French people convicted of murder

Martin Dumollard (June 22, 1810 − March 8, 1862) was a French serial killer condemned to the guillotine after having been arrested and charged with the deaths of maids from 1855 to 1861. His victims were approached in Lyon by Dumollard, who offered them a nice house in Côtière. Convinced, they would eventually follow him and, during their wanderings on foot, he attacked them. All twelve assaults or attempted assaults occurred in the late 1850s and early 1860s until that of Marie Pichon on May 28, 1861. He was quickly arrested, along with his wife and accomplice, Marie-Anne Martinet, who stole the personal belongings and used them for resale. Their trial took place from January 29 to February 1, 1862: Dumollard was sentenced to death and his wife, twenty years of penal labour. This affair, which preceded that of Joseph Vacher by about thirty years, had a great repercussion in France; it is often considered one of the first cases of a serial killer in France. Dumollard is notably mentioned in Les Misérables by Victor Hugo.

Hélène Jégado (1803 – 26 February 1852) was a French domestic servant and serial killer. She is believed to have murdered as many as 36 people with arsenic over a period of 18 years. After an initial period of activity, between 1833 and 1841, she seems to have stopped for nearly ten years before a final spree in 1851.

Christine Malèvre (born 10 January 1970) is a former nurse who was arrested in 1998 on suspicion of having killed as many as 30 patients. She confessed to some of the murders, but claimed she had done so at the request of the patients, who were all terminally ill. France, however, does not recognize a right to die, and Malèvre eventually recanted most of her confessions. The families of several of her victims strongly denied that their relatives had expressed any will to die, much less asked Malèvre to kill them.

Michel Paul Fourniret (4 April 1942 – 10 May 2021) was a French serial killer who confessed to killing 12 people in France and Belgium between 1987 and 2003. After he was arrested in June 2003 for the attempted kidnapping of a teenage girl in Ciney, Fourniret confessed in 2004 to killing nine people — eight females and one male — having been informed on by his then-wife, Monique Pierrette Olivier (born 31 October 1948). Fourniret was convicted of seven of these murders on 28 May 2008 and sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole, while Olivier was given life with a minimum term of 28 years for complicity.In February 2018, Fourniret confessed to killing two more women. On 16 November 2018, Fourniret and Olivier were convicted of the murder of Farida Hammiche, the last of the eight women that Fourniret confessed to killing in 2004. Fourniret was given a second life sentence and Olivier was sentenced to a further 20 years of imprisonment. In March 2020, Fourniret confessed to killing Estelle Mouzin, who disappeared from Guermantes in 2003.

Henri Charrière (French pronunciation: [ɑ̃ʁi ʃaʁjɛʁ]; 16 November 1906 – 29 July 1973) was a French writer, convicted in 1931 as a murderer by the French courts and pardoned in 1970. He wrote the novel Papillon, a memoir of his incarceration in and escape from a penal colony in French Guiana. While Charrière claimed that Papillon was largely true, modern researchers believe that much of the book’s material came from other inmates, rather than Charrière himself. Charrière denied committing the murder, although he freely admitted to having committed various other petty crimes prior to his incarceration.

Émile "Mimile" Buisson (19 August 1902 – 28 February 1956) was a French gangster, and French public enemy No. 1 for 1950. A member of the French Gang des Tractions Avant, Buisson was responsible for over thirty murders and a hundred robberies. Buisson was pursued and caught by French detective of the Sûreté Nationale Roger Borniche, and was executed in 1956 by the guillotine. Borniche's memoirs on the pursuit, Flic Story, were later made into a film of the same name in 1975, with Buisson portrayed by Jean-Louis Trintignant.
Buisson was born in Paray-le-Monial, Saône-et-Loire, and was jailed at the age of 16 for pickpocketing, swindling and possessing an offensive weapon. He was exiled to Shanghai with his brother for 5 years. Upon returning to France, Buisson was involved in a number of crimes and murders, becoming a member of Paris' criminal organizations, and took part in a hold-up of Troyes in 1937. In 1941 Buisson killed a passenger on board a security van during a robbery, and was captured by police during an identity check. Buisson was regarded as criminally insane and was committed to a psychiatric hospital, only to escape in 1947 with the help of Roger Dekker. Becoming French public enemy No. 1 for 1950, Buisson was eventually captured by Roger Borniche and was executed by guillotine in 1956, being buried at Ivry Cemetery.

David Hotyat was convicted of the killings of real estate promoter Xavier Flactif and his girlfriend and children. Their bodies were then taken to the forest and burned on a pyre. The massacre took place in Le Grand-Bornand, Haute-Savoie, France.

Guy Georges (born Guy Rampillon; 15 October 1962) is a French serial killer and serial rapist, dubbed le tueur de l'Est Parisien (the East Paris killer) or The Beast of the Bastille. He was convicted on 5 April 2001, of murdering seven women between 1991 and 1997. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 22 years.

Émile Louis (21 January 1934 – 20 October 2013) was a French bus driver and the prime suspect in the disappearance of seven young women in the Yonne department, Burgundy, in the late 1970s. He confessed to their murders in 2000 but retracted this confession one month later. Louis was sentenced to life in prison by the cour d'assises of Yonne in 2004. The sentence, which was upheld on appeal in 2006, was confirmed by the Court of Cassation in 2007.

Claude Lastennet (born January 19, 1971) is a French serial killer who was convicted of murdering five elderly women between August 1993 and January 1994.
Lastennet was convicted of murdering the following 5 victims:
Lastennet was arrested on January 12, 1994, and admitted his guilt to police. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for 18 years.