France: The Killer of Little Luc

Leaping from four police cars in a Versailles square last week, a wedge of cops hustled their handcuffed prisoner toward the doors of St. Pierre jail. Before they could make it, a screaming mob burst through police lines and pelted the prisoner with blows. "Give him to us!" they cried. "Kill the monster!" Their target was the confessed killer of little Jean-Luc Taron (TIME, June 19), and he seemed elated at the commotion. Turning to the flics, he yelled above the uproar: "They're right! 1 am a monster!"

In truth, Lucien Leger, 27, looked disappointingly unlike most Parisians' spine-tingling image of I'etrangleur, the Jekyll-and-Hyde strangler who had hogged the headlines and taunted the police for 40 days. "The Machiavelli of crime," as France-Soir had dubbed him, turned out to be a colorless, bespectacled little (5 ft. 4 in., 130 Ibs.) male student nurse from the shabby suburb of Villejuif. His hobby was writing banal verse, which he set to borrowed music; he even paid to have his songs recorded and issued in a jacket flatteringly decorated with his face and name.

Trapped by the last bizarre stunt in his succession of bragging phone calls and letters to the police and press, Le´ger sat chatting with detectives at police headquarters as a squad from the Suûr-eteÚ's First Mobile Brigade searched his apartment; in it they found the lined rose-tinted pad on which all 58 of the strangler's messages had been written. After 24 hours of grilling, LeÚger burst into tears and admitted: "Oui, je suis bien I'assassin du petit Luc." He was drawn to the little boy, he explained, because "he seemed as unhappy as I was when I was his age."