The Papin Sisters: The Shocking 1933 Murder Case That Horrified France

The Papin Sisters: The Shocking 1933 Murder Case That Horrified France

Christine Papin and Léa were two French maids who murdered their employer's wife and daughter. They beat them to the point of being unrecognisable.

The daughter's eyes was found on the floor near her. Madame Lancelin's eyes were gouged out and found in the folds of the scarf around her neck. The two maids were found in their room in bed together and confessed to killing the two women. The weapons used were a kitchen knife, a hammer and a pewter pot. They were sisters, maids, murders and lovers. They were upset because their intimate relationship had been discovered.

Their employer had plans to separate them by finding new employment for one of the sisters.

This is how the story Goes

On February 2, 1933, Christine and Léa Papin committed a gruesome crime. But were they motivated by madness, blood lust, or class warfare? To this day, we still don’t know—it’s just one of the many questions about this perplexing case that has gone unanswered for nearly a century.

Born into a dysfunctional, working-class family, the Papin sisters were raised by aunts, uncles, and a Catholic orphanage. Christine had wanted to become a nun, just like the girls’ older sister, Emilia, but their mother forbade it. Instead, both Christine (born in 1905) and Léa (born in 1911) took up employment as “the help” for wealthier families.

In 1926, the two sisters, who preferred to work together, took live-in positions as maids for René Lancelin, a retired solicitor who lived in Le Mans, France with his wife Léonie and their adult daughter Genevieve.

By all outward appearances, things were going well. The sisters ate the same food as the rest of the family, lived in heated rooms, and were paid the standard wage of the time. Christine in particular was praised for her cooking and needlework.

What wasn’t so apparent was that the sisters worked 14-hour days, with only one half-day off each week, and that Léonie Lancelin was a demanding mistress, who often performed “white glove tests” throughout the house and chastised the two maids severely for any perceived failings.

On the night of February 2, 1933, the Lancelins were supposed to meet for dinner at the home of a family friend, and weren’t expected back at the house until late. Léonie and Genevieve had been out shopping, and when they returned home before dinner to find the house dark, the mistress of the house was not pleased.

According to Christine and Léa Papin, the power had gone out when Christine plugged in a faulty iron. Since the family wasn’t expected home until late, the sisters had decided to wait until the following morning to have the iron repaired.

The sisters later testified that when they told Léonie about what happened, she flew into a rage and attacked them on the landing of the stairs. At first, the two sisters were just defending themselves, especially when Genevieve joined in the fray. Or so they said. But their ire quickly went far beyond self-defense.

The two sisters gouged out the eyes of their employers and, once the women were blinded and unable to fight back, beat them with a pewter pitcher and a hammer, then stabbed them with a knife taken from the kitchen. Observers of the crime scene later noted that it appeared as though the women’s bodies had been scored like the loaves of bread that Christine prepared each day.

Once they were done, they locked all the doors in the house and went up to their room, taking only a candle for light. That evening, when his wife and daughter didn’t arrive at dinner as planned, René Lancelin became concerned. Returning home and finding the house dark and all the doors locked, he fetched the police.

The police climbed over a garden wall to access the house, where they found the gruesome crime scene. Both women had been beaten and mutilated to the point that they were almost impossible to recognize. Léonie’s eyes were found in the folds of the scarf around her neck; one of her daughter’s eyes was found underneath her body, the other on the stairs.

When the police broke open the door to the sisters’ room, they expected to find Christine and Léa in a similar state. Instead, they found them huddled together in bed, naked. A candle was burning and there was a hammer on a nearby chair, with blood and bits of hair still clinging to it. Upon being questioned by the police, the sisters immediately confessed.

The story of the gruesome murder caused a firestorm in the media. Psychologists came to the defense of the women, arguing both that the two sisters were suffering from folie à deux, otherwise known as shared psychosis or shared delusional disorder. Meanwhile, notable French thinkers declared that the attack was a manifestation of class warfare, the inevitable result of the mistreatment and exploitation of the working class by the wealthy.

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