Devilish cop who snared a serial killer

Detective who caught France's most notorious murderer reveals his secrets.

In the duel between a small-town cop and France's most dangerous serial killer, the advantage appeared heavily in favour of Francis Heaulme, the criminal known as the 'man from nowhere', who may have killed up to 50 men, women and children.

Heaulme left few ordinary clues during a career of crime spread across the country in a haphazard and unconnected pattern. Faced with a master of ingenious alibis and innate resistance to interrogation, all his gendarmerie opponent could count on was instinct, but it was exploited with such skill that defence lawyers labelled the policeman 'that devil Jean-François Abgrall' when their client was jailed for life.

Because the hunt for Heaulme was a psychological battle spread over three years, Abgrall has titled his book on the cornering of the murderer, Dans la Tête d'un Tueur - In the Head of a Killer - an account with echoes of Dostoevsky.

Heaulme, now serving six sentences for murder and awaiting trial for six other killings, is a familiar figure on French television. In earlier trials, his tall thin figure - he measures 6ft 3in - his big glasses and his intellectual face gave the impression of an absent-minded professor but an appearance in court this year showed a man of 43, bent and old before his time.

Abgrall, a compact, dark-haired man of the shadows, has only age in common with his criminal opponent, and yet the methodical, self-driven investigator became Heaulme's confidant, the repository for obscure and elliptical confessions that often began: 'Jean-Francois, I know that you know...'.

In talking about the hunt, Abgrall makes no secret of the fact that he upset traditional gendarmerie teamwork, creating a chill that led to his resigning two years ago and setting up as a private detective specialising in psychological profiles.

Except to speculate that a similarity in names - Francis and François - encouraged an intimacy between criminal and detective, he offers no explanation why Heaulme, should lead his opponent along a meandering cryptic trail that led to a life in prison.

The men met in the gendarmerie at Saint-Clair-sur-l'Elle in Normandy in 1989 when Abgrall was investigating the murder of a woman in Brest. Heaulme had an apparently unbreakable alibi. At the time of the murder, a nurse in a hospital 50 miles away, where he was being treated, had noted down his temperature.

'As soon as I saw this man, I detected a dangerous and violent character,' Abgrall said. 'He talked in a staccato and random way about his sexual impulses towards women, about how to kill a sentry. After hours of questioning I was convinced he was the murderer. The watertight alibi? I discovered that if a patient was absent, nurses noted down the temperature of the thermometer on the bedside table.'

Nearly three years later Heaulme was charged with the murder of the woman in Brest. By then, Abgrall had alerted other police forces and had enough information to believe that Heaulme was involved in dozens of crimes, sometimes with accomplices. Some police forces took action, others shelved his reports. Heaulme's true catalogue of crime will probably never be known.

To Abgrall, Heaulme was unique because of his conflicting desires to talk and shut up, before suddenly describing violent events that he had supposedly witnessed. 'We realised he was talking about crimes we did not even know had been committed. He was allowed to lead us into his world at his own pace.'

Heaulme never spoke of murders. He referred to 'pépins' - bothersome details, before noting days between 1986 and 1991 when the 'pépins' coincided with killings he had supposedly witnessed. 'He gave the impression that he was an accidental observer of events in which women were beaten to death or children repeatedly stabbed,' Abgrall said.

The crimes often had a sexual motive which Heaulme refused to discuss, and most involved extreme violence - in one case his victim was stabbed 84 times.

'He had no criminal record and was scrupulous in ensuring he was seen to be living within the law. He often took refuge in hospitals - 85 times in five years.' In psychiatric hospitals, he admitted murders but the confessions were covered by medical secrecy.

Abgrall, who once claimed that Heaulme was involved in at least 50 murders, said he was not allowed to discuss the estimate for legal reasons but he could not forget Heaulme's chilling remark that 'every time I visited somewhere there was a pépin '. So far, the former policeman has identified 400 towns and villages where Heaulme stayed.