Men Of Flesh And Blood (3 page)

"This is the time when I
also developed a fascination for death and the occult. I would
spend hours reading books on vampires and werewolves. A photo of
the statue of the Sumerian demon Pazuzu especially fascinated me. I
found it in a book my parents had bought in England. For me, it
symbolized something extremely ancient and powerful -- something
that I respected. A few years later, I saw the same statue used in
the movie Exorcist, and my interest in the occult grew
stronger."

When Nico was 10, his
grandfather died because of a cerebral embolism. The two had been
arguing at the time and Nico always felt that his family blamed him
for the premature death. This was a very critical moment in his
life, one that he claims made him become literally obsessed with
physical death. From then on, he says that he was fascinated with
burial rites, wakes, and the atmosphere of morgues.

Claux: "When I was 16, we
moved back to Paris, where I lived alone with my father. As far
back as I can remember I have been obsessed by graveyards. Before
long, I knew every single cemetery in Paris like the back of my
hand. Between 1990 and 1993, I spent the majority of my free time
in graveyards. As a botanist studies plants and flowers, I would
examine rusty locks and evaluate the weight of cement lids. My
favorite things were mausoleums. The most impressive ones can be
found at Pere-Lachaise, Montmartre, or Passy cemeteries. I would
peek through their windows to see the inside. Some were decorated
with furniture, paintings, or statues. It was not long before I
began working on a plan to get a much closer view."

Eventually Nico designed
his own lock-picking tools, his favorite being an L-shaped key. If
a lock on one of the mausoleums were too rusty to pick, he would
use a crowbar, or enter through a window. Once inside, he says he
"felt like an emperor reigning in Hell." The place would become his
kingdom. Often times he said he would enter a mausoleum during the
day, only to resurface at night, when the gates were closed, and he
could continue his activities without fear of being
discovered.

Nico Claux said that over
time, simply lurking in graveyards and breaking into mausoleums was
not enough to satisfy his desires. His fantasies became sadistic
blueprints, tools for fulfilling his new cravings. Whether this
change began at this point or years earlier is a matter of
speculation, but it is clear that he believed that he had stepped
up to an entirely new level.

"I woke up one day feeling
this sinister urge to dig up a corpse and mutilate it. I gathered a
small crowbar, a pair of pliers, a screwdriver, black candles and a
pair of surgical gloves in a backpack. Then I took the subway until
the Trocadero station. It was nearly noon. The gates of the Passy
Cemetery were wide open, but nobody was inside. The undertakers
were out for lunch.

"Passy is a small Gothic
graveyard with plenty of huge mausoleums, which were built during
the 19th century. It is located right between two large avenues, so
it is impossible to climb inside at night. Anyway, nobody could
ever imagine that there was someone robbing graves at noon. I had
this special grave in mind. It was a small mausoleum, the burial
site of a family of Russian immigrants from the 1917 revolution. I
had already pried open the iron door a few days before, and I had
closed it afterwards so it would seem that nobody had ever touched
it. All I had to do was kick it open ... At this point, my mind was
in total chaos. I had flashes of death in my head. I took a deep
breath, and I climbed down the steps leading to the
crypt.”

"It was a rather small
one, with damp walls, buried deep inside the cemetery ground. There
was no other source of light than the candles I had brought. To
begin, for more than an hour, I removed one of the heavy coffins
from its stone casing. It was especially hard not to let the coffin
fall all of sudden to the ground, but somehow I managed to slowly
lay it down without making too much noise. However, one edge of the
coffin scratched my lower leg when it touched the ground. But that
didn't stop me at all.”

"I examined the casket for
a while. It was solid oak and sealed with big screws. It looked
like brand new, so I expected to find a recently deceased corpse.
First, I unscrewed the coffin, which took me less than 10 minutes.
Then I pried it open with the crowbar. Once opened, a horrible
stench of putrefaction came out of the box. It smelled like
Thanatyl, the product embalmers use on a corpse in order to delay
the process of decay. Then I saw the body inside. It was a
half-rotten old woman, shrouded in a white sheet, covered with
brown stains. Her face seemed to be smeared with oil, but it was
simply the death fluids oozing from her skin. The stench was so
intense that I nearly fainted. I tried to lift one side of the
sheet, but it was glued to her petrified skin. The teeth were
protruding from the mouth, but her eyes were gone. I stared into
the empty eye sockets, and all of a sudden, something broke into my
mind. I felt like I was falling into a whirlwind.

"That's when I picked up a
screwdriver. The corpse inside the coffin started to move slightly,
like if it had guessed what would happen next. Therefore, I began
to stab the belly, the rib area, and the shoulders. I stabbed her
at least 50 times. I really cannot remember. All I can remember is
that when I woke up my forearms were covered with corpse
slime."

After violating his first
grave, Nico said that he spent much of his free time searching the
cemetery for new graves to desecrate. This is a pattern he said
would continue up until the time of his arrest. At 20, Nico joined
the military, where he was trained as a gunsmith, cleaning and
repaired weapons. However, he soon found this lifestyle boring. His
only satisfaction came from fantasizing about murder. After serving
just a year, Nico moved on and said that he began to consider a
career as a mortician.

Claux: "In 1993, the one
and only local school for embalming declined my application, so I
began working at Saint Vincent-de-Paul Hospital in Paris, a
hospital for children. This was the only way I could really do what
I wanted for a living and I found out that it was the best way to
be in contact with corpses. I was given the job of a morgue
attendant and my first contact with a corpse there was when I
assisted the autopsy of a 10-year-old girl. The other attendant
showed me how to stitch up her belly, and that was the first time I
ever got to touch a fresh corpse. I was amazed by how red and clean
her organs were."

Nico did not stay at Saint
Vincent-de-Paul for long, and in December 1993, he took a position
as a morgue attendant and stretcher-bearer at Saint Joseph
Hospital, which is also in Paris. His duties involved helping with
autopsies, cleaning up the morgue slabs, and prepping the bodies
for wakes. A small chapel was located up the stairs where bereaved
relatives could later view the bodies of their loved
ones.

Claux: "Most of the
autopsies were done by us, the morgue attendants. We would do the
Y-shaped incision, cut the ribs at the joints, and open the skull
with an electric saw. The pathologist only dissected the organs and
put them in a box. I would be left alone with the body after the
autopsy to do the stitches, which were my specialty. This is when
I
began
eating
strips of muscles from the bodies. I always checked out their
medical files first. I talked with a butcher once who told me that
meat is better three or four days after death. This was something I
had always dreamed of doing, and it was the opportunity to do it on
a regular basis. Sometimes I brought select meats home with me to
be cooked, but my preference was to eat them raw. It tasted like
tartar steak, or Carpaccio. The big muscles of the thighs and back
were good, but there was no good meat in the breasts, only fats.
People often ask me what went through my mind the first time I
indulged my cannibalistic fantasy. Well, to be honest, I said to
myself, 'Wow! Now I'm a cannibal. Cool!'"

Nico's other job at Saint
Joseph Hospital involved working in the digestive surgery unit. One
of his duties involved delivering the blood bags from the
hospital's blood bank to the surgery room. He claimed that it did
not take long for him to notice that it was not unusual for bags to
be left over and eventually he devised a scheme in which he would
rip the sticker off of the unused bag, making it appear to have
been opened, and then hide it in his locker.

At the end of his shift,
he said that he would transfer the bag to his backpack, take it
home, and begin cooling it in his fridge. Once the desired
temperature was reached, he would mix the blood with powder
proteins, or human ashes, and then drink it. Since there was no
plasma within the bags, the blood was extremely thin, which was why
he chose to thicken it up.

On the morning of Oct. 4,
1994, Nicolas Claux said that he decided it was time to turn
another one of his fantasies into reality. This fantasy was a
special one to Nico, one that would, in his mind, put him on a far
greater level than petty grave robbing and corpse mutilations. He
had been waiting for just the right time, and he was finally ready
to cross the line, an irreversible step that can change a man
forever.

Nico spent his morning
searching for a victim, any victim, nothing mattered, not age,
race, or sex, he said. He was looking for death, nothing more, and
nothing less. By the early afternoon, Nico decided to try his luck
on Minitel, an early version of the Internet and soon began
chatting with a man named Thierry about bondage and S&M. After
a while, the two decided to get together and the man gave Nico the
address to his home. Little did Thierry know sex was the last thing
on Nico Claux's mind.

Claux: "Back then it was a
common practice in the gay community to meet on Minitel. They would
establish contact through this means since it was quick and easy
for them. I found out that it was an easy way for me to kill them
without any witnesses, plus I had the guarantee of remaining
anonymous, since there was no possibility of tracing back the
discussions on Minitel. So I agreed on meeting Thierry around noon.
With me, I carried a single shot 22-caliber handgun, which I hid
under my jacket. When I arrived at his place, a one-room apartment
under the roof of an old building, I knocked on the door and gave
him the fake first name that I had given him on Minitel. He opened
the door, I stepped inside, quickly turned around while he was
closing the door, and pulled out the gun.

"I looked at his face just
as he turned his head towards me and saw the gun pointed at his
eye. After a few awkward moments passed, I pulled the trigger. He
instantly fell face down without a word. It was really eerie. It
all happened like in slow motion. Then I watched him bleed on the
carpet. Soon I decided to see what the apartment was like and
wandered around a bit.”

"When I returned to where
he was lying I observed that he was still moving and making
horrible breathing noises on the floor, like if he was breathing
through a straw. I reloaded the gun and shot again, this time
striking him in the back of the head. I reloaded and fired a few
more times, but he was still alive and making noise. I was
surprised that he was still holding on, I had expected the first
shot to kill him. After a few minutes, I went into his kitchen and
found some cookies to eat and then sat in a corner of the room and
watched him as I ate. When I was finished, I decided to get out of
there quickly, so I shot him one last time in the back. I also
lifted a huge plant container and smashed it on his head, crushing
it some. I then wiped down my fingerprints, picked up his
checkbook, a credit card and a wallet (with ID papers), his driving
license, an alarm clock, and an answering machine, and finally left
the scene."

Thierry Bissonnier's body
remained on the floor of his apartment for three days, until his
parents, distraught at not being able to get in touch with him,
went to his apartment and discovered the grisly scene. Reports on
the life Thierry led are rather sketchy. Claux claims that little
was said in the press following the discovery of Bissonnier’s body,
and during Claux's subsequent trial a "black out" was placed on the
press, meaning that no members of the media or public were allowed
inside the courtroom.

Claux believes that the
family of the victim did not want the life of their relative to be
exposed in public, and that there was elements in that case that
were too "sensitive" for the public. Regardless, it is known that
the 34-year-old victim was a restaurateur and part-time classical
musician, involved in a steady relationship with an older
man.

One of the first
investigators to arrive at the scene was Brigade Criminelle
Investigator Gilbert Thiel. As shocking as the murder appeared, it
was nothing new to Thiel. The victim was one of many homosexuals
murdered every year in Paris, and that month alone, there had
already been seven others in almost identical circumstances.
According to Agence France-Presse, homosexual murders represent
about a third of all murders in the Paris. The victims usually have
the same profile and similar habits, including a liberal view on
sexuality, which incorporates risks as a part of the ultimate
pleasure. During the early 1990s, the majority of these encounters
started with messages on Minitel.