Vampire of Paris: The story of Nico Claux
Exploring His Kingdom
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Nico Claux said that over time, simply lurking in graveyards and breaking into mausoleums was not enough to satisfy his desires. His fantasies became sadistic blueprints — tools for fulfilling his new cravings. Whether this change began at this point or years earlier is a matter of speculation, but it is clear that he believed that he had stepped up to an entirely new level.
Within this chapter, the subsequent narrations have been translated from one of many statements that Nico said that he eventually gave to Parisian authorities while in custody.
“I woke up one day feeling this sinister urge to dig up a corpse and mutilate it. I gathered a small crowbar, a pair of pliers, a screwdriver, black candles and a pair of surgical gloves in a backpack. Then I took the subway until the Trocadero station. It was nearly noon. The gates of the Passy Cemetery were wide open, but nobody was inside. The undertakers were out for lunch.
"Passy is a small Gothic graveyard with plenty of huge mausoleums, which were built during the 19th century. It is located right between two large avenues, so it is impossible to climb inside at night. But anyway, nobody could ever imagine that there was someone robbing graves at noon.
“I had this special grave in mind. It was a small mausoleum, the burial site of a family of Russian immigrants from the 1917 revolution. I had already pried open the iron door a few days before, and I had closed it afterwards so it would seem that nobody had ever touched it. All I had to do was kick it open ... At this point, my mind was in total chaos. I had flashes of death in my head. I took a deep breath, and I climbed down the steps leading to the crypt.
"It was a rather small one, with damp walls, buried deep inside the cemetery ground. There was no other source of light than the candles I had brought. To begin, for more than an hour, I removed one of the heavy coffins from its stone casing. It was especially hard not to let the coffin fall all of sudden to the ground, but somehow I managed to slowly lay it down without making too much noise. However, one edge of the coffin scratched my lower leg when it touched the ground. But that didn't stop me at all.
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“I examined the casket for a while. It was solid oak and sealed with big screws. It looked like brand new, so I expected to find a recently deceased corpse. First, I unscrewed the coffin, which took me less than 10 minutes. Then I pried it open with the crowbar. Once opened, a horrible stench of putrefaction came out of the box. It smelled like Thanatyl, the product embalmers use on a corpse in order to delay the process of decay.
"Then I saw the body inside. It was a half rotten old woman, shrouded in a white sheet, covered with brown stains. Her face seemed to be smeared with oil, but it was simply the death fluids oozing from her skin. The stench was so intense that I nearly fainted. I tried to lift one side of the sheet, but it was glued to her petrified skin. The teeth were protruding from the mouth, but her eyes were gone. I stared into the empty eye sockets, and all of a sudden something broke into my mind. I felt like I was falling into a whirlwind.
"That's when I picked up a screwdriver. The corpse inside the coffin started to move slightly, like if it had guessed what would happen next. So I began to stab the belly, the rib area and the shoulders. I stabbed her at least 50 times. I really can't remember. All I can remember is that when I woke up my forearms were covered with corpse slime.”
After violating his first grave, Nico said that he spent the much of his free time searching the cemetery for new graves to desecrate. This is a pattern he said would continue up until the time of his arrest.
