Pierrot the Madman

In the spring of 2004, France was shaken by a gruesome series of murders involving three women who had been abducted, raped, and mutilated. Near Strasbourg, the bodies of a woman and two girls were found in different streams, their genitals cut out. The trail quickly led to 56-year-old Pierre Bodein, who had been released from prison just four months earlier and had spent 36 years of his life in prisons and closed psychiatric institutions. To this day, he denies murdering 38-year-old Hedwige Vallée, 10-year-old Jeanne-Marie Kegelin, and 14-year-old Julie Scharsch. However, genetic analysis and numerous other pieces of incriminating evidence left no doubt that Pierre Bodein had murdered the women in the most brutal manner. According to the medical examiner, all three victims were first raped. Then their genitals were cut out while they were still alive, and afterwards they were drowned in streams not far from Strasbourg. But who was the man capable of such cruelty? Pierre Bodein was born on December 30, 1947, the eleventh of 16 children in Obernai in northeastern France. He went astray at an early age, which led to his first prison sentence in 1969. After that, prison and psychiatric wards became his permanent residence. In 1976, he was classified as “unfit for imprisonment” due to his state of health and was released in 1980. Once free again, he committed numerous robberies, for which he ended up back behind bars in 1989. According to psychiatric reports, Pierre Bodein was considered insane, swallowing his own excrement and getting around in a wheelchair. He managed to escape in December 1992 through an open skylight in the Erstein mental hospital. His escape lasted three days, during which he abducted two women, one of whom he raped. He then committed a bank robbery and stole from an armory. He subsequently went on a rampage against police stations and two police officers, which earned him the nickname “Pierrot the Madman” in the media. For this, Pierre Bodein was sentenced to 30 years in prison. In the appeal proceedings in February 1996, the sentence was reduced to 28 years and finally to 20 years. Bodein, who had become a model prisoner, was released from prison on March 14, 2004, due to good behavior, years of pretrial detention, automatic sentencing, and remission of punishment. Since then, he has been living with his brother, a scrap dealer in Burgheim, in his caravan. On June 21, 2004, just four months after Pierre Bodein’s release from prison, the gruesome series of murders began with the murder of 38-year-old Hedwige Vallée, followed by the discovery of the body of 10-year-old Jeanne-Marie Kegelin on June 29 and the body of 14-year-old Julie Scharsch on July 3. Pierre Bodein was arrested on June 26, but released shortly afterwards due to lack of evidence. On June 30, he was re-arrested and charged with triple murder. The three-month trial against Bodein began on April 11, 2007, before the Cour d’Assise in Strasbourg. On July 4, a French court handed down the first ever life sentence. The jury accepted the prosecutor’s decision a week later. Pierre Bodein, who did not admit to any of the murders, saw himself as the victim of a conspiracy. This harshest sentence ever imposed in France on a particularly brutal criminal was upheld as lawful by the European Court of Human Rights on November 13, 2014.