Un Bonjour de L'Etrangleur

A man and a boy stood deep within the Bois de Verrieres just south of Paris. Above the boy's head, a giant oak reared away into the predawn darkness. "Tell me," he asked the man, "are there wolves here?" The man placed a reassuring hand on the nape of the boy's neck. "No, my little Luc, there are no wolves." Slowly the man's hand tightened . . .

The body of Jean-Luc Taron, aged 11, was found face down beneath the oak tree at 5:30 on the morning of May 27. The back of the neck was severely bruised, and the boy's nostrils were filled with loam, indicating that the murderer had used the soft forest floor for two purposes: to smother the cries of his victim, and to bring about death by suffocation.

To Chief Inspector Jean Samson of Paris' First Mobile Brigade, it appeared to be one of those senseless, psychotic murders committed by a madman who quickly gives himself away or else fades into the anonymity of the city and is never caught. But within a day of Jean-Luc Taron's murder, the case took a bizarre turn, and before the week was out Paris had been half-hypnotized with horror. For Jean-Luc's killer was a brazen publicity seeker, who taunted the cops and the newspapers with a barrage of telephone calls, special-delivery letters and threats of another child murder unless he was immediately paid $100,000 in advance ransom.

Developing Image. To convince Chief Inspector Samson that he was indeed I'etrangleur (the strangler), the criminal filled his various messages with details that only the murderer could have known. Jean-Luc had told him, the killer reported, how he had run away from home after lifting 15 francs from his mother's purse. He was tired of doing his homework (his last assignment: to conjugate the verb rire, to laugh), and when he left his parents' house on Paris' middle-class Rue de Naples, he was wearing a tan corduroy jacket and carrying a Bugs Bunny comic book. He had a spot of mercurochrome on one leg ("I can no longer remember which," the killer apologized in a phone call to Agence France-Presse). The boy's jacket, added the strangler, could be found along highway N306 "just before Chatillon going toward Paris." (It was.) The most convincing touch was the dialogue concerning Jean-Luc's fear of wolves. Said Jean-Luc's businessman father, "Each time my boy entered a wood, he asked that question."

Doling out "exclusives" to the Paris newspapers, the killer evidently took pleasure in watching his image develop. He modestly acknowledged the description that handwriting experts had built up from his messages: "I do come from a well-educated background (my father was a high civil servant), and I do not lack intelligence." To Paris-Presse he sent a sketch of the murder scene that showed the killer ("me") and the boy ("him") in the exact positions Inspector Samson had calculated. An accompanying note said: "Expect another dramatic development." It came when a grey-haired man in his 40s, dressed as a worker, handed Jean-Luc's Bugs Bunny comic book to a ticket puncher in the

Porte de Clignancourt Metro station, then jumped on a train and disappeared.

Ransom or Death. With every passing day, the strangler gave Inspector Samson a few more clues. Soon hundreds of cops were checking the route taken by the killer after he picked up Jean-Luc near his home, hoping to find eyewitnesses. Other investigators searched the 15th arrondissement, where the killer said he lived, and stopped drivers of Citroen DS 19s, which the killer said he drove. Meanwhile, Jean-Luc's father scanned photographs taken at the boy's funeral, which the killer said he had attended ("but I wasn't crazy enough to show myself"). By week's end--fully 18 days, 26 messages and 13 phone calls after the murder--the killer was still at large. The press blamed police for being unable to follow up the many clues, impatiently demanded an arrest.

And the messages continued to pour in: "It is because I need money that I killed without pity, and I will kill again. Now I am waiting for the opportunity to snatch my next little child and to receive the ransom money. Afterward, you will no longer hear about me. Remember: ransom or death. Un bonjour de I'etrangleur [Good day from the strangler]."

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