Who is Daniel Zagury, the psychiatrist who has examined the worst serial killers?

He is recognizable by his graying mustache that falls on a thoughtful pout. Daniel Zagury’s face is little known to the general public. However, he is a star of the courts, a psychiatrist renowned for his expertise on serial killers. What excites him? Thinking the unthinkable, giving meaning to the senseless, breaking out of the dialectic of monsters and normality.

In Unsuspected, series in four episodes broadcast on France 2, Daniel Zagury takes on a perilous exercise: drawing up the psychological profile of the Pockmarked Man, without being able to meet this extraordinary serial killer who killed himself in September 2021.

François Vérove, his real name, left a farewell letter in which he admitted to having been active until 1997. For 35 years he escaped justicecontinuing his life as a gendarme and then as a police officer, even getting involved in the municipal council of his last town of residence.

“The Grêlé affair is unique in its scale and its darkness,” says Daniel Zagury in his introduction. However, he warns: “I’m not interested in sensationalism. I want to answer this riddle: what drives some men to commit such terrible acts?” A question that has guided his work since the beginning of his career.

Patrice Alègre, Guy Georges and Michel Fourniret

Daniel Zagury, 74, has dedicated his life to understanding the psychology of evil. Starting with the worst serial killers. First Guy Georges, the killer of East Paris, in prison since 2001.

Patrice Alègre, sentenced to life in prison in 2002, will follow, then Michel Fourniret, now deceased. The latter’s ex-wife, Monique Olivier, was sentenced to life in prison in November 2023 for her complicity in three murders.

“It’s a criminal love story, a very strong bond,” the psychiatrist said at the time on RTL about the Fourniret-Olivier couple. The French did not want to accept the idea that a woman could engage in such perverse behavior in association with her husband. There is something that shocks us almost even more when it comes to a woman and at the time a future mother who uses such perverse subterfuges.”

It is the duality of these personalities that Daniel Zagury tries to understand. Like François Vérove, serial killers have the appearance of “Mr. Everyman”. Unsuspected. How can we explain this dual personality that seems to be common to the worst criminals?

“The mystery of serial killers”

In 2008, Daniel Zagury provided some avenues for reflection in his work The mystery of serial killers (Plon). One of them concerns the “cleavage” that he observes among these criminals: “This is precisely what fascinates the general public, he explains in The Hour of Crimewith someone who has a seemingly adapted, seemingly pseudo-normal life, and at the same time commits terrible acts.”

In this interview, the psychiatrist takes the example of Grêlé. In 2019, François Vérove was a candidate on a TV game show on France 2. “He is comfortable, he is like us, and when we are in front of him, we can only say to ourselves: How is it possible that this man could have committed these acts?”

The cleavage is a survival mechanism put in place by the brain, most often to assimilate a trauma. “In the case of serial killers, for example, in the vast majority of cases, you have childhoods marked by deprivation, abuse, mistreatment… sometimes even torture, so childhoods very, very marked in the register of lack of love”, summarizes Daniel Zagury.

Expertise without absolutes

However, Daniel Zagury does not claim to have an absolute answer to the enigma. “It really annoys me when people say ‘the experts didn’t help us understand’,” he confided to Justine Vignaux, “maybe we can’t give a simplistic, rudimentary explanation, ‘he killed or she killed for such and such a reason’, which would be simple, This is what I call the quest for the guilty cause. We are all happy, we believe we have the ultimate explanation of a complex phenomenon. So that, yes, it is true, that, we cannot formulate it. Or if we formulate it, we will say stupid things.”

“From there, the insights we can provide are a little bit more complex than something that can be summed up in a sentence or twoespecially since the logic of the unconscious can make opposites coexist, he continues. If I tell you ‘he killed out of love and hate’, you’re going to tell me ‘he’s talking nonsense’. (…) And yet, for the unconscious, the two can coexist. That’s it.”

A reflection that Daniel Zagury pursues in the four episodes of the series Unsuspected on the Grêlé routeand which led him to take an interest in other types of criminals. In 2018, he published The barbarity of ordinary men. These criminals who could be us (L’Observatoire), and has also distinguished himself in several cases, other than serial crimes. Among them, the Fabienne Kabou case, whose trial was adapted for the cinema by Alice Diop, or the Cahuzac case, for which he was called to the bar to decipher the lies of the former minister accused of tax fraud.

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