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. 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. 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.īecause 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. "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 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. 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. 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.
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