Nicolas Claux, the French murderer dubbed the “Paris Vampire,” was once imprisoned for murder. Years after his release, he has again drawn global attention with his disturbing statements. Recently, he gave a rare interview, for the first time fully revealing how he became fascinated with death as a child, secretly ate corpse flesh in morgues, and eventually went down the path of murder and cannibalism. His horrifying accounts have once again shocked French society.
Now 53, Claux was arrested in the 1990s for murder and cannibalism, receiving a 12-year prison sentence in 1997. He ultimately served just over 7 years before being released.
In a recent appearance on the YouTube show Anything Goes With James English, Claux revealed that his abnormal obsession began when his grandfather died in an accident when he was 10. At 12, after reading about Japanese cannibal Issei Sagawa’s dismemberment and cannibalism case in Paris, he began to fantasize about eating human flesh. In 1981, Sagawa murdered a Dutch woman in Paris and ate parts of her body.
As a result, when he grew up he deliberately sought out work that would give him access to morgues. Claux said that when left alone in the autopsy room, he would secretly cut small pieces of flesh from corpses to eat raw, and later even brought them home to cook.
In 1997, after meeting a Parisian man online, he lured the man to his apartment and shot him, intending to dismember and eat him. However, before he could carry out his plan, he was arrested for attempting to purchase a video camera with a forged check belonging to one of his victims. He was eventually sentenced to 12 years in prison. At the time, police found blood-stained items, blood bags, a human fetus, and an altar made of skulls at his residence.
Over the years, whenever Claux was asked what human flesh tastes like, he would only say, “like horse meat.” However, he emphasized: “The taste isn’t the point. What really drove me was the ever-emerging urge and thrill.”
Perhaps most disturbingly, after his release, he continued to use forged documents to work in various morgues across France for 13 years, and has published several books describing how he “manages his impulses.”