“No habit is more easily acquired than mard-savoring; eat one, delicious, eat another, no two taste alike, but all are subtle and the effect is somewhat that of an olive. ”
—Donatien Alphonse Francois, describing the joys of, quite literally, eating shit
Long before Marc Dutroux, there was Donatien Alphonse Francois.
Francois was born into an atmosphere of power and privilege; his mother was a relative of the ruling administration and his father served as an ambassador. When Donatien was just two years old, he was sent to live with his paternal grandmother and her five daughters in what has been described as a sexually promiscuous atmosphere. The women reportedly lavished attention on the boy, though it is debatable just what sort of attention it was.
After two years there, Donatien was sent to live with his fathers brother, who was ostensibly a man of the cloth. Francois’ uncle was rather notorious for frequently engaging in decadent sex, with numerous male and female partners. He also had a considerable collection of pornographic literature. The young boy spent a considerable amount of time reading through his uncles collection. After six years there, he was uprooted once again and sent to live at a religious prep school. At the school, he was subjected to harsh and frequent punishment from his caretakers, including being frequently sodomized. The young man was also taught the importance of confessing his sins as the means to identify and eliminate personal weaknesses.
Following his years at the prep school, Donatien was enrolled in a military academy, after which he entered into military service. Due to his family connections, he entered as a lieutenant and was soon placed in an elite, Special Forces unit. He left the military after eight years holding the rank of captain, and at that time married a woman from a socially prominent family. She would serve as his accomplice in many of his subsequent crimes, and his new mother-in-law would actively work to free him from various legal entanglements.
His first arrest came some ten days after a violent sexual assault on a woman. He is said to have raped her with a religious icon, and likely to have whipped her as well. For this, he served less than three weeks in jail. Shortly thereafter, he went to live in a secluded, fortified family estate that had at one time served as a jail. Within a year or two of his arrival, he had built a secret room. He also hosted frequent parties that were notable for featuring what were euphemistically dubbed ‘orgies.’ These parties were attended by various members of the ruling elite and the clergy, including Donatien’s aforementioned uncle.
Within a few years of taking up residence in the estate, Francois was once again arrested. Once again he had violently assaulted a young woman, on Easter Sunday, forcing her to strip and then binding her, sexually assaulting her and whipping her with a cat-o-nine-tails. He then left her locked up, but she was able to escape out a window. She was found running from the estate half-naked and covered in her own blood. For that assault, Francois served just four months before being once again released.
Shortly thereafter, Donatien rejoined the military, elevated to the rank of colonel despite his criminal past. It was not long before he once again ran afoul of the law. Francois and a male accomplice reportedly engaged the services of four prostitutes, as well as the services of each other. There was, of course, the requisite whipping involved. Following the encounter, the women became violently ill and grew convinced that they had been poisoned. When police went to arrest Donatien and his accomplice, they found that someone had tipped them off to the impending arrest and the men had fled. By the end of the year, however, Donatien was in custody, and he once again served prison time.
He ‘escaped,’ however, after less than five months, curiously leaving behind a note claiming full credit for engineering the escape and explicitly clearing his cap-tors of any culpability. Strangely enough, the escape occurred on, of all days, April 30: Walpurgisnacht.
In short order, Francois was back at the family estate, with authorities making occasional raids on the compound in an alleged attempt to arrest the escaped convict. His activities, meanwhile, grew increasingly disturbing. Shortly after his return, he began staging what some accounts refer to euphemistically as extended ‘orgies.’ That hardly seems a fair description of what occurred, however, since some of the ‘participants’ were young boys and girls being held at the estate, many of whom had been abducted. The victims were abused continuously for several weeks. Assisted by his wife and at least three other adults, Francois inflicted all manner of torture and sexual abuse on the victims. Whipping was a preferred means of torture, along with burning with heated implements. Donatien also had a fondness for sodomizing his victims, and for forcing them to eat excrement, which he himself indulged in as well.
Despite the gravity of his crimes, legal action was not immediately taken. It was several months before police finally raided the estate, in search of the escaped convict, kidnapper, torturer, rapist, and pedophile. Though the suspect was reportedly hiding in the estate, his pursuers failed to locate him. A little more than a year later, he was still free and was back at the property, accompanied by a number of young women and girls procured for him by a member of the clergy. A few months later, he was finally arrested and imprisoned, but he quickly escaped once again, only to be recaptured a month later. Following his recapture, he remained in prison for thirteen years, during which time he wrote prolifically of his fascination with torture, copraphilia, pedophilia, and various other depravities.
Amazingly enough, just two years after his release he held political office. A decade later, he was confined to a mental institution, where he spent the last twelve years of his life once again writing of rape, torture and murder. After his death at the age of seventy-four, his oldest son burned most of his writings, though some survived.
Donatien’s full regal title was Donatien Alphonse Francois, Comte de Sade, but he is better known as the Marquis de Sade. His crimes were committed over two hundred years ago, around the time that America was declaring its independence. Yet even as these words are being written, he is being revived and rehabilitated on Americas movie screens. The Encyclopaedia Britannica provides the following assessment of the Marquis: “de Sade is to some an incarnation of absolute evil who advocates the unleashing of instincts even to the point of crime. Others have looked upon him as a champion of total liberation through the satisfaction of his desires in all forms.”
Virtually those same words have been used to eulogize such other notorious figures as Aleister Crowley and Anton LaVey, both of whose later musings echoed the writings of the Marquis.
Perhaps the most cogent analysis of those writings was provided by Alex Steiner, a contributor to the World Socialist Web Site. Steiner noted that the “clearest formulation of de Sades philosophy appears in his Philosophy in the Bedroom [which] features a philosophical interlude.” Within that interlude lies a “philosophical defense, argued in the language of the Enlightenment, but not of course, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, that presents a justification for incest, rape, murder and cruelty.” That interlude is said to have been published separately in 1848, under the title “Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans.” It was intended for distribution as a political manifesto. Among other things, the tract contained a “defense of murder as a legitimate civil activity used to weed out the weaker members of society.” Steiner also noted that writer and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini^ saw “in de Sade the antecedents of fascism.” One of the defining characteristics of de Sade’s philosophy was his “view of society as composed of atomistic individuals potentially engaged in a war of all against all,” which is, of course, precisely the direction in which Western society is being driven.
Perhaps the most revealing passage in Steiner’s piece reads as follows: “De Sade’s state of nature is a veritable hell on earth. Perhaps de Sade’s alleged Satanism is an appropriate metaphor of his philosophy.” It could be reasonably argued that Satanism was more than just a metaphor of de Sade’s philosophy; it was his philosophy. As Steiner notes, “De Sade is unwilling to allow any restraints on his ability to exploit, mistreat and even destroy other human beings in the pursuit of pleasure.” That same notion is now the mantra of modern Satanists, expressed by Crowley and others as: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”
“Sade...only had one occupation in his long life which really absorbed him—that of enumerating to the point of exhaustion the possibilities of destroying human life; of destroying them and of enjoying the thought of their death and suffering. ”
—French writer Georges Bataille
More than three centuries before the birth of de Sade, another Frenchman was providing a blueprint for the Marquis to later follow. Born in 1406 in the ‘Black Tower’ of his family’s castle at Champtoce, Gilles de Rais was the eldest son of one of the wealthiest men in all of France, Guy de Rais. Gilles’ mother was Marie d’Craon, the daughter of Jean d’Craon, who was also one of the wealthiest and most politically powerful men in the country.
In 1415, Guy de Rais was reportedly gored to death by a boar while hunting. That same year, Gilles mother died as well, as did her brother, Amaury d’Craon,
49 Strangely enough, Pasolini was killed in an apparent ritual murder in 1975. The slain leftist was discovered just two days after Halloween with his head bludgeoned beyond recognition. UK author Janet Street-Porter noted that “only a few weeks before his death he had written a series of newspaper articles attacking his compatriots, saying they had become obsessed with crime and had abandoned genuine values for those of the bourgeois consumer society.”
who was slain in the legendary battle at Agincourt. As Amaury had been Jean d’Craon’s only son, the rapid succession of deaths left young Gilles de Rais as the sole heir to both the de Rais and the d’Craon family fortunes. In 1420, Gilles kidnapped and then married his cousin, Catherine de Thouars, whose family had vast land holdings adjacent to the properties owned by the de Rais and d’Craon families. At just sixteen years of age, Gilles de Rais stood poised to become the wealthiest man in France—by some accounts, possibly the richest man in all of Europe.
Following the death of his parents, Gilles was raised by his grandfather, Jean d’Craon, and was trained as a knight and a soldier. By 1429, he had been named the Marshal of France, making him the highest-ranking military figure in the country—roughly equivalent to the post today of Secretary of Defense. Serving alongside of him was someone who is now regarded as the patron saint of France: Joan of Arc. Joan was said to hear voices in her head, not unlike numerous others whose stories have filled the pages of this book. She also reportedly had Visions,’ which she apparently attributed to divine guidance.
Traveling with a 10,000-man army and accompanied by her general and adviser, Gilles de Rais, Joan was credited with saving France by lifting the siege of Orleans, a crucial battle in the Hundred Years War between France and England. Shortly after that, Gilles was given the honor of personally crowning France’s new king, Charles VII. Joan of Arc sat at the new king’s side during the coronation. Joan’s fortunes turned quickly, however; she was captured by the Duke of Burgundy the next year and accused by the Brits of heresy and sorcery. She was burned at the stake on May 30, 1431 The next year, de Rais ended his public career and retired, along with his entourage, to a family castle at Machecoul, which was just one of five lavish country estates that Gilles then owned.
The arrival of Machecoul’s new residents was accompanied almost immediately by the disappearances of local children. The first child was abducted in 1432 by Gilles de Sille, a cousin of Gilles de Rais. The kidnappings continued, uninterrupted, for nearly a decade. The victims were taken to the de Rais castle where
50 According to a report in Pravda, Ukrainian anthropologist Sergey Gorbenko determined that it was some other woman, with her face cloaked, who burned at the stake that day. Joan of Arc—also known as Margarita d’Champdiver, the daughter of King Karl VI and his mistress, Odetta d’Champdiver—lived to the age of 57. Gorbenko based his findings on an examination of a collection of skulls of the French royal family housed at the Notre Dame Cathedral, and on correspondence among royal family members and other historical artifacts. (“Joan of Arc Was Not Executed. She Died at 57,” Pravda, January 17, 2004)
they were brutally and ritualistically slaughtered by Gilles and his accomplices. As the years went by, the list of those accomplices grew, numbering both men and women. Among his more notorious accomplices were Roger de Briqueville, another cousin, and a woman named Perrine Martin, who was also known as “La Meffraye,” or “The Terror.” Another known accomplice was a man named Etienne Corrillaut, who was also known as Poitou. He was, apparently, initially brought to the castle as a victim, but he was spared for unknown reasons.
The rest of the abductees were not so lucky. At the hands of de Rais and his numerous accomplices, they were subjected to torture, rape and sadistic mutilation. Gilles took great pleasure in watching his victims die, frequently raping them or masturbating on them as they were in their death throes. Gilles was also deeply involved in occultism, necromancy and alchemy. Many of the child victims’ dismembered and disemboweled body parts were reportedly used in rituals that were aimed at “summoning demons.” Some reports hold that the blood of some of the victims was used to write a book of spells and incantations.
De Rais’ fatal mistake was apparently the kidnapping of a priest. The church had been aware for years of the recurrent hushed reports of abducted children, but had chosen to ignore them. It was common knowledge among the townspeople that the missing children had been tortured and killed, but they were powerless to voice their accusations against the unfathomably wealthy and powerful Gilles de Rais. In 1440, the accusations were finally made public by the church. Gilles de Sille and Roger de Briqueville promptly disappeared into one of history’s black holes. On September 14, arrest warrants were issued for de Rais and several of his remaining cohorts.
On October 13, 1440, de Rais was indicted on thirty-four counts of murder, sodomy and heresy. The indictment held that 140 children had been abducted over the course of fourteen years. Many historians have denied that the killings began that early, primarily because acknowledging that to be the case would necessitate a reevaluation of the revered Joan of Arc. There is considerable debate about the number of victims as well. Some accounts claim that the figure of 140 is grossly inflated. Others, however, contend that the actual victim count was somewhere between 200 and 800. The true number is, most likely, forever lost to history. According to one account, the dismembered remains of fifty children were found in the tower at the Machecoul castle, and a similar number were discovered at another of the de Rais estates. An untold number of other victims had apparently been cremated.
De Rais confessed to many of his crimes, but he steadfastly refused to admit to the charge of heresy. Both he and the church apparently felt that heresy was a more serious offense than sadistically murdering scores of what were, after all, ‘peasant’ children. Gilles ultimately did confess to all of his crimes, either due to the threat of, or the actual application of, torture, depending on which account one chooses to believe. On October 26, he was sent to the gallows and executed.
Gilles de Rais reportedly claimed that he had patterned his life after Caligula, the notoriously depraved Roman emperor. He is said by some to have provided the inspiration for the mythical Bluebeard. He also, needless to say, provided the inspiration for countless others who have followed in his footsteps.
“I’m no psycho. I have a good mind.”
—Howard Unruh, responding to a query from an arresting officer
Long before ‘spree’ killers became a fixture of American society, terrorizing the nation’s schools and workplaces, there was Howard Unruh. Howard was, like the other young men of his generation, drafted by the United States Army and sent off to war. He was trained to kill, and he apparently performed that task quite well as a machine-gunner. It was later discovered that he had kept a diary of his war experiences. All of his kills were carefully recorded, complete with the date, time and place of each killing. Most importantly, Howard included a detailed description of how each of his victims looked in death. He received a number of commendations for his exemplary service.
After returning from the war, he grew increasingly estranged from his parents, with whom he was living. He eventually became something of a recluse, spending much of his time indulging in a hobby he had acquired in the army: collecting, admiring and practicing with various lethal weapons.
Then one day, Howard Unruh just sort of went off.
Armed with a 9mm handgun and a back-up weapon, he took a brisk stroll through downtown Camden, New Jersey, along the way shooting sixteen people, thirteen of whom died instantly. He proved to be a remarkably efficient assassin, robotically shooting most of his victims twice—once in the head and once in the torso. He walked door to door, from a cobbler shop to a barbershop, then to a pharmacy and finally to a tailor. He killed almost everyone he encountered and reportedly remained expressionless throughout the rampage. His youngest victim was just three years old.
Running low on ammunition, Unruh soon retreated to his house. His entire killing spree had lasted just twelve minutes. No sooner was he back home than a local reporter phoned the house. What followed was what Jay Robert Nash described as “one of the strangest phone conversations in the annals of crime”:
Unruh: Hello.
Phillip Buxton: Is this Howard?
Unruh: Yes, this is Howard. What is the last name of the party you want?
Buxton: Unruh.
Unruh: Who are you and what do you want?
Buxton: Pm a friend, and I want to know what they’re doing to you.
Unruh: Well, they haven’t done anything to me yet, but I’m doing plenty to them.
Buxton: How many have you killed?
Unruh: I don’t know yet—I haven’t counted ’em, but it looks like a pretty good score.
Buxton: Why are you killing people, Howard?
Unruh: [pause] I don’t know. I can’t answer that yet—I am too busy. I’ll have to talk to you later.
With his house surrounded by dozens of armed officers, Howard Unruh walked out and calmly gave himself up. He never faced trial for the killings. Instead, he was declared incurably insane and committed to the New Jersey State Mental Hospital for a life term. According to recent reports, he is still there, more than half a century later.
“For the highest spiritual working one must accordingly choose that victim which contains the greatest and purest force. A male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence is the most satisfactory and suitable victim.”
—Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice
Programmed to Kill The Politics of Serial Murder
David McGowan
