Overview

The Sadist of Romont: Michel Peiry On May 1, 1987, Swiss police arrested Michel Peiry, a charming, community-minded young man from the small Catholic town of Romont in the canton of Fribourg. Behind his agreeable social surface lay the most prolific serial killer in post-war Swiss history, a man whose decade of predatory violence had claimed at least ten lives across five countries, from the sun-scorched highways of Florida to the Alpine isolation of the Valais. The Sadist of Romont is the definitive account of Michel Peiry's crimes, his psychology, and the seismic legal legacy he left behind. Drawing on forensic psychology, psychiatric case records, and the full arc of Swiss legal history, Sean Joe Mulholland traces the development of a sexual sadist whose mask of normality defeated every social and institutional safeguard designed to detect him, until one sixteen-year-old boy walked out of a river and changed everything. This is not merely a true crime narrative. It is an examination of how a democratic society confronts the limits of its own ideals. Peiry's case inspired the 2004 Swiss constitutional amendment on permanent internment, reshaping the nation's fundamental law. Nearly four decades after his arrest, the questions his case raises about evil, justice, rehabilitation, and human dignity remain urgently, uncomfortably unresolved

Full Product Details

9798235112896

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Sean Joe Mulholland is an Irish historian and narrative nonfiction writer whose work examines the intersection of institutional failure, extreme violence, and the legal systems societies build - or rebuild - in response to both. Drawing on deep archival research and a rigorous engagement with forensic psychology, criminology, and constitutional law, Mulholland has established himself as one of the most serious voices in European true crime writing, bringing to each subject the analytical discipline of the historian and the narrative instincts of the storyteller. Born and raised in Ireland, Mulholland has written extensively on criminal cases, historical atrocities, and the marginalised figures whom conventional history has too often passed over in silence. His work is characterised by its refusal of easy moral conclusions, its insistence on the full humanity of victims, and its sustained engagement with the institutional and philosophical questions that extreme violence raises for the societies that must reckon with it. The Sadist of Romont represents Mulholland's most ambitious undertaking to date - a comprehensive, unflinching account of the Michel Peiry case that situates one man's crimes within the broadest possible legal, psychological, and cultural context, and asks, with the honesty the subject demands, what a nation learns when it is forced to confront the darkness it did not know it contained.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available