Pierre Bodein
French criminal
Pierre Fernand Bodein (born December 30, 1947, in Obernai) is a French criminal and spree killer who, since 1969, has alternated stays between psychiatric hospitals and prisons. Nicknamed "Pierrot le fou" meaning "Pierre the madman", his criminal record includes seven convictions, three of which are murders, including violent rapes. He is the 11th child of a family of 16 children, descending from a Yenish community.
Crimes
After his first prison term, served in 1969, Bodein, a member of a family of "basket makers" (names for travelers settled in Alsace) would have many other stays in prisons, including for robbery, theft and sexual assault. In 1976, due to his health state he was deemed "incompatible for detention". A psychiatric director at the time, Michel Patris, said this about him: "He was in a vegetative state, frozen, shutting himself in silence." Bodein swallowed his excrements, and was now moved in a wheelchair. Released in 1980, he resumed his robberies. He was re-arrested in 1989, and was again considered crazy. According to psychiatrist Henri Brunner, "all psychiatric experts on that date considered Bodein crazy, myself included."
In December 1992, he left his wheelchair to escape through a skylight of the psychiatric hospital in Erstein, which had remained open. In a span of three days, he took two women hostage, before sequestering and raping one of them, robbing a bank and armory afterwards.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pierre Bodein” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.