Three decades after his arrest, Nico Clos, known as the "Vampire of Paris," has spoken openly about how his obsession with human flesh began, a story that shocked France in the early 1990s.
Clos, then 22, was arrested in Paris for the murder of 34-year-old Thierry Bissonnier. Police officers who searched his apartment found a gruesome sight: human bones and teeth scattered on the floor, bone fragments hanging from the ceiling, jars of human ashes on the television and bags of blood in the refrigerator.
He confessed to the crime and revealed that he had robbed graves to collect remains while working in a morgue to gain access to human bodies. He admitted to cutting small pieces of flesh from the corpses and eating them, first raw and later cooked in various ways. Cloe was sentenced to 12 years in prison, but was released in 2002 after serving seven years. He is now free and has written a cookbook, “The Cannibal Cookbook,” and runs a website that sells “collectibles inspired by notorious killers.”
In a recent interview on the podcast “Anything Goes” with James English, Cloe described how the horror began. “I was 12 years old when I saw a magazine with pictures of a cannibalistic crime. Those images left their mark on me. Ever since then I’ve had psychopathic fantasies, thinking about tearing flesh with my teeth,” he confessed. He said that at the age of 17 he developed a “blood fetish” and when he got a job in a morgue he discovered how easy it was to be alone with bodies. “When I started working there, I realized that when I was alone in the autopsy, I could cut off small pieces of flesh and eat them. At first, raw, then I would take them home and cook them,” he further revealed.
He also admitted to stealing blood bags from the hospital where he worked part-time, using fake stickers to make it look like they had been used: “I was getting two or three bags of blood a week for about six months.” As he put it, the act wasn’t about the taste, but about the “tension and adrenaline” it gave him. The “Vampire of Paris” remains one of the most shocking examples of cannibalism in modern Europe./TAR