Vampire cannibal killer 'drank blood and ate flesh in morgue' before murder

Nico Claux is an artist and YouTuber whose channel, packed with true crime and “graveyard exploration” content, boasts nearly 7,000 subscribers.

He is also a convicted killer and self-described cannibal, necrophiliac and Satan-worshipper perhaps more widely recognised as the “Vampire of Paris”.

It was winter 1994 in the French capital, and officers had observed a marked increase in the number of gay men being killed in the City of Love.

That October, they had documented seven distinct cases, prompting detectives to suspect they were confronting a sadistic serial murderer.

Amongst these killings was that of Thierry Bissonnier, a 34 year old classical musician and restaurant owner, reports the Daily Star.

The duo met online and Bissonnier welcomed Claux to his residence. Once inside, Claux repeatedly discharged a 22-calibre handgun at Bissonnier and “watched him bleed on the carpet.”

Officers arrested Claux, 22, outside the renowned Moulin Rouge a month afterwards, following his attempt to buy a video recorder using Bissonnier’s stolen and forged bank cheques.

Examining Claux’s residence, French officers were appalled. Within they discovered bone fragments, which Claux subsequently claimed to have removed from local graveyards, bags of blood he had stolen from the hospital where he was employed and violent S&M publications.

Claux admitted to officers that since the age of 10, when he witnessed his grandfather abruptly die during a row, he had been tormented by fantasies of death, cannibalism and necrophilia.

He claimed to have murdered Bissonnier with the sole purpose of taking portions of his body home to prepare and consume.

Even more alarmingly, he informed police that cannibalism was nothing new to him. He revealed he began breaking into graveyards at around the age of 16, where he would desecrate and mutilate corpses.

At around 20, he managed to secure employment as a morgue attendant.

He said: “I would be left alone with the body after the autopsy to do the stitches, which were my specialty. This is when I began eating strips of muscles from the bodies.

“I always checked out their medical files first. I talked with a butcher once who told me that meat is better three or four days after death. This was something I had always dreamed of doing, and it was the opportunity to do it on a regular basis.

“Sometimes I brought select meats home with me to be cooked, but my preference was to eat them raw. It tasted like tartar steak, or carpaccio.

“The big muscles of the thighs and back were good.”

He further claimed to have exploited his access as a morgue worker to steal bags of blood, which he would take home to consume.

Claux was convicted on a single count of murder, yet received a sentence of only 12 years due to his “diminished responsibility”.

Following his release in 2002, he published a book entitled The Cannibal Cookbook and featured on the podcast Anything Goes with James English, whose host, 42-year-old James English, was recently accused of “attacking” his pregnant ex-girlfriend. Claux told English consuming human flesh was not about the flavour, but rather the “rush, the sensation.”

He added: “It was keeping me constantly on a high, aroused. The goal was not just murder for the sake of murder. It was to get the meat. Because I had already been eating small strips of meat in the morgue and I had developed this craving.

“I wanted to kill to harvest the meat to get the meat home.”

Nevertheless, police highlight that no evidence suggesting Claux had attempted to cannibalise Bissonnier was ever uncovered, nor was he convicted of grave robbing, as he maintains.

The sadistic killer has since faced accusations of exaggerating his own crimes for notoriety and attention.