17. The “National Razor’s” Final Shave
Hamida Djandoubi was born in Tunis in 1949, and moved to Marseilles in 1968. There, he worked a series of menial jobs. One of them, a stint as a landscaper, ended when a workplace accident resulted in the amputation of one of his legs. So he switched careers, and became a pimp. He earned a date with “The National Razor” after he kidnapped, tortured, and strangled to death a former girlfriend in 1974, after she filed a complaint that accused him of trying to force her into prostitution.
Djandoubi was arrested and went to trial in February of 1974. He was duly convicted and sentenced to death. After he exhausted his appeals and failed to win a reprieve from France’s president, Djandoubi’s went under the guillotine in a Marseilles prison at 4:40AM, September 10th, 1977. The guillotine remained France’s official instrument of execution throughout the end of the 1970s, and into the early 1980s. The French did not abolish the guillotine and capital punishment until 1981 – the same year MS-DOS 1.0 was released, and Indiana Jones premiered in the US.