The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot

Thomas Maeder

To Shawn

CONTENTS

A Note on French Currency

PART ONE

1 The Bodies in the Rue Le Sueur

2 The First Identified Victims

3 The Investigation

4 The Escape Network

5 The Weight of the Evidence

6 Departures without End

PART TWO

7 Marcel Petiot: The Dossier

8 Dr. Petiot and Mr. Mayor

9 The Doctor in Paris

10 The Arrest

11 Captain Henri Valéri

12 Petiot: Hero of the Resistance

13 “I Wish to Explain Myself in Court”

PART THREE

14 Petiot on Trial

15 Monsieur de Paris

Image Gallery

Selected List of Characters

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

About the Author

A NOTE ON FRENCH CURRENCY

The official exchange rates for French francs (F) and U.S. dollars ($) at certain times between the years 1940 and 1946 (the period of particular concern in this book) were:

Taking into consideration the devaluation of the dollar over the past three decades, one can roughly translate these franc values into the following August 1979 purchasing-power equivalents.

There are no standard rate-of-exchange figures for the period from 1941 to August 1944 during which the Germans occupied France, as there was no normal international commerce. According to some sources, the figures for the year 1940 remained valid throughout the Occupation, though one must assume that depletion of the work force, rationing, and the effect of the black market made the actual worth of French money during the period somewhat less than its artificially fixed value.

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

1

THE BODIES IN THE RUE LE SUEUR

On March 6, 1944, thick, greasy, foul-smelling smoke began pouring from the chimney of an elegant private house at 21 rue Le Sueur in Paris. It was a three-story, nineteenth-century building with stables and courtyard located near the Etoile in the wealthy sixteenth arrondissement, and was the former residence of Princess Maria Colloredo de Mansfeld,* who had moved out in 1930 and allowed dust and dilapidation to take over. Since its purchase in 1941 by a Dr. Marcel Petiot, the building had remained uninhabited, though neighbors noticed several curious events. Almost every day, a man on a bicycle, dressed like a workman, arrived towing a wagon. Two trucks had come during the previous year—one removed forty-seven suitcases, and the other unloaded thirty or forty heavy sacks inside the double coach door. Otherwise no one entered or left the building. Neighbors would later tell police that a horse-drawn cart had stopped in the street at 11:30 every night for the previous six months. They believed it had stopped at number 21, and some even reported hearing the doors open and close; but since it was wartime and the city was blacked out at that hour for fear of Allied bombings, nothing was actually seen, and the significance of this occurrence was never made clear.

The smoke increased in volume over the next few days, and on Saturday, March 11, a contrary breeze kept the suffocating stench in the rue Le Sueur hovering at the level of Madame Andrée Marçais’s fifth-floor apartment across the street. When her husband returned from work that evening, she insisted that he do something about it. Jacques Marçais knocked at number 21 several times before noticing the worn paper fastened to the door: Away for one month. Forward mail to 18 rue des Lombards in Auxerre. At 6:25, Monsieur Marçais telephoned the police.

Two uniformed, bicycle-mounted policemen, Joseph Teyssier and Emile Fillion, tried the door and shuttered windows, then made inquiries at the neighboring houses. The concierge next door told them number 21 was owned by Dr. Marcel Petiot, who lived two miles across Paris at 66 rue Caumartin. She even had his telephone number: Pigalle 77.11. Teyssier ran to the Crocodile, a café on the corner, and phoned the doctor’s home. A woman who identified herself as Madame Petiot answered and passed the receiver to her husband. “Have you entered the building?” he asked Teyssier after being told there was a fire. “Don’t do anything. I will be there in fifteen minutes with the keys.”

Half an hour later, no one had arrived. The smoke grew worse and the firemen were called. Fire Chief Avilla Boudringhin climbed to a second-floor window, pried open the shutters, smashed a windowpane, and entered with a few men. After searching the upper floors, they followed the stench to the basement. When they emerged from the coach door several minutes later, one of the young firemen leaned against the doorway and vomited, while a pale and shaken Boudringhin stepped up to the two policemen and said, “Gentlemen, I think you have some work ahead of you.”

Teyssier, Fillion, and a civil-defense officer who chanced to be passing by were led down to the basement, where they found two coal-burning stoves. The one on the left was cold, but the smaller one, to the right, was going full blast, and a human hand, apparently female, dangled from the open door. From the light of the fire the three officers discerned a pile of coal and the bottom steps of a short staircase on which were littered a head, skulls, arms, two nearly complete skeletons, shattered rib cages, feet, hands, jawbones, large chunks of unrecognizable flesh, and a quantity of small bones. They left hurriedly and Teyssier again ran to the Crocodile, this time to call his superiors.

As Teyssier was returning, a hatless man in a gray overcoat rode up on a green bicycle and dismounted in front of number 21. He was in his early to mid-forties, with piercing eyes of such dark brown as to look black. He seemed surprised to find the doors to the building ajar, but with an air of confidence and authority approached Fillion and identified himself as the brother of the building’s owner. Teyssier returned from the café, and the two agents led the man into the building; he began climbing the steps toward the main floor, but they quickly motioned him downstairs. Gazing calmly at the litter of human remains in the basement, the man said: “This is serious. My head may be at stake.” The policemen were scarcely surprised. They accompanied the man back to the street to escape the smell of decayed and burning flesh. He turned to them and asked, “Are you Frenchmen?” Teyssier indignantly asked the reason for this strange and offensive question.

“The bodies you have seen are those of Germans and traitors to our country,” he replied. “I assume you have already notified your superiors and that the Germans will soon learn of your discovery. I am the head of a Resistance group, and I have three hundred files at my home which must be destroyed before the enemy finds them.”

By March 1944, Paris had already suffered nearly four years under the Occupation and German military rule. There were two Gestapo offices in the neighborhood of the rue Le Sueur, and a brothel reserved for German officers was just around the corner. The man spoke with conviction, and it seemed obvious to the French policemen that the carnage was the result of systematic executions by an organized group. Teyssier tipped his cap to a patriot and advised him to flee, promising not to mention the visit when his superiors arrived. And thus Dr. Marcel Petiot—for it was he himself—climbed back on his bicycle and rode off into the night.

Brigadier Henri Chanel soon arrived with three men from the local police station and, after briefly inspecting the still-burning stove, ordered the firemen back to their station and called the police commissaire for the quartier of Porte Dauphine and the appropriate judicial authorities. The commissaire arrived fifteen minutes later and promptly called back the firemen to extinguish the stove and remove some of the remains. He then examined the rest of the building.

Upon first entering the double front door of 21 rue Le Sueur, one came to a short vaulted passageway. Steps to the right off the passage led into the ground floor of the house, but if one continued straight along the corridor for thirty feet, one arrived in a flagstone-covered courtyard surrounded by the building on three sides and a four-story wall on the other; the yard was thus totally concealed from the neighbors’ view. The house was large and had once been elegant, with six bedrooms, a spacious dining room and basement kitchen, half a dozen salons and other large rooms, and a library. It was presently in a state of filthy disrepair, and it was obvious no one had lived there for many years. A thick coat of dust covered everything, and most of the rooms were crammed with an incredible assortment of furniture, art objects, chandeliers, and gadgets stored in chaotic piles.

The outbuildings, located on the opposite side of the court from the main body of the house and connected on two floors by a narrow passage, had originally housed the stables and the servants’ quarters. A second library was there now, as well as the only clean and orderly spot in the place: a doctor’s consultation room. The commissaire found it odd that with dozens of large rooms in the house from which to choose, the owner had decided to repair a cramped, L-shaped passageway—little more than six feet wide and situated between a staircase, a storeroom, and the stable—and to neatly furnish it with a cabinet full of medical supplies and knickknacks, a tidy desk, a small round table, and two comfortable armchairs.

In the garage next to the consultation room, the commissaire discovered a pile of quicklime—fourteen feet long, eight feet wide, and three feet high at its peak. Interspersed throughout the pile were fragments of flesh and bone, among which he recognized a jawbone and a detached human scalp. In the adjacent stable he found a former manure pit; a block and tackle was rigged above it and a wooden ladder propped inside. Leaning over, the commissaire discovered it was half filled with several more cubic yards of lime and human remains. On a landing of the staircase leading from the courtyard down to the basement he found a canvas sack containing the headless left side of a human body, complete but for the foot and internal organs. At the bottom of the stairs, next to the mound of coal and corpses, was a hatchet covered with rust-colored stains and, a short distance away, a shovel.

Commissaire Georges Massu had just climbed into bed at 10:00 P.M. when headquarters called. Massu was a thirty-three-year police veteran with 3,257 arrests to his credit, and after recently solving a spectacular case he had been promoted to chief of the Criminal Brigade of the Police Judiciaire—a detective force that does for the Paris region what the Sûreté Nationale does for the rest of France. Massu had participated in most of the major criminal affairs of the past three decades, including the celebrated case of Eugen Weidmann, who murdered six people for profit and whose death on the guillotine in 1939 was the last public execution in France. Ten years earlier, Massu had befriended the young mystery writer Georges Simenon, who was then looking for realistic atmosphere to improve his novels, and the taciturn and methodical Massu was gradually transformed into the fictional commissaire Maigret. Massu himself claimed the pipe and habits of Maigret were more like Simenon, but details of some cases were so close to his own that Massu’s own memoirs seemed redundant when they appeared. On this evening in 1944, Massu was awakened to investigate what he was later to call “the greatest criminal affair of the century.”

Thirty minutes later, Massu arrived at the rue Le Sueur with his son Bernard, a seventeen-year-old law student who worked as a part-time inspector under his father whenever there was a case more interesting than his studies. Georges Massu stared at the piles of remains. He took off his overcoat and climbed into the pit; the bones crunched sickeningly under his shoes and his trousers became covered with lime. In the basement kitchen he noticed that the large double sink was just long enough for an outstretched body and that its sloping bottom was steep enough for blood to flow down without coagulating before reaching the drain.

Meanwhile, the other investigators had found, joined to the consultation room by a small corridor, a triangular chamber—six feet on the short side, eight feet on the longest, and completely empty except for eight heavy iron rings fixed in one wall and a naked light bulb attached to the ceiling. Opposite the entrance was a double wooden door, and beside it an electric doorbell. Given the layout of the building, the doors presumably led to a street in the rear, but when Massu forced them open he found that they were attached to a solid wall. The wires of the bell led nowhere. A zealous policeman began to remove the room’s wallpaper and was rewarded by the discovery of the wide end of a spyglass such as those placed in apartment doors to identify visitors. The eyepiece was just over six feet off the ground in the stable on the other side of the wall, and next to it were two light switches: one for the stable itself, the other for the triangular room. As an experiment, Bernard Massu positioned himself between the eight iron rings in the room as though lashed to them. Through the viewer in the stable, the commissaire saw his son’s enlarged face perfectly framed in the field of vision. On his way to the stable, Georges Massu noticed that the door to the triangular room had no knob on the inside.

As yet, there was no indication of who the victims might be nor why they had been killed, but the death scenes the house’s arrangement conjured in Commissaire Massu’s mind grew increasingly horrifying. Under some pretext, he imagined, the doctor instructed a patient to leave his consultation room by the back door. The patient, already drugged or poisoned—gas, perhaps, or an injection—entered the triangular room, whose one true door, virtually soundproof, he could not reopen once it closed. Perhaps Petiot lashed his victims to the rings, then watched their death agonies from the stable. The room seemed arranged especially for this purpose, though the viewer was placed inconveniently high, the white plaster wall of the stable was unblemished by dirt from the face and hands of a peering observer, and, most puzzling of all, the wallpaper had obviously been placed over the lens many years ago. There were no marks indicating a captive trying to escape his prison, nor any signs of struggle in the triangular room or elsewhere. There were no poisons or drugs in the consultation room—no needles, no gas, nothing of use to a murderer. To Massu and everyone else involved, this would remain the most puzzling aspect of the Petiot affair; and no one would ever discover how the victims were killed or what purpose was served by the triangular room, which the press found the most sinister and horrifying aspect of the case, and around which they spun the most gruesome hypotheses.

By 1:30 A.M. Massu had learned all he could at the scene, and was about to leave with two inspectors for Petiot’s apartment at 66 rue Caumartin when a telegram arrived from police headquarters: ORDER FROM GERMAN AUTHORITIES. ARREST PETIOT. DANGEROUS LUNATIC. Word had filtered up through the hierarchy, and some German bureau had communicated this enigmatic order to the director of the Police Judiciaire. Massu hesitated. At the time of the Occupation, the police had been faced with the choice of abandoning their posts or remaining at them under German rule. The first alternative would have compelled the enemy to use its own soldiers as policemen; the latter, the police reasoned; kept civil disputes among Frenchmen, and incidentally left room for sabotage. The Germans, however, did not adhere strictly to their agreement to leave domestic crimes and those only to the French police, who thus sometimes found themselves forced to chase “criminals” and “terrorists” whose only crime was allegiance to France. When the Germans showed particular interest in a case, the police tactic now was to display considerable oversight and error. Thus, when Massu received his telegram and learned how eager the Germans were for Petiot’s arrest, his suspicions were aroused. Pleading exhaustion, he instructed the two inspectors to wait until the following morning and went home to bed.

The next morning, the police contrived to waste several hours on irrelevant details of the case. They seemed in no hurry to capture Petiot. As they knew 21 rue Le Sueur had previously belonged to the Princess Colloredo de Mansfeld, they went to find the princess. Her house on the rue de la Faisanderie had been requisitioned by the Secretary of the Navy, and it was some time before they tracked down the sixty-seven-year-old princess on the avenue de Friedland. She informed them that she had lived at the rue Le Sueur from 1924 to 1930, that subsequently friends had lived there, that the actress Cécile Sorel had used it to store her costumes, and that she had sold the building to Dr. Petiot via the Simon agency in 1941 and had not seen him since signing the agreement of sale.

An express letter had been found at 21 rue Le Sueur addressed to “Camille,” asking him to come fetch his delivery cart. Inspectors soon persuaded themselves that they believed Petiot had sublet his luxurious house to a deliveryman. They spent two hours tracking down the sender of the letter, Raymond Lion, and the intended recipient, Camille Vanderheyden, who worked with him at the Maison Lepesme. Lion, not knowing his fellow employee’s exact address, had randomly written “21,” whereas Vanderheyden actually lived in a small apartment at 20 rue Le Sueur, where he was nursing a head cold when the police made their dramatic entrance. He had never even heard of Petiot, and it took the police some time to make him understand why they were there. They did not tell him they were there only to waste time—but they were.

It was late in the morning when Chief Inspector Marius Batut of the Police Judiciaire arrived at the rue Caumartin with two other detectives. They stopped at the concierge’s loge to ask whether Petiot was in. The concierge was out, but her twelve-year-old daughter, Alice Denis, told the police officers she had seen the doctor and Madame Petiot at 9:30 the previous evening and believed they were still at home. Batut knocked on the door of their first-floor apartment and, receiving no reply, automatically tried the latch and found it unlocked. He took this as possible evidence of a hasty departure (police later learned that, in reality, Petiot never locked his door, believing that a determined burglar would get in anyway, and by leaving the door open he would at least save himself the expense of repairing a broken lock); indeed, the apartment proved empty and the bed had not been slept in. It was several days before the police discovered that Petiot had not left in haste at all; he had been there packing only half an hour before the detectives’ arrival and had persuaded Alice Denis, who had often enjoyed Madame Petiot’s cakes and cookies, to lie to them about his movements.

The police did not spend the rest of the day searching train stations and circulating photographs of Dr. Petiot as one would expect. Instead they went to the Simon Real Estate Agency. They learned that Monsieur Simon was a Jew and had fled France when the Germans dissolved his business. A further search turned up a former employee of the agency and the notary who had handled the sale of the rue Le Sueur house. Petiot had purchased the building in his son Gérard’s name on August 11, 1941. He paid F495,000—F373,000 down, the balance payable in annual installments of F17,500.

Investigators then located the construction firm that had built the triangular room, installed the iron rings, and erected the wall that sheltered the courtyard from the eyes of curious neighbors. Two masons and several workers had done the job in October 1941 at a cost of F14,458.52. They had seen Petiot frequently at the time, they told the police, and the doctor had said he intended to install a clinic in the house after the war. The wall was to prevent neighbors from bothering his patients and to keep children from throwing peach pits into the yard. He intended to set up an electrotherapy apparatus in the triangular room and monitor its functioning through a viewer in the wall. The workers had found Petiot quite an amiable fellow.

The police found these details of mild interest but such information did little in helping to capture the criminal. Nor was it intended to at first—as headquarters soon came to realize. Superiors learned that the agents Teyssier and Fillion had let a prime suspect escape, and the two fled France for fear of reprisals (they did not return until after the Liberation). The Germans now told Commissaire Massu they were astonished that Petiot had not yet been caught. Massu replied that he was surprised by their astonishment, since the files showed that the Germans had once actually held Petiot in prison and had voluntarily released him. The impasse lasted only briefly, after which it became all too evident that Petiot’s crimes, far from being committed in the name of France, were gruesomely personal. By then, however, the authorities had lost valuable time, and Petiot had vanished completely.

French newspapers during the Occupation were completely under German control and largely printed German propaganda as well as enlistment calls for the French Gestapo. Their circulation dropped more than 50 percent as they ceased to publish anything of interest except amended rationing regulations. Fewer than 18 percent of the major prewar Parisian dailies and periodicals survived, while the rest fled to the free zone or succumbed to Nazi censorship. Those that remained and the handful of new publications were forced to collaborate actively (and their staff members were among the most harshly treated when the Liberation and purge finally came).

The Germans had no wish to censor the Petiot affair, and may even have welcomed it as harmless diversion for a subjugated Paris. On Monday, circulations shot up as every newspaper in France exaggerated the discovery at the rue Le Sueur in an orgy of sordid detail and carried banner headlines about the “new Landru.”* Estimates ranged as high as sixty victims, and most reporters assumed all of them were women. Petiot, in the speculating press, became a drug addict and abortionist, a sadist and a lunatic who had a dozen means—each more outlandish than the last—of murdering helpless, lovely ladies in his triangular chamber. More than one paper carried rumors that the lower part of the bodies in the pit had been more severely damaged than the upper, indicating that the victims had been forced to stand in the caustic lime and dissolve alive. Even for people oppressed by years of war, the bizarre cruelty of the crimes soon became the favorite topic of conversation and, later, of wry amusement. One cartoon depicted a woman at a physician’s office door saying, “I’ll only come in for my appointment, doctor, if you swear you don’t have a stove.” Another showed a group of psychics communicating with the beyond through table-tilting: “If we put our hands on the stove instead,” one of the mediums suggested, “maybe we could contact Dr. Petiot.”

The police did not find it entertaining as they began seeking answers to a long list of questions. They methodically set out to discover: who and where was Petiot? who were the victims and how many were there? how and why had they been killed? how and by whom had the building been equipped for murder? where did the lime come from? and were there accomplices? Experts from the police forensic lab photographed and made scale drawings of 21 rue Le Sueur. They took fingerprints from every available surface—and perhaps intentionally mishandled that job; how otherwise explain the fact that no useful prints were found at either the rue Le Sueur or the rue Caumartin?

In closets and corners of the basement, inspectors found a jumbled collection of objects, including:

They also found: a black satin evening gown, with golden swallows embroidered on the bosom, bearing the manufacturer’s label Sylvia Rosa, Marseille; a jaunty woman’s hat made by Suzanne Talbot in Paris; a man’s white shirt from which the initials K.K. had been maladroitly removed; and a photograph of an unidentified man, which the newspapers published at the request of the police.

The large human remains had been taken to the morgue on Sunday. Policemen refused to touch the piles of quicklime, and four gravediggers from the Passy cemetery were hired to sift through them with a sieve and pack the human elements in plain wooden coffins. The examination was headed by the celebrated forensic expert Dr. Albert Paul, who had directed every major coroner’s inquest in the department of the Seine since the Landru case in 1920 (when he burned human heads in a kitchen stove to observe their rate of combustion) and whose macabre humor and love of morbid detail made him as popular at social affairs as in court. Dr. Paul, Dr. Léon Dérobert, Dr. René Piédelièvre, and two professors from the Museum of Natural History, specialists in skeletal assembly and the reconstruction of fossil remains, spent several months measuring and categorizing thirty-four specimens ranging in size from a single connected shoulder blade and breastbone to the eviscerated half-corpse found on the stairs. Their final, voluminous report, with 150 pages of photographs and reams of description, was sadly disappointing.

Not even the number of victims could be accurately determined. There were:

From these remains the experts concluded that there were at least ten victims—five men, five women. But taking into account the fifteen kilograms of badly charred bones, eleven kilograms of uncharred fragments, quantities of pieces too small to identify (“three garbage cans full,” Dr. Paul told the newspapers), and the fact that there were five kilograms of hair, including more than ten entire human scalps, Dr. Paul could only cautiously say that “the number ten is vastly inferior to the real one.”

Identification of the victims was equally impossible based on the limited information provided by such mutilated and badly decomposed bodies. The youngest of the ten victims, the experts determined, was a twenty-five-year-old woman; the eldest, a fifty-year-old man. There were no old bone injuries that could be used for identification. The existing teeth were almost all in poor condition, though one had a porcelain cap. One woman had very small hands and feet, and the forearm of a five-foot-ten male victim was abnormally short. One man had a particularly voluminous skull, as did one woman, whose head was also round and flattened at the back. Another woman had a protruding lower jaw, which would have given her a distinctly simian appearance in life.

Radiological examinations showed no traces of bullet or knife wounds, nor any similar marks of violence on bones. Some of the long bones of the legs and arms had been broken after death, apparently either to conceal telltale deformities or to make them easier to fit into the stove for burning; the breaks were so crude that Dr. Paul gaily theorized the bones had been wedged between a door and its jamb and yanked. Photographs and full-scale drawings were made of each piece, the teguments were removed, and insect larvae were lifted and placed in numbered test tubes; then each piece was cleaned, measured, photographed, and drawn again.

Someone with an intimate knowledge of anatomy had dissected the bodies in a professional manner, though Paul noted that whereas a doctor would sever an arm at the shoulder, in this case the rib cage had been cut at the center and the whole arm, shoulder blade, and collarbone removed as a single piece—precisely, he pointed out, as one might carve a chicken. The dismemberment technique was identical to that used on a dozen batches of human remains, including nine severed heads, that were fished out of the Seine in 1942 and 1943—a flood of cadavers that ended when the culprit narrowly escaped detection after throwing a human hand off a bridge just as a barge passed underneath. Identification of these bodies, too, had been impossible, due both to decomposition and the fact that someone had stripped away the fingerprints and expertly removed the faces and scalps in a single piece. At the time, Dr. Paul had been concerned by scalpel marks in the fleshy parts of four thighs that floated ashore at La Muette on October 29, 1942. He knew firsthand that, unlike a surgeon, a coroner switching to another instrument does not lay down his scalpel but instead uses the cadaver’s thigh as a convenient pincushion; Paul had feared that one of his own students might be moonlighting. The bodies found at the rue Le Sueur bore identical marks on the thighs, and though a definite link was never proved, at least one forensic expert was convinced that the same person was responsible for the Seine and rue Le Sueur murders. This assumption did raise disturbing questions, though. Disfigurement was understandable when the bodies were to be thrown into a public waterway, but at the rue Le Sueur, when they were to be burned, what was the need for such delicate care? Perhaps the killer found the dissection not only practical, but pleasurable?

Professor Henri Griffon, director of the police toxicology laboratory, was given five jars of viscera and a kilogram of lime to examine for toxic substances. He noted that no blood was present in any specimen; the viscera were shapeless, impregnated with quicklime, in an advanced state of mummification, and exuded “a piquant and extremely disagreeable odor.” His vague estimate placed the time of death at least several months to a year before the discovery, but the effects of the lime were so uncertain that Griffon would not later repeat this opinion in court. Chemical analysis could rule out poisoning by toxic metals such as lead, bismuth, barium, zinc, mercury, antimony, and arsenic, but this left innumerable other poisons as well as strangulation, asphyxiation, and a host of other murder techniques whose marks would not show or could be concealed. Organic poisons that doctors normally use, such as ouabaine, scopolamine, chloroform, strychnine, and digitalis, were eventually found at Petiot’s rue Caumartin apartment, along with fifty times the amount of a doctor’s normal stock of morphine and heroin, but no such substances were found at the rue Le Sueur, and no trace of them would be expected in such badly decayed corpses.

The remains were among the most horrible the forensic experts had ever seen, but despite their revulsion, they could not restrain a certain amount of professional admiration for someone who had covered his tracks so effectively. Years later, Dr. Piédelièvre included in his Memoirs of a Coroner a chapter on Petiot entitled “My Dear Confrère, Doctor Petiot.” All of their science did not help them find one scrap of information, though they had more than enough material to study. When Dr. Paul gave his conservative estimate of ten bodies at the rue Le Sueur, he also said the number could go as high as thirty. There were from nine to a dozen more in the Seine. No one could guess how many more were never found or, at a time when bodies were common and too often meant trouble with the Germans, were found and never reported. Petiot himself later referred to sixty-three deaths—and on a few topics he was always scrupulously accurate.

* A selected list of characters begins on page 289.

* A generation earlier, Henri Désiré Landru had been guillotined for seducing and murdering at least ten women and burning their remains in his stove.

2

THE FIRST IDENTIFIED VICTIMS

The first two tentative identifications of victims were made with embarrassing ease: the police checked department files to see whether Petiot had a record, and the bodies began to assume names—Jean-Marc Van Bever and Marthe Khaït. These two murders, apparently among the first in the series, had been simple, practical affairs, different from the rest; and perhaps by showing Petiot just how easily murder could be done, they had started him in his new vocation. At the time when they occurred, no murder charges had been brought: the police simply noted it as strange that two people connected with Petiot conveniently disappeared just before they were due to testify in court on two separate narcotics charges against him. As Massu’s subordinates pieced the story together, the following tale emerged.

Early in 1942, two years before the rue Le Sueur discovery, the Police Judiciaire vice squad impounded the books of all Parisian pharmacies in an attempt to track down people who were receiving inordinately large amounts of narcotics. This massive raid was typical of Maréchal Philippe Pétain’s paradoxically moralistic Vichy government, which substituted Family, Fatherland, Work for the republican French motto Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and elevated basic old-fashioned morality to the level of patriotic duty. Since drug abuse ruined the bodies and minds of Frenchmen, it was not only damaging to the individual, but almost a crime against the State.

A raid on pharmacies was certain to catch most abusers. In occupied France drugs were exceptionally hard to find. Borders were effectively closed to smugglers, and pushers and other specialists in illegal traffic found more lucrative work in the black-market sale of daily goods. The only way an addict could support his habit was through compliant doctors or by misrepresenting himself to a number of honest doctors as a candidate for a drug cure. Either method left records in the dangerous-drugs registers of pharmacies, and it was on such evidence that the police arrested Jean-Marc Van Bever and his mistress on February 19, 1942.

Van Bever was the son of Adolphe Van Bever, coeditor with Paul Léautaud of a well-known anthology of French poets, and the nephew of the painter La Quintinie, one of the founders of the Salon d’Automne. Jean-Marc Van Bever was well brought up and fairly well educated. He had received his baccalauréat degree, spoke fluent English and some Italian and Spanish, and had spent a year or so in law school, but after this promising start his life fell into ruins. He squandered a F500,000 inheritance on various publishing and printing ventures, all of which failed, and spent much of the decade before his arrest drawing unemployment or welfare benefits. He had found his first regular job at age forty-one, four months before his arrest, when he and his sole friend, an out-of-work Italian hatter named Ugo Papini, began delivering coal. This work brought F60–F120 a day, and by economizing Van Bever had been able to save some F2,000–F3,000, which he always carried on his person.

Van Bever had made an abortive foray into marriage a decade earlier, and since then his only female companionship had been prostitutes. Jeannette Gaul, thirty-four, was one of these. At age thirty she had begun to use drugs, and with drugs as a lever one of her suppliers had persuaded her to quit her job as a chambermaid and become a licensed prostitute in a registered brothel. She drifted from one provincial brothel to another, and by late 1940 ended up in Paris, where she became a streetwalker, hanging about the seedier quartiers, picking up men—including Van Bever—and escorting them to the nearest cheap hotel. Van Bever was her paying client for three weeks in November 1941. When she fell ill, he visited her in the hospital. He persuaded her to move in with him at his hotel on the rue Piat two days before Christmas.

When she moved in with Van Bever, Jeannette Gaul gave up prostitution, but not her drug habit, which she continued to support by procuring, under guise of cures, limited quantities of heroin from five different doctors—each of whom presumably believed he was gradually weaning her from the drug. Among them was Dr. Marcel Petiot, who in late January and February 1942 had written five prescriptions in Jeannette Gaul’s name and two in that of Van Bever. The latter was not an addict, and had even been trying to persuade his mistress to give up drugs. But she was more stubborn than he, and until he could convince her to change, Van Bever stood by meekly.

In France, a criminal case is first turned over to a juge d’instruction, or examining magistrate, who conducts the instruction—interrogating and confronting witnesses, gathering evidence, directing police investigations, and compiling a dossier that, should he decide that a crime has been committed, he sends to the public-prosecutor’s office, where the indictment is drawn up. When this is complete, an avocat général, roughly equivalent to a prosecuting attorney, actually takes the case to court and argues on the State’s behalf. The Van Bever and Gaul case was turned over to juge d’instruction Achille Olmi, who was generally seen with his mouth open and an astonished look in his eyes, and whom lawyers found to be one of the less efficient and scintillating magistrates in Paris.

Petiot in 1942 was operating as a general practitioner out of an office in his apartment at 66 rue Caumartin in the busy commercial district near the Gare Saint-Lazare. Among his other patients were about ninety-five addicts whom he was curing of their habits by means of diminishing doses of drugs. Though such cures were legal, most respectable physicians shied away from them, and there were only about twenty-five Parisian doctors who cared to deal with them at all. Petiot had previously run afoul of the narcotics laws, and though never convicted, this made him suspect from the beginning. Jeannette Gaul and Van Bever, when arrested, initially stated that Petiot had given Van Bever the two prescriptions with full knowledge that they were actually for his mistress. Both admitted that the doctor had refused to furnish him a third prescription. The whole case rested on this one point, for Petiot could possibly have been deceived by Jeannette Gaul, who had no real intention of being cured; but had he given her additional prescriptions in Van Bever’s name, it would be obvious that he knew of her intentions.

When called before Olmi for questioning in February 1942, Petiot quite truthfully pointed out that his fee was only fifty francs, a quite reasonable rate and hardly the sort of sum one would charge for the illegal sale of drugs. He outlined the precautions he took to avoid abuse of his services and said he had warned Jeannette Gaul at the start that, despite any requests she might make, he would never give her more than a certain predetermined quantity of heroin. Van Bever had been presented to him as an addict, and, given certain physical signs and an awareness of the “habitual proselytism of addicts,” Petiot had believed him to be one. Examination had been difficult, he said, because Van Bever had pretended to be deaf and his mistress had whispered in his ear before he answered any question. Petiot had given him two prescriptions but had finally tired of the whispering routine and grown suspicious about Van Bever’s addiction, and when the latter returned a week after his second visit, Petiot refused to give him any more.

Following Petiot’s statement, Jeannette Gaul changed hers and said Petiot had told the truth. Van Bever agreed, saying he had accompanied his mistress to the doctor’s office in all innocence, and had been greatly surprised when he heard her telling Petiot that he was an addict. Several weeks later, Olmi heard the three again. Petiot and Gaul repeated the same story, but Van Bever now claimed he had told Petiot that he was not an addict. Jeannette Gaul then changed her statement again, saying that, after all, Petiot had really known the heroin was for her. Both maintained that Petiot had never bothered to examine Van Bever—an absolutely essential step before furnishing a prescription. Olmi didn’t know what to do, and while waiting for something to occur to him, he indicted all three. Jeannette Gaul remained in jail, while the judge granted Van Bever a provisional release on March 15. Petiot had not been jailed at all. The trial date was set for May 26, 1942.

At 9:30 on the morning of Sunday, March 22, Van Bever and his friend Papini went down to the café in their building for coffee. A robust, clean-shaven man of about forty-five was waiting for Van Bever. The two seemed to know one another, and after a brief conversation, Van Bever went up to his room, came down, and was about to go out the door with the stranger when he turned to Papini. The man, Van Bever told his friend, was the husband of one of Jeannette Gaul’s friends and had a letter from Jeannette that had been smuggled out of the prison. Papini asked why the stranger couldn’t have brought the letter with him. “Perhaps Jeannette had some debts that they want me to pay—but don’t worry, I won’t pay them.” Saying he would return that afternoon or evening, Van Bever bid his friend farewell and left.

Van Bever did not return that day, nor did he work or come home Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. Papini entered his friend’s room and noticed that everything was in its place and that Van Bever, a heavy smoker, had not even taken his tobacco pouch or a letter he had been in a hurry to post. On Wednesday, Papini contacted Van Bever’s lawyer, who advised him to write to the public prosecutor. In his letter, Papini did not even mention Petiot, since Van Bever had not worried much about the case and did not think he would have any further trouble with it. Papini instead wrote that in November 1941 Van Bever had gone to Troyes with France Mignot, a prostitute who had been his mistress before Jeannette Gaul, to meet her family. When the couple had arrived at the house, the entire Mignot family had thrown itself on Van Bever, beating him with clubs, stabbing him twice, and robbing him of F1,200. Van Bever had pressed charges, and the case had been due to come up in Troyes on March 24, 1942—two days after the disappearance. Papini feared that the Mignots had murdered his friend.

The issue grew more complex on March 26, when a stranger delivered two letters to the boulevard Saint-Germain office of Jeannette Gaul’s lawyer, Françoise Pavie. One asked Maître Pavie to tell Van Bever’s lawyer, Maître Michel Menard, that his services would no longer be required, while the other begged Jeannette Gaul to tell the truth—that Van Bever truly had been an addict. Maître Menard was convinced that neither the handwriting nor the style of the letters was his client’s, and since he was an old family friend he could not believe Van Bever would willingly have dismissed him with a brusque note sent to a third party.

Police searched hospitals and prisons, and made inquiries at Troyes and among Jeannette Gaul’s circle of friends—all without result. A drug dealer who was tentatively identified as the man who had taken the letters to Maître Pavie could never be found for questioning. Similarly, the husband of a young addict who was both a friend of Jeannette Gaul’s and an occasional client of Dr. Petiot fit the description of the man who had led Van Bever away, but police never found him either. The case remained a mystery; at the time, there was no compelling reason to suspect Petiot, who denied any knowledge of Van Bever’s fate and apparently stood to gain little at that stage by his disappearance. Retrospectively, however, one might find a motive in the fact that ten days after Van Bever vanished, Petiot suddenly “found” a complete report on his medical examination of Van Bever—a report so complete, he boasted to Judge Olmi, that he had even measured the length of the man’s penis. Here, then, was incontrovertible proof that Petiot had diligently fulfilled the obligations of his profession. A prosecutor later wondered whether the careful report was the result not of an examination, but of an autopsy.

The drug charge came to trial as scheduled in May. Jeannette Gaul was sentenced to six months in prison and fined F2,400. Released in August, she promptly returned to prostitution and drugs, and died of tetanus three months later. Van Bever was sentenced in absentia to one year in prison and drew the same fine as his mistress. Petiot was found guilty and given a suspended one-year sentence and a F10,000 fine, which his lawyer, René Floriot, subsequently succeeded in reducing. The search for Van Bever continued over the next year, headed by Police Inspector Roger Gignoux.

The old Petiot file Commissaire Massu consulted contained another, remarkably similar case. On March 5, 1942, another young woman, Raymonde Baudet, was arrested for infraction of the drug laws. She had taken a prescription for the mild tranquilizer Sonéryl and, with the help of her lover, had removed the word “Sonéryl” with ink eradicator and substituted “14 ampoules of heroin.” The pharmacist to whom she presented it immediately noticed the clumsy forgery and telephoned the police. The original prescription had been written by Dr. Marcel Petiot, who had previously given Raymonde Baudet four prescriptions for heroin as part of a drug cure.

It is not clear what Petiot thought the danger to himself might be from the Baudet forgery. Perhaps he was worried about the earlier four prescriptions, particularly since the Gaul–Van Bever case had begun only two weeks earlier. Whatever the reason, his next actions were drastic and suspicious. Raymonde Baudet’s mother, née Marthe Fortin, married three times: to a man named Lavie, by whom she had a son; to Raymonde’s father, Monsieur Baudet; and presently to David Khaït. Raymonde had used the name Khaït with Petiot—possibly concealing the fact that she was getting drugs elsewhere under another name—and it was “Khaït” alone that appeared on the prescriptions. Petiot apparently reasoned that if the mother were an addict as well and he claimed that half the prescriptions had been intended for her, the case against him would be seriously weakened. But to make the police believe this, he would need the mother’s help.

Several days after Raymonde’s arrest, a little past noon, a man went to the Khaït home and introduced himself as Dr. Petiot. Marthe Khaït initially resisted the propositions he made, but with tortuous logic he explained, cajoled, and finally persuaded her that if she lied to the police she would weaken some of the accusations against her daughter. Brazenly speaking in her eldest son’s presence, Petiot told her that since the police might wish to verify Madame Khaït’s fictitious narcotics use by a physical examination, he would need to give her a dozen dry injections in the thigh to leave convincing puncture marks. The son, Fernand Lavie, an employee at the Préfecture de Police, objected to this deceit, but his mother brushed him off, saying that she had done many things for his sister in the past and could certainly do one more small thing to help her. Petiot and Madame Khaït went into the next room, and after a few minutes he emerged and left.

Several days later, Madame Khaït changed her mind. She told her son that she would no longer follow Petiot’s counsel and went to consult Dr. Pierre Trocmé, a trusted family friend as well as her physician. Trocmé at first could not believe a real medical man would have made such outrageous suggestions, but when he found Petiot’s name quite properly listed in his medical directory, he advised his patient to tell the police everything. Later in the investigation he hid behind professional secrecy, and though he admitted having examined Madame Khaït, he would not tell police whether he had found puncture marks.

At 7:00 P.M.