World of Criminal Justice on Gilles de Rais, Baron
After six centuries, the story of Baron Gilles de Rais rivals those of even the most prolific modern serial killers. Once the wealthiest man in Europe, a war hero, and a marshal of France, the baron was widely admired and his lavish parties always attended in the early fifteenth century. But privately, his sadism knew no bounds. Only his accomplices and victims knew that de Rais had tortured, raped, and killed anywhere from 150 to 800 children, keeping their corpses in his castle towers. In 1440, his confession revealed how a man with money, power, and constant leisure was able to spend nearly a decade devoted to evil.
Born in 1404 in Chaptoce, France, de Rais had a childhood of loneliness and rare privilege. As the heir to a line of medieval knights, he was raised in luxury at a time of general deprivation when France and England fought the remaining battles of the Hundred Years War. His father died when he was nine, and his mother abandoned him and his brother, who were raised by a cold grandfather. At sixteen, intelligent and well-educated, de Rais married into even more wealth. Then the death of his grandfather brought him a vast inheritance.
Military success came at the age of 24. He fought beside Joan of Arc as one of her guards in two celebrated defeats of the English in 1429, and then won another important victory. After King Charles VII honored his efforts by making him a Marshal of France, de Rais was a national hero. Still in his mid-twenties, he had money, castles, prestige, and total freedom. He had a more luxurious home than even the king, spent money freely on parties and the arts, and kept a private retinue of 200 knights. He was a model nobleman.
But he also loved to sodomize and murder children. De Rais had his accomplices lure boys and girls to the castle,or else kidnap them from the homes and fields of the peasants. Torture, then rape, murder, and disembowelment or beheading, would follow. His sexual depredations included necrophilia and mutilating corpses, numbers of which were kept in rotting heaps.
De Rais' evil might have continued longer had he not been too loose with his money. As his excessive lifestyle gradually depleted his treasury, he sold off large pieces of his property until his family intervened. Under royal edict from the king to sell no more, de Rais desperately resorted to hiring magicians who promised to conjure gold. When the magicians failed, he turned to Satanism, and some of his young victims died as sacrifices in his hope of summoning demonic financial advisors.
Historical uncertainty surrounds the baron's downfall. One theory holds that a rival, the Duke of Brittany, wanted his lands, and therefore engineered his arrest and indictment in September of 1440. Another theory doubts the accuracy of his confession because he was threatened with torture. Nonetheless, taken before both religious and civil courts, he confessed in graphically lurid detail. He and his accomplices were publically executed on October 26, 1440.
This is the complete article, containing 504 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
