Inside The Mind Of A Killer Read online

  No use, he couldn’t hear me.

  ‘In 1990 I went to Spain, to the Emmaüs community in Pamplona. To Belgium too, to Namur. And to Germany, to Berlin. Will they be coming too?’ he asked without a trace of irony.

  ‘I don’t know yet. In any case, we’ll have plenty of time to talk about it all, Francis.’

  I tried once again to stop him.

  ‘Francis, I have to go, I’ve got an urgent meeting. Do you need anything?’ I asked, getting to my feet.

  ‘No, François, I’ve got a TV. Goodbye!’

  Behind this icy energy, I could sense he was both amused by this situation and rather glad to have talked. In the depths of his shining eyes, I even discerned a certain pride. He brusquely rose and went to the door. Next to the heavy blue door was an outsize window, a blend of architectural modernism and prison functionalism … I walked over to join him. Through the window I gave a little sign to the warder. He smiled and the door opened. Francis was accompanied back to his cell, without so much as a backward glance. It was 2.30 p.m. I had only been there an hour, but I felt as if I had run a marathon. I was dazed by what I had just heard.

  The minute I left the prison, I went straight to the Law Courts. The second floor was where the examining magistrates’ offices were. I raced up the stairs and soon found myself in the judge’s chambers. I met his clerk in the corridor, and she invited me in. Sitting at his desk, the judge waved at me.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr Abgrall. Come and sit down. Here, I’ve prepared your authorisation to contact other departments. If the investigators can’t come on these dates, don’t worry, I’ll change them without your having to make another appointment,’ he said, handing me the pink forms.

  ‘Thank you, Your Honour. But I need to talk to you. Do you have a moment?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘I’ve just come from the prison, where I met Francis Heaulme. On my previous visit, we talked about his itinerary and he mentioned his “cock-ups”. I thought he would carry on in this vein and that we would piece together his travels. Instead, he listed a series of incidents that he supposedly witnessed. I’m afraid these may be new murders. Now, the way he presented things, his behaviour … everything suggests that we may be dealing with somebody who is mentally ill. In any case, I find it hard to work him out. He’s disturbing.’

  ‘But what exactly did he tell you?’ asked the judge, intrigued.

  I went over my surreal conversation with Francis Heaulme point by point. It only took a few minutes to see the effect of his words. The magistrate thought for a moment. Eventually, he replied:

  ‘Listen, I think you should launch some fresh investigations. It is essential to find out whether these incidents took place. Personally, I’m not in charge of these cases and cannot do anything on my own initiative. I think it is too soon to infer anything, but if the facts confirm what he’s told you, talk to the public prosecutor. As to his insanity, I have just received the psychiatrists’ and psychologists’ reports. In all likelihood, Francis Heaulme will not be deemed “irresponsible”. He will be brought before the court in Quimper. Here, look!’ The magistrate showed me the two reports sitting on his desk. ‘You may read them, if you wish.’

  I nodded. He handed me the files.

  In criminal cases, the defendant undergoes two examinations. One, the psychiatric examination, is to determine whether the accused was insane at the time of the crime and whether he or she is suffering from mental illness. The other is a psychologist’s report to assess how dangerous the individual is. The experts have a number of elements to draw on, including police statements relevant to the case, hospital records, an interview with the defendant and psychological tests.

  The first report began with a letter from a psychiatrist who had treated Heaulme for several years.

  Mr Heaulme was an in-patient at Jury-lès-Metz psychiatric hospital on thirteen occasions from 1982. He has always presented a psychopathic tendency and finds it hard to cope with the constraints of institutional life. He frequently requests various forms of assistance, but has failed in everything he has undertaken as soon as it has been presented to him in the form of a contract.

  Already, all the ambiguities of Heaulme’s character were evident. What was he seeking in disclosing his problems but refusing help?

  He also seemed to react very strongly to frustration. He was violent with the other patients, but aware of this violence, which never seemed to the doctor to be of a ‘sexual nature’.

  That was Francis Heaulme, all right. And yet his tragic action on the beach must have opened up a new avenue of exploration for the psychiatrist.

  We examined Mr Francis Heaulme almost three years after the event. This is a very long gap, allowing every imaginable reconstruction in a subject who has been a frequent patient in psychiatric hospitals, which has made him conversant with psychiatric culture.

  Was this preamble the customary reservation or did it imply that Heaulme’s character was especially difficult to pin down? Did he make up answers? On the next page, Francis Heaulme presented himself succinctly to the expert. It was the same story as usual, except for one detail. He had taken on his father’s profession. He stated he was an industrial electrician.

  He is articulate when he wishes to be, his speech is a little stilted, he finds it hard to express what he wants to say, and he makes up for this by gesticulating when he talks. He easily gets bogged down in details.

  Were they really details?

  His language difficulties reveal his educational shortcomings. It should be added that as a child he spoke both patois and French. He presents as someone of average intelligence. From the start, he stressed the violence of his father, whom he has not seen for several years. For him, effectively, this is the explanation for ‘this whole business that he’s being blamed for’.

  Of average intelligence … It was certain that Heaulme was not the innocent he sometimes pretended to be. There was no doubt about it, he was definitely the killer. There had to be something that incited him to murder. The rest was a long biography during which Francis Heaulme retraced the milestones in his life. His violent father, the death of his mother, when his world fell apart, being on the road, alcohol … I knew it all by heart, more or less.

  In 1986, Mr Heaulme decided to leave. ‘1986, that’s when I …’, meaning that since then, he has led an itinerant existence, wandering from hostel to hostel, getting himself thrown out on a regular basis for alcohol abuse. He is unable to give precise details of his travels.

  Why in 1986?

  In Saint-Lô, he was arrested by the police. During questioning, he said ‘that he had been in the commandos, that he liked to kill and he added that he had not been detained.’ He left for Caen, then Metz and Blainville. There, having lost his ID documents, he went to the police station, where he knew he was wanted. ‘Wherever I go, there’s a murder. I was accused of a murder near Avignon.’ Once again, he added that he was allowed to go free.

  ‘Wherever I go, there’s a murder …’ What audacity! Had Francis duped the psychiatrist? Nothing seemed to bother him.

  An attentive subject, he seeks to explain himself and convince, telling us, by the way, that he was waiting to be able to talk to the experts to get them to understand what had happened to him … He is fully in command and at no point in the conversation did he show any emotion. There was no rise in his pulse rate or blood pressure by the end of the examination.

  Did he always manage to remain so cold? He really was imperturbable.

  The expert then focused on the cause of his many scars. He examined Francis Heaulme’s arms and torso, and noted:

  If he harmed himself sometimes, it was never during the real periods of depression, but much more during bouts of drunkenness causing psychomotor arousal. ‘That’s how I am, I explode,’ said Francis Heaulme.

  The following analysis explored the subject’s emotional side.

  He sometimes experienced a sense of unease, a feeling that he had not been u
nderstood, not been heard, that he had nobody to confide in, that he was seeking happiness without being able to define the object of his search. This reflects a certain dissatisfaction with his life, an unrequited emotional search much more than a depressive state or neurotic tendencies.

  Could that lead to murder?

  There is no indication of progressive or overt mental illness. Some police statements give the impression that Heaulme has a very clear recollection of what happened during the murders. The allegation of fantasies, dreams or fictitious scenarios that became reality but had nothing to do with him do not correspond to any psychological model for which there might be a scientific explanation.

  He was not mentally ill – I found that hard to believe. On the other hand, his fantasies always corresponded to an actual murder. The following analysis reinforced my own impressions.

  Heaulme cannot be considered as presenting a dangerous state in the psychiatric sense of the word. On the other hand, it seems to us that he presents a dangerous state in the criminological sense of the word. If he is the author of the crimes of which he is accused, we have not encountered any indications that permit us to state that, at the times of the crimes, he was in a deranged state as defined by Article 64 of the penal code.

  In other words, Heaulme was conscious of and responsible for his actions. In the everyday sense of the word, he was not ‘mad’. He would have to stand trial.

  Heaulme also took the Rorschach test. The object of this exercise is to reveal a person’s level of aggression. In these well-known tests where the subject is asked to interpret famous symmetrical inkblots, some people see butterflies, or flowers, depending on their personality.

  Francis Heaulme was unable to control his speech, and his interpretations of the blots were coloured by violence and morbidity. ‘Two people having an argument … No, who are fighting … There are red spots … It’s blood … There, I squeeze him with my hands, he howls like an animal, there’s blood everywhere … I squeeze, I can’t help it.’ Then, without any transition or particular affection, Mr Heaulme reverted to very standard interpretations, devoid of any emotion.

  I found these last lines perturbing. Despite this new insight into the murderer’s personality, a number of questions remained unanswered. His sexuality had barely been touched on, whereas I was still convinced that his crimes were of a sexual nature. Francis Heaulme continued to remain an enigma.

  Back at the unit, I had a meeting with Colonel F. He quickly grasped the situation, and reacted promptly. ‘Start a preliminary national computer search, try and identify anything that matches his statements. Meanwhile, I’ll contact the police crime division HQ. If you have any problems, my office is at your disposal.’

  Every indication of his unconditional support …

  The next morning, I invaded the unit secretary’s office. To her great despair, I had brought all the files with me. This was where our computers were. Sitting at the terminal, I did a search using keywords that would enable me to identify the cases that interested us. The locations, modus operandi, the years and the names given by Francis Heaulme – all these details were transmitted to the central computer.

  After nearly an hour’s wait, the results came through; they were indisputable. No case was a direct parallel with the declarations made by the Moulin Blanc murderer. I was surprised. There must have been problems with cross-referencing the files. I input the data again, adding a few variants. The results were identical. Neither murders nor assaults. It was unbelievable. When I told Colonel F, he decided to call Rosny-sous-Bois – the nerve centre of the entire gendarme force – in person. I waited in my office.

  A quarter of an hour later, the telephone rang. It was my superior. In a voice that brooked no interruption, he asked me to come to his office. As I neared the door, I reckoned that this time, it was over. I was going to be told to stop investigating Heaulme and to go back to my other cases … and for the time being, I was at a loss for anything to say.

  8

  A trail of blood

  Against my expectations, the Colonel had called me in to assure me of his support. He was well aware that our database had surprising limitations. On this occasion, we realised that cases dealt with by the police department were not necessarily logged on the computers of the gendarmerie, especially in the case of old crimes. It was a sizeable loss of information. Furthermore, without an exact date, a computer search often proved fruitless. So I fell back on traditional methods, the telex and the telephone. One by one, I called my colleagues in Marseille, Strasbourg, Bordeaux, Paris and elsewhere, on the trail of Heaulme’s ‘cock-ups’.

  Thus I collected a set of data that more or less corresponded to the incidents described by Francis Heaulme, like the following episode in Auch, for example. The local police recalled clearly that there had been a knife fight between two vagrants behind the church one Christmas night, but there were no records of the proceedings. In any case, on 23 and 28 December 1990, Francis Heaulme had been treated at the city’s hospital for an injury to his forehead. Was it a simple spat between drifters?

  And that attempted theft near a fountain in Marseille which he claimed to have been a victim of … The local gendarmerie confirmed that Francis Heaulme had indeed been admitted to the Becker hospital following an assault. Now, that same day, 6 August 1989, a foreign hitch-hiker had been admitted to casualty at the same hospital. ‘Stomach injury inflicted by a bladed weapon’, read the report by the fire officers who had brought him in. Registered under a false name, this man had vanished as soon as he was able to get out of bed. A mere coincidence? An argument that got out of hand again? Or that simmering violence of Francis Heaulme’s that could boil over at the slightest provocation?

  And what to make of the assault, Route de Vallières in Metz in 1990, which Heaulme claimed to have witnessed? The gypsy he claimed to have seen killed in a fight with a North African really had died. Except that, on the day of the crime, Francis Heaulme was in Quimperlé, 850 kilometres away … Not to mention the fact that this crime had not taken place on Route de Vallières as he had stated. What did it mean, what message had he been trying to convey?

  In Bayonne, during the summer of 1990, the body of a girl had indeed been found at the foot of a cliff. The initial investigation had concluded it was a suicide. At the time, Francis Heaulme had been staying in the local Emmaüs community. Even more surprising, on 8 August 1990 the Biarritz-Plage fire brigade was called out to assist a man who claimed to have fallen from a cliff. This was a Charles Francis, one of Francis Heaulme’s aliases. These facts were sufficiently worrying for the investigation to be reopened.

  And then there were the children found dead beside a railway line. There was no record of them in any file. Try as I might to fathom the man, this time I had no key to understanding him. These cases remained elusive, but I did not discount my hunch that Heaulme could have been behind them all. He made nothing up. The psychologist’s report emphasised his involvement in the scenarios he described, but to what extent it was impossible to tell.

  On reflection, I could only see one explanation, and that was that each scenario Heaulme described was made up of several true-life incidents. But he mixed up the dates, places and people so that it was impossible to link them with any actual cases. If that were true, he had us well duped. I had to probe further.

  It was no accident that he had managed to slip through the net for so long, nor was it luck. He had a system in place, but how did it work? I didn’t know yet, but the answer was perhaps in the places where he had said he’d had a ‘cock-up’. They probably had some significance for him, but what was it? It was a pity I couldn’t go and visit these places, I was convinced that seeing these different sites would provide new clues.

  As for his aliases, research into these yielded astonishing results. The names he chose were not random. There was a logic to everything. This much was now clear. He used the name of a neighbour from Metz, his grandmother’s maiden name, that of a vagrant he h
ad stayed with in Cherbourg. Only the name Herman did not seem to have any connections … Unless it was that ‘other’ who spoke German and whom Francis Heaulme had seen ‘grab a woman in a field and punch and kick her’.

  Again, the Reims investigators had alerted me to this attack. Heaulme’s account was very similar to one of their cases. They were coming to Brest that week and wanted to meet me.

  Late morning on 23 September 1992, the commander of the Reims unit arrived, accompanied by a major. When they got out of their unmarked car, I was surprised to see that they were in uniform. They were impeccably turned out and their military air gave no hint that they had just driven more than 700 kilometres. The look they gave the barracks spoke volumes. It was true that the old, grey building near a major road intersection was rather unprepossessing, even when the sun was shining. It was even more depressing than the Law Courts. The introductions were brief and courteous.

  ‘Will you be available for the duration of our stay?’ inquired the officer.

  ‘Absolutely. I’m at your service.’

  My reply brought a smile to his lips. We were both keen to get down to work. I suggested going straight to the Petty Officers’ Club where rooms had been booked for them. This military hotel in the city centre is very useful for visiting officers. Furthermore, it was a pleasant place.

  The dazzling white seven-storey building housed several treasures. It also had a stunning view. From their windows, the commander and the major could contemplate the whole of Brest harbour. They were delighted, and this made contact between us all the easier. They settled in, and at lunchtime we met in the large restaurant. Our table was slightly apart from the others.

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ began the officer, ‘I’ll tell you about our investigation over lunch, and, of course, why we are interested in Francis Heaulme.’

  So, without asking any questions, he gave a detailed account of the investigation into the death of a thirty-year-old woman who had been found naked in a field one morning in July 1989. I listened attentively. At times the major broke in and added certain details. They knew the case inside out. I could see that this new lead had raised their hopes, but their speech remained cautious. They were both experienced investigators, and they knew only too well how a new avenue can very quickly turn out to be a dead end. The way they let me in on their investigations, including their failures, showed the trust they placed in me. We were aware of the special bond that exists between investigators who handle these difficult cases. They had been working on this one for more than three years. I knew what an investment that represented. Our food had been served and was already cold. The commander apologised.