CHRISTOPHER STEVENS: Like a scene from the Revolution, the grisly finish of serial killer who was final to be publicly executed in France

Eugen Weidmann met his death with his eyes tightly shut. The young German serial killer, whose gaze was said to be hypnotic and whose good looks had captivated the world, was terrified. 

He had been sobbing uncontrollably, sometimes for days on end, since his arrest – during which he had tried to murder two policemen in an attempt to escape.

For four of his five victims, he had shown no emotion. But when he spoke of the naive, dark-haired dancer he lured to his home and killed with his bare hands, he became tearfully sentimental. ‘She was gentle and unsuspecting,’ he wept. ‘When I reached for her throat, she went down like a doll.’

This ladies’ man was now set to meet his fate under the knife’s edge of the device Parisians called ‘the Widow’ or Madame la Guillotine.

On June 17, 1939, less than three months before the outbreak of the Second World War, 31-year-old Weidmann became the last man to be executed in public by the guillotine. 

Crowds began gathering before midnight near Saint Peter’s Prison in Versailles where the execution would take place, cramming into the nearby cafes that stayed open all night.

By sunrise at 4am, 600 people were waiting to watch the killer die. Some climbed neighbouring buildings, sitting astride rooftops and clinging to chimneys. Residents with windows overlooking the scaffold charged high prices to anyone who could afford to pay for a better view.

Police moved in to hold the crowds back, erecting a temporary fence that encircled the tall wooden framework of the guillotine.

A surge of excitement ran through the streets at 4.30am as Weidmann was led out with his hands tied behind him, propelled so quickly that his feet were off the ground.

His face was flushed. His blue shirt was pulled down to expose his white shoulders. A warder pushed his body, face down, on to the wooden block, with an audible thump. The executioner, Jules-Henri Desfourneaux, grabbed Weidmann’s head and turned it so the neck was exposed.

Within 10 seconds of his appearance, the blade fell. Cameras flashed and several French newspapers ran photographs showing the moment of his decapitation.

One of those in the throng, actor Christopher Lee, later described how a ‘powerful wave of howling and shrieking’ ran through the crowd. They pushed forward in a mob, dipping handkerchiefs in the blood for souvenirs.

These scenes were so wild and hysterical that French president Albert Lebrun demanded an official report and within a week banned all future public executions. 

Though French criminals continued to die by the guillotine until 1977, Weidmann was the last to be executed before a crowd.

The emotional fervour around this petty criminal who turned to murder as an easy way of stealing small sums was bizarre and disturbing. He seemed to exert a powerful influence, especially over women who were repelled but mesmerised by his crimes.

When he was first sentenced to death, after pleading guilty to five murders, he seemed willing to accept the punishment without argument. That was until his female lawyer, Renee Jardin, begged him to appeal.

‘I have been condemned to have my head cut off,’ he initially told the court. ‘Let them do it and let there be an end to it. I want peace.’

But after Ms Jardin pleaded with him for an hour in his cell, he changed his mind and agreed to the appeal. ‘All right,’ he announced, ‘I will do it just to please you. You have been very kind and considerate to me.’

The Daily Mail’s reporter throughout both the trial and appeal was the brilliant F Tennyson Jesse, one of the first female war correspondents, who later wrote up the Weidmann case in her seminal true-crime book, Comments On Cain.

The New Yorker magazine’s correspondent was also a woman, Janet Flanner. She called Weidmann ‘exceptionally handsome in the medieval manner’. Her fascination with the case is detailed in a recently published book entitled The Typewriter And The Guillotine, by Mark Braude.

Some women fell under Weidmann’s spell at first sight. For Jean de Koven, it was an instant attraction that would cost her her life.

She met him in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel on Paris’s Boulevard Haussmann. Jean was 22, an aspiring actress from Brooklyn, New York, who had studied ballet at the Metropolitan Opera.

Her family nicknamed her Gypsy as she longed to travel, though she had never been further than New Jersey until she boarded a transatlantic liner, the Normandie, in July 1937 to visit her aunt Ida Sackheim in Paris. 

‘Sacky’, as Jean called her, was 42 and worked in fashion. She took her niece to see the Mona Lisa at the Louvre and the dancers at the Folies Bergere. After a day’s sightseeing they stopped at the Ambassador for a drink.

Sacky concluded that they needed to find an interpreter before their next excursion, so went to speak to the concierge. Jean looked around the bar and noticed a young man reading an English magazine. Wondering if he might be a fellow American, she asked if she could borrow it when he’d finished reading.

The young man was Eugen Weidmann, who was there with a plan to befriend and kidnap a tourist, to rob her and perhaps hold her to ransom. He had tried once before, but the woman fought him off.

This time, he decided to wait to be approached… and it worked. By the time Sacky returned, the pair were deep in conversation. 

Weidmann claimed his name was Bobby Hunter but suggested Jean could call him Siegfried, after the romantic hero in Wagner’s opera. He implied he was Swiss, saying his father was an industrialist who owned a chemicals plant.

He was good-looking, Sacky had to concede. His square-jawed face was clean-shaven with strong features and wavy brown hair. His gaze was alluring with dark eyes that seemed to direct their full attention to everyone who met him.

He offered to take Jean driving the following day to show her the real Paris, the sights most tourists missed. But when he called to collect her, he had no car. He’d lent it to a friend, he claimed.

Instead, he suggested taking her by train to see his home in the country suburb of Saint-Cloud. Sacky had tickets for the Opera at Palais Garnier that night. ‘Bobby’ promised to bring Jean back in time for the curtain.

Jean wore a blue dress with a red plaid top, a brown hat and new leather shoes. She took her camera, a Kodak, purchased specially for the trip. She also had about $430 in American Express traveller’s cheques (about £7,200 in today’s money).

Jean and ‘Bobby’ did not return that night. The next morning, a tele­gram arrived, apparently from Jean and addressed to ‘Secky’. That misspelling, along with the odd wording, made the girl’s aunt certain that something was seriously wrong.

Her fears were confirmed with the arrival, a few hours later, of a ransom note: ‘Jean de Koven is kidnapped and is being held for a $500 ransom.’ 

That was not a huge sum, less than £10,000 at today’s prices. But it came with a chilling warning: Sacky was not to contact the gendarmes. If she did, ‘you know how Chikago [sic] gangsters operate’.

Ida Sackheim did go to the police… who laughed at her. Saint-Cloud was a lovely place in summer, they said, ‘pour un beau couple d’amoureux’ – that is, for a pair of lovebirds.

Sacky began making desperate enquiries on her own, trying to find out if anyone at the Ambassador knew ‘Bobby Hunter’. No one did. More notes arrived, demanding coded messages be placed in a newspaper.

Still the police refused to take an interest. After three days, Sacky received a phone call, reiterating the ransom demand. 

Once again, she went to the French national police – where this time she was told that Jean must be playing a practical joke because the ransom demand was so small.

Her desperately worried family set sail for France from New York, after phoning to assure police that Jean would never dream of staging such a stupid stunt.

It was not until her $10 traveller’s cheques began to be cashed, with obviously forged signatures, that an investigation was launched. Police discovered the cheques were being presented at tourist spots all over Paris, by two men and two women.

Paris’s Herald Tribune ran the story, sparking a spate of reported sightings. The head waiter at a restaurant in Saint-Cloud claimed to have seen Jean on his terrace, flirting over dinner with a handsome athlete. 

A taxi driver thought he’d dropped her with two male companions at a cafe in Montparnasse. A fortune teller named Nancy saw her in a trance ‘somewhere by the ocean’, and a hoaxer rang Sacky’s hotel five times in an afternoon to scream that her niece was dead.

What followed was a confused sequence of apparently unconnected murders. On September 7, a chauffeur called Joseph Couffy was found in a forest in Tours, 150 miles from Paris, with a bullet through the nape of his neck. He had been robbed.

Four weeks later, a cook from Strasbourg, Janine Keller, was found in Fontainebleau Forest, 40 miles outside Paris, also with a fatal bullet wound in the back of her neck. She too had been robbed.

A businessman named Roger Leblond was found shot dead in his car opposite a cemetery in the Paris suburbs. His mistress told police he’d gone there to meet a contact about a cinema deal.

The breakthrough came when an estate agent named Raymond Lesobre was shot dead, again through the back of the neck, and robbed of 5,000 francs (nearly £30,000 today) after meeting a client in Saint-Cloud. A business card found next to Lesobre’s corpse led police to a petty criminal called Fritz Frommer, who had recently been reported missing.

Frommer’s family told police the youth had been hanging round with a man he met in prison in Germany. That man lived in Saint-Cloud.

Two detectives went to the house in question – and while they were standing in the garden, Weidmann came home. When they produced their police cards, he invited them inside, and politely invited them to go ahead of him.

Remembering how many people had been shot through the back of the neck, they refused. Weidmann pulled his gun and opened fire, wounding them both. Spotting a small hammer on the ground, one of the detectives seized it and beat the suspect unconscious.

When Weidmann had his mugshot taken, his head was bloody and bandaged, but the piercing stare was unwavering.

He confessed to all the killings, except that of Lesobre – who was killed, he said, by his apprentice, another small-time crook named Roger Million. Weidmann was teaching him how to kill, with ‘the shot in the back of the neck that never fails’.

Million’s father worked in a cafe. The cafe owner had a wife, Colette Tricot, who was sleeping with young Million, and who helped to cash Jean’s travellers’ cheques. Weidmann handed police the whole gang, without apparently expecting any leniency in return.

He told police where to find Jean’s body, buried under his front porch in Saint-Cloud. Police discovered her remains with her camera buried beside her. When they developed the film, they found snapshots of the murderer.

Weidmann also admitted murdering his former crony Frommer. He was so frank about it all that detectives began to suspect he was exaggerating his guilt. And when he described how he shot Leblond, they refused to believe him. 

‘I never lie,’ Weidmann retorted, opening his coat showed off his braces which he had stolen from Leblond’s corpse.

Readers in Britain were appalled at the case too. Crime novelist Peter Cheyney wrote a psychological profile of Weidmann for the Daily Mail

‘The criminal in France,’ he wrote, ‘who commits robbery with violence knows that the penal colony Devil’s Island awaits him if he is caught. Knowing this, he is prepared to kill his victim outright – although he did not originally intend to do so – preferring to take his chance of the guillotine rather than serve a fearful sentence on the island.

‘There is another angle that may have some bearing here. There are some people of ordinarily “quiet” mentality who, having “tasted blood”, are driven to continue doing so. Eugen Weidmann may be one.’

The Typewriter And The Guillotine by Mark Braude is published by Grand Central