VIDEO: Serial Killer of Children – Gilles De Rais

There is nothing and no one worse than serial killers who choose children as their victims!

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Gilles de Rais (prob. c. September 1405 – 26 October 1440) was a knight and lord convicted of murdering many children by his confessions and the detailed eyewitness accounts of his own confederates and victims’ parents.

According to Wikipedia, in his confession, Gilles mentioned the first assaults on children occurred between spring 1432 and spring 1433. The first murders occurred at Champtocé-sur-Loire; however, no account of these murders survived.

Shortly after, Gilles moved to Machecoul where, as the record of his confession states, he killed, or ordered to be killed, a great but uncertain number of children after he sodomized them. Forty naked bodies of children were discovered in Machecoul in 1437.

Gilles’ bodyservant Étienne Corrillaut, known as Poitou, was an accomplice in many of the crimes and testified that his master stripped the child naked and hung him with ropes from a hook to prevent him from crying out, then masturbated upon the child’s belly or thighs. If the victim was a boy he would touch his genitals and buttocks.

Taking the victim down, Rais comforted the child and assured him he only wanted to play with him. Gilles then either killed the child himself or had the child killed by his cousin Gilles de Sillé, Poitou or another bodyservant called Henriet. The victims were killed by decapitation, cutting of their throats, dismemberment, or breaking of their necks with a stick.

A short, thick, double-edged sword called a braquemard was kept at hand for the murders. Poitou further testified that Rais sometimes abused the victims before wounding them and at other times after the victim had been slashed in the throat or decapitated.

According to Poitou, Rais disdained the victim’s sexual organs, and took “infinitely more pleasure in debauching himself in this manner … than in using their natural orifice, in the normal manner.”

In his own confession, Gilles testified that “when the said children were dead, he kissed them and those who had the most handsome limbs and heads he held up to admire them, and had their bodies cruelly cut open and took delight at the sight of their inner organs; and very often when the children were dying he sat on their stomachs and took pleasure in seeing them die and laughed”.

Poitou testified that he and Henriet burned the bodies in the fireplace in Gilles’ room. The clothes of the victim were placed into the fire piece by piece so they burned slowly and the smell was minimized. The ashes were then thrown into the cesspit, the moat, or other hiding places.

The last recorded murder was of the son of Éonnet de Villeblanche and his wife Macée. Poitou paid 20 sous to have a page’s doublet made for the victim, who was then assaulted, murdered and incinerated in August 1440.

On 23 October 1440, the secular court heard the confessions of Poitou and Henriet and condemned them both to death, followed by Gilles’ death sentence on 25 October.