Nicholas Claux aka the Vampire of Paris is one of those poster-cases for shows you see on TV about troubled people, however I had a hard time placing this article in a specific series because the myth was created by Nico himself via the testimony he gave the police and via a website created once he was let out of prison.
I have therefor decided to post this under both Vampiric Murderers and Media Sensations

Name: Nicolas Claux Born – 1972 / Died – **** Number of victims: 1

So let us begin with the little we know for sure…
Born in 1972 in Cameroon to parents that had little time to mind him, he ended up moving around a lot while in his formative years and as he grew he became more and more distant towards his family.
He eventually settled in Paris where, as a teen, he would become more and more morbid. His spending time in the cemeteries escalated to grave vandalism and he eventually got a job at a mortuary, presumably to be able to spend more time the presence of fresh corpses thus being able to fulfill several of his darker fantasies.

While he was sentenced to 12years of prison for only 1 murder, it was believed that he was responsible for at least 6 others, however he was never successfully linked to the rest by the police. The string of murders [believed at the time to have connection with the homosexual community of Paris] was the tip of the iceberg in a case.

Perhaps the best way to describe his living accommodations is to insert a fragment from his statement to the police from the day of his arrest on the 15th of October 1994, one week after the murder of Thierry Bissonnier.
Keeping in mind that this fragment of his statement has been polished, consider that Claux said: “With little hesitation on my part, I informed them that I had been robbing the graves of several Parisian gothic graveyards and mutilating the mummified remains. When asked the reason why I was storing stolen blood bags inside my refrigerator, I simply answered that I drank the blood on a regular basis. Working as a mortuary assistant for 10 months, I had been using my position as a means to fulfill a lifelong fantasy of mine revolving around cannibalism. When left alone to stitch the bodies after the autopsies, I would cut strips of meat from the ribs and eat them. On some occasions, I would bring pieces of flesh back to my place, where I would cook and eat those pieces as well.”

With respect to his fascination with death, Nico claimed that it all started with the death of his grandfather, when he was 10 years old. Apparently that is when his fascination for burial rites, wakes and morgues started.
Not long after, at age 16, he started to spend more and more time in cemeteries and ended up breaking into mausoleums from various gothic cemeteries all across Paris.
When he was 19 he enrolled in the military and tried to sort himself out, however he failed to bury his urges and ended up looking for a job that would enable him to pursue his fantasies as opposed to sublimate them.
Thus, at 20 he was hired as an assistant mortician and he started to carve up parts of the bodies that he was charged to prepare for the funeral rites. Another task was that of delivering blood bags to various hospitals and he devised a way to keep some for himself for later consumption – apparently he would mix the cooled blood with protein powder and/or human ashes.

In Nico`s mind the next logical step in his death fantasy was to get his hands on a corpse as fresh as possible and the only was to achieve that was to kill someone himself. On the morning of October the 4th 1994 he went on Minitel [early-days internet chat] and engaged in talks about BDSM with various people.
Fate would have it that he managed to arrange a meeting for that very day – with a 34year old man by the name of Thierry Bissonnier. Around noon he arrived at his apartment and shot him several times in the head, ending it all with a shot through the heart while the young man lay on the floor bleeding out – he did not consume any of his flesh or blood, he simply left the scene.
Several days would pass before Thierry was discovered by his parents. The murder might have gone unsolved if Nico didn`t try to use a modified version of his victim`s ID in order to make a purchase with one of the stolen checks. He was arrested near the iconic Moulin Rouge.

Deemed as fit to stand trial he was convicted to 12years after being found guilty of premeditated murder, armed robbery, fraudulent use of a bank check, falsification of his drivers license photo, and an attempt to defraud the retailer of the video camera – as you can see, there is no mention of more victims, cannibalism, vampirism, corpse mutilation or blood stealing.
He would be released after serving only 7 years and he reinvented himself as an artist that specializes in portraits of serial killers and more morbid themes.

Kindly note that this article was not written with an intent to dive into extreme details as I believe that maintaining a respectful attitude towards the victims is more important than anything in this series of articles. Rest in peace, Thierry!

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† Vampiric Murderers