Born in 1404, de Rais married into an equally noble family at the age of 16. He owned five vast estates, had a private chapel that required the attendance of 30 canons and was so esteemed in the eyes of the court that he was appointed to the post of Marshal so that he could personally crown King Charles VII of France. Of proud and muscular bearing, he was a brilliant warrior, being instrumental in securing Charles's victories over the English. He rode alongside Joan of Arc and was followed by a personal retinue of 200 knights.

Yet for all those glittering prizes, de Rais maintained a sick and savage secret. He was guilty of what a contemporary described as `that which the most monstrously depraved imagination could never have conceived.

He is said to have sadistically tortured and murdered between 140 and 800 children. Obsessed with the letting of blood, he would order his servants to stab his young victims in their jugular vein so that the blood would spurt over him. He was alleged to have sat on one dying boy while drinking his blood.

Ten years after Joan of Arc's trial for heresy, de Rais was charged with the same offence after he attacked a priest. Haughtily refuting that accusation, he was then charged with murder. In the words ofhis ecclesiastical accusers, he was a `heretic, sorcerer, sodomite, invocator of evil spirits, diviner, killer of innocents, apostate from the faith, idolator'.

There was good reason for the Church to have fabricated the case against de Rais. He was a secular challenge to their power over the king and his court, and if found guilty the Church stood to seize his lands. No effort was spared in preparing the most damning case: de Rais's servants were tortured until adequate evidence was given against their master. De Rais himself was probably not tortured. Yet he made a full and ready confession-not only to the murder of 140 children, of which he was charged but to the murder of `at least 800.'

Two rational reasons were given for this slaughter. The first was the influence on him of a book, an illustrated copy of Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius, which included graphic descriptions of the mad Emperor Caligula's sadistic excesses. The second was the approach of an Italian alchemist, Francisco Prelati, who promised the secret of turning iron into gold by black magic rites and sacrifices. But the real reason for the mass killings de Rais perpetrated could only have been what we now know as paedophilia and sadism-both carried out on a scale probably unequalled before or since.

Predictably, de Rais was found guilty and in a show of public contrition and humility begged forgiveness from the parents of the children he admitted slaughtering. Like Joan of Arc before him, he was sentenced to death by fire. But as an act of`mercy' for not recanting his confession, he was first garrotted to death before being thrown on the flames on 26 October, 1440.

Fritz Haarmann
It is incredible that two `vampire' killers could turn up in the same country in the same period. Yet while `the Dusseldorf Vampire', Peter Kurten, was beginning to gain infamy for his deeds, another brutal monster was coming to the end of his reign of terror. He was Fritz Haarmann, `the Hanover Vampire'.

At the end of World War One, Haarmann, then aged 39, emerged from a five-year jail sentence for theft and returned to his home town of Hanover to try to scrape together a living in the chaos of post-war Germany. The business he chose was as a purveyor of meats, pies and second-hand clothes in a poor area of the city. He prospered because of the cheap and simple source of his raw materials...murdered young men and boys.

Haarmann spent his evenings and nights prowling Hanover's railway stations and back alleys to seek out the human flotsam sleeping rough there. He would offer those who were jobless or homeless the chance of free food, lodging and companionship. In return, they would be sexually abused and often murdered. Their bodies would be butchered, their clothes sold and their flesh put into Haarmann's tasty pies.

The method of murder gave rise to Haarmann's sobriquet as `Vampire of Hanover'-he would kill his victims by biting through their throats. Incredibly, police and voluntary workers, who must certainly have suspected Haarmann, not only turned a blind eye to his nefarious activities but actively encouraged him. He became a police informer, passing on details of suspicious newcomers to town, of planned crimes and of hidden loot. So close was his relationship with the police that when in 1918 the parents of one 17-year-old boy reported their son missing after being seen in Haarmann's company, the ensuing search of the killer's room was no more than cursory. The murderer was later to boast at his trial: `When the police examined my room, the head of the boy was lying in newspaper behind the oven.'

The following year Fritz Haarmann met the accomplice who was to speed up the `production line' at his cooked meats plant. His name was Hans Gans; He was just 20 but was already a heartless, vicious thug whose job it was to pick out the victims ready for the executioner. Together, they began disposing of boys and young men at a prodigious rate.

Hanover had by now gained an unenviable reputation as the city where people could vanish from the streets without trace while the police were apparently powerless to act. In fact, the police could have acted and saved many lives, but they found Haarmann's information so helpful that they effectively gave him immunity. They even failed to respond to complaints about the one-way traffic of boys into Haarmann's rooms, the buckets of blood carried out and the bloodied clothes and suspect meat (labelled as pork) which he was selling.

Eventually, the discovery of two human skulls, one of a youngster, on the bank of the River Leine forced police to act. They searched the riverside and discovered more human remains. Boys playing nearby found a sack packed with human organs. And the dredging of the river bed raised more than 500 human bones. Haarmann's blood-spattered apartments and workshops were raided.

In December 1924 Haarmann and Gans went on trial. `How many victims did you kill?' asked the prosecutor. Haarmann replied: `It might be 30, it might be 40, I can't remember the exact number.' Asked how he had killed his victims, Haarmann replied dispassionately: `I bit them through their throats'.

While Hans Gans received a life sentence (of which he subsequently served only 12 years) the Vampire of Hanover was predictably sentenced to death, having been found sane and entirely responsible for his bloody deeds. Before being beheaded, he declared: `I will go to my execution as if it were a wedding.'