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Thierry Paulin: The 'Monster of Montmartre'

20 hours ago
3 min read

In the mid-1980s, the elderly women of Paris lived in fear. Someone was entering their homes and killing them — robbing, beating and strangling frail victims for the meagre cash in their purses. The killer, Thierry Paulin, would become known as the 'Monster of Montmartre' and the 'Killer of Old Ladies', and he is believed to have murdered between eighteen and twenty-one elderly women in just a few years. Yet he never faced trial: he died of AIDS-related illness before justice could be done. Out of respect for the victims, this account avoids graphic detail.

Paulin's case is a disturbing portrait of a predator who hid a double life of flamboyant parties behind a campaign of brutal violence against the most vulnerable.

Thierry Paulin: The 'Monster of Montmartre'

Key Facts at a Glance

Full name: Thierry Paulin
Born: 28 November 1963, Fort-de-France, Martinique
Known as: The Monster of Montmartre; the Killer of Old Ladies
Victims: Believed to have killed 18–21 elderly women (1984–1987), Paris
Outcome: Died of AIDS-related illness in 1989, before trial

A rootless youth

Born in 1963 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, Paulin was abandoned by his father shortly after birth and raised largely by a grandmother who, by many accounts, paid him little attention. Shuttled later between his mother in France and a difficult new family, and marginalised as a mixed-race, openly gay young man, he grew increasingly unmoored. After a brief, unhappy stint in the military, he drifted into petty crime, drugs and the Paris nightlife scene, where he performed in drag and dreamed of cabaret stardom.

The killings begin

Paulin's violence against the elderly escalated into murder in 1984. For his early crimes he was joined by his lover and accomplice, Jean-Thierry Mathurin, and together they targeted old women living alone in the Montmartre district and beyond. They forced their way into homes, bound and beat their victims, and strangled or suffocated them, taking whatever money they could find. In one stretch of just weeks in the autumn of 1984, numerous women were attacked.

A double life

After a pause, Paulin returned to killing, increasingly on his own, as his life spiralled amid cocaine addiction and financial desperation. He funded a lavish, chaotic lifestyle with the proceeds of his crimes, reportedly throwing extravagant parties — on one occasion celebrating a birthday with dozens of guests using cash taken from a murdered woman. Associates later recalled, with horror, that when he said he was 'going to work', he was heading out to find another victim.

A city under siege

As elderly women continued to die in their homes, sometimes within a few hundred metres of one another, Paris was gripped by dread, and the fingerprint and pattern evidence convinced police that a single offender — or pair — was responsible. The investigation became a race against a killer who struck the defenceless and vanished back into the city's nightlife.

Arrest

Paulin was arrested on 1 December 1987, and Mathurin was also taken into custody. In custody Paulin confessed to a long series of murders, laying bare the scale of the killings that had terrorised the elderly of Paris for years. By this time, however, he was already gravely ill: he had tested HIV-positive and was deteriorating rapidly.

Death before justice

Thierry Paulin never stood trial. He died in the hospital wing of Fresnes Prison on 16 April 1989, at the age of just twenty-five, of complications related to AIDS, having arrived in a state of near-paralysis from tuberculosis and meningitis. His accomplice, Jean-Thierry Mathurin, was tried for the earlier murders and sentenced to life imprisonment. Because Paulin died beforehand, he was never formally convicted of the crimes he had confessed to.

The Monster of Montmartre case left France shaken and inspired works including Claire Denis's 1994 film 'I Can't Sleep'. Beneath the lurid nickname and the killer's strange double life are the elderly women he murdered — isolated, trusting, and preyed upon in the supposed safety of their own homes. They, and the justice that his early death denied them, are the heart of this disturbing chapter.