![]() Co-director Patricia Tourancheau was a journalist who followed this serial killer case as it played out, death by grisly death, in the 1990s in Paris, and her insights and knowledge make this riveting at times. The Women and the Murderer is a well-paced procedural that lays emphasis on the role that passionate and smart women played in cracking a case about attacks on women. The epilogue is a remarkable account and moving description of a mother's compassion for the man who killed her daughter. Bloody toe prints at one crime scene are misleading. Investigators follow mistaken leads: The police sketch isn't an exact representation of the killer's face. The man is now 58, serving a life sentence. Despite confessing to the crimes, he pleads innocent at trial. We finally learn that the perp, deemed a "narcissistic psychopath" by psychiatrists, was in and out of French prisons for a variety of assaults against women by the time he began his killing spree in 1991. The low expectations the public had of women in France, even in the 1990s, is a subtopic here, and underscores the brutal attacks that the killer perpetrated solely on female victims. The plea is "not guilty," despite his detailed confession to police. The male-female dynamic plays out further as the murderer nears trial and his male attorney invites a woman to be co-counsel, a calculatedly good look for the defense team of a serial rapist-killer. Like Chief Monteil, she toiled in a male-dominated field, working hard to be taken seriously by colleagues and the world. Equally intrigued by the case was reporter Patricia Tourancheau, a co-director on the film. Martine Monteil, one of the only women on France's most elite police team, the Serious Crime Unit, is chief of that storied unit now as she recounts the arduous and frustrating process of finding the killer before he harmed more innocent women. Gautier, interviewed recently and seen in many clips from the 1990s, launched her own tireless investigation, canvassing neighborhoods, interviewing witnesses, and trying to put the pieces together, all the while pressuring the police to do more to spare other, future families the agony of Gautier's loss. Anne Gautier's daughter Helen was raped and murdered in 1995, but the Paris police seemed to be getting nowhere. THE WOMEN AND THE MURDERER focuses on a few women whose dogged attention helped bring France's first serial killer to justice. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails. Female journalists and police officers deal with sexism in the workplace. Language includes "s-t," "scumbag," "piss," and "damn," and "vaginal swabs" and "sperm" are mentioned with respect to collected evidence. Only black-and-white crime scene photos are shown, minimizing the horror to some degree, but verbal descriptions make clear that atrocities were committed. Given the nature of the violent crimes, the material is unsuitable for kids. His capture and conviction helped overcome public resistance to establishing a DNA database that, once formed in 1998, would help to resolve hundreds of other crime cases. ![]() Parents need to know that The Women and the Murderer is a 2021 French documentary (in French with English subtitles) about France's first serial killer, who raped, tortured, and murdered at least seven women over a decade and assaulted a dozen others. ![]()
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