The Killer of Little Luc

Leaping from four police cars in a Versailles square last week, a wedge of cops hustled their handcuffed prisoner toward the doors of St. Pierre jail. Before they could make it, a screaming mob burst through police lines and pelted the prisoner with blows. "Give him to us!" they cried. "Kill the monster!" Their target was the confessed killer of little Jean-Luc Taron (TIME, June 19), and he seemed elated at the commotion. Turning to the flics, he yelled above the uproar: "They're right! 1 am a monster!"

In truth, Lucien Leger, 27, looked disappointingly unlike most Parisians' spine-tingling image of I'etrangleur, the Jekyll-and-Hyde strangler who had hogged the headlines and taunted the police for 40 days. "The Machiavelli of crime," as France-Soir had dubbed him, turned out to be a colorless, bespectacled little (5 ft. 4 in., 130 Ibs.) male student nurse from the shabby suburb of Villejuif. His hobby was writing banal verse, which he set to borrowed music; he even paid to have his songs recorded and issued in a jacket flatteringly decorated with his face and name.

Trapped by the last bizarre stunt in his succession of bragging phone calls and letters to the police and press, Le'ger sat chatting with detectives at police headquarters as a squad from the Suur-eteU's First Mobile Brigade searched his apartment; in it they found the lined rose-tinted pad on which all 58 of the strangler's messages had been written. After 24 hours of grilling, LeUger burst into tears and admitted: "Oui, je suis bien I'assassin du petit Luc." He was drawn to the little boy, he explained, because "he seemed as unhappy as I was when I was his age."

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