Jean-Baptiste Chandonne

Jean-Baptiste Chandonne, also known as The Werewolf and The Wolfman, is one of the main antagonists of Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta series. Chandonne appears in Black Notice, The Last Precinct, and Blow Fly.

Chandonne is a shunned and previously imprisoned son of the French Chandonne crime family, from being born with hypertrichosis, a condition leaving him covered in excessive hair, akin to a werewolf. Hating his deformity and always hoping for a cure, Chandonne has an animal-like instinct to savagely maul to death. The Wolfman is eventually captured, scarring main character Kay Scarpetta and even nearly framing her for his crimes by manipulating chaotic police squads. Chandonne eventually escapes with the help of his twin brother, Jay Talley, and later comes back to wreak more havoc in final vendettas.

Biography
Chandonne is an almost unheard of son of the influential French family with organized crime ties, the Chandonnes. But Chandonne was born afflicted with a nearly incurable condition known as hypertrichosis, a condition involving excessive hair, specifically baby hairs, spanning the surface area of his entire body. The repulsed Chandonne heads of the family locked Jean-Baptiste away in a dark box for years. But Chandonne eventually escaped, the family still keeping his existence a secret.

Chandonne hated his ugliness and hoped to cure his condition, so he would bath in waters of natural springs and streams in hopes it would vitalize his normal body enough to make his hair go away. Despite starting off in a feral state once achieving freedom, Chandonne found ways to adapt in he world but still live in hiding. But under the psychosis of being a werewolf as well as with a mixture of bloodthirsty rage, Chandonne would also go out at night and stalk for women to maul to death, beating them until they had know faces, biting them, and ripping their tops open to show their naked bodies. In France, Chandonne ended up being a serial killer by murdering seven women in the fashion. When being tailed by police and talked about as a myth, Chandonne's psychosis soon morphed with a brutal adaptation of survival to form a beastly psychopathology of sorts. Chandonne took on the chaos of his deformity and the legend of him so much, he gave himself the moniker "Le Loup-Garou", which loosely translates to "The Werewolf" or "The Wolfman".

By unknown means, the Chandonne's found out about Jean-Baptiste's sightings and crime spree, so Jean-Baptiste's brother, Thomas, was sent to retrieve him or kill him. Jean-Baptiste got the best of Thomas and killed him instead, but knowing he'd be targeted, he didn't stay in France. Jean-Baptiste hid in a cargo container which, by sheer coincidence, was arranged to be shipped to Kay Scarpetta's town of Richmond. After stowing away long enough to arrive at the town's sea port, when Jean-Baptiste got the chance, he fled, leaving Thomas' rotting corpse behind, along with a note: "Bon voyage, le loup-garou".

Black Notice
When Scarpetta is called to examine Thomas' corpse, she identifies a tattoo on him and finds Jean-Baptiste's baby hairs on his rotting corpse. She and her team are called to fly over to France, where Thomas' identity is revealed by the chief coroner there. They also hear of Jean-Baptiste and his rumors and serial murders. When they get back to Richmond, Chandonne has slaughtered Kim Juong in his usual fashion, which everyone on the local team obviously recognizes. When Deputy Chief Diane Bray tries to break down the investigation to hide her drug smuggling activities, The Werewolf kills her too, on the floor of her bedroom. But the extent of her murder is extensive damage done at the hands of a chipping hammer, used in masonry.

Chandonne later tries to break into Scarpetta's house, but her alarm goes off. The police come, find no one, and leave, but Chandonne is still there. Trying to take a different approach, Chandonne appears at the door and pretends to be an agent and insists to be let in. Scarpetta is shocked to Realize The Wolfman is at the door, and he understands English. He breaches through the outside of the house and lunges at Scarpetta, but in a scuffle of dodging and striking back, she quickly ends the fight by grabbing a vial of formalin she was using in her lab and splashing it at Chandonne. It not only scars The Werewolf, but also blinds him in the moment, badly enough eh runs out screaming, crying, and trying to clean his eyes with the snow. Backup arrives, Scarpetta's niece Lucy Farinelli nearly shooting Chandonne in a fit of rage while he cowers on the ground. Scarpetta screams and pleads for Farinelli to give her the gun, and after enough, Farinelli tosses it aside, leaving Le Loup Garou to be arrested.

The Last Precinct
After Chandonne is incarcerated, Scarpetta has to fight to defend herself when she's framed for the murder of Bray, with the assistance of New York prosecutor Jaime Berger, who's been tracking Chandonne and believes the Wolfman to be responsible for more, specifically the murder of a woman in her city. But as Scarpetta tries to exonerate herself, digging into Chandonne reveals he's been stalking her for a while and might have information on her presumably deceased boyfriend, FBI Agent Benton Wesley, who faked his death under orders of superiors.

Blow Fly
Chandonne makes another return when Scarpetta quits her Virginia job and starts a private practice in Florida. But Chandonne's planned a series of killings with Jay Talley, the ATF liaison and Interpol agent on his case when he was first apprehended, who's revealed to be his twin brother. The escape is successful, but Talley's accomplice, Bev Kiffin, is killed in a shootout with Scarpetta and her team.

Additional Books
TBA

Appearance
Chandonne is a tall Frenchman with a bulky build and natural sounding voice when trying to sound nonchalant. But with Chandonne's hypertrichosis, he's covered in baby hairs that sprout all over his body, leaving him with the appearance of a humanoid beast.

Personality
Chandonne is a feral-minded, neglected, insatiable child of a rich, historic family never treated as such brethren. With his condition, torture, and wants all combined, Chandonne's profile is both underdeveloped in pieces and convoluted and erratic. An obvious self-directed disgust over his condition, even where he doesn't hold himself "personally accountable", he finds his excessive hair both a curse and an excuse for him to be subjected to suffering. Chandonne's not just obsessed with getting rid of his look of Le Loup Garou, he's afraid of what it means in the future if other people find he continues to look like that. Without much to confront and take down his family on, the best he can do is fight with his psychosis and only wait for vindication or revenge.

When Chandonne escaped confines, he wanted to soak up as much as he could of his freedom and what the resources he could find in it had to offer him. When the first hurdle or missing answer to a question met him, he felt even a partial loss of his hope, thus turning to natural waters as his best chance of curing his condition. When that failed, his despair only led him to spiral out of control, being taken over by his "werewolf" psychosis and living like that in morphed ways that also tell signs of how Chandonne would hope to both be human and snap from the shame the Chandonnes tarnished his image and efforts with. Because of his hope for love and intimacy, The Wolfman sets his sights on women, but his condition and insanity lead him to maul them instead for he's paranoid to believe he or they wouldn't last long with the other person. When he found his brother Thomas and killed, his personal resolve only increased, but his psychosis declared more of a war on it. As a result, he continued his attacks, targeted more influential and powerful people, and especially became more violent, savage, and desperate for content. With the killing of a family member, more rejection and danger from the real world, more desperation to preserve himself, and a willingness to adapt from a immensely driven survival drive, he Wolfman not only grew to be more versatile and wider targeted, but also much more psychopathic and utilizing of his evil and chaos. But Chandonne shows easy wants, regret and twinge of hope still from a weakness to a severe attack or counterattack, like when Scarpetta blinded him with formalin solution.

When getting to prison, Chandonne became much more accustomed to a cage and willing to master it, but also scared of staying forever and finding solace of a chance to escape again. When he got the chance, he took it, and his smugness was both a weapon and a distraction to play enough time out so Talley and Kiffin could successfully help free him and send him into hiding.

Modus Operandi
Chandonne targeted women at random under the psychosis of being a werewolf and eventually to stonewall manhunts after him. The Wolfman would typically maul the women to death in an identical fashion: ripping their tops apart, stealing their shoes, and beating them to death so badly, their brains bleed and their faces are mangled. Kim Luong appeared to not suffer severe enough damage that her face was mangled, but Diane Bray was especially beaten and mutilated by the means of a masonry chipping hammer. Jean-Baptiste's brother Thomas Chandonne died of unknown causes, but he was left rotted in a cargo container at a port in Richmond.

Victims

 * 1999:
 * France: Seven unidentified women, 21-52 (ripped their tops, stole their shoes, beaten, bitten, mangled their faces)
 * Richmond, VA:
 * Thomas Chandonne (killed by unknown means; left in a container with a note postmortem)
 * Kim Luong, 30 (shot in her neck to paralyze her, ripped her top, stole her shoes, and beaten to death)
 * Diane Bray (killed on the floor of her bedroom; ripped her top, stole her shoes, beaten and mangled her face with a chipping hammer)
 * Kay Scarpetta (broke into her home and attempted to kill; was blinded by formalin and arrested instead)
 * 2000:
 * Kay Scarpetta (framed for the murder of Bray; was exonerated)