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

5.

“100,000 AUTOPSIES”

MY DEAR COMMISSAIRE, I DO NOT ENVY YOU INVESTIGATORS WHEN IT COMES TO PUTTING NAMES ON THIS DEBRIS.

—DR. Albert Paul

PARIS’S newspapers devoured the story of the monster in the elegant 16th arrondissement. Marcel Petiot was dubbed “The New Landru,” after the infamous French murderer who had been convicted in 1921 for killing eleven people, ten of them lovers. Le Petit Parisien chose that sobriquet for its two-inch-high headlines on Monday, March 13. L’Oeuvre used it that morning as well, reporting that some twenty-five or perhaps thirty women had been killed or “burned alive” in the charnel house. L’Oeuvre and its many rivals in the capital competed in depicting the killer as a sadistic sex fiend who tortured women before he watched their “throes of agony” in his viewer and then mutilated their bodies.

Le Matin was also emphasizing the “demonic, erotic” nature of the crimes. All the bodies found at rue Le Sueur—that is, those that were not chopped up, burned, or caked with lime—were naked. When exactly had the killer removed the victim’s clothes? Was it before or after he latched them to the hooks of his padded cell? To complete the nightmare image, Le Matin was also reporting that Dr. Petiot would wear a frightening mask as he tortured and finished off his victims.

As the controlled French press covered the Petiot case for the home market, the official state-run German news agency DNB, Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro, broadcast the news internationally of the “charred and dismembered skeletons of 25 women” found on the physician’s property. Almost every night, its bulletins detailed how Petiot pedaled to the empty house near the Arc de Triomphe to conduct the grim business that filled his lime pit and produced the nauseating smoke that emanated from his chimney.

The DNB, like the Parisian press, sometimes reported that Georgette Petiot knew or participated in her husband’s activities; other times, she was presented as oblivious to his double life. Usually, however, the German-controlled press emphasized that Petiot preyed on women. The physician was described as leaving his wife at home as he arranged nightly rendezvous on rue Le Sueur. Neighbors looked away, disinclined to interfere with the physician’s presumably romantic liaisons.

The female visitors to his property—often assumed to be “shady ladies of the demi-monde”—sought packets of heroin, cocaine, or some other narcotic. What they received, however, was not “the white powders of forgetfulness, but death itself.” Petiot, with his hypodermic needle, was quickly deduced to have injected a poison into the veins of his victims. Whether it was a yet-to-be-identified substance, an overdose of some generic drug, or perhaps a concoction of his own invention was not clear.

Thanks to his connections, a German journalist for the DNB, Karl Schmidt, received one of the first tours of the triangular room. The butcher, he speculated, drugged his victim and then dragged her into the dark room, where she was tied up and suspended from the hooks on the back wall. The murderer projected two spotlights onto her face, watching the “human agony until the last convulsion.” The physician, using his medical skills, proceeded to inflict torture, presumably prolonging the pain as long as possible. He then dissected “the twisted corpse” and tossed it into the lime pit.

Massu, however, was far from ready to draw any conclusion. Known for his caution, the commissaire preferred to move slowly, building his case piece by piece and proceeding with as much certainty as possible, rather than rushing into a mistake. He was skeptical, particularly of evidence that seemed too clear or obvious. “You have often heard me say,” Massu said to Brigade Secretary Canitrot, “it is necessary to be suspicious of the so-called evidence.” When policemen make hasty conclusions based on “the evidence,” Massu believed, they often fall into a river of error, with potentially “catastrophic” results. The fundamental problem for a detective was how to interpret the evidence.

On one hand, Massu was relieved to receive unambiguous instructions from the Gestapo, hoping of course that it would mean that German authorities would not interfere with or obstruct his investigation. At the same time, there was another concern. The Gestapo rarely expressed immediate interest in a French criminal case. When they did, particularly when ordering an arrest, it was usually to catch a culprit whose crime consisted of little more than opposing the Nazi regime. Did this mean that the owner of the house at No. 21 rue Le Sueur possibly served the French Resistance?

The case was certainly perplexing. Unlike the case of the infamous French serial killer Henri Landru or the recent murder spree of Eugen Weidmann, it was not clear how exactly Petiot or the murderer had either killed or disposed of his victims. There was no sign of stabbing or physical blows, and there was no blood found on the bodies of the victims or in the basement. As the journalist Jacques Perry put it, there were many bodies, but no signs of a murder.

ON the morning of March 13, a saleswoman at the department store Grand Magasins du Printemps on Boulevard Haussmann contacted the police to tell her story. “I should have been killed this afternoon at three o’clock,” she said. Based on a referral from her pharmacist, she claimed to have consulted Petiot about a sore wrist on the afternoon of March 11. Petiot, she thought, looked more like a mason than a medical doctor, and his suit was supposedly stained with lime.

“A shiver ran down my spine,” she claimed, describing her unease as the physician, staring intensely at her, touched her wrist to examine it. “His black eyes,” she said, “bored into me with such impertinence that I thought he was mad.” Petiot allegedly X-rayed her hand, diagnosed a sprain, and told her that her delicate bones needed more calcium. He prescribed treatment. But as he did not have the necessary equipment at his office, he asked her to consult a “special clinic.” The address was 21 rue Le Sueur.

Although it was not easy to sift out the valuable pieces of information in the barrage of rumors and allegations already coming to his attention, Massu now had many leads. The chief priority, of course, was locating the physician. The obvious place to check was the forwarding address posted on the front door at rue Le Sueur: 18 rue des Lombards, Auxerre, just under one hundred miles to the southeast, in the central Burgundian region of Yonne. In addition, examining the note, Massu learned that there had originally been a different address—one that had been removed and then replaced, in a different handwriting. The original was 55 or 56 rue du Pont, Auxerre.

Massu asked one of his assistants to make the travel arrangements. Trains ran less regularly during the Occupation, only twice a week to Auxerre, and the next one did not leave for a few days. But Massu obviously did not want to wait. He called a friend in the garage of the préfecture de police and obtained car number 3313 and gasoline for his trip, which, in the strict rationing system, was not always an easy prospect even for the head of the Brigade Criminelle. The brigade secretary and two inspectors joined him. By six o’clock that morning, they were on the road.

Massu was still trying to figure out how the murderer selected his victims, lured them into the town house, and, as he imagined the terrifying scenario, pulled out a long syringe to deliver a deadly injection. The killer then chopped up the bodies, disposed of the internal organs, and dropped the remaining debris into the lime pit, which would further dehydrate the bodies and make them easier to burn. Massu’s hypothesis sounded, as he put it, as “horrible and icy as any story of Edgar Allan Poe.”

Massu needed to find out how and when the doctor obtained his lime, and who had helped him. Clearly the doctor—or whoever the murderer was—could not have killed so many people on his own. How, too, could he have escaped detection by his neighbors? Massu was nowhere near understanding the case, let alone finding the killer and the evidence to convict him. For the first time in his career, the commissaire was having trouble sleeping.

“Boss,” the secretary asked in the car, “is it true, as it’s said, that some engravings of the devil were found in the office at rue Caumartin?”

“Yes,” Massu said. “There was better than that, or worse, depending on your view.” The commissaire did not elaborate more than mentioning some “bestial and smutty drawings” found in Petiot’s office.

“Is the doctor a drug addict?” another inspector wondered, picking up on another rumor.

“It’s almost certain,” Massu answered, probably too hastily. Drugs were too easy an explanation for how a respectable physician by day could become a monster at night.

Before reaching Auxerre, the investigators stopped at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, the town where Dr. Petiot had served as mayor. Chief Inspector Marius Battut and Inspector Rochereau went first to the murder suspect’s former home at 56 rue Carnot. The current occupant, another physician, told them that he had lived there since July 1934. He had seen Dr. Petiot only once and had never had any dealings with him. The home owner, Battut summed up in his report, “did not want to provide any interesting information.”

The gendarmes at the Villeneuve-sur-Yonne police department, however, were more helpful. They told the officers of the Brigade Criminelle that Petiot suffered from a “very bad reputation.” During his term as mayor, he had been suspected of committing a number of thefts, including cans of oil and gasoline. One time, he was charged with stealing electricity by tampering with the meter attached to his property. What’s more, the brigade inspectors learned that another one of his suspected lovers had died in mysterious circumstances.

ON March 11, 1930, fourteen years to the day before the discovery at rue Le Sueur, Armand Debauve, the owner of a dairy cooperative outside Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, was having a drink at Frascot’s bistro. About eight o’clock that evening, a villager arrived with news that his dairy was on fire. Debauve rushed home to find his house in flames and his wife, firefighters informed him, sprawled out dead on the kitchen floor, her head covered in blood.

It did not take long for detectives to conclude that the fire had been intentionally set, and the victim, forty-five-year-old Henriette Debauve, had received a series of blows to her skull. The size of the wounds suggested that the weapon had been a hammer. Indeed, of the handful of objects missing from the property, one of them was a hammer.

Not long afterward, neighbors reported seeing Mayor Petiot drive by the ruined farmhouse with his wife. He had come, eyewitnesses first deduced, to express his condolences to the family of the victim. For an experienced doctor and veteran of the First World War, however, he seemed strangely uneasy, even nervous. Then, to further surprise, the mayor returned to his car and drove into the town of Sens to take his wife to the cinema.

Petiot certainly knew the victim. The two had been introduced several years before by “Old Man Frascot”—the same man who had introduced Petiot to his previous lover, Louisette Delaveau. Frascot, moreover, had joined the doctor and Henriette for dinner a few times, and they had appeared to hit it off. She became his patient, and, as police investigators later believed, almost certainly his lover.

There were many curiosities about this case. The fire occurred on a Tuesday evening, when Debauve’s husband went out to the bistro. This was also the second Tuesday of the month, the day before the dairy paid the farmers for milk. The safe had been forced open, but no money had been found there, because Debauve had hidden it earlier that day under the kitchen cabinet.

Interestingly, too, the police had uncovered a clear set of fingerprints on an iron engraving tool that had been removed from the shed and probably had been used to pry open the safe in the bedroom. Fingerprints were taken of the dairy’s twenty-one employees, but there was no match. When Petiot was asked for fingerprints, he refused. Robert Seguin, his successor as mayor in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, later described the uproar when Petiot finally complied. He lost his temper and ripped out a page from the town’s official register (registre officiel des déliberations). “Furiously, he pressed his fingers into the ink himself and affixed his fingerprints onto the legally inviolable register. Then he threw it on the table saying, ‘Do what you want. You’ll see that it will not get you anywhere.’ ” He stormed out of the room, slamming the door.

When Commissaire Massu requested the file on the Debauve murder from the investigators of the Brigade Mobile of Dijon, it was not found, and detectives began to grow suspicious. Speculations rose about the missing documents, and many people believed that the mayor had used his power to destroy them. Years later, the dossier was actually located—filed not under D for Debauve, but M for murder. Curiously, too, it was slim, containing no record of any interviews or even a reference to Petiot’s arrival on the scene.

Of course, a crime of this nature had attracted a great deal of attention from police, press, and townsmen. One freelance reporter for the local paper, Le Petit Régional, was particularly well informed. His reporting was soon filling in details that perplexed even the main investigators. Among other scoops, he retrieved the hammer used in the murder, from a stream close to the farmhouse, dropped there likely so that the rust would remove any trace of fingerprints. The journalist never signed his name to any of the articles. His identity was only revealed in 1945. It was Marcel Petiot.

Frascot, in the meantime, had been claiming that he knew something about the case that no one else did, insinuating that he had seen Petiot at the dairy before the fire and implying that the hunt for the murderer should begin in the mayor’s office.

What exactly Frascot knew about that night may never be revealed because, a few weeks after Debauve’s death, he agreed to meet with Petiot for a drink at the bar of the Hôtel du Dauphin. During the course of the conversation, Frascot told his doctor that he was suffering from a painful bout of rheumatism. Petiot informed him of a pioneering new drug from Paris that would likely relieve the symptoms, if not also cure him. As a favor to his old friend, Petiot offered to administer the injection for free. They walked to Petiot’s office down the street. Three hours later, one of the most promising witnesses in the murder investigation was dead.

The official cause of Frascot’s death was an aneurysm, or “by accident … from a heart shock, or some unknown side effect resulting from a hypodermic injection.” This is of course possible, but the person who conducted the postmortem and signed the death certification was Villeneuve-sur-Yonne’s medical coroner. And that position—Massu learned with disbelief—was held by Dr. Marcel Petiot.

AFTER finishing a funeral at Passy cemetery, the gravediggers returned to their sieves at the Petiot town house, retrieving the bones and rotten limbs from the pit, placing them in wooden boxes that resembled coffins, and then transporting them to the Institut médico-légal on the place de Mazas in the 12th arrondissement.

The Institut médico-légal (IML) boasted one of the most celebrated forensic laboratories in the world. After moving to this location in 1914, from its previous site just behind Notre Dame, the IML had expanded from its original role as a morgue to being an advanced institution that pioneered the use of science in criminal investigation. One of the groundbreaking investigators was Alphonse Bertillon, an early proponent of what he called “anthropometric” techniques: that is, learning how specific measurements uniquely identify individuals.

As nineteenth-century French law differentiated between first-time and repeat offenders, allowing for more lenient penalties for the former, criminals regularly adopted false aliases to pose as first-timers. Bertillon’s method consisted of measuring every criminal upon arrest on eleven points: height, width of outstretched arms, length and breadth of head, as well as length of the foot, the middle finger, the little finger, the arm from elbow to middle finger, and so on—the left side being preferred in the measurements because it was the least likely to change if the suspect engaged in hard physical labor. Together, these precise measurements would uniquely identify a person. Two people, Bertillon reasoned, may share one, two, or perhaps three of the same measurements, but not all eleven. The odds, he calculated, were 268,435,456 to 1. And then, to address this possibility, he added three additional descriptive points of reference: the color of the suspect’s eyes, hair, and skin.

In February 1883, after years of cataloguing and refining his classification system, Bertillon successfully identified a repeat offender, an achievement that has been heralded as the first use in history of scientific detection to identify a criminal. Over the next few years, Bertillon would repeatedly demonstrate the value of this method, identifying no fewer than 241 offenders in 1884, 425 in 1885, and by the end of the decade, some 3,500. By the mid-1890s, the French police had five million measurements on file.

Bertillon would pioneer a number of other changes as well, from standardizing the photograph of the criminal upon arrest into a front and side “mug shot,” to bringing a camera to document the scene of the crime. He would eventually support the use of fingerprints, though he had first resisted this tool as a challenge to his own identification system. Bertillon’s esteem had risen quickly. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would make Sherlock Holmes show “enthusiastic admiration of the French savant,” and then, in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Dr. Mortimer credits Holmes and Bertillon as being the two best detectives in Europe.

The current head of the IML was Paris’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Albert Paul, a renowned sixty-five-year-old forensic scientist who came from a family of doctors and lawyers. After studying under Paul Brouardel, a leading expert on forensic pathology and forensic entomology, Paul had become professor of forensic medicine at the Sorbonne in 1918 and worked on many high-profile cases, most famously the Henri Landru case in 1920–1921. Landru had eluded authorities for years as he killed wealthy women, robbed them, and then burned their bodies.

Dr. Paul had cracked the case when, replicating Landru’s technique of disposing of his victims, he burned human body parts in a kitchen stove. “A right foot,” Paul learned, “disappears in fifty minutes, a half skull with brains taken out in thirty-six minutes, the whole skull in one hour ten minutes. A human head with the brain, hair, tongue, etc. disappears in about one hour forty minutes.” The most difficult to dispose of were the trunk and thorax, possibly explaining why the murderer at rue Le Sueur chopped the bodies up before feeding them to the fire.

A legend in his field, Dr. Paul was also no small sensation in Parisian society, where he was known for a wealth of tales, often spiced up with his macabre sense of humor. Commissaire Massu had a great respect for Dr. Paul, whom he called “the doctor of a 100,000 autopsies.” Massu and Paul had met thirty-two years before, in the spring of 1912, when both were starting their careers, Massu at the brigade and Paul at the old coroner’s office on quai de l’Archevêché, before he moved to the Institut after the First World War. Massu had learned among other things that the coroner was a touchy eccentric who hated long questions and could not stand “chatterboxes.” Massu always kept this in mind in his dealings with the temperamental expert.

On the rue Le Sueur case Paul would be assisted by a talented forensic team that included Professors Léon Dérobert and René Piédelièvre of the Museum of Natural History. Both Dérobert and Piédelièvre were specialists in the area of reconstructing fossil remains—an expertise that would prove invaluable in the Petiot investigation. Paul already suspected that work on this case would be more difficult than even Landru.

The coroner’s office was being asked to identify human beings from a horrid mass of decomposed and mutilated remains retrieved from the lime pit, the stove, and the basement of rue Le Sueur. They would have to match arms, legs, torsos, and thighs—much as they might do for a dinosaur skeleton at the museum. They were asked to determine, among other things, the number of victims, identifying them by age and gender as well as cause and time of death. Their report would be crucial evidence to authorities struggling for fundamental facts.

Hard at work, Paul sorted through a heap of “thigh bones, craniums, shinbones, ribs, fingers, knee caps, and teeth” at his large marble table. There were two nearly complete skeletons and two half torsos. In most cases, however, they were dealing with bones, such as the ten collarbones, nine sterna, six shoulder blades, and one complete pelvis that had been found, or, more often, fragments too small or deformed to be identified. There were many of those pieces or, as Dr. Paul put it, “three garbage cans full.” There were also several human scalps. The collection of hair alone weighed eleven pounds.

“It’s not an autopsy,” Paul said. “It’s a puzzle.” A puzzle, or rather, as investigators would soon learn, a set of different puzzles with many missing pieces.