The Typewriter and the Last Guillotine: The True Crime Story of Eugen Weidmann, France's Most Notorious Serial Killer and the Last Man Publicly Executed by Guillotine

She arrived in Paris on a Tuesday with a new camera and a letter to write home. By Saturday she was dead. Jean de Koven was twenty-two years old, a ballet student from Brooklyn, when she met a charming German man who called himself Siegfried and invited her to visit his villa near a Napoleonic mansion. She photographed him while she still believed the afternoon was pleasant. The developed images, found months later beside her buried body, showed the face of her killer staring calmly into the lens. His name was Eugen Weidmann. And Jean de Koven was only the beginning. Over five months in 1937, Weidmann lured six trusting people to their deaths across France, shooting each victim in the back of the neck, stripping them of their money, and burying their bodies in garden graves, forest caves, and cellar floors. A chauffeur on a country road. A nurse promised a job who walked into an ancient forest instead. A young theatrical producer who thought he was meeting investors. A Jewish man who had survived the Nazis only to be murdered by someone he called a friend. He was caught because of a business card. His trial in March 1939 drew novelist Colette, celebrity lawyers, and journalists from across the world. His execution on June 17, 1939 drew thousands of screaming spectators to the streets of Versailles before dawn, so many and so unruly, so hungry for the spectacle of death, that the French government abolished public execution forever within days. A seventeen-year-old Christopher Lee stood in that crowd. He turned his head away. But he heard. Eugen Weidmann became the last person publicly guillotined in France. Three months later, the Second World War began. The Last Guillotine is the definitive true crime account of six victims, one killer, and the night a civilization looked into its own darkness and decided it could no longer watch. Read more