French housemaid and murderer Léa Papin was BOTD in 1911. Born in Le Mans, she was the youngest child of working-class parents. Her father was a violent alcoholic who left the family home, and is thought to have sexually abused her elder sister Émilia. When Léa was about 11, her mother sent her and her elder sisters Émilia and Christine to live in a Catholic orphanage. She and Christine became housemaids at various homes in Le Mans, preferring to work together where possible. Léa was described as quiet, hard-working and obedient, though less intelligent than her sister. In 1926, Christine found work as a live-in housemaid 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 blood-soaked 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. 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 testified 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 acting under Christine’s influence. Christine was initially sentenced to death by guillotine, later commuted to life imprisonment. After attempting to gouge out her own eyes and starve herself, she was transferred to a mental institution, where she died in 1937. Léa served eight years in prison, and was released in 1941 for good behaviour. She moved to Nantes where she lived with her mother, assuming a false identity and working as a hotel maid. (Presumably no one asked her for references). She was thought to have died in 1982, aged 70 or 71. In 2000, the filmmaker Claude Ventura claimed to have discovered Léa living in a hospice, while he was researching the documentary En Quête des Soeurs Papin (In Search of the Papin Sisters). The woman he claimed to be Léa had suffered a stroke and was unable to speak or confirm her identity, dying in 2001. The sisters’ crimes became legendary in France, interpreted variously as an example 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 Jodhi May as Léa and Joely Richardson as Christine, and in 2000’s Les blessures assassines (released in English as Murderous Maids) starring Julie-Marie Parmentier as Léa and Sylvie Testud as Christine.