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Beast of Jersey

Content below is from #187 of The Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • This week I recommend a 90s classic: Matilda
    • Now, I’m hoping most of you have already seen Matilda and to you, I urge you to give it a rewatch. It is surprising just how well this movie holds up after nearly 3 decades
    • But to those of you who haven’t seen it, heres the plot:
      • This film adaptation of a Roald Dahl work tells the story of Matilda Wormwood (Mara Wilson), a gifted girl forced to put up with a crude, distant father (Danny DeVito) and mother (Rhea Perlman). Worse, Agatha Trunchbull (Pam Ferris), the evil principal at Matilda’s school, is a terrifyingly strict bully. However, when Matilda realizes she has the power of telekinesis, she begins to defend her friends from Trunchbull’s wrath and fight back against her unkind parents.
  • I recommend this beloved movie because I was recently at my friend’s 30th birthday and brought it up… to my surprise, a bunch of my friends and their significant others hadn’t seen Matilda… They hadn’t even heard of it.
  • So naturally, Shannon and I… plus my friend Tori were recounting some of our favorite parts of the movie… all while the people who hadn’t seen it look at us with bizarre reactions LOL

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • My dad sends me more instagram DMs than any of my friends and I love it.
    • In between the posts about grilled meat, grizzly bears, and dad jokes, he will occasionally send me something he thinks would make a good podcast episode.
    • This week’s main event was inspired by one of those posts. Thanks dad.
  • The vast majority of this episode is read directly from the website behind the Instagram post my dad sent me and All Thats Interesting .com…
    • With a smattering of Wikipedia info to tie it all together.
    • I know, I know.. wikipedia isn’t the most reliable source. You are correct… but I’m not doing this for money or a grade in a class or anything. I’m just here to tell mostly-accurate stories LOL

Edward John Louis Paisnel[1] (1925 – 1994)

Edward Paisnel was born in 1925. While the exact date and location of his birth are unclear, the Brit came from a family of means. He was barely a teenager when the United Kingdom declared war on Germany in 1939 and was at one point briefly imprisoned for stealing food to give to starving families.

– Throughout the 1960s, Edward Paisnel appeared to be a pillar of his small community on the English Channel Island of Jersey. He was a family man who was devoted to his wife Joan and her young children, and he even played Santa Claus at Christmastime for the young foster children at the group home that Joan founded.

But when he wasn’t spending time with his family or doing good deeds, he was donning this mask and sneaking into his neighbors’ homes at night in order to assault and rape women and children.⁠

Dubbed the Beast of Jersey, Edward Paisnel was a notorious sex offender who terrorised the Channel Island of Jersey between 1957 and 1971. He entered homes at night dressed in a rubber mask and nail-studded wristlets, attacking women and children.

During the Beast of Jersey’s crime spree There were no alarm systems at the time and hardly any policemen at hand. Home telephones were easily destroyed by a cut of the cord.

Paisnel’s crimes began in early 1957, long before he garnered his infamous moniker or donned the Beast of Jersey mask. With a scarf over his face, the 32-year-old approached a young woman waiting for a bus in the Monte a L’abbe district and tied a rope around her neck. He forced her to a nearby field, raped her, and fled.

Targeting bus stops and using isolated fields became his modus operandi. Paisnel assaulted a 20-year-old woman in the same manner in March. He repeated this in July, then again in October 1959. All of his victims described their attacker as having a “musty” stench. Within a year, that smell wafted into homes.

It was Valentine’s Day 1960 when a 12-year-old boy awoke to find a man in his bedroom. The intruder used a rope to force him outside and into a nearby field to sodomize him. In March, a woman at a bus stop asked a man parked nearby if he could give her a ride. It was Paisnel — who drove her to a field and raped her.

He targeted a 43-year-old woman’s remote cottage next. She was awoken by alarming noise at 1:30 a.m. and tried calling the police, but Paisnel had cut the phone lines. Though he violently confronted her, she was able to escape and find help. She returned to find him gone, and her 14-year-old daughter left behind raped.

Paisnel began exclusively targeting children at this point, invading a 14-year-old’s bedroom in April. She awoke to find him watching her from the shadows, but screamed so loud that he fled. An 8-year-old boy in July, meanwhile, was taken from his room and raped in a field only for Paisnel himself to walk the boy back home.

It took long enough, but police began questioning all residents with criminal records. With 13 of them including Paisnel refusing to provide fingerprints, the suspect list had narrowed. Police believed a fisherman named Alphonse Le Gastelois was their man, although the only evidence they had was that he was a known eccentric.

Suspicion for the attacks initially fell on eccentric agricultural worker and fisherman Alphonse Le Gastelois, who was arrested but released through lack of evidence. Public suspicion remained so strong, however, that Le Gastelois’ cottage was burnt down in an act of arson. Le Gastelois, fearing for his life, fled to Les Écréhous where he spent 14 years in self-imposed exile on La Marmotière as the second self-styled king of the Écréhous despite being cleared of suspicion when the attacks of the Beast of Jersey continued unabated.

The rapist was estimated to be between 40 and 45 years old, five feet and six inches tall, wearing either a mask or scarf. He smelled terrible and attacked between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. He invaded homes through bedroom windows and used a flashlight. Curiously, the Beast of Jersey soon vanished — only to return in 1963.

After two years of radio silence, the Beast of Jersey resurfaced. Between April and November 1963 he raped and sodomized four girls and boys he had snatched from their bedrooms. While he yet again disappeared for another two years, a letter appeared at the Jersey police station in 1966, taunting police.

It chastised investigators for being incompetent while proudly proclaiming that the author had committed the perfect crime. It also stated that this wasn’t satisfying enough and that two more people would be victimized. That August, a 15-year-old girl was snatched from her home, raped, and covered in scratches.

The same exact thing happened to a 14-year-old boy in August 1970 — and the boy told police the attacker wore a mask. Fortunately, the Beast of Jersey mask would never be donned again, as 46-year-old Paisnel was pulled over for running a red light in a stolen car in the St. Helier district on July 10, 1971.


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It would take more than a decade for police to finally catch up with the “Beast of Jersey” as they repeatedly focused on other suspects, blind to the fact that a man like Paisnel could commit such crimes.

On 17 July 1971 Edward Paisnel was stopped by the police after running a red traffic light and then attempting to evade police pursuit. In the car, which he had stolen earlier that evening, police discovered several pointed sticks and elements of his “Beast” costume. In December 1971 he was convicted of 13 counts of assault, rape and sodomy and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Police found a black wig, cords, tape, and an ominous mask inside. Paisnel wore a raincoat with nails fitted on the cuffs and shoulders, and had a flashlight on his person. He claimed he was on his way to an orgy — but he was taken into custody instead.

A search of his home yielded a hidden room with photographs of local properties, a sword, and an altar covered with books on the occult and black magic. Paisnel’s trial began on November 29. It took a mere 38 minutes of deliberation for the jury to find him guilty.

Convicted of 13 counts of rape, sexual assault, and sodomy against six of his victims, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Disturbingly, Edward Paisnel was released for good behavior in 1991, but died of a heart attack three years later. To this day, evidence of his abuses at various children’s homes continues to surface.

Paisnel was released in 1991 but died of a heart attack in 1994.

His wife, Joan Paisnel, was the founder of a community home in Jersey where, at her request, he once played Santa Claus.

In 1972 his wife Joan Paisnel wrote the book The Beast of Jersey (published by NEL Paperbacks, ISBN 0-450017-17-6).

After the trial, freelance journalist Alan Shadrake became Joan Paisnel’s literary agent, and ghost-wrote a first person article with John Lisners which was published in the Sunday Mirror under the title “The Beauty & the Beast” with a photograph of Mrs Paisnel, in a ballet dance pose in white, and a police photo of her husband wearing the horrific mask which he wore when he kidnapped and assaulted his victims. One source, however, reports that at the trial it was stated that Paisnel never wore the mask during his attacks.

CREDIT:


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