Part One: The Summer of the Exhibition
Paris, 1937. The City of Light was putting on a show—“The
Exhibition of Art and Technology in Modern Life”—and the tourists came in
droves, moths to a flame that burned from May through November. They came with
their cameras and their traveler’s checks and their wide American smiles, never
knowing that something else had escaped into the summer heat. Something that
had learned its trade in the gray walls of Saarbrücken Prison and now moved
through the crowds like a shark through chum-filled waters.
His name was Eugene Weidmann, and if you’d passed him on the
street, you might have tipped your hat. Tall, educated, fluent in English and
French—he had the kind of charm that opened doors and loosened purse strings.
He called himself Siegfried Sauerbrey sometimes, or Bobby, or Karrer. Names were
just masks, and Weidmann wore them the way other men wore cologne.
Jean de Koven was twenty-two years old, a ballet dancer from
Brooklyn with her whole life stretched out before her like a road on a summer
day. She was visiting her aunt Ida in Paris that July, and when she met the
handsome young man who said he worked as an exhibition translator, her heart
must have done a little pirouette in her chest.
“I’ll be back by eight,” she told Ida on July 23rd, camera
in hand. “We’re going to the opera.”
She never made it to the opera.
“We took the train at four o’clock,” Weidmann would later
say, his voice flat as a knife blade, “and Jean was happy, very happy.”
The villa in Saint-Cloud was waiting. So was the glass of
milk, white and innocent-looking. So was the rope. When he buried her in the
courtyard, did he think about her aunt waiting for her to come home? Did he
think about anything at all except the $635 in cash and those lovely,
negotiable traveler’s checks?
The thing was—and this is where it gets truly dark, the
place where Stephen King would tell you to look away if you wanted to, but you
won’t, you never do—even after Jean de Koven was cold in the ground, Weidmann’s
gang contacted Ida Sackheim demanding ransom. Five hundred dollars to get back
a niece who was already feeding the worms.
The Paris police thought it was a publicity stunt at first.
Can you imagine? A woman’s niece goes missing and they accuse her of
making it up, of trying to get her name in the papers. It wasn’t until December
8th, when they found Jean’s body, that anyone took Ida seriously.
By then, Weidmann had already killed four more times.
Part Two: The Boy Who Learned to Steal
Eugene Weidmann was born in Frankfurt on February 5, 1908,
into the kind of family that had money and respectability—or at least the
appearance of both. His father was an export businessman and, wouldn’t you know
it, a member of the Nazi Party. Not that politics mattered much to young
Eugene. What mattered was that World War I scattered his childhood like leaves
in a November wind.
Sent to live with his grandparents while the world tore
itself apart, the boy learned a valuable lesson: when no one’s watching, you
can take what you want. Stealing became as natural to him as breathing.
By 1926, eighteen years old with that itch in his blood, he
crossed the ocean to Canada. Saskatchewan seemed like a good place to rob a
payroll clerk, until it wasn’t. One year in prison, then deportation back to
Europe with his tail between his legs.
But here’s the thing about men like Weidmann—prison doesn’t
rehabilitate them. It educates them. Five years in Saarbrücken for robbery, and
when he walked out in the early 1930s, he had two new friends: Roger Million
and Jean Blanc. They were like the Three Musketeers, if the Three Musketeers
had been sociopaths with a taste for murder.
March 1937: Paris. The gang rented a villa in Saint-Cloud,
close enough to smell the tourists’ perfume and cologne. They divided up the
work like any good business. Weidmann was the brains and the trigger finger.
Million was his right hand, helping with the kidnappings and the killing. Blanc
provided safe houses and fenced the goods. And Colette Tricot, Million’s lover,
cashed those stolen traveler’s checks with a smile that could melt butter.
Part Three: The Killing Season
After Jean de Koven, they couldn’t stop. Or wouldn’t. Maybe
there’s no difference.
September 1st: Joseph Couffy, a driver, thought he was
taking a fare to the French Riviera. Instead, he got a bullet in the back of
the neck—Weidmann’s signature, that shot to the nape like you were putting down
a horse. The killer even tried to make it look like Couffy was sleeping,
covering his head with a newspaper. As if death were just a nap you don’t wake
up from.
Two days later, Janine Keller, a private nurse, followed
Weidmann and Million into a cave in Fontainebleau forest. They’d promised her a
nanny job. She got the bullet instead, right in the back of the neck. Another
1,400 francs, another diamond ring.
October 16th: Roger LeBlond, a young theater producer with
dreams of making it big, met Weidmann to discuss an investment. The only thing
that got invested was a bullet in the back of his head. Five thousand francs
disappeared from his wallet like smoke.
Fritz Frommer, a Jewish anti-Nazi who’d known Weidmann in
prison, died on November 22nd. His body went into the cellar of the Saint-Cloud
villa, right next to Jean de Koven. The house was becoming a charnel house, but
the neighbors never noticed. They never do.
The final murder came five days later. Raymond Lesobre, a
real estate agent, was just showing Weidmann a property. Another bullet,
another 5,000 francs, but this time—finally—Weidmann made a mistake. He left
his business card in Lesobre’s office. The kind of amateur hour error that gets
you caught, that unravels everything.
Part Four: The Capture
December 8, 1937. When Weidmann came home, two Sûreté
officers were waiting for him like death’s tax collectors. He invited them in,
cool as spring water, then spun and fired three shots.
The thing about shooting cops is that they tend to take it
personally. Even wounded, they came at him, and one of them grabbed a hammer—a hammer,
for Christ’s sake—and knocked Weidmann cold. When he woke up, the game was
over.
And here’s what’s strange: he confessed to everything. All
of it. Spilled his guts like he’d been waiting for the chance. The only killing
he seemed to regret was Jean de Koven’s, the ballet dancer from Brooklyn who’d
smiled at him that summer day.
Part Five: The Trial and the Crowd
March 1939, Versailles. The trial was a circus, but not the
good kind. Five hours of deliberation, eighty questions for the jury to answer.
Weidmann was convicted of four premeditated murders—Couffy, LeBlond, Keller,
and Frommer. Jean de Koven’s death was ruled unplanned, as if that made it
better somehow.
“I am guilty, very guilty,” Weidmann said, standing there in
the dock. “I offer you all I have—my life.”
Roger Million wasn’t so calm. When the verdict came down
just before midnight, he screamed his innocence to anyone who’d listen, his
eyes wild as a cornered animal’s. “Don’t punish me! I’m innocent! I was only a
tool in Weidmann’s hands!”
The jury wasn’t buying it. Both men got the death sentence,
though Million’s would later be commuted to life. Blanc got twenty months for
hiding Million. Colette Tricot walked free.
Part Six: The Last Show
June 17, 1939. Dawn coming up over Saint-Pierre Prison in
Versailles, and the crowd had been gathering since midnight. Because here’s the
dirty little secret: people loved public executions. They brought their
kids. They packed picnic lunches. They wanted the best view, like they were
going to see Garbo or Gable instead of a man getting his head chopped off.
The crowd was so big that morning that they had to delay
everything. Can you imagine? Too many spectators for a beheading, like
overselling a concert venue.
When Weidmann finally appeared, his eyes were squeezed shut,
his face flushed, his light-blue shirt cut open at the chest and neck—that pale
skin against the dark wood of the guillotine, that ancient killing machine that
had been France’s favorite toy for over a thousand years.
Chief executioner Jules-Henri Desfourneaux and his
assistants—Georges Martin and Henri Sabin, names you’d never remember except
they’re forever linked to this moment—prepared the blade. The guillotine board
malfunctioned, because of course it did, and they had to shove Weidmann forward
to line him up properly.
Ten seconds. That’s all it took. The blade fell, the head
rolled, and the cameras captured everything.
But here’s what really got under people’s skin: the crowd.
They screamed and cheered like Weidmann’s death was the finale of a fireworks
show. They rushed forward afterward, dipping their handkerchiefs and scarves in
the blood on the pavement like they were collecting relics.
A seventeen-year-old actor named Christopher Lee was there
that morning, would later become famous for playing Dracula. He turned his head
away but couldn’t close his ears. “I heard,” he’d say decades later, and you
could still hear the horror in his voice.
Marcel, fifteen years old at the time, watched as they
dismantled the guillotine quick as a carnival ride, washed the blood off the
sidewalk, and let life resume. The first tram passed. The cafés reopened. Like
nothing had happened at all.
Epilogue: The End of the Show
Paris-Soir called the crowd “disgusting,” “unruly,” “shoving,
shouting, whistling.” The government agreed. President Albert Lebrun, who’d
always hated the death penalty, was horrified. One week later—just seven
days—they passed a decree: no more public executions. From now on, the
killing would happen behind prison walls, witnessed only by officials and
clergy.
One man’s death ended a thousand-year tradition.
The guillotine kept working in private for another
thirty-eight years. Christian Ranucci in 1976. Jérôme Carrein in 1977. And
finally, on September 10, 1977, Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian immigrant, became
the last person in France—the last person in the world—to die by
guillotine.
Four years later, François Mitterrand became president, and
his Justice Minister, Robert Badinter, stood before the National Assembly with
fire in his voice.
“Tomorrow, thanks to you, the justice of France will no
longer be a justice that kills,” he said. “Tomorrow, thanks to you, there will
be no more, to our collective shame, secret executions at dawn under a black
canopy in the prisons of France. Tomorrow, the bloodstained pages of our
justice’s history will turn.”
October 9, 1981: the death penalty was abolished in France.
In 2007, they wrote it into the Constitution, making sure no one could bring it
back. And in October 2025, they laid Robert Badinter to rest in the Panthéon,
where France keeps its heroes.
All because one summer day in 1937, a man named Eugene
Weidmann met a ballet dancer named Jean de Koven and decided her life was worth
less than six hundred dollars and change.
That’s the real horror story, friends. Not the guillotine,
not the blood on the pavement, not even the screaming crowd. It’s how easy it
is for some people to look at another human being and see nothing but prey.
Sleep tight.
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