Bus driver turned notorious serial killer dies, 79

Emile Louis, an ostensibly harmless bus driver who became one of the most notorious serial killers in French history, has died at the age of 79.

Louis, who was convicted in 2004 of killing seven mentally impaired young women in the 1970s, died on Sunday in a secure hospital in Nancy in eastern France, his lawyer Alain Fraitag said.

He was serving parallel life sentences for the murders and for the rape and torture of his second wife, and the sexual assault of her daughter.

His death marks the latest but not necessarily the final chapter in a tragic saga of extraordinary cruelty and judicial bungling. Exactly why it took nearly a quarter of a century for Louis to be brought to justice has yet to be explained, and mystery still surrounds the 1997 death of the police officer who first identified him as a suspect.

All seven murder victims, aged between 15 and 25, were under the care of social services in the Yonne district of northern Burgundy, for whom Louis worked as a bus driver.

Louis first came on to the radar of French police in 1981 during an investigation into the death of Sylviane Lesage. Investigators quickly established that Lesage had been having an illicit sexual relationship with Louis, and that he had also sexually abused three girls being looked after by his partner at the time.

Louis was convicted in 1983 of indecent assaults on minors, but a charge of murder in the Lesage case was dropped in 1984. That in turn led to the probe into the six other murders of young women that had occurred between 1975 and 1979 being shelved.

Christian Jambert, a gendarme who had identified Louis as a prime suspect, was found shot dead in 1997. The death was officially classified as a suicide but many experts on the case suspect Jambert was murdered.

After serving his first prison term, Louis moved to Frejus in the south of France, where he was convicted in 1989 of sexually assaulting his neighbours’ children on the camp site where he had taken up residence. Despite the pattern of repeated sexual abuse, it was not until 2000 that he was finally re-arrested in connection with the seven murders.

Louis was transferred to hospital from Ensisheim prison on Oct 14.