Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris

4.

TWO WITNESSES

THE REIGN OF BEASTS HAS BEGUN.

—Albert Camus, Notebook, September 7, 1939

MARCEL Petiot had indeed been selling drugs. By March 1944, no fewer than ninety-five registered drug addicts were attending his “detoxication program” at rue Caumartin, ostensibly to be cured of their addiction by a series of increasingly smaller doses. Petiot had gained a reputation for this treatment and also for being a sympathetic doctor who indulged his patients. His waiting room was regularly packed. Georgette, who did the bookkeeping for the practice, was busier than ever.

Massu now learned that Petiot had a sizable file with the Brigade Mondaine, a specialized force of the Police Judiciaire that dealt with, among other things, prostitution, procurement, pornography, and drugs. In early 1942, in another periodic clamp-down on the rampant illicit drug trade in Paris, the Brigade Mondaine had launched a campaign to arrest suspected addicts. Among the people taken into custody was one of Petiot’s patients, and the subsequent inquiry had raised a number of questions about the physician, which, in light of the later investigation, would prove to be a key piece of evidence.

The patient was Jean-Marc Van Bever, a forty-one-year-old coal deliverer. This was his first steady job, gained only a few months before, with the rising demand for this scarce resource to heat offices, apartments, and other buildings. Previously Van Bever had invested his inheritance into a number of printing businesses that had gone bust. For most of the late 1930s, he had lived in poverty, eking out an existence thanks to social welfare and various charities. This was an unexpected result for a man of his background.

After graduating from the prestigious Louis-le-Grand Lycée, Van Bever had studied at university, including a year in law school. He spoke English and knew a smattering of Spanish and Italian. His father, Adolphe Van Bever, had coedited a noted anthology of French poets, and his great-uncle was the painter La Quintinie.

At the time of his arrest, Van Bever had protested that he was not an addict himself, claiming only to have mixed in the environment thanks to his relationship with a prostitute named Jeannette Gaul. At thirty-four years of age, Gaul had a severe addiction to morphine and one of its more potent derivatives, heroin, which had grown in popularity in Paris after expanding beyond its original use as a cough suppressant and cure for a variety of diseases of the “air passages,” ranging from bronchitis to pneumonia. Both morphine and heroin flourished in the demimonde, not least among prostitutes trying to escape hazards of the trade.

After working as a chambermaid with a family in Fontainebleau and later moving on to a number of brothels in Nantes, Clamecy, and Auxerre, Gaul had arrived in Paris just after the Occupation. Her last pimp, Henri “The Jailbird” Baldenweek, had abandoned her and she became an unlicensed streetwalker, the most exposed and dangerous of the main types of prostitution that flourished in the Occupation. In November 1941, not far from La Madeleine, Gaul met Van Bever. After three weeks of regular visits, he asked her to move in with him in his small rented room at 56 rue Piat in the 20th arrondissement. She promised to quit her job. This was two days before Christmas 1941.

Gaul, however, remained an addict. To obtain narcotics, she had exploited the lack of control in the system by obtaining heroin prescriptions from five different doctors. One of them was Marcel Petiot. In the first month and a half of 1942, specifically the last twenty-two days, Petiot had written five prescriptions for her and two more in the name of Van Bever.

On February 19, 1942, Inspectors Dupont and Gautier of the Brigade Mondaine arrested Gaul in her room. Van Bever was also apprehended, and then after being held in custody for almost four weeks, he was released on bail. Discovering Petiot’s name as the physician who prescribed the drugs, the Brigade Mondaine sent this information to Achille Olmi, the juge d’instruction, an investigating magistrate who would decide whether or not the state would prosecute. Olmi summoned Petiot for questioning.

The prescriptions were legal, Petiot argued. He was merely attempting to cure his patient by prescribing progressively smaller doses of the drug. This method was superior to having the addict “go out and steal, or even kill to get it” and, even more, remained “the only known cure.” The state was wrong to suspect him of trafficking. If he had been doing that, Petiot said, he would not have charged a mere 50 francs for a visit and 200 for a substance that would fetch far more on the black market.

As for writing prescriptions to Van Bever, Petiot said that he had been told that he was an addict, and after a physical examination, he had believed it was true. He had, however, become suspicious on their third visit, when Van Bever, claiming to be deaf, answered the doctor’s questions only after his girlfriend whispered in his ear. At this point, Petiot refused to sign any more prescriptions. Both Van Bever and Gaul later acknowledged that this was accurate. Van Bever defended his deception by saying that he had been surprised when his girlfriend claimed that he was a deaf addict and had not known what to do. On the spur of the moment, he had gone along with the scheme.

Van Bever and Gaul later changed their story in certain respects to create just enough confusion that the magistrate felt compelled to indict the patients as well as the physician. The crux of the matter was that Van Bever now claimed that Petiot knew all along that he was no drug addict and that the drugs in his name would go to his lover. If the patients were found guilty, they would go to prison; if Petiot were found guilty, he would, at minimum, lose his medical practice. The trial, which would take place at the Tribunal Correctionnel, was set for May 26, 1942.

Two months before the trial, however, Van Bever disappeared.

VAN Bever was last seen at a café on rue Piat on the morning of March 22. He was having a drink with his friend and fellow coal deliverer, a former Italian hatter named Ugo Papini. During their conversation, Van Bever was called away to meet a tall man in his mid-forties, dark-haired, clean-shaven, and wearing a beret. Not long afterward, Van Bever returned and said that he had to leave with the stranger. It was all very mysterious, Papini acknowledged. Van Bever said only that the man was a friend of Jeannette Gaul, or more exactly, the husband of one of her friends. “Perhaps Jeannette had some debts that they want me to pay,” Van Bever said, promising not to be gone long.

When Van Bever failed to return that night, or show up for work the following day, Papini entered his room, which looked untidy as usual. Strangely, Van Bever, a smoker, had not taken his tobacco with him. Earlier, he had told Papini that he had to mail an urgent letter, but it was still in the room. Papini wrote immediately to Van Bever’s lawyer, Maître Michel Menard, who suggested that he report the missing person to the procureur de la République, or public prosecutor.

On March 26, 1942, Papini filed a report, elaborating on his fears for his friend’s safety. He never suspected Dr. Petiot, nor did the police. At the time, there was a more likely suspect.

Over the past few months, Van Bever had been visiting another prostitute, France Mignot. In November 1941, he had accompanied her to her family’s house in Troyes. As he prepared to have sex with her, Mignot’s brothers and mother attacked. Van Bever was stabbed, beaten, and robbed. After his release from the hospital, he pressed charges. The girl, her mother, and her brothers had all been arrested, with a trial scheduled to begin on Tuesday, March 24, 1942. So when Van Bever suddenly disappeared two days before that, Papini suspected that the culprit was someone in or close to that family.

But then, on March 26, while Petiot’s case was still pending, an unknown man delivered two letters to the office of Jeannette Gaul’s public defender, Maître Françoise Pavie on Boulevard Saint-Germain. Both letters were purportedly written by Van Bever. The first one, addressed to his attorney, Maître Menard, informed him that his services were no longer needed—an odd way to end a business relationship with an old family friend. The second letter, addressed to Jeannette Gaul, was even more peculiar.

“It is no longer necessary to tell any stories,” the writer began. He then claimed to be a drug addict who required one to four shots a day and admonished her to tell the truth. There was little here about Van Bever’s lover, but a great deal instead about his physician:

You know that Dr. Petiot examined me in the next room. The proof is that he saw the scabs of my hypos. If I made false statements, it was to get temporary freedom to make a new life for myself somewhere else. We will meet on your release to try to make a new life together, far from all filth. I kiss you warmly

.

The letter was signed “Jean Marc van Bever.”

Why would Van Bever go to the trouble of writing to his lover only to spend two-thirds of his letter confessing to an addiction that either he did not have or that, if he did, would not be news, and then proceed to make points that corroborated Petiot’s position? Why, too, in a letter to his lover, was he signing his full name? Van Bever’s attorney, for one, doubted that these letters were written by his client.

The police continued to search for Van Bever in bars, prisons, hospitals, asylums, morgues, and other likely places around the capital and surrounding country, without success. His trial with Petiot, meanwhile, came up, as scheduled, at the Tenth Police Court. Van Bever was pronounced guilty in absentia and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment with a fine of 10,000 francs. He was never found.

As for Jeannette Gaul, she received a fine of 2,400 francs and a sentence of six months in prison, though she would be released after serving only three months (in May 1942), counting from her arrest in February. She returned to the streets and her drug habit, even visiting Dr. Petiot again. She died three months later of tetanus, a complication from an unclean hypodermic needle.

Petiot argued that Van Bever’s disappearance—“he did not dare to show up”—was proof of his own innocence. He was let off with a fine of 10,000 francs, which his lawyer, René Floriot, appealed and soon managed to reduce to 2,400 francs. Dr. Petiot had emerged from a potentially disastrous narcotics charge with his record untarnished.

AS the Van Bever–Gaul investigation was winding down, Petiot was implicated in a second narcotics case. The circumstances were similar. He was allegedly attempting to cure a patient, who had then tried to circumvent his treatment and gain more drugs by deception. But as the case emerged, there would be even more striking similarities.

The patient in the investigation was the twenty-eight-year-old Régine or Raymonde Baudet. In early 1942, when Petiot had prescribed Sonéryl, a mild sleeping pill, Baudet had attempted to replace the word “Sonéryl” with “14 vials of heroin.” The pharmacist on rue des Écoles was not fooled by the unsophisticated tactic. He notified the police. Baudet was taken into custody on March 16, 1942, her fourth arrest on drug charges, two of which had previously led to convictions.

Once again hauled into court for a drug case, Petiot freely admitted trying to cure Baudet of her addiction. He had written four prescriptions for heroin for her already under the name that she had given him, Raymonde Khaït, the last name borrowed from her stepfather. Petiot had refused, he further stated, to write any more prescriptions, offering instead a sedative. It was hardly his fault that his patient, in conjunction with one of her lovers, a man named Daniel Desrouët, had tried to alter his prescription.

There is no evidence that Petiot was involved in the attempted forgery, but what he did next was surprising to say the least, and the case becomes more convoluted. According to the police report filed by Raymonde’s half brother, Fernand Lavie, a thirty-six-year-old clerk at the Préfecture de Police, Petiot went over to the home of their mother, fifty-three-year-old Marthe Antoinette Khaït, at 27 rue de la Huchette, in the Latin Quarter. Passing the cabaret El Djezair in the same building, an Abwehr-controlled establishment, Petiot entered the apartment and berated Khaït for her daughter’s preposterous mistakes. Then Petiot offered to help. They would first need to hire a good attorney, and he offered to pay the expenses.

The physician then advised that Raymonde could best escape a long prison sentence if Madame Khaït claimed that she was herself a drug addict. The authorities would believe it, he explained, because Raymonde had already told the police that she and her mother shared the prescriptions, which had been made to the name of Khaït. Then, to make this claim more credible should the police examine her, Petiot offered to make a dozen injections in her thigh. The injections, he promised, would be innocuous.

Khaït’s son was shocked by the doctor’s proposal. Under no circumstances, he told her, should she be a party to such fraud. Madame Khaït, however, was eventually won over by Petiot’s apparent generosity and adamancy. After many years of helping her daughter, Khaït said that she would not stop now in this time of need. Petiot and Khaït went into another room. A few minutes later, the doctor left the apartment.

At some point that week, probably one or two days later, Khaït decided that she did not want to follow through with their plan and deliberately mislead authorities. Her son had rebuked her for her complicity, as had her husband David and her physician, Dr. Pierre Trocmé, who was appalled to learn about the behavior of his medical colleague. In fact, Trocmé refused to believe that a licensed doctor would give such advice. He urged Madame Khaït to report the matter to the police. If she refused, he would do so himself.

About seven o’clock in the evening of March 25, 1942, Madame Khaït left her apartment, telling her husband that she had to see Dr. Petiot and then stop by the office of her daughter’s lawyer. It would be a quick errand, she said. She did not state the purpose of the visit. Nor did she take any identification papers, ration cards, or even her purse. A large pot of water was boiling on the stove.

On the following morning, when she had still not returned home, an envelope containing two letters had been slipped under the door of Madame Khaït’s residence. One was for her husband David, a Jewish tailor, and the other for her son Fernand. Both were allegedly written by Marthe Khaït. Opening the envelope addressed to himself, David Khaït read with surprise:

Do not trouble yourself on my account. Do not say anything to anybody and above all, don’t go to the police. What I’m doing is in the interest of Raymonde. Dr. Petiot was right. It is better for the police to believe that I am a drug addict. I am not able to withstand an interrogation. I am going to escape to the Free Zone. You will definitely be able to come and join me by adopting the same means. Later, Raymonde will rejoin us

.

Bizarrely, she then confessed to having taken drugs for years as a painkiller for a heart ailment. The letter to Fernand was similar. And both letters bore a striking resemblance to the letter in the Van Bever case, in everything from confession and explanation of the disappearance (which in both cases involved leaving abruptly without packing), to the method and timing of the letters’ delivery (which in both cases had the person signing his or her full legal name). Some experts would extend the similarities further, concluding that the handwriting appeared to be from the same person, though this would be disputed.

The handwriting actually seemed to be his wife’s, David Khaït acknowledged, and he eventually concluded that she had in fact written the letters. He also thought that she had delivered them herself. The family dog, which always barked at the approach of a stranger, had not stirred. Even the stubborn latch on the door in the courtyard had posed no problem. Someone familiar with the building must have delivered the letters. Khaït also recalled his wife’s earlier frustrations about her daughter’s predicament and some conversations when she claimed that she had considered fleeing to the unoccupied zone for the duration of the trial. But at the same time, he knew, she was no drug addict.

Also that morning, two other letters were delivered to the home of Raymonde’s attorney, Maître Pierre Véron. Both of them—one to the attorney, the other to Raymonde—duplicated the information contained in the letters to her family. Three one-hundred-franc notes were enclosed for the attorney’s fee.

The maid, who received the letters, first said they had been delivered by Marthe Khaït. She was certain, she said, because she recognized the woman from previous visits. Later she changed her statement, claiming that the letters were delivered by someone who resembled Madame Khaït. As with the first two letters, the tone of these two was more formal than usual and devoid of the usual nicknames for members of Madame Khaït’s family. Handwriting experts again disagreed on the authenticity of the letters.

Why had Madame Khaït gone to Petiot anyway? Was it to report her decision not to participate in his fraudulent scheme? Was it to pick up the money to pay the attorney, as he had earlier promised, or was there yet some other, unknown reason?

Madame Khaït’s husband, David, uncertain how to proceed, listened to the pleas in the letters and refrained from approaching the police, which was only done by Fernand on May 7, 1942. David Khaït, being Jewish, had good reasons for avoiding contact with authorities and had first gone to Petiot, who claimed not to have seen his wife on the day she disappeared. He had not seen her, he added, since the day he visited her house after Raymonde’s arrest. “All that I know,” Petiot told him in his office, “is that she wanted to leave for the Free Zone.”

Petiot did say that he had earlier given her a contact in the unoccupied zone, should she want to flee. While David Khaït waited, Petiot grabbed a postcard, addressed it to “Monsieur Gaston,” Plagne, near Loupiac, Cantal, in southwest France, and scribbled the single line: “Have you seen the party I sent to you?” Petiot placed a stamp on the card and gave it to Khaït.

The following month, when David Khaït visited Petiot a second time, the doctor said he had not heard from his contact. On a third encounter, in Olmi’s office at the Palace of Justice in early May, Petiot said that he had just learned that his associate in the unoccupied zone had not seen Madame Khaït.

“You wretch! You criminal!” Khaït shouted. “It’s you who killed my wife!” He could read it in the physician’s eyes, he said. Petiot replied calmly that the man was crazy and needed to be locked up.

When questioned by the police, Petiot said he had no idea what happened to Marthe Khaït and denied that he had given her any injections. He also alleged that he had received a letter from Madame Khaït’s daughter, threatening to blackmail him if he did not say that the original prescriptions were genuine. The story of his injections, Petiot said, was simply the lie of a drug addict desperate to save her own skin.

Baudet was found guilty on July 15, 1942. Petiot was also fined and sentenced for drug trafficking, though his attorney, René Floriot, succeeded in January 1943 in having the fines of the Van Bever and Khaït cases combined for a total of 2,400 francs. Despite the verdict, many who worked on the case remained suspicious. Maître Véron, for one, urged Magistrate Olmi to charge Petiot with kidnapping or murder. He would later come to play an important role in the suspect’s life.

The police continued to look for Madame Khaït, under that name as well as several possible aliases suggested by her family, including her maiden name, Fortin, and variations of her earlier name by marriage, Lavie, such as Lavic, Laric, and Lepic. They never found her. So just three days after Van Bever vanished, another witness in a separate case against Dr. Petiot had disappeared.

The police eventually searched Petiot’s apartment on rue Caumartin, finding nothing whatsoever to implicate him in the disappearance of either person. They did, however, find a surprising number of jewels, linen, and other objects of value in an office drawer, which Petiot explained as “gifts of clients” who could not afford his fees. Almost apologetically, as the search failed to turn up any evidence of the missing persons, the presiding officer, Achille Olmi, turned to Petiot and said, “Rest assured, no one is accusing you of burning them in your stove.”