The Sadist of Romont - Sean Joe Mulholland

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