 |
Francis Heaulme | |
|---|---|
| Born | Francis Heaulme 25 February 1959 |
| Other names | The Criminal Backpacker |
| Conviction(s) | Murder |
| Criminal penalty | Life Imprisonment |
| Details | |
| Victims | 9+ |
Francis Heaulme (born 25 February 1959 in Metz) is a French serial killer dubbed the "Criminal Backpacker" ("Routard du crime").
Heaulme's father brutalized him until the age of 17, leading him to become an alcoholic and attempting suicide. However, he had a good relationship with his younger sister and held a boundless adoration for his mother, who died of cancer when he was 23 years old.
At the age of 20, he suddenly picked up a passion for cycling. Eight years later, he left home to travel erratically around France on foot, by hitchhiking, cycling, and via train (often without a ticket), staying in Emmaüs shelters, psychiatric institutions, and detoxification centres. He occasionally found odd jobs as a mason or metal worker, and spent his meagre earnings on drinking, sometimes mixing alcohol and tranquilizers.
As someone with untreated Klinefelter's syndrome, Heaulme was at the time incapable of committing rape in the "standard" manner. [1] However, in at least two instances he was accompanied by other men (one a distant cousin), who violated the victims themselves while Heaulme killed them. He confessed the murders to medical personnel who did not reveal the information because of medical confidentiality. In many police stations, he did in fact recount false assaults.
He was arrested on 7 January 1992 at Bischwiller. The law enforcement agencies (police and gendarmerie) had great difficulty proving their cases because the acts were done without apparent reason or motive by a person who was highly mobile, and had alibis due to negligence. The shortcomings and poor coordination of the police organizations were also contributing factors.
Despite the lack of support from his superiors, gendarme Jean-François Abgrall quickly understood the basic rule about who he is responsible for tracking down: "It's when you ask him nothing that he says the most."
Francis Heaulme recounted murder scenes with incredible precision. For example, he showed officers how to kill a sentry by having a firm grip on the back of his head with one hand and stabbing him in the carotid artery with the other, drawing, and then retracting. According to Abgrall, "He doesn't lie. He never makes anything up. But he deliberately covers his tracks by mixing the crimes, dates and locations."
The cases in which he is suspected, accused or convicted are many. There are reportedly dozens in 87 departments in France. Among them:
Chief Warrant Officer Gendarmerie, Jean-François Abgrall, the Research Section of the gendarmerie in Rennes, is the specialist for cases in which Francis Heaulme was convicted, accused or suspected. He arrested Heaulme on 7 January 1992 at Bischwiller in Alsace.
Behind the face of a madman hides a manipulative and calculating mind. His morbid game consists of releasing bits of information to police to make it clear that he had "hit a snag" (French : pépin ), a term he uses to describe his murders. This occurred in each new case and is evident throughout the course of his dialogues.
According to one of his successive string of lawyers, Gonzalez de Pierre Gaspard, Heaulme is not to be confronted by an authority, whether a policeman, a police officer or a judge, because he feels like they can make him say whatever they want.
| This section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources .(December 2020) |
San Quentin Rehabilitation Center (SQ), formerly known as San Quentin State Prison, is a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation state prison for men, located north of San Francisco in the unincorporated place of San Quentin in Marin County.
A thrill killing is premeditated or random murder that is motivated by the sheer excitement of the act. While there have been attempts to categorize multiple murders, such as identifying "thrill killing" as a type of "hedonistic mass killing", actual details of events frequently overlap category definitions making attempts at such distinctions problematic.
Charles Sobhraj is a serial killer, fraudster, and thief who preyed on Western tourists travelling on the hippie trail of South Asia during the 1970s. He was known as the Bikini Killer because of the attire of several of his victims, as well as the Splitting Killer and the Serpent for "his snake-like ability to avoid detection by authorities".
Daniel Camargo Barbosa was a Colombian serial killer and rapist. He is one of the most prolific serial killers in history and is believed to have raped and murdered at least 72 young girls in Colombia and Ecuador during the 1970s and 1980s.
The backpacker murders were a spate of serial killings that took place in New South Wales, Australia, between 1989 and 1993, committed by Ivan Milat. The bodies of seven missing young people aged 19 to 22 were discovered partially buried in the Belanglo State Forest, 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) south-west of the New South Wales town of Berrima. Five of the victims were foreign backpackers and two were Australians from Melbourne. Milat was convicted of the murders on 27 July 1996 and was sentenced to seven consecutive life sentences, as well as 18 years without parole. He died in prison on 27 October 2019, having never confessed to the murders for which he was convicted.
Following the historic Lindbergh kidnapping, the United States Congress passed a federal kidnapping statute—known as the Federal Kidnapping Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1) —which was intended to let federal authorities step in and pursue kidnappers once they had crossed state lines with their victim. The act was first proposed in December 1931 by Missouri Senator Roscoe Conkling Patterson, who pointed to several recent kidnappings in the Missouri area in calling for a federal solution. Initial resistance to Patterson's proposal was based on concerns over funding and state's rights. Consideration of the law was revived following the kidnapping of Howard Woolverton in late January 1932. Woolverton's kidnapping featured prominently in several newspaper series researched and prepared in the weeks following his abduction, and were quite possibly inspired by it. Two such projects, by Bruce Catton of the Newspaper Enterprise Association and Fred Pasley of the Daily News of New York City, were ready for publication within a day or two of the Lindbergh kidnapping. Both series, which ran in papers across North America, described kidnapping as an existential threat to American life, a singular, growing crime wave in which no one was safe.
John Francis Duffy and David Mulcahy are two British serial rapists and serial killers who together attacked numerous women and children at railway stations in southern England during the 1980s.
Mark Goudeau is an American serial killer, kidnapper, thief and rapist. Goudeau terrorized victims in the Phoenix metro area between August 2005 and June 2006; coincidentally, Goudeau was active at the same time as two other Phoenix serial killers, jointly known as the "Serial Shooter.”
Leonard John Fraser, also known as The Rockhampton Rapist, was an Australian convicted serial killer.
Carlton Michael Gary was an American serial killer who murdered three elderly women in Columbus, Georgia, and one in Syracuse, New York, between 1975 and 1978, though he is suspected of at least four more killings. Gary was arrested in December 1978 for an armed robbery and sentenced to 21 years in prison. He escaped from custody in 1983 and was caught a year later. Evidence was found linking him to the earlier murders and he was convicted and sentenced to death in August 1986. He was executed by lethal injection on March 15, 2018.
The Ripper Crew or the Chicago Rippers was an organized crime group of serial killers, cannibals, rapists, and necrophiles. The group composed of Robin Gecht and three associates: Edward Spreitzer, and brothers Andrew and Thomas Kokoraleis. They were suspected in the murders of 17 women in Illinois in 1981 and 1982, as well as the unrelated fatal shooting of a man in a random drive-by shooting. According to one of the detectives who investigated the case, Gecht "made Manson look like a Boy Scout."
Robert Zarinsky was a convicted murderer and suspected serial killer from Linden, New Jersey.
Sibusiso Derrick Duma is a South African serial killer who was convicted of two murders in 2007 and five murders in 2009 and sentenced to 8 life sentences in prison. He was mostly active around the City of Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu Natal.
Ivan Robert Marko Milat, commonly referred to in media as the Backpacker Murderer, was an Australian serial killer who abducted, assaulted, robbed and murdered two men and five women in New South Wales between 1989 and 1992. His modus operandi was to approach backpackers along the Hume Highway under the guise of providing them transport to areas of southern New South Wales, then take his victims into the Belanglo State Forest where he would incapacitate and murder them. Milat is also suspected of having committed many other similar offences and murders around Australia.
Patrick Dils is a French victim of a miscarriage of justice. He was accused of the murder of two boys in Montigny-lès-Metz, in Moselle on 30 April 1987, at the age of 16. On 27 January 1989, the court sentenced him to life imprisonment for murder. On 24 April 2002 after spending 15 years in prison, he was exonerated. The French government gave him one million euros for judicial mistake. This is one of the most serious judicial mistakes recognised in France and it's the first one concerning a minor sentenced to life imprisonment for murder.
Alfredo Rolando Prieto was a Salvadoran-American serial killer. After being initially convicted for a single murder, he would later be connected to eight other murders committed in Virginia and California between May 1988 and September 1990 via DNA profiling. Sentenced to death in both states, Prieto was executed by lethal injection in Virginia in 2015.
Mark Errin Rust is a convicted Australian serial sex murderer and rapist: he was convicted of two murders committed in 1999 and 2001 respectively. Rust is currently on an indefinite detention order.
Larry Lee Ranes and Danny Arthur Ranes were American serial killer brothers who committed their crime sprees predominantly in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Larry, a suspect in the murders of five people in the 1960s, was sentenced to life imprisonment for one murder in 1964; Danny was convicted of four sexually-motivated murders between March and August 1972 with accomplice Brent Eugene Koster, for which both were sentenced to life imprisonment. Their case is notable for the fact that, unlike other siblings who engage in crime, they operated completely independently of one another.
