Christine and Léa Papin

The murder had a significant influence on French intellectuals such as Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jacques Lacan, and was considered symbolic of class struggle.

The case formed the basis of publications, plays, and films, as well as essays, spoken word, songs, and artwork.

Suspecting that Clémence was still having an affair with her employer, Gustave found a new job in another city and announced that the family would move.

Clémence, believing that Émilia had seduced her father, sent her to the Bon Pasteur Catholic Orphanage, which was known for its discipline.

Soon afterward, Émilia was joined by Christine and Léa, who Clémence intended would remain at the orphanage until age 15, when they could be employed.

After a few months of excellent service, Christine convinced Madame Lancelin to hire Léa as a chambermaid.

Some years after Christine and Léa started working for the family, Madame Léonie developed depression.

[citation needed] On the evening of Thursday, February 2, 1933, Monsieur Lancelin was supposed to meet Madame Léonie and Genevieve for dinner at the home of a family friend.

The Papin sisters explained to Madame Lancelin that the power outage had been caused by Christine plugging in a faulty iron.

She brought both weapons upstairs, where the sisters continued hitting the Lancelin women, slashing and bludgeoning them.

At some point, one of the sisters grabbed a heavy pewter pitcher and used it to strike the heads of both Lancelin women.

He returned to his residence with his son-in-law at approximately 18:30 or 19:00, where they discovered the entire house still dark except for a light in the Papin sisters' room.

Inside the room, he found the Papin sisters naked in bed together, and a bloody hammer, with hair still clinging to it, on a chair nearby.

Christine and Léa demonstrated signs of mental illness such as limiting eye contact and staring straight ahead appearing to be in a daze.

The court appointed three doctors to administer psychological evaluations of the sisters to determine their mental state.

They also believed that Christine's affection for her sister was based on family ties, not an incestuous relationship as others had suggested.

After much consideration, it was concluded that Christine and Léa suffered from "Shared Paranoid Disorder", which is believed to occur when groups or pairs of people are isolated from the world, developing paranoia, and in which one partner dominates the other.

[2] Léa fared better than Christine, serving only eight years of her 10-year sentence due to good behavior in prison.

[3] Some accounts state that Léa died in 1982, but French film producer Claude Ventura claims to have discovered Léa living in a hospice center in France in 2000 while creating the film En Quête des Soeurs Papin (in English In Search of the Papin Sisters).

The woman he claimed to be Léa had suffered a stroke which had rendered her partially paralyzed and unable to speak.