Thierry Paulin was born in Fort-de-France, Martinique, on November 28, 1963, and brought to France as a child. He served briefly in the army, worked as a waiter and a nightclub performer, and lived expensively on cocaine and clothes in Paris in the mid-1980s.
Between October 1984 and 1987 he attacked elderly women in the eighteenth arrondissement and around Montmartre, following them home from shops, forcing his way in behind them, and beating, suffocating or strangling them for whatever cash and jewellery was in the flat. The sums were often tiny. For part of the run he worked with his boyfriend Jean-Thierry Mathurin.
Paris had a serious panic about it. Elderly women stopped going out, and the press called him the Monster of Montmartre. The police had a description that was widely disbelieved because it did not fit the assumptions being made about who commits such crimes.
He was arrested on December 1, 1987, after a woman he attacked survived and identified him. He confessed to twenty-one murders. He was diagnosed with AIDS in prison and died at the Fresnes prison hospital on April 16, 1989, aged twenty-five, before any trial. Mathurin was tried in 1991 and convicted of participation in several of the killings.