French housemaid and murderer Christine Papin was BOTD in 1905. Born in Le Mans, she was the second child of working-class parents. Her father was a violent alcoholic who left the family home when Christine was an infant, and is thought to have sexually abused her elder sister Émilia. Christine was raised by an aunt and uncle, until her mother sent her, Émilia and their younger sister Léa to a Catholic orphanage. After Émilia became a nun, Christine also expressed a wish to remain in the convent, but was sent into the workforce by her mother. She and Léa became domestic servants in various homes in Le Mans, preferring to work together where possible. In 1926, Christine found work as a live-in maid for René and Léonie Lancelin, eventually persuading them to employ Léa as a chambermaid. The sisters worked for the Lancelins for seven years, sharing a bedroom and largely forbidden to speak when in the house. Léonie became hyper-critical of the sisters’ work, often physically attacking them for perceived failings. In February 1933, Léonie and her adult daughter Genevieve returned home to find no power in the house. Christine explained that the power outage was caused by Léa plugging in a faulty iron. Léonie flew into a rage and attacked her. Christine and Léa retaliated by murdering both women, gouging out their eyes with their bare hands, bludgeoning them to death with a hammer and mutilating their thighs and buttocks with knives. Léonie’s and Genevieve’s bodies were discovered by police later that evening. The sisters were found naked in bed together with the murder weapons, and were immediately arrested. Interrogated separately by police, each woman confessed to being the sole killer, presumably in an attempt to exonerate the other. Pending their trial, they were imprisoned separately, causing Christine extreme distress. When finally allowed to meet, Christine reportedly threw herself at Léa, unbuttoning her blouse and begging her “Please, say yes!”, igniting rumours of an incestuous attraction. Christine later experienced a psychotic episode in which she tried to gouge her own eyes out, later telling the trial judge that she had experienced a similar episode prior to the murders. Their trial was a national sensation, reported extensively in the press and igniting public debate about their motives and psychological state. The sisters pled not guilty by reason of insanity, but were deemed fit to stand trial. Psychologists testifying in court concluded that the sisters were sane, though suffered from “shared paranoid disorder”. Both were found guilty of murder. Léa received a ten year prison sentence, on the basis that she had been dominated by Christine. Initially sentenced to death by guillotine, Christine’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Permanently separated from Léa, Christine attempted to gouge out her own eyes and starve herself. She was eventually transferred to a mental institution, where she died in 1937 from self-starvation, aged 35. The sisters’ crimes became legendary in France, interpreted variously as examples of congenital psychosis, sadistic perversion, repressed homosexuality and incestuous attraction. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan argued that the Papins killed their employers because they saw in them their own mirror image, while Existentialist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir read the crimes as acts of proletarian protest against an authoritarian bourgeois class. The case inspired a number of fictional retellings, notably Jean Genet‘s 1947 play Les Bonnes (The Maids), in which two housemaids perform ritualised games of domination and submission, taking turns to play mistress and servant while plotting the murder of their female employer. The Papins have been portrayed numerous times onscreen, notably in Nancy Meckler’s 1994 film Sister My Sister, an expressly lesbian reading of their relationship starring Joely Richardson as Christine and Jodhi May as Léa, and in 2000’s Les blessures assassines (released in English as Murderous Maids) starring Sylvie Testud as Christine and Julie-Marie Parmentier as Léa.