Nicolas Claux, known as the “Vampire of Paris,” spoke about his obsession with human flesh three decades after his arrest. This is a story that shocked France in the early 1990s.
The “Vampire of Paris” who ate human flesh
The then 22-year-old Claux was arrested in Paris for the murder of 34-year-old Thierry Bissonnet. Police officers who searched his apartment were confronted with a horrific scene: bones and human teeth scattered on the floor, bone fragments hanging from the ceiling, jars with human ashes on top of the television, and bags of blood inside the refrigerator.
He confessed to the crime and revealed that he had robbed graves to collect corpse remains, while working at a morgue to gain access to human bodies. He admitted to cutting small pieces of flesh from the corpses and eating them, initially raw and later cooked in various ways.
Claux was sentenced to 12 years in prison but was released in 2002, after seven years. Today he lives freely and has written the book “The Cannibal Cookbook,” while maintaining a website where he sells “collectible items inspired by notorious murderers.”
The confession of a cannibal
In a recent interview on the podcast “Anything Goes with James English,” the now 54-year-old Claux described how the horror began: “I was 12 years old when I saw a magazine with photos from a cannibalism crime. Those images marked me. From then on I had psychopathic fantasies, I thought about tearing flesh with my teeth.”
As he said, at 17 he developed a “fetish for blood,” and when he found work at a morgue he discovered how easy it was to be left alone with the corpses. “When I started working there, I realized that I could, when I was alone in the morgues, cut small strips of flesh and eat them. At first raw, then I would take them home and cook them.”
At the same time, he admitted to stealing blood bags from the hospital where he worked part-time, using fake stickers to make it appear they had been used: “I took two or three bags a week for about six months.”
As he said, the act was not about taste, but about “the intensity, the adrenaline” it caused him.
The “Vampire of Paris” remains one of the most shocking examples of cannibalism in modern Europe, as the case revealed extreme psychopathic behavior hidden behind the mask of a quiet young morgue employee.
