternoon, they had sat in the dining room, watching TV, the smaller man began. Everything was quiet, but then, around 4.30, a fight broke out between two men. Others got involved. The men had to be separated before somebody got hurt. Some even went out to cool off …

  I found this extremely interesting. I had the feeling that here was something tangible, that might have some bearing on the murder. Homeless men, some armed with knives. People fired up from a fight that had broken out on this first warm day. The hostel located a few hundred metres from the scene of the murder. And all those hasty departures …

  The names of these witnesses, all potential suspects, were listed in the hostel’s records. We sent out wanted notices all over France. I already knew it would be several weeks before we heard anything.

  In the meantime, we finished following up local leads. It was now the end of May. This time we targeted the drug dealers. Brest had become a major heroin trafficking centre, involving several gangs. Fanch, the head of the drugs squad at Brest police station, was an old friend of mine. He told me that dealing sometimes went on at Moulin Blanc. He thought that the irrational nature of the attack could be the act of a junkie in withdrawal. We decided to pool our efforts.

  Within a few days the arrest count shot up, and in less than a week the local dealers started sending us messages. They were worried by our joint action. The street price of drugs had never been so high, and the goods were in short supply. They wanted us to find the killer and even offered us their services. If they found out anything, they would let us know … But they came up with nothing.

  This slow progress demoralised the fainter-hearted. Some investigators already believed we would never identify the murderer, particularly because their presence in the police stations was causing friction. The identikit picture of the knife attacker near Brest castle on the evening of the murder on the beach was pinned up on the wall in every office in the station. The police were looking for a thin-faced suspect aged around thirty, with long fair hair drawn back off his face and a clear gaze. Supposing he was our man too? they thought. Two gendarmes were tasked with following that line of inquiry. They too drew a blank.

  Beginning of June. It would soon be the summer holidays and the investigation was floundering. I dreaded the summer. It’s a time when everything grinds to a halt. A real obstacle to thorough investigations.

  But then a fourteen-year-old boy rekindled our hopes. The appeal for witnesses in the press at last bore fruit. On 8 June, Philippe walked into the gendarmerie of Le Relecq-Kerhuon, accompanied by his father.

  ‘I’m the boy in the fluorescent green shorts,’ he began.

  Resting his elbows on the corner of a little desk, this fragile-looking young man spoke. He had gone for a walk along the beach before settling near the sunbathing woman at around 4.45 p.m. He had stayed there for around ten minutes, sitting on a concrete slab. A little embarrassed, he admitted he had been attracted by the woman’s bare breasts. On becoming aware of his presence, she had discreetly put her top back on. But there was also a man standing there, on top of the rocks about thirty metres away. He stood upright, like a lookout, not far from the road. His hair was dishevelled and he was overdressed for the time of year. From his vantage point, the individual, who was aged about forty, could see right across the Sables Rouges area.

  Philippe had then set off for the rocky headland. I couldn’t help thinking that he had unwittingly just sealed Aline Pérès’s fate. His departure was the moment the killer had been waiting for.

  * Translator’s note: Equivalent of the Salvation Army.

  2 />
  The first meeting

  with

  Francis Heaulme

  16 June 1989. It is said that the murderer always returns to the scene of the crime, but in my experience they have always tended to hare off in the opposite direction. Despite that, four plain-clothes gendarmes had kept the beach under constant surveillance since the day of the murder. They kept a low profile, noting each day the behaviour of people strolling past the crime scene. That day, their patience was rewarded.

  In the early afternoon, I received a call from the unit supervisor.

  ‘We’re intrigued by the behaviour of a man in his forties,’ he began. ‘He’s wearing a beige raincoat. He’s not very tall and has a limp in his left leg. He keeps walking up and down the beach, looking for marks on the rocks. He’s an odd customer. We’re tailing him.’

  I quickly joined the team. The suspect had just gone back to a van parked behind one of the apartment blocks overlooking the beach. I decided to bring him in. A few moments later, we began a search of his makeshift home. I could feel the team was on its toes. Perhaps he was our man …

  We rapidly searched the van, dismantled part of the bodywork and carefully examined all the knives found in the few bits of furniture it contained. Meanwhile, the man watched closely. His name was Gérard and he didn’t seem bothered at all. I even had the feeling that he was admiring our professionalism with the appreciation of a connoisseur. We took him into the local gendarmerie. The interview began.

  ‘Have you been living in that van long?’

  ‘Ever since my divorce. I started drinking. A friend gave me his van last November. I don’t do much with my time. I get up quite late, around noon. I cook – mainly canned food … In the afternoon, I hang around the van. I don’t see many people. From time to time, a neighbour, Martin, comes to see me and we have a glass of red. He’s the one who told me about the murder.’