At dawn this date in 1977, child murderer Jerome Carrein was guillotined in the courtyard of Douai prison. He was the second-last person executed in France’s history.*
He was a vagabond ex-convict who slept most nights in the slough of rural Arleux, cadging food enough off relatives and a pitying local barkeep.
It was a more bestial appetite that saw him into the guillotine’s annals: on October 27, he pursuaded an eight-year-old schoolgirl, the daughter of his benefactor publican, to come along with him. Once he had her in the swamps, Carrein attempted to ravish little Cathy Petit. As Cathy struggled, Carrein later explained — he confessed almost immediately — “I saw red. I felt lost in the idea that she would denounce me, so I threw her in the pond.”
Her drowned corpse was discovered the next day.
The growing reluctance of the French state to slice off heads in the 1970s did not express itself in interminable wait times on death row. Carrein was condemned to death on July 12, 1976, during the run-up to Christian Ranucci‘s execution for a similar abduction/child murder.
That conviction was vacated a few months later for a trial irregularity, but the retrial took place in the wake of another high-profile trial: anti-death penalty crusader Robert Badinter had successfully defended a man named Patrick Henry from the guillotine in yet another nationally known child murder case, winning a life sentence instead. There was no small public outcry over this outcome, and Carrein’s prosecutor explicitly called on the jury in his second case to avenge with severity to Carrein the “rape of public conscience” perpetrated by leniency to Henry. (London Times, June 24, 1977)
Pierre Lefrance, speaking for Carrein’s defense, ventured his own appeal to the jurors’ wider sensibilities — in this case, of the growing likelihood that capital punishment was nearing the end of the line in France: “Were the death penalty to be abolished at last in the next year or two, would you wish that Carrein was the last man guillotined in France?”
The invaluable French-language guillotine.cultureforum.net has a forum thread on this case; be sure to note the appearance on page 3 of a poster claiming to be the daughter of Jerome Carrein’s first wife.
* It was also the first execution of France’s last official chief executioner, Marcel Chevalier.
On this day..
- 1939: Toribio Martinez Cabrera
- 1915: Carl Frederick Muller, fluent in languages but not in espionage
- 1865: Thomas King, heartstabber
- 1505: The Val Camonica witches
- 1784: Fifteen crooks hanged at Newgate
- 1886: John W. Kelliher lynched in Becker County, Minnesota
- 1608: St. Thomas Garnet, protomartyr of Stonyhurst
- 1954: George Robertson, the last hanged in Edinburgh
- 1786: David Nelson, but not William Horbord
- 1989: Sean Patrick Flanagan, self-hating gay man
- 1592: Roger Ashton
- Unspecified Year: Justine Moritz, Frankenstein family servant