Life and styleThe making of a serial killer
Guy Georges was a popular figure in the Paris squatting scene. No one suspected him of leading a double life. But since his arrest in 1998, he has confessed to murdering seven women. Paul Webster unravels the grim story of a man abandoned in childhood and robbed of his identity'Subject is 1 metre 73. Age 38. Afro-European. Well-built and physically vigorous. Practises a number of sports. Tidy and clean. Shy. IQ 101. Verbal skills above average.' - extract from official descriptions of Guy Georges.
A report by four psychiatrists on Guy Georges, self-confessed murderer of seven lively, intelligent young women, all stabbed to death with butchers' knives, evokes a far more vivid and blood-curdling image than the precise but matter-of-fact language of the verbal identikit. The doctors portray a lone psychopathic killer, prowling through the Paris night, planning the destruction of victims chosen out of the crowd for their evident confidence, energy. He needed, say the analysts led by Dr Henri Grynzspan, to "feed on the energy and vital force of those who submitted to his power. What was unbearable for him was the other person's successful life, which reflected his own feelings of frustration and failure."
The psychiatrists, carried away by a fascination for a man who hid his real nature even from his numerous girlfriends, concluded that the killings amounted to "a ritual of vampirisation" - a sensationally macabre image that will feed popular hatred and fear when Georges appears at the Paris assizes in the New Year. The details of Georges's crimes, including a dozen other rapes and knifings, suggest he is France's most dangerous and methodical murderer since Dr Marcel Petiot attracted fleeing Jews to his Paris surgery during the war to rob them and burn their bodies in his apartment stove. In France, although criminal cases are heard before juries, the juries include three judges as well as civilians, and the publication of detailed evidence and even presumptions of guilt - which would be considered grossly prejudicial in the British judicial system - are legally permitted.
"Georges's victims did not exist as people, only as objects to support his perverse attempts to appropriate their inner qualities," the psychiatrists decided. In their report they explore at length the details of the way he used his knife "in a surgical sense of the term to cut away clothes and underclothes", before rape and throat-slitting.
Because there seemed no light of salvation among Georges's alleged crimes, I began to look closer at the case to find flaws in a simplistic summary - on one side a sadistic assassin and on the other a group of young women thrust into the public eye through their brutal death. Among the darkness, there was a glimmer of sympathetic insight into Georges's motivation: Georges was abandoned by his mother when he was six, and the identity of his father was concealed from him by a legal manoeuvre described by psychiatrists as "genealogical death", which they consider central to his later development. There was also a recognition of the innumerable shockwaves following in the wake of multiple crimes: unreported traumas that have so deeply marked families, police and lawyers that their inner lives, humanity and self-confidence have been shaken forever.
I reported for the Guardian on the panic and terror caused by Georges's multiple killings before he was identified, but it was not until police rugby-tackled him outside the Blanche metro station, Paris, in March 1998 as the chief suspect that I was made aware of a family link. My daughter, Claire, knew him well, liked him and recognised him as the amiable "peacemaker" in a number of squats. He was a lukewarm hanger-on in her section of the Confédération Nationale du Travail (CNT), an anarcho-syndicalist movement, and benefited from its amateur social work for those living on the margins.
With another 50 or so drifters, Georges was first sighted at a militant squat in the residential rue Didot on the left bank in 1995, and he used the Saint Vincent de Paul welfare centre as his address. Later, after claiming to have been recently released for armed robbery, he took a vague interest in the leftwing demonstrations of a loosely affiliated collectif of protest groups while joining in all-night raves in the vast cellars at the rue Didot, where drink, drugs and sex were easily available.
As far as women were concerned, he was charming and protective, Claire said, particularly if they were mentally distressed. And he had lots of girlfriends (one of whom, Sandrine, recalled that he made love to her on average eight times a day and constantly talked about starting a family). Squats, where everyone had a social problem or a secret, were not so much Georges's refuge as his natural environment. No one had to prove their credentials, justify their past lives or explain their absences, which, for Georges, included living rough in Amsterdam and London.
"Joe", as he called himself in homage to the malevolent Injun in Tom Sawyer, followed this mixed bunch of restless activists, junkies and misfits from temporary refuge to temporary refuge for more than two years, carrying his drumsticks in a back pocket, boasting of fabricated criminal exploits and expressing hatred of homosexuals and skinheads.
Philippe Dusanter, a CNT militant and hospital psychiatrist who corresponds with Joe in La Santé prison, was completely taken in by Georges's "Belmondo-style attitude - the real cool small-time crook who said he had just been released from 13 years for a bank hold-up". "He was helpful, coherent, polite and easy-going, ready to arbitrate in disputes, particularly when our political activity was transferred to a block in the rue Saint Sauveur, a filthy squat near Les Halles," says Dusanter. "He didn't identify himself with average squatters - he saw them as human wrecks. No one suspected him of sexual crimes. But, on looking back, we remembered that he had wept on three occasions that coincided with murders. He told a friend that relatives had died." These incidents recall Georges's own remark to police that, "if a man killed a woman, he would probably weep".
If no one asked "Joe" where he came from or where he disappeared to, they also ignored an unsuspected clue to his origins when he spoke admiringly of his father, supposedly a Nato general and war hero. The references were put down to fantasies over his "illegitimate" birth. Even after his arrest, the press referred to his origins as French West Indian and his father's real identity was not revealed until two years of interrogation ended - a disclosure that had a profound effect on Georges's personality and self-confidence.
Much of my background on Georges's early life and criminal career comes from confidential records made during the mise en examen - the two-year inquiry led by a juge d'instruction , or examining magistrate, at the Palais de Justice - which form the basis of the charges. Of the 30 volumes of documents sent to the public prosecutor, the essence is summed up in a key procès-verbal d'interrogatoire - report on a verbal interrogation- by Judge Gilbert Thiel on May 28, 1998, lasting from 10.10am until 5.55pm, during which Georges confessed to all the killings. The unemotional style of questioning and the detailed recapitulation of previous statements, police evidence, post- mortem and clinical examinations, make the most apparently authentic fictional account of judicial activity in literature and TV seem hollow, invented and strained.
Thiel's method comes through as coldly bureaucratic - earlier statements are repeated verbatim over and over again - and the postmortem detail is clinically precise. The last few hours of the murdered women before returning to their studio flats are routinely ordinary - an outing with friends, a drink in a bar, a telephone chat about wedding arrangements or shopping for brand-name clothes. By contrast, the narration of the crimes themselves is visceral and horrifying. Then Thiel patiently digs out the hidden clues to the making of a murderer, a child bureaucratically assassinated and subsequently resurrected under another identity.
No public reference has yet been made to the fact that Guy Georges was first registered as Guy Rampillon after his birth to a single mother at Vitry le François, eastern France, on October 10, 1962. His birth certificate as recorded in all pre-trial documents shows, instead, that he was born in the central city of Angers on October 15 of the same year. His father is described as inconnu - unknown - although it is now established that he lived with Guy's mother for some time.
The explanation for the little boy's lost identity is both simple and cruel. His mother, Hélène, abandoned him to state custody at the age of six because she wanted to marry a US serviceman and emigrate to California, where she lives today. She took with her another son, Stéphane, three years older than his brother and conceived with another American. The difference between the two boys is significant - Stéphane is white and Guy is black, the son of a US air force cook called George Cartwright serving at a French Nato base, who has long since returned to the US.
Hélène's own military family - her father was a retired NCO - fostered Stéphane until their daughter emigrated, but refused Guy. It was enough that their estranged daughter had produced one child out of wedlock during a wayward fascination for Americans in uniform, but in her stuffy provincial home town of Angers there was intolerable social stigma attached to a mixed-race birth. After six years' delay, in which Guy was bounced between foster homes and his mother, his status as a ward of the state was finally settled when in the care of a temporary family. The condition of abandonment was the issue of a new birth certificate with false details to prevent him from discovering his origins - a procedure used in similar cases for decades until it was banned in 1996 as a deprivation of basic rights.
I have a picture of Guy Georges at six, standing among the many members of his foster family outside a church. His curly hair is abundant and his mouth is set in a sulk. By then he may already have known that he had been chosen by Jeanne Morin, his surrogate mother, because she had previously looked after another black boy whose removal by the authorities made her weep. Guy was a substitute for a lost child.
Georges told Thiel that he loved his authoritarian Catholic foster mother, who was decorated for bringing up 12 children in addition to seven of her own. But in pre-adolescence he began to steal from the family food store and, more significantly, acquired a knife to hunt and kill animals in the countryside behind his village home near Angers. By 16, he had attacked two of his foster sisters - neither for sexual reasons - and was packed off to a state orphanage for adolescents. At 17, he was jailed for stealing a woman's handbag after ripping her face open with a knife. Of the next 18 years, before his arrest for serial killing, he spent more than half in jail; every period of release saw a new flurry of sexual attacks. Psychiatrists made no secret about the underlying cause - disaffiliation.
"It is among these subjects of a genealogical death that we most often meet children who transgress laws in a violent and aggressive fashion," Grynzspan's team reported, adding that, in Georges's case, "the real pleasure came from the hunt, the excitement, the wait of a man on his guard".
Among many letters written to a girlfriend after his arrest, Guy Georges refers to his admiration for the tiger. His tidy writing, resembling small, faint print, underlines his fascination for an "intelligent, powerful, resistant animal, careful and adaptable"; he claims that he climbed into a tiger's cage as a boy and caressed a tigress "because it showed no hostility to me". The psychiatrists were particularly struck by this incident, pointing out that "hunting in the wild and matters of animal behaviour were constantly present in his conversation, and showed an atavistic identification with domination and predation".
Knowledge of Georges's appalling childhood and the psychiatrists' references to an "uncontrollable Jekyll and Hyde personality" that flowed from it might point to extenuating circumstances; however, both medical and psychiatric analysis suggest that he was fully responsible for his self-confessed acts.
Within 48 hours of his arrest in 1998, Georges had offered to "relieve his conscience" by giving police details of his first murder in 1991. Over the following months, he gave graphic details of the killings of five women in their Paris apartments - four of them around midnight - and of two other women who had been found raped with their throats cut in underground car parks.
In describing the first murder - of Pascale Escarfail, a 19-year-old student who had dressed particularly carefully on her last day of life because she had an interview for part-time work in an ice-cream parlour - Georges said that he had been attracted to the young woman with long, blonde hair as she walked past the cafe where he was sitting. He followed her home, forced his way into her apartment at knifepoint, and then bound her hands with sticky tape. "I must say it was not really a sexual impulse that made me act like that," he said. "I had been with prostitutes just before, and I cannot say what force guided me."
After raping Escarfail, he looted the flat; he was angered when she gave him a kick, and he then stabbed and suffocated her. The attack took place in 1991 while Georges was on parole for a 10-year sentence for a previous rape at knifepoint. His calm recollections of similar hunts, threats and savage endings are even more terrifying.
In October 1999, Thiel, a lawyer of monk-like perseverance and courtesy, summoned all the families of Georges's victims to a courtroom in the Palais de Justice just after he recommended prosecution. Under French criminal law, survivors and relatives claim the status of partie civile, or plaintiff, which allows them access to files and opens the way to compensation. Parties civiles are usually seen as an irritant by examining magistrates, the overall strategists in criminal inquiries, so Thiel's initiative in informing the victims' families of his findings was a rare gesture.
The gathering at the Palais de Justice provided one of the most striking instances of the subsidiary ravages of Guy Georges' serial killings. Elisabeth Ortega, a hospital nurse, greeted each arrival with a hug, consoling them as Judge Thiel read from the years of gathered evidence. Ortega had been threatened by Guy Georges carrying "the sort of knife you use to debone a leg of lamb", but she had escaped from the ground-floor window of her flat after a lengthy conversation before he could assault her. Unfortunately, her eye-witness description of the incident was so misleading that he remained free long enough to kill three more women. Ortega told police that her attacker was "of North African type, about 25 years old, athletic build, black shaved hair, about 1m 70, darkish skin, oval face, fine features..." In fact, Georges's appearance suggests African-European descent.
Ortega spent weeks helping the police, but it was hardly surprising that she could find no one among thousands of criminal portraits to resemble Georges. A computer photofit picture using software developed by Scotland Yard confused the search even further by throwing up an image resembling an Asian. As the months dragged on, the North African trail grew stronger after the discovery of a bloodstained footprint that supposedly gave racial clues.
Misleading evidence added to sloppy police work, in which rival Police Judiciaire (CID) squads - one trying to solve the murders in the flats and the other working on those in the underground car parks - failed to spot the link between the two series of killings, despite several striking similarities. When the killer was finally identified during a belated hunt through DNA records, neither families nor detectives had the heart to blame Ortega. At the meeting arranged by Judge Thiel, she was in a wheelchair, paralysed from the waist down. I thought this was a sequel to Georges's attack, until she recalled that she had gone on holiday in Greece to forget the ordeal and had broken her back when diving from a rock.
Her story is only one account of what military men would call "collateral damage". Magali Sirroti's mother, Chantal, for instance, cannot sleep at night. The last recorded message she left on her daughter's telephone on September 23, 1997, the day she died, turns over and over in her head: "Bonjour, c'est maman. There's no need to call me back, there is nothing important. Gros bisous." The telephone had rung unanswered beside the bed where Magali had already bled to death a few minutes earlier. Since then, Chantal Sirotti has read Georges's own description of the killing.
Magali Sirotti was killed in the late afternoon on her return from work to the flat where she lived with a garage mechanic. They were planning to get married in the spring, and her wedding dress was in the wardrobe. Magali's parents were a retired working-class couple in the Paris suburbs. Her father, Aldo, spends his days cleaning his daughter's grave or sitting in an armchair absently looking into nowhere. He developed something of a persecution complex, believing that his local town council was trying to drive him mad. After several rows, he found just cause: the theatre near his house had billed a concert. The main work was Schubert's Death And The Maiden. Furious, Aldo Sirotti confronted the mayor and forced him to cover up the posters.
Another father slowly drowned himself in drink and died in a suspect car crash. Another refused to console his wife and walked away with all his daughter's personal possessions. Others planned a vigilante group to kill Guy Georges, buying guns and interrupting Thiel's meeting with shouts of "A mort, à mort."
Anne Gautier, 60, a retired schoolmistress and divorced mother of Hélène Frinking, is the most outspoken critic of police failures in the Guy Georges affair. "It was not until I alerted the press on coincidences between the murders that there was an outcry," she said. "Journalists invented the description 'The Bastille killer', because two cases were located near the monument and the authorities were forced to accept that a serial killer was loose. Police had told me earlier that tueurs ensérie [serial killers] were an Anglo-Saxon thing. I think their stubbornness cost at least two lives.
"I found that the Police Judiciaire didn't even question Hélène's neighbours until 23 months after she was killed," continued Gautier. "The Elisabeth Ortega identity portrait was drawn up 28 months after she was attacked, but accurate descriptions from other survivors and witnesses [in at least four other cases] were ignored. I was treated patronisingly, like a 'poor little woman', and was told that the links in the Guy Georges's case were missed because police were overworked. They were distracted by the 1995 terrorist bombings, and gave far more importance to the 1997 investigation into Princess Diana's death, when the entire force was mobilised to satisfy public opinion.
"If you challenge the French police," she added, "they are arrogant and claim to be the best in the world, but they had Georges under arrest at least three times for related offences without linking him to the murders, even though he left several clues."
Other parents have shunned Gautier's attempt to set up a lobby to expose police and administrative failures, which include at least 70 unsolved murders of young women in recent years, accusing her of profiting from her suffering to become a media star. But her lawyers told me that Gautier's apparent toughness was superficial, that she was the most resolute of the mothers in hiding her pain, and that she broke down and wept for days when Georges was finally arrested.
Few people concerned by the murders seem to have escaped unscathed. A sense of shame hangs around the Police Judiciaire on the Quai des Orfèvres. The senior woman superintendent in overall charge of the police inquiry has been transferred to administrative work, and the interior ministry now blocks all requests to speak to her. The two detectives who led the field inquiry admit privately to an unbearable weight of guilt for their failures: one, with a daughter in her 20s, is so depressed that his colleagues believe that the setback will break his career; the other, who worked as a rival rather than a colleague, demanded a transfer to an obscure post in the provinces.
Judge Thiel has joined the self-flagellation, although the case would never have been solved if he had not cut through regulations and ordered a search for DNA held in private clinics that finally linked Georges to sexual crimes more than 10 years before. He condemns police bungling in his final report, but finishes by officially blaming himself, as investigator-in-chief, "for lack of vigilance".
The office of François Honnorat, Georges's first defence counsel, is typical of the profession, a huge, expensively-furnished bureau in a residential quarter remote from the ugliness of violent crime. He spoke in a curiously monotonous, haunted voice, like someone coming to terms with a bewildering experience. A family man in his mid-30s, Honnorat had been chosen by the Paris Bar from 12 stand-by counsels to defend Georges while still representing another multiple killer.
"My first client was terrifying - at one moment calm and attentive, and the next moment extremely violent," Honnorat said. "But Georges is so reasonable and doesn't show any sign of aggression. Talking to him is like chatting to someone in the local cafe. He is extremely well-informed and talks about everything - sport, social questions, politics - in a calm and intelligent way.
"He has been placed in a cell block with big-time criminals, and this has helped him push his own acts out of his mind and inflated his self-esteem. He is at home in prison. He has his television, reads the newspapers and receives visits from his friends in the squats, who give him pocket money. Even the warders like him."
Georges told psychiatrists that it was "better I am in prison: outside, I am dangerous"; he has been diagnosed as "hyper-adaptable", colouring himself to his environment in the same way as he adapted his personality to night-prowling, arbitrating in squats, living rough and seducing any number of women. Honnorat found his behaviour so disconcerting that he was glad when he received a short, well-written letter from Guy Georges dismissing him as a lawyer.
The decision is linked to the fact that Georges's cell neighbour is Carlos "The Jackal", the international terrorist whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez. Carlos, a Venezuelan, became notorious in the 70s for actions on behalf of the Palestinians, notably the kidnap of the Opec oil ministers in Vienna in 1975. He was arrested in 1994 and is currently serving a life sentence for the murders of two French policemen. His family is campaigning to have him released on the grounds that his imprisonment in France is illegal, and Carlos himself went on a hunger strike in 1998 in protest at ill-treatment by prison guards. Since then, in La Santé, Carlos has continued his incessant attack on the corruption of western society, and has persuaded Georges to take a more aggressive stance against the French state, as a personal revenge for all wrongs done to him. To this end, Georges has taken on another barrister with a reputation for turning hearings into show trials.
"I don't see why I should be the only one to pay for this," Georges told Honnorat in his last letter, referring to appalling laxity in the French prison system that diagnosed him as "extremely dangerous" nearly 20 years ago and yet released him on to the streets without treatment, money or meaningful care. At the basis of this feeling of persecution lies Georges's resentment for a birthright that was stolen by officialdom, which obstructed all his attempts to find his father at times of great stress.
"When he was finally told his father's name, it was as if he had been reborn," Honnorat said. "He leaped with joy. He had retrieved the identity that he had been running after all his life. Being American raised his self-importance and self-confidence. Before he heard the news, he was ready to admit his crimes at the assizes to save the families further anguish. Now, he wants to take on the whole system."
Since meeting Carlos, Georges has invented a bizarre defence, claiming that he was framed by the French secret service because he supposedly stole an official limousine carrying confidential documents. Recent letters to his friends say that he will plead not guilty in what may be an attempt to impress his long-lost father.
"Unfortunately, this will only antagonise the jury," Honnorat said. "He has no hope of escaping a lifetime in prison after confessing his crimes repeatedly to police and Judge Thiel in the presence of his own defence counsel." But the lawyer was clearly torn in his own judgment on the appropriate punishment for the criminal journey of a lost child whom society had treated as trash. "I asked the psychiatrists if they could find a solution to save him from perpetual confinement," Honnorat said. "Their answer was clear: Georges was not mad and was fully responsible for his acts. They said that there were two roads for a man of his type. He was pre-destined to become a murderer or a war hero."
In a flash of black humour, the psychiatrists added: "And we have no intention of starting a world war to save Guy Georges."
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