Eat Thy Neighbour (30 page)

In December 1993 Claux left St Vincent-de-Paul’s to take a similar job at St Joseph’s Hospital. In addition to working in the morgue, Claux was required to deliver blood from the hospital
blood bank to the operating theatres. Within a few weeks he was secretly removing any unused blood bags left over after the surgery, changing the labels to make it look as though the seal had been broken. Hiding them in his locker and taking them home with him, after re-cooling the blood in his refrigerator he would mix it with powdered protein or human ash and drink it in the best vampire fashion.

Still, it was the hospital morgue and working with the cadavers that were his real love. Later, in his confession, Claux stated: ‘Most of the autopsies were done by us, the morgue attendants. We would do the Y-shaped incision, cut the ribs at the joints and open the skull with an electric saw. The pathologist only dissected the organs . . . I would be left alone with the body after the autopsy to do the stitches, which were my speciality.’ During his tenure at St Joseph’s, Claux moved from simply helping prepare the deceased for their final rest to the realm of desecrating the bodies that had been entrusted to his care. In addition to insisting that he had sex with some of the corpses, he claims to have begun eating the bodies.

‘This is when I began eating strips of muscles from the bodies. I always checked their medical files first. I talked with a butcher once who told me that meat is better three or four days after death. This was something I had always dreamed of doing and this was the opportunity to do it on a regular basis. On some occasions, I would bring pieces of flesh back to my place where I would cook and eat those pieces as well . . . but my preference was to eat them raw. It tasted like steak tartare or carpaccio. Human meat tastes pretty good. It depends on what part you eat. The big muscles of the thighs and back were good, but there was no good meat in the breasts, only fats. People often ask me what went through my mind the first time I indulged my cannibalistic fantasy. Well, to be honest, I said to myself: “Wow! Now I’m a cannibal. Cool!”’ From his tone, it is hard to tell if Claux was confessing or simply bragging to the police.

When in a more introspective, reflective mood, Claux had another opinion on the more spiritual aspects of cannibalism. ‘It feels like touching the face of God. It makes you feel like you don’t belong to the human race any more.’ Most people would probably agree with at least the second part of that statement. But Claux tries hard not to become too reflective about his grotesque taste for human flesh, preferring to keep a light, chatty, yet informative flavour to his narrative. He has even written down his recommendations as to the best way to choose, and prepare, the human body for the dinner table. The following is taken from his on-line tome, ‘Cooking with Nico’.

I personally recommend taking meat from someone who died less than 48 hours ago. Rigor mortis disappears more or less five hours after death, so it would be better to cut the meat the day following the cattle’s demise.

I’m not the kind of guy who likes to eat disgusting stuff like offal, brains,
etc.
I only appreciate red meat. Therefore I recommend the following chunks of meat: Quadriceps – the two big muscles on the front of the legs. They provide big juicy steaks. [And the] calves, my favourite meat. Two muscles on each leg, easy to cut. [The] buttocks are the biggest muscles on the human body. But there’s a good amount of fat tissue in them (especially in women), and I only eat girl meat so it’s not my favourite meal. But when the girl is sporty, then it becomes my favourite meal. The other pieces of meat are too tiny (arms, neck) or covered with fat tissue (breasts) so I won’t mention them. Once you have cut all the food, you can store it up to 3 days in a fridge. But first remove the skin, the fat tissues and the nerves.

I know it is more hygienic to cook meat before eating it. But sometimes you don’t have the patience and you just bite into raw meat and feel the juicy proteins pouring down
your throat. Other cannibals worldwide have described how they like to cook human meat and season it with spices. I am not that sophisticated. I won’t tell you that beans are a good side dish, and that meat is best when flavoured with BBQ sauce. I personally think that any kind of spiced sauce will spoil the naturally sweet taste of human meat and blood. Human meat is a gift from the gods, and it is a shame to ruin its delightful taste. Bon Appétit – Nicolas Claux – Dec ’98

For ten months Claux satisfied himself with doing his grocery shopping among the helpless cadavers of the deceased but, as had happened so often in the past, with the need for taking his cravings to ever greater heights, or depths, the pleasures of the morgue soon became no more than routine. If the already dead were good, how much better it would be to make his own corpses. Even being in a sadomasochistic relationship with a young woman who enjoyed being beaten did nothing to assuage his taste for violence. Only an actual killing could do that.

On 4 October 1994, Nicolas Claux awoke with the realisation that this would be a good day to kill someone. He wandered around the streets of Paris all morning looking for a likely victim and although none of the available prey seemed to his liking, an idea did come to him. That summer and autumn there had been an ongoing string of murders of gay men that had left the police completely baffled. One more murder buried among so many others should go almost unnoticed. Claux was also aware that many in Paris’ homosexual community arranged their meetings on Minitel, an early version of the Internet. It would be a completely anonymous way to find and stalk his prey. So far as Claux could see, the plan had only one downside. ‘Queers were an easy prey . . . but the bad side was that I couldn’t mutilate them and eat some of their meat, because I don’t like to touch men, and they have diseases.’

Late that morning, Claux logged on to Minitel and made contact with Thierry Bissonnier, a 34-year-old restaurateur and part-time classical musician who was already involved in a steady relationship. Thierry, however, seemed to enjoy the occasional meeting with a stranger for a bout of anonymous sex, particularly if it involved bondage and sadomasochism. Only a few e-mails passed between them before Bissonnier foolishly gave Claux his home address. Claux’s own description of their meeting follows:

So I agreed to meet Thierry around noon. With me I carried a single shot 22-calibre handgun, which I hid under my jacket. When I arrived at his place, a one-room apartment under the roof of an old building, I knocked on the door and gave him the fake first name that I had given him on Minitel. He opened the door, I stepped inside, quickly turned around while he was closing the door and pulled out the gun.

I looked at his face just as he turned his head towards me and saw the gun pointed at his eye. After a few awkward moments passed, I pulled the trigger. He instantly fell face down without a word. It was really eerie. It all happened like in slow motion. Then I watched him bleed on the carpet. Soon I decided to see what the apartment was like and wandered around a bit.

When I returned to where he was lying I observed that he was still moving and making horrible breathing noises on the floor, like he was breathing through a straw. I reloaded the gun and shot again, this time striking him in the back of the head. I reloaded and fired a few more times, but he was still alive and making a noise. I was surprised that he was still holding on; I had expected the first shot to kill him.

After a few minutes, I went into his kitchen and found some cookies to eat and then sat in a corner of the room
and watched him as I ate. When I was finished, I decided to get out of there quickly, so I shot him one last time in the back. I also lifted a huge plant container and smashed it on his head, partly crushing it. I then wiped down my fingerprints; picked up his cheque-book; a credit card and a wallet (with ID papers); his driving licence; an alarm clock, and an answering machine, and finally left the scene.

If Claux’s description of the murder of Thierry Bissonnier sounds impossibly cold and detached, a statement he made in a later interview reveals much about his feelings towards his victim and, possibly, about his opinion of the human race in general. ‘I didn’t kill anybody. I just killed some insects. Not people. Insects.’ We have no explanation for Claux’s use of the plural in the above quote except that it raises the question of other killings with which Claux was never officially connected.

Bissonnier’s body was not discovered for three days. When he failed to return repeated telephone calls from his parents, they went to his apartment only to discover the grisly remains of Claux’s handiwork lying inside their son’s door. Immediately, they rang the police.

To Chief Inspector Gilbert Thiel, Bissonnier’s murder at first appeared to be just another addition to the growing list of gay men who had been brutally killed by a person, or persons, unknown. Homosexual hate-killings already accounted for one in three murders in Paris and the general assumption among the police and press was that a gang of neo-Nazis was taking its mindless revenge on a nearly invisible segment of the population. Obviously, this is exactly what Claux had hoped the official reaction would be to Thierry’s death. Despite the similarities with the other gay murders, Inspector Thiel quickly realised that there were subtle differences in the Bissonnier case. There was no sexual mutilation or violation of the body as there had been in
most of the other cases, and the items stolen from the apartment were certainly at the low end of a thief ’s wish list. It was almost as though robbery was not the motive at all. If it wasn’t a hate-crime and robbery was not the real motive, what was? Why had Thierry Bissonnier been murdered?

Nicolas Claux might actually have got away with the murder if he had not tried to forge one of Bissonnier’s cheques to buy a new VCR machine. As a form of identification, he gave the shop assistant Bissonnier’s driving licence on to which he had made a sloppy attempt to insert his own photograph. Suspicious of the licence and the none-too-subtle forgery of Bissonnier’s signature, the clerk rang the police. In panic, Claux fled the scene, leaving the forged driving licence – with his picture on it – behind. Inspector Thiel and the criminal squad now had a photograph linking a man with long, black hair and a small beard to the death of Thierry Bissonnier.

On 15 November 1994, six weeks after the killing, police had already obtained a search warrant for the home of the as yet unidentified man in the photo. The minute they found him they would be able to sort through his possessions so there would be no opportunity to destroy any evidence of the Bissonnier murder still remaining intact. When Claux got into a heated argument with a woman in front of the famous Moulin Rouge nightclub on the evening of the 15th, a passing policeman moved in to break up the fracas. Immediately, he recognised the face in the forged driving licence photo that had been circulated throughout the Paris Metropolitan Police and arrested him. Almost before Claux arrived at the police station a squad of detectives were ploughing through the morbid museum of human bones, teeth and violent videotapes that cluttered his apartment and life. One of the items they discovered was the .22 calibre pistol lying under his bed.

At first, Claux denied any knowledge of Bissonnier’s death, but when ballistic tests on the gun came back as a match with
the bullets found in Bissonnier’s head he confessed. Initially, Claux insisted it was a simple robbery that had gone horribly wrong, but he quickly revised his position in the belief that it could work to his benefit if he said it was an act of revenge taken out on a random homosexual in retaliation for an argument he had had with another gay man. It was Claux’s hope that by giving this cock and bull story he might get a lesser sentence on the grounds of diminished responsibility: what most people think of as temporary insanity. He also played on the bags of blood the detectives found in his refrigerator, insisting that he was a vampire. He went on to confess his predilection for grave mutilation and eating human flesh. If he hoped the police would think he was crazy, he was probably right, but faced with the mountain of evidence found in his apartment, they were equally convinced he was guilty.

If the wheels of justice grind slow, the French judiciary system seems to grind slower than most. For two years after his arrest Claux was remanded to the Fleury-Merogis jail where he underwent extensive psychological testing while the police were putting together an airtight case against him. The psychologists and psychiatrists who examined Claux came to the conclusion that he was psychotic with a penchant for necrophilia and sexual sadism. His response to Rorschach, or ‘ink blot’ tests, showed that he suffered from an ‘inner void’ which is accepted as a typical symptom of the schizophrenic personality. By December 1996 Inspector Thiel was content that he had sufficient evidence to press a solid case of premeditated murder against Claux and the case was handed over to the Office of Prosecution. Claux himself insists that he was also charged with desecration of graves and theft of blood from the hospital, but court records make no mention of any such charges.

The trial of Nicolas Claux opened on 9 May 1997. Presiding judge Waechter imposed a news blackout on the case, so many of the details of the proceedings are unavailable for review and
confirmation. What is known is that Claux’s defence counsel, Irène Terrel, entered a plea of ‘not guilty’ on Claux’s behalf. Fully aware of this move, the prosecution opened its case by displaying photos of the crime scene, Bissonnier’s body and shots of Claux’s macabre apartment. The prosecutor insisted that Claux’s style of living clearly showed his morbid and violent turn of mind and dubbed him a ‘death addict’ and a ‘real-life vampire’. It all seemed to be going just as the prosecution had planned until they tried to connect Claux with the many other unsolved homosexual murders that had taken place in Paris prior to his arrest. Under cross-examination, Inspector Carcin, one of the detectives assigned to the case, admitted that there was no physical evidence to connect Claux to any murder other than the one with which he had been formally charged. The only defence he could offer for his assumption was that Claux matched the profile of a serial killer and there were witnesses who believed they had seen Claux in gay bars that other murder victims were known to have frequented. Again, the accusations of grave robbing, necrophilia and blood theft were never made in connection with Claux; charges the prosecution would undoubtedly have made if there had been any evidence to support them. After three hours of deliberation the nine-member jury found Nicolas Claux guilty of premeditated murder, armed robbery, fraudulent use of a bank cheque, falsification of a driving licence and an attempt to defraud a retail merchant of a videotape machine. For all of these crimes he was sentenced to only 12 years in prison.