• At

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    , we like to tell scary stories by the fireside.

    For Halloween, we tell you about the “Monsters of our cities”.

    Killer of shepherdesses, strangler of children, butcher of widows, etc., they threw terror from Toulouse to Lille and everywhere in France.

  • In Rennes, it was a Norman swindler, Lemaire de Clermont, who raged at the beginning of the 19th century, multiplying heinous crimes with a gang of convicts.

  • Thirty years after his execution, workers will discover the skeletons of several of his victims while working on the site of the future Rennes station.

He is much less famous than Hélène Jégado, nicknamed the arsenic killer, who is accused of having poisoned dozens of people in the middle of the 19th century in Brittany.

But Lemaire de Clermont still hit the headlines almost at the same time in the West.

It was in Caen that the serial killer first hit.

Before taking action, the Norman, born in Bayeux in 1781, had already had a lot of trouble with the law.

Condemned to forced labor, he will know the prison of Brest where he will be branded with a hot iron.

There he will meet other scoundrels with whom he will keep in contact to mount his villainous crimes.

His favorite prey?

Fairground traders lugging around town with cash in their pockets.

"With his acolytes, they presented themselves as customers, they made an appointment with their victim before zigzagging them and stealing their money and their goods", says Claude Quétel, who devoted an article to Lemaire de Clermont in 1984 in the journal

Annales de Normandie

.

"But unlike some serial killers, he did not kill by obsession with a ritual," continues the historian, who has just released

Once upon a time

in

France

at Buchet Chastel.

He was killing because it was the only way not to get caught.

Because if we left our victim alive, we would run the risk of being recognized ”.

Wanted for murder in Caen, he fled to Rennes

This is what will happen in May 1824 with the discovery in Caen of the corpse of a young lady named Thouroude, a second-hand clothing merchant who has been missing for a month. Lemaire de Clermont was in the sights of the police and, knowing he was wanted, he fled in the direction of Rennes. To be forgotten, he changes his identity, now calling himself Poulain de Beauregard. There he leads a seemingly quiet life in a house located rue de Châtillon, marrying the cook of the owner of the place. But the criminal has basically not changed, continuing to mount villainous blows with other convicts and frequent brothels after dark.

In his confessions written in prison, Poulain de Beauregard recognizes that in the summer of 1824, he and his associates murdered a linen merchant.

“We buried him near a road to Saint-Hélier, in a meadow, having taken his money and his goods,” he wrote.

Shortly after, he met a certain Julien Turmel, a wealthy neighbor aged 68, with whom he befriended.

During the night of August 7 to 8, the poor gentleman is assassinated at Poulain de Beauregard's home.

Worried about his father's disappearance for several days, his son Turmel alerted the authorities before joining Rennes.

He will be guillotined on May 2, 1825

Here again, the suspicions are on the Norman swindler.

Especially since other suspicious disappearances have been recently reported in the area.

Around mid-August, during a search carried out at Poulain de Beauregard's, the Turmel son, intrigued by a detail on the ground, lifts a slab.

He then discovers with horror the rotten hand of his father and the remains of his corpse.

In the meantime, our assassin has already fled, joining his native Normandy.

He was finally arrested in September in Saint-Lô before being guillotined on May 2, 1825 in Caen in front of a huge crowd, taking his macabre secrets with him.

Our file on Halloween

"We do not know in the end how many victims he made because he does not give any figures or precise facts in his memories", indicates Claude Quétel.

Thirty years later, on the construction site of the future Rennes station, workers finally unearthed several skeletons not far from Poulain de Beauregard's home.

One more proof for investigators that the swindler from Normandy was indeed a serial killer.

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