French police have detained a 68-year-old retired drag queen performer on suspicion over the murders of 18 mainly gay men over three decades. Detained on Tuesday at his home in the eastern French city of Mulhouse, the man was being held in nearby Montbeliard along with a male former lover who is a suspected accomplice, prosecutors said. The suspect worked as a drag performer in a string of cabarets in eastern France and over the border in Germany until he retired in 1992, according to sources close to the investigation. The suspected accomplice, a 43-year-old Tunisian man serving a jail term for the murder of a gay insurance agent in 1999, is his former lover, the sources said. The Tunisian has been moved from a Paris jail to Montbeliard for new questioning, deputy state prosecutor Jean-Marc Gervason said in a statement. Most of the murders took place in the eastern French regions of Alsace and Franche-Comte, although three were in the Paris area. The 18 murders were committed between 1980 and 2000 but Gervason said the current investigation concerned only six of the killings, which took place between 1983 and 2000. He said it was "too soon, at this stage" to speak of a serial killer case. Of the six victims currently under investigation, one was a woman prostitute and five were men - one had a disability and another was a barman. Both men deny the accusations, and the prosecution says it has "no formal proof" of their guilt at this stage. Neighbours in the block of flats in Mulhouse, where the suspect lived with his dog, said they were shocked by his arrest. "He was such a nice man - and now we learn he might be a serial killer," said one. Another said he used to "reach out to people and talk to them". L'Alsace newspaper said the arrest followed a two-year investigation by a Montbeliard police officer, who spotted the man's name in database files relating to a string of unsolved murders and traced a connection. The victims were all killed by a violent blow to the head, followed by multiple stabbings. Each time the bodies were found partly naked, but the victims' faces were covered up. Several other people connected to the two main suspects are also being questioned.
Credit: GayNZ.com News Staff
First published: Thursday, 29th November 2007 - 9:50am