9781422284131

The Principal Charge Against Gilles “According to the lamentable outcries, tears and wailings, and denunciations coming from many people of both sexes, crying out and complaining of the loss and death of children, the aforesaid Gilles de Rais has taken innocent boys and girls, and inhumanely butchered, killed, dismembered, burned and otherwise tortured them . . . invoked and sacrificed to evil spirits, and has foully com- mitted the sin of sodomy with young boys and in other ways lusted against nature after young girls. . . .” After hearing the testimony of 110 witnesses, the court put Gilles and his servants to torture, and on October 21, he confessed everything. Two days later, he was strangled and his body thrown onto a bonfire. But whether he ever actually murdered the total of 500–800 children, of which he is accused, is open to speculation. A report on the morning after the first killing claimed, “No murder was ever more ferociously and more brutally done.” In this case, and another that followed within a week, the woman’s abdomen was ripped open. However, the slaughter was soon to become even more horrifying. Panic spread three weeks later, when the killer named himself as “Jack the Ripper” in a letter to the Central News Agency. On the last day of September, just two days after this letter was received, two more bodies were discovered. One was “that of a woman with a deep gash on the throat running almost from ear to ear,” but it was not muti- lated—probably because the killing had taken place in an open street. Given this more-exposed location, the killer wouldn’t have had time to mutilate the body without being discovered. In the case of the second body, “the face had been so slashed as to render it hard for the remains to be identified, and the abdomen had been ripped up, and a portion of the intestines had been dragged out and left lying about the neck.” In addition, portions of several organs, including the left kidney, had been gruesomely cut out and taken away. The next day, the Central News Agency received a postcard in the same handwriting as the letter and apparently bloodstained. It claimed: “Number one squealed a bit couldnt finish straight off had not time to get ears . . . .” Like the

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SERIAL MURDERS