April 12

Henri Désiré Landru was born on the 12th in 1869. He was a man on a mission, a mission that he pursued with remarkable vigor. It is unfortunate that the mission consisted of defrauding young women, stealing their money, and then indiscriminately killing them. While his body count does not really hold up when compared to other serial killers, he had his routine down pat. He used a number of aliases when approaching young ladies so that his identity would be shielded. When someone is engaged in a project such as the one that Henri was in, it pays to be as consistent in your behavior as possible. In order to keep track of just who he was on a given day Henri began to keep a rather large ledger of the aliases he had and was using. The final body count was 10 women and a son of one of the victims. However, I think the size of the ledger that he maintained might indicate a rather higher body count. Compared to fellow resident of France, Hélène Jegado, Landru was a rank amateur. Between 1833 and 1851, she murdered 23 people and is suspected in the deaths of at least 13 others.