Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters by Peter Vronsky

castle—until one day he simply did not return from a delivery. Another was left at home to care for his younger siblings. When his parents returned he had vanished. Witnesses would later testify that although the entire region was now gripped in a mass fear for its children and that there were even rumors that “they ate children” at Gilles de Rais’s castle in Machecoul, nobody dared to raise a voice of suspicion or complaint against the great lord. In the archives of France are still preserved a series of witness depositions, some of them corroborated by several additional witnesses, describing the disappearance of at least thirty-seven children: 57
The witnesses declare that it was public and common knowledge that children were put to death in the said castle. 58
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    Certain neighbors of his had told Barbe and his wife that they ought to watch over their child, who was at risk of being snatched and they were very frightened about him; in fact, the witness had even been at Saint-Jean-d’Angély, and someone asked him where he was from, and when he replied that he was from Machecoul, that person marveled [was shocked], telling him that they ate little children there. [In Old French: sur ce, l’on lui avait dit, en se merveillant, qu’on y mangeoit les petis enffants. ] 59
    In 1440 Gilles de Rais became embroiled in a dispute over the sale of some land. The party with whom Gilles was in dispute transferred the land to his brother who was a priest. In a fit of anger, Gilles de Rais rode to the church where the priest was celebrating mass and with an armed escort burst into the church, forcing the priest to relinquish the disputed land. As his attack on the priest was a grave ecclesiastical offense, the offices of the Inquisition immediately investigated Gilles. It was not long before the accounts of missing children reached the Church authorities. On September 14, 1440, Gilles de Rais was arrested and taken to Nantes. During the subsequent ecclesiastical and civil trials, the horrific fate of the missing children, estimated to number between 140 and 800, came to light. (In one of the ecclesiastical indictments, it was charged specifically that he “killed treacherously, cruelly, and inhumanly one hundred and forty, or more, children, boys and girls, or had them killed . . .”)
    According to witnesses, Gilles de Rais would approach his victims very gradually after they were presented to him. At first he would treat them as his favorite servants, giving them much attention and remarking on their handsome beauty. De Rais would next caress the child and then begin grasping and pinching. At first if the child took fear and became upset, Gilles would dismiss his actions as playful and assure the child that he meant no harm. As soon as the boy would regain his self-composure, Gilles would pounce on the child and sodomize him. In the transcripts of the trial, which survive to this day, one of Gilles’s servants testified:
The accused exercised his lust once or twice on the children, then he killed them sometimes with his own hand or had them killed . . . sometimes they were decapitated and dismembered; sometimes he cut their throats leaving the head attached to the body; sometimes he broke their necks with a club; sometimes he cut their throats or some other parts of their neck, so that their blood flowed . . .
    Often he loved to gaze at the severed heads and showed them to the witness and to Etienne Corrillaut, asking them which of the heads was the most beautiful, the head severed just then or the one cut off the previous day. And he often kissed the head that pleased him the most, and took delight in it.
    The witness heard Gilles say that he took more pleasure in the murder of the children, and in seeing their heads and their members removed, and watching them languish, and seeing their blood flow than in knowing them carnally . . . while they were