This feeling of power and desire led Claux to the Passy Cemetery across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower and home to the remains of Octave Mirbeau author of The Torture Garden.
‘You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.’[282]
Once inside the cemetery he entered a mausoleum containing the bodies of a Russian family relocated to Paris after the 1917 revolution. Claux opened one of the coffins, inhaled the odour of decay and embalming fluid, and experienced ‘a religion of breath… of impalpable touch, a religion of the word, of proferring, of exhaling—a deleterious odor of the dead, with perfumes pleasing to the One Eternal, an odor of sanctity.’[283] Inside the coffin, Claux saw the shrouded body of an old woman, he tried to unclothe the corpse but it was stuck down with bodily fluids and embalming chemicals. The skin was petrified, the teeth yellow, the eyes were missing from the orbits.
‘The body’s like a pure spirit: it keeps completely to itself and inside itself, in a single point. Break that point, and the body dies. The point’s situated between the eyes, between the ribs, in the middle of the liver, all around the skull, in the midst of the femoral artery, and in lots of other places, too. The body’s a collection of spirits.’[284]
A vertiginous feeling overwhelmed Claux, he took a screwdriver from his tool kit and preceded to stab the corpse in the stomach and through the ribcage in a similar way to the method used by Peter Sutcliffe to kill and mutilate his victims. After this initial desecration, Claux continued his symbolic necrophilia in other cemeteries around Paris.
Like Sergeant Bertrand 130 years before him, Claux joined the French Army and spent his time planning murders. His army career only lasted a year and he left wanting to become a mortician but his application to study embalming was declined. Desiring to be near dead bodies, he found a position as a morgue attendant at Saint Vincent-de-Paul Hospital in Paris where he assisted in autopsies. ‘An anatomy of configurations, of the plasticity of what we’d have to call states of body, ways of being, bearing, breathings, paces, staggerings, sufferings, pleasures, coats, windings, brushings, masses. Bodies, to begin with, are masses, masses offered with nothing to be articulated about them, nothing to link them to, whether a discourse or a story: palms, cheeks, wombs, buttocks. Even an eye is a mass, as are tongue and ear-lobe.’[285]
Claux became fascinated with body parts, organs and skulls at the various hospitals he worked at. Besides assisting in autopsies, he cleaned the mortuary slabs, prepared bodied for viewing by relatives, worked as a stretcher-bearer, anything to be in proximity to a corpse. Left alone with the dead bodies, he began to excise strips of flesh and muscle and took the home to eat raw or cook. It was also during work in the hospital that he began to steel bags of blood from the blood bank, these he would make into a morbid milkshake using protein powders or human ashes.
These acts were not enough for Claux and his fantasies became more violent. Over Minitel (a pre-WWW service), Claux made contact with a 34-year-old man called Thierry Bissonnier and they agreed to meet for sadomasochistic sex. Claux took with him a gun and on entering the apartment shot Thierry through the eye. After searching the flat, Claux discovered that Thierry was still alive and shot him again in the back of the head. But Thierry wouldn’t die. After eating some cookies while watching Thierry, he then shot him in the back and smashed a plant pot on his head. After getting rid of any incriminating evidence, Claux stole personal items to make the act look like a burglary. Among the items stolen by Claux was a cheque book and a driver’s licence, which he used to buy a VCR; however, the shop assistant became suspicious and notified the police but Claux had already fled.
After being apprehended, Claux confessed to the crime and to his desecration of tombs and cannibalism; he denied any sexual motive, claiming he just wanted to murder someone, anyone. Psychiatrists who examined Claux diagnosed him as having a borderline psychotic personality disorder, necrophiliac and sexually sadistic tendencies and schizophrenia very similar to the psychiatric notes made on Miyazaki.
On the 9th of May 1997, Claux stood trial for the murder of Thierry Bissonnier. The jury was shown photographs of the crime scene and of Claux’s apartment—a union of Gein’s and Dahmer’s homes—in order to show that Claux’s fantasy world had tipped over into reality and was responsible for a number of murders in Paris. Like Sergeant Bertrand, Peter Kürten and Friedrich Haarmann before him, Claux was a dubbed ‘a real-life vampire.’
Eventually, the jurors took only three hours to find Claux guilty of premeditated murder, armed robbery and fraud and he was sentenced to 12 years in prison. After four years in Fleury-Merogis prison he was transferred to Maison Centrale Poissy where he claimed he made contact with serial killers. While there, he studied computer programming and spent his spare time in the gym and painting. Claux was incarcerated for seven years and four months and released in March 2002.
There is no doubt that Nico Claux is and was a fantasist. His pseudonecrophilia may have led him to murder Thierry Bissonnier but there is no concrete evidence that he sexually interfered with the body or the bodies he may or may not have disinterred. The psychiatric reports branded him a necrophile because of his obsession with death and dead bodies. Claux achieved minor celebrity status after his release because of his tales of grave-robbery, sadomasochism and a fascination with serial killers, subjects he posts on his website. His paintings include portraits of Ed Gein, Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer, He welcomes the Vampire of Paris tag and travels the world promoting the occult, fetishism, tattooing and Gothism. When asked in an interview ‘what killers stick in your mind?’ he mentioned Ed Gein and also that he admired Sergeant Bertrand.
We all live a psychosexual life. Not all of us realize that life. And maybe that’s a good thing. Most pseudonecrophiles live a life of blameless fantasy in which death is a substitute for any other fetish. Regular necrophiles are few and desire the dead through an obsessional need for human contact, even if the human is dead, and this like other perversions is most likely triggered in childhood, although to a far lesser degree than sadism, masochism and the other paraphilias. Foucault would argue that necrophilia was but one of many instances of humankind’s ‘manifold sexualities’ that, ‘The nineteenth century and our own have been rather the age of multiplication: a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of “perversions.” Our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities.’[286] Freud would agree, believing necrophilia—in particular the pseudo and regular kinds—were part of our polymorphous perversity, that necrophilia is a matter of transgression and a degree of inversion. ‘“Perverse” is then the absence of disgust in a context where reactions of disgust and repression are normally expected; it is the untimely persistence of infantile libido, the breakdown of the civilized devaluation of smells, excrement, mouth and anus (a devaluation serving to promote purely genital sexuality).’[287] If that is the case then it is one of the ‘peripheral sexualities. Whence the setting apart of the ‘unnatural’ as a specific dimension in the field of sexuality. This kind of activity assumed an autonomy with regard to the other condemned forms such as adultery or rape (and the latter was condemned less and less): to marry a close relative or practice sodomy, to seduce a nun or engage in sadism, to deceive one’s wife or violate cadavers, became things that were essentially different.’[288]