Inside The Mind Of A Killer

by Jean-Francois Abgrall

  I went over two phrases I had read in the most recent psychologists’ reports.

  Francis Heaulme shows a strong tendency to act on impulse, then having shown that he has understood the instructions, he gradually forgets them and replaces them with his own rules. The only law he follows is the law of the jungle.

  He knew our rules, but preferred his world. Shouldn’t he be in a psychiatric hospital rather than in prison?

  On my return to the gendarmerie, I called Christophe in Rosny-sous-Bois.

  ‘Can you do a search on the discovery of a body, in 1989, about fifteen kilometres from the sea, somewhere in France, perhaps between Dunkerque and Cherbourg? Ask Éric to contact all the stations between those two points. He can go there.’

  Christophe was used to this kind of request. Especially since he had been present at an interview with Francis Heaulme. He had seen the suspect wear down the investigators and amuse himself describing his visions. He preferred to work at a distance, in the peace and quiet of his office.

  ‘I’ll call you as soon as I’ve got something. Oh, by the way, I’m sending you Heaulme’s itinerary straight away. We’ve done it, I think we’ve reached the end, you’ll see.’

  And indeed, the document I received seemed very thorough. We had now located Heaulme in 400 different places where he had stayed briefly – Emmaüs communities, psychiatric hospitals, cheap hotels, camp sites, and so on. On the other hand, the number of murders that he could possibly have committed had gone down to about fifty. The pieces of the jigsaw were beginning to fit together. One by one, each piece had to be checked before we could be certain of anything.

  For three years, Heaulme had been amusing himself by casually littering his interviews with the many details of his various murders. The challenge was to piece together these fragments of truth and find which murder each one related to. After months of effort, this was now done. We had an efficient tool for interpreting his words. A real key to his character. Francis Heaulme could transpose to his heart’s content, we had the means to put everything back in place. Now, it didn’t matter whether what he was saying was coherent or his stories plausible, the main thing was to preserve every detail of his accounts.

  Unsurprisingly, I was very much in demand. In Reims, interviews with Francis Heaulme followed one after the other, charges too. I pursued my mission from city to city, from police station to gendarmerie. By the end of 1993, the list of his victims was growing longer and longer.

  Lyonelle Gineste, Pont-à-Mousson, 1984

  This murder was a carbon copy of that of Laurence Guillaume, only it had taken place seven years earlier. The case went back to 1984. The naked body of Lyonelle, a young hitch-hiker of seventeen, was found in a wood at Montauville, near Pont-à-Mousson. The young woman had been strangled and stabbed. Her clothes had been scattered over an area of several kilometres by the attacker or attackers. Various clues found by the investigators suggested that there were two of them.

  Questioned by the investigators in charge of the case, Francis Heaulme described the events.

  ‘I met this fellow. He called me Francis and invited me for a drink at the Bel Air café next door. When he picked up the girl hitch-hiker by the phone booth outside the baker’s in Pont-à-Mousson, it annoyed me. I thought she looked like a whore. She was sexy in her black tights. She got into the back of the car, because I was next to the driver. I remember her bag, which was crescent-shaped. She shook my hand and I saw she had rings on all her fingers. I felt them too.’

  A little later in the interview, he added:

  ‘Actually, it’s true he asked me to pass him the knife. It wasn’t me who killed the kid. It’s the other nutter. I panicked, I threw him the knife. Actually, I put it in his hand. But it wasn’t me who killed her. Afterwards, it was me who got out and put the blue sweater by a tree in the forest near Atton. It’s the other fellow who thought of leaving her things somewhere else … but it was I who found the place because I knew the area from riding around on my bike.’

  Francis Heaulme would not give the name of his accomplice. It took the Nancy police two more months of painstaking effort to fit the pieces of the puzzle together, with my help. The ‘fellow’ in question was finally identified. He lived in the south of France, his name was Joseph and he was a baker. At the time of the murder, he was working with Heaulme at Lorraine TP, a civil engineering firm in Meurthe-et-Moselle. He had the same profile as young Laurence Guillaume’s cousin: a slightly lost young man who was readily influenced, easy to manipulate. He too was sucked into a situation, unaware of its full horror. His interview put a different slant on things.

  On 13 April 1994, Francis Heaulme and his accomplice were tried and convicted of murder.

  Ghislaine Ponsard and Georgette Manesse,

  Charleville-Mézières, 1988

  Eighty-six-year-old Ghislaine Ponsard was found stabbed to death in her kitchen. She was still wearing her raincoat. She had just come home from shopping at the market, a stone’s throw from where she lived. Her trolley was full of fruit and vegetables. A few feet away, in the hall, lay Georgette Manesse, her neighbour, who acted as home help when she felt like it. She too had been stabbed. The little house in a cul-de-sac off the beaten track had been hurriedly ransacked.

  Francis Heaulme was the number one suspect. A few years earlier, in Montluçon, he had been arrested after having assaulted an eighty-year-old woman who had just returned home from shopping. Fortunately, there is a gendarmes’ NCO training college in Montluçon and the streets are crawling with trainees. A group of them witnessed Francis Heaulme’s attack. Caught in the act, he was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. On that occasion, his victim escaped without coming to any further harm.

  After several interviews with my colleagues from Reims, Francis Heaulme was charged on 18 October 1993. The trial still hasn’t taken place. And so, at the time of writing, he is presumed innocent.

  Janciane Closet, Namur, January 1989

  Francis Heaulme’s killing spree took us to Namur, the capital of Wallonia, in Belgium, a quiet town in the Ardennes whose emblem is the snail, the symbol of tranquillity. The local police were investigating the kidnapping of a twelve-year-old girl. There was nothing to suggest that it had anything to do with Francis Heaulme, but during one interview, for no reason, he had given a very accurate description of the town. With this man, no lead could be discounted, as we had learned from past experience, especially as the Belgian inspector in charge of the kidnapping was working on another case. A murder, this time, which had shocked the people of Namur. That of a sixteen-year-old girl, who had been strangled and thrown into the river. Her body, naked to the waist, had been found on the banks of the river that flows through the region.

  A Belgian delegation was expected in Reims. The inspector from Namur only had an international letter rogatory. Consequently, the case of the murdered teenager could not be mentioned.

  The interview took place at the regional police criminal investigation headquarters. Accompanied by Ange-Marie, I introduced the Belgian investigators to Francis Heaulme. He liked their Belgian accent. He voluntarily replied to the customary questions, with almost too much alacrity. I had the sense that my presence encouraged him. He commented:

  ‘Why don’t you ask François what I’ve done, he knows everything. He says the name of the town, and then I remember.’

  ‘That’s true, Francis, you tend to remember things more easily when I’m there. I wonder why that is.’

  He knew exactly what I meant. My presence restricted his scope for manipulation. He could not change his mind about the cases I knew about. Very calmly, he continued his account. He described the city and confirmed that he had been there with a friend ‘who picked up a girl in a square’.

  The Belgian investigators did not have enough information to support or contradict his explanations, as Francis Heaulme had long since realised.

  They mentioned the district where the girl had vanished, but that did not interest h
im. The interview went on interminably and soon became bogged down. I tried to help the Belgian police officers. I asked Heaulme what had made him talk to us about Namur before, but to no avail. He was making fun of us. It was best to halt the interview.

  Suddenly, Francis Heaulme changed the subject. He started talking about one of his friends, called Raymond, to whom he had given his Opinel knife. The next day, he claimed, his friend used it to kill a girl in Blainville-sur-l’Eau. He had been arrested. Was this another coded message? Francis Heaulme was showing off. What was behind this provocation? He clearly had nothing to do with the kidnapping of the teenage girl. The Belgian inspectors decided to call it a day. Before leaving, they asked him one last thing.

  ‘We’re going to ask you a terrible question, which is: how would you kill a little girl?’

  Francis Heaulme turned to me in amusement. What’s so ‘terrible’ about that, he seemed to want to say. After a long silence, he announced:

  ‘In Namur? I would strangle her like a maniac, then I’d throw the body into the river.’

  Francis Heaulme’s answer left us stunned. He clearly wanted to talk about something else. We were convinced that he was referring to the case of the girl in the river. Without a letter rogatory, my colleagues had to stop there. They left, certain they knew the identity of the killer they were seeking, but absolutely unable to prove it. Heaulme would never refer to that affair again.

  Despite the suspicions hanging over him, he was never charged.

  After carrying out various checks, one detail continued to bother me, and still does today. This Raymond to whom Heaulme had given his knife does actually exist. He was even convicted in 1990 for the murder of a young girl, in Blainville-sur- l’Eau, as Francis had told us. Give or take a few details, the Moulin Blanc killer had been there, on the eve of the murder, his name in black and white in the register of the town’s Emmaüs community.

  Joris Viville, Port-Grimaud, April 1989

  The ‘young one’ left in the wild grass by Francis Heaulme was called Joris Viville. A nine-year-old boy of Flemish origin, kidnapped from a camp site at Port-Grimaud in April 1989. After Brest, this was the fourth charge for a murder committed between April and August 1989.

  Joris was kidnapped at around 5.30 p.m. on 5 April 1989. His clothes were soon discovered under a bridge on the road to Fréjus. His naked body was found seventeen days later. The child was lying on a bed of ferns, slightly set back from the road, behind a forest-fire-prevention water tank, well sheltered from view.

  He had not been killed on the spot, but just deposited there. It was an out-of-the-way place, even more remote than the sites of previous murders. He had been strangled, but his body had strange puncture marks that the autopsy was unable to identify.

  Apart from the mode of operation, the crime did not initially seem to bear Heaulme’s stamp. First of all, little Joris’s clothes found under the bridge could only have been thrown from a car. And secondly, on the day of the kidnapping, Heaulme had an alibi – he had been staying as an in-patient at the psychiatric hospital of La Fontonne, in Antibes, eighty kilometres away from the camp site. The only connection was that the hospital had booked some caravans there to give some of the patients a holiday.

  Furthermore, in the hospital records, a nurse had mentioned something of great interest, dated the day the boy vanished. The report concerns the arrival during the evening of Francis Heaulme. It reads: ‘Patient arrived alone, state of anxiety: “+ + +”. He refuses to go and watch TV and says he killed someone in Port-Antibes.’

  Unfortunately, the hospital staff did not attempt to probe further. The next day, everybody read the papers, but as nobody had been found dead in the port of Antibes, the business was forgotten. Worse, he was given a train ticket back to Metz.

  It is hard to understand why nobody from the hospital came forward when the boy’s body was found a couple of weeks later. Interviews were arranged, hospital personnel were questioned, but they all took shelter behind patient confidentiality. There was nothing the investigating magistrate in charge of the case could do.

  It seemed very likely that Heaulme had an accomplice.

  He gave the investigators from Aix-en-Provence his version of events.

  ‘I remember the tree went all limp. I strangled something that became someone, but I don’t remember where. I don’t remember. I only know that it was in 1989. I don’t remember, but let me explain. I had a fit, I hugged a tree, and I saw a shadow, somebody standing in front of me, I saw red, but I don’t know who I killed. The person was in front of me, I don’t know if it was a man or a woman, I know I could see the sea, there was a little road with trees, I don’t remember where it was … I was in the south, somewhere between Marseille and Nice … when I came to, I was squeezing a tree between my hands. I had a fit, it was silent and the tree fell. When the tree fell, it became a person. I didn’t touch it. I left.’

  Later during questioning, he explained, ‘I went off with another patient from the hospital. I know he had a goatee … We went to the shop to buy some beer … Then we went to drink it, further away. Someone was throwing stones at us. My companion went over to him and they got into a fight. I stepped in and squeezed his throat. He collapsed …’

  And then, after that:

  ‘Now I’m going to tell you the truth. I went out with a male nurse … We sat on the rocks. I drank a beer and we chatted. Suddenly, we saw a youth coming towards us. I don’t know where he appeared from, but he started throwing stones at us and shouting abuse. He had an accent. I couldn’t understand what he was saying.’

  The victim was a young Belgian who spoke only Flemish.

  ‘I know the other fellow hit the kid with something he was holding, he hit him all over, on the head and all over his body. I tried to step in, and that’s when I squeezed a tree … He undressed the kid … I said to him, “Don’t undress the kid, people will think it’s a rape.” I don’t touch kids. I don’t like homosexuals. I’m not interested in sex. The only thing that matters is work, besides, I’m impotent … Afterwards, he threw the kid’s clothes some ten metres from the car …’

  Legally, this statement contained no concrete proof. Francis Heaulme was now so accustomed to being questioned that he had become adept at interrogation techniques. He could see through the investigators’ questions like a hardened criminal. However, I advised my colleagues from Aix-en-Provence to continue. I believed they were close to success.

  Unfortunately, the subsequent interviews ended in confusion. Several times, Francis Heaulme gave the names of accomplices, which he hastily changed. The first concrete elements he supplied were three sketches. One pinpointed the camp site where the boy had been kidnapped, the others the scene of the crime and the place where the body had been found. Yet this was still insufficient. The names Heaulme gave confused the investigators more than anything else. My strategy of writing everything down had its limitations.

  Then another factor disrupted everything. The press publicised the suspicions surrounding Heaulme. In prison, he was often threatened. Child murderers are despised by the other prisoners. Very quickly he clammed up and refused to talk. His Parisian counsel, Maître Pierre Gonzalez de Gaspard, was now beginning to talk of unprecedented police intimidation. He believed that his client was ‘confessing because he was unable to withstand the pressure of detention’. Some of the cases, based on scant evidence, were lacking in detail, which did not help matters.

  From then on, Heaulme systematically retracted his statements. His counsel was in full agreement with him. When he killed alone, we soon drew a blank. The successive charges had only one effect: media exposure. Francis Heaulme enjoyed the status of serial offender. His avowed and putative crimes made him a media figure. More than ever, he was mocking us.

  The situation rapidly went downhill. In less than two weeks, the mood deteriorated. People began to doubt. Colonel F of the Rennes unit was replaced. His successor was by no means a stranger to me. He was the former commande
r of the Brest company, the man who, in 1989, had refused to believe that Francis Heaulme might be implicated in the Moulin Blanc murder … The minute his feet were under the desk, he formally summoned me to inform me that he would do everything in his power to have me removed from his department. He disliked the way I worked. A promising start …

  At the same time, in Paris, the officer who had set up the Heaulme unit was also replaced. In the face of mounting media pressure, his boss, a colonel, also summoned me. I presented myself at headquarters, accompanied by a colleague. We were shown up to the VIP floor. We walked along a spotless red carpet. I didn’t know what to think. The man who received us was the head of the gendarmerie’s criminal investigation bureau, he was an important figure. His greeting was artificially cordial.

  ‘Come in, do sit down. I’ve heard so much about you.’

  Not mentioning the purpose of the meeting was not necessarily a good sign. I sat down. The colonel went on, ‘Would you like a coffee?’

  Immediately, a captain appeared from nowhere with four cups of coffee. Amazing. What did he want?

  ‘I’d like you to know, Chief Abgrall, that all of us here are very satisfied with your work. Oh, yes, absolutely. However, we have to be clear about how far we can go. You’ve seen the press: Heaulme is retracting his statements. Is he really the author of these murders? What will happen when he appears in court? If he ends up being acquitted, it will make the gendarmerie look bad, do you see?’

  I replied:

  ‘There is absolutely no doubt about the Moulin Blanc case, there’s nothing to fear. Heaulme is well and truly implicated in the cases he’s been charged with, it’s up to the defence to prove the contrary.’