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

9.

EVASION

DR. PETIOT WAS A CLEVER MAN.

—René Piédelièvre

EXAMINING the black satin dress found in the basement of rue Le Sueur, Massu’s men had identified a possible victim. Detectives had contacted the Marseille designer listed on the fashion tag, Silvy-Rosa, whose real name was Sylvie Givaudan, and she remembered the dress. Givaudan had made it about three and a half years before and sold it to a woman named Paulette from a nearby brothel, whom she described as young and beautiful.

The Marseille police department was able to provide more information about this woman. Her real name was Joséphine Aimée Grippay. She had been given the name Paulette by a pimp who thought “Joséphine” sounded old-fashioned. “It was good one hundred years ago,” he had reportedly told her, “[but] men like easy names to remember.” Grippay had gained a number of other sobriquets, including “La Chinoise” for her long black hair, high cheekbones, and other facial features deemed Asian, though she was actually from Corsica.

Born January 7, 1917, in the port of Bonifacio (Bunifaziu), to a Corsican mother and a Breton father, Grippay had begun working in a brothel in Ajaccio before reaching Marseille, where she settled into an upscale brothel on rue Venture. Grippay soon made connections with many figures in the underworld, including, most prominently, Joseph Piereschi, known variously as “Joseph le Marseillais,” Dionisi, or Zé. By the time World War II broke out, Piereschi had been sentenced to prison a number of times, mostly for petty theft, though there was one murder charge and his participation in a train robbery that netted 983,000 francs. During the German Occupation, he started running a brothel for Nazi officers at Aire-sur-la-Lys. Eventually accused of defrauding German authorities, Piereschi fled, bringing Paulette Grippay with him. They worked their way north. Grippay had been in Paris just over one year when the police found her dress in Dr. Petiot’s basement.

How had Petiot come to know her? Was he one of her clients, or was she one of his? Rue Caumartin, after all, was located in the middle of a lively district full of nightclubs, bars, and brothels.

Not far away, on rue Provence, tucked into a discreet building with closed white shutters, was the One Two Two. The seven-story brothel, once the home of Napoleon’s marshal Joachim Murat, catered to an exclusive clientele that included royalty, statesmen, film stars, and eventually, many tourists. Each room upstairs projected a different theme. There was an Orient Express suite, a luxurious ocean liner cabin, and a Cloth of Gold Room inspired by the famous celebration by King Francis I and King Henry VIII in the summer of 1520. The Arctic igloo came with reindeer antlers and a polar bear rug, and the “sunny farmhouse” was surrounded by a white picket fence with a mock hayloft above the bed. Two rooms were covered completely with mirrors. The top floors contained the more risqué rooms, including the popular torture chamber, with its whips, chains, handcuffs, and leather thongs.

Since his arrival in Paris eleven years before, Petiot had drawn many clients from this environment. He had also attracted women from far less luxurious brothels, and many of them, like Jeannette Gaul, were outside the system of regulation altogether. Antonie Marguerite Bella, a thirty-six-year-old former chambermaid who became addicted to heroin and then worked as an unlicensed street walker, often visited his practice. She had no difficulty whatsoever in obtaining drugs from Dr. Petiot, she told Inspector Jean Prigent when he questioned her in prison. She had been referred to his practice by a friend in the same line of business, who consulted the doctor for “the same reasons” and, she added, found the “same satisfaction.”

There was no shortage of witnesses ready to testify about Petiot’s clientele, which seemed overwhelmingly female, with many of them addicted to morphine, heroin, or cocaine. As one patient later put it, Dr. Petiot was known to “nearly all the drug addicts of Montmartre.” And if these women could not pay his rates, Petiot was not averse to cutting a deal or trading services. The physician credited these women with teaching him invaluable lessons, not least in how to impose his will on other people. “It is through them that you learn to dominate,” Petiot said, calling prostitutes “the harems which make the great conquerors.”

One unidentified prostitute and client later told a reporter of her experiences with Petiot. “We were all a little afraid of him. He always asked for tricks that we did not like or sometimes that we did not know. Then, he would explain it to us with a funny laugh.” He was often rough and liked to bite or “pinch nipples with all his might.” Some prostitutes, like Marguerite la Poupée or Annette “Chouchou,” frequented his clinic for ointments. Petiot had a reputation for treating venereal diseases, particularly gonorrhea and syphilis, the latter being an especially difficult and lengthy procedure. There was, in short, no lack of opportunities for Petiot to gain insight and influence into the Parisian underworld.

Was this how the physician had met Paulette Grippay? The brothel where she worked was located just one street away, on rue Godot de Mauroy. Had Petiot sold her drugs, treated her for disease, or was there some other still-unknown link? The police would soon have their answer, and it would not be at all what Massu expected.

“ALL human preoccupations, all the difficulties, and all the worries of life—in order to end up there,” René Piédelièvre, a forensic expert working on the Petiot case, later reflected after his forty-five years of experience at the autopsy table. By “there,” he meant a lifeless body lying “among the debris which is going to crumble and disappear progressively into a microbial rot in the earth among the devouring insects and their larva, the workers of death.”

Piédelièvre had never forgotten his first trip to rue Le Sueur. Walking across the courtyard, he had stumbled upon what he thought was a pebble. He reached down to examine it and found instead a “fragmented vertebra where one could still see through the ligament.” He had “trampled in the dust of bones” and then, once the debris arrived at the Institut médico-légal, examined the “portions of scalps with the hair completely impregnated by a foul magma.” But, as with Commissaire Massu, the most troubling discovery for Piédelièvre was the drainage pit in the back building, where he saw the many twisted bodies, “cooped together like herring and partially burned by the lime which whitens them like sparrows.”

Some of the bodies were nearly intact, others were dismembered, and an early examination proved to him that the suspect was a skilled dissector. Like his colleagues on the case, Dr. Paul and Dr. Dérobert, Piédelièvre was not yet prepared to state that the murderer was an anatomist, or a forensic specialist, but he was clearly a doctor. “The dislocations were well done,” Piédelièvre said, noting how the suspect had carefully removed the pulpes digitales to prevent fingerprint identification and then removed the face mask in a single cut. Piédelièvre marveled at the “extreme skill” of the murderer.

As forensic scientists, Piédelièvre’s team would serve as an important “auxiliary to justice.” The goal was to render a carefully weighed opinion that, given the hard evidence, they would not soon “be obliged to contradict.” The task in the Petiot case was excruciatingly complicated, as they tried to reconstruct the bodies among the scalped craniums, the broken thighbones, and what Piédelièvre called a “foul muddle” of lime-caked flesh and debris. And when they could not reconstruct, they would resort to calculating the number of victims by weighing the bone fragments.

They were asked to determine the number and gender of the victims. This was difficult enough, but possible by concentrating on certain bones, such as the pelvis, the thighbone, and the femur, all of which were wider and more spread out in the female. Far more difficult, however, was trying to determine the time and cause of death. Most of the remains were not only savagely mutilated, but also in an advanced state of decomposition.

To complicate matters further, the forensic team had found no evidence of a bullet, knife, bludgeon, or other violent wound. A few of the victims had broken arms or legs, but the angle of fracture suggested that this had probably happened after death, and clearly after the skin and muscles had been removed from the bone. The implication was that the breaks had occurred when an arm or leg had been crammed into the small space of the basement stove.

Nor were there bloodstains, smears, drops, splashes, or even a trace of poison. In most cases, the internal organs had been cut out. Disemboweling the victim had certainly diminished the stench; it would also multiply the difficulties of finding the cause of death. In the few instances when they found internal organs, it was feared that the fire, the lime, and the advanced putrefaction would prevent the organs from yielding any significant conclusions.

The unanswered questions were certainly accumulating. Massu needed to learn everything he could about the suspect and who, if anyone, might be helping him. “The smallest testimony can have its importance,” Massu said, sending detectives across the city looking for anyone who might have known the doctor.

MAURICE Petiot, meanwhile, was brought in for a second interrogation.

“Would you please indicate how you spent your time during the days of March 11 through March 13?”

On the eleventh, Maurice answered, he had stayed the entire day in Auxerre. He had made some repairs in the neighborhood, and then, in the evening, he received his friend Albert Neuhausen, who arrived on the 9:30 train from Paris. As he had “no means of returning home to Courson,” Maurice had invited him to stay the night at one of his properties.

On Sunday the twelfth, Maurice worked on the central heating of his property on rue Sous-Murs. In the evening, he and his wife, Monique, went to an auction house and purchased a rug. On the thirteenth, he remained at home on rue du Pont until three in the afternoon, when he biked to Seignelay to visit a farm that Georgette Petiot had inherited from her father after his death in October 1943. “I did not find anyone there,” Maurice said, adding that it was only that day that he heard the news of the police investigation.

“Contrary to what you claim,” Massu said, “you have sent certain products or material to the property at rue Le Sueur. Would you like to explain?”

“If I have sent any materials, it is for you to prove it.”

“You have sent some, including lime.”

“It is for you to prove.”

Massu was well on his way to doing just that. The truck driver who came by the Hôtel Alicot looking for Maurice about a delivery, Jean Eustache, had already contacted the police with a major revelation. Eustache, age twenty-two, informed detectives that he had made deliveries for Maurice Petiot on four or five occasions. Mostly it was electronics or furniture, but the last time, in mid-February 1944, Eustache and a fellow worker named Robert Massonière had picked up Maurice Petiot in truck number 290-ZU-4 and driven him to a quarry outside Aisy-sur-Armançon, where they had collected four hundred kilograms of quicklime.

“He told me it was for whitewashing the property,” Eustache said. Upon arrival in Paris about ten o’clock on the morning of February 19, 1944, the three men had unloaded the sacks just inside the carriage entrance to a private mansion somewhere in the city. Eustache was not sure exactly where. Maurice did not pay him anything for the transport, he said, and he assumed that the price had been negotiated with his employer.

Massu did not specifically question Maurice yet about the lime, as he did not have the deposition in front of him. Instead, the commissaire pressed on, preparing the ground for the future confrontation.

“Have you seen any lime on the property at rue Le Sueur?”

“No,” Maurice answered. “I have never seen any there.”

Massu asked about his whereabouts on February 19. Once again, Maurice claimed to have spent the day at home. Did he know a man named Jean Eustache? Yes, Maurice said, but not very well, and he could not say for sure the last time he had seen him. How about on the nineteenth?

Maurice hesitated, removed his scarf, and then calmly said that he would now tell the truth. He had come to Paris about that time, probably the nineteenth, in a small truck driven by Eustache. Maurice then claimed that he had been dropped off at the Place de la Concorde, while Eustache and a coworker at the delivery firm proceeded to make deliveries. The three of them were to meet the following day about two o’clock at the intersection of rue Le Sueur and the Avenue Grande Armée. Maurice was then supposed to direct them to a warehouse, where they would haul away “the electrical material that I had bought.”

But Eustache did not arrive at the designated time, Maurice said, and so he went to dine with his brother at rue Caumartin and then afterward to a vaudeville show at the A.B.C. on the Grands Boulevards. Later, at the Hôtel Alicot, Maurice said, he learned that Eustache had not shown up at the rendezvous because his truck had been involved in an accident.

Massu interrupted to ask if Maurice had been to 21 rue Le Sueur at any point during this trip to Paris.

“I did go to rue Le Sueur,” Maurice now admitted, but he had not entered the house. He said that he had to return a set of keys to his brother—a statement that Massu thought had been uttered accidentally. It certainly did not help his claims about not knowing much about the building.

“I should tell you,” Maurice added, “that in the truck were about thirty bags of coal which were supposed to be returned to Auxerre.” After the accident, Maurice said that he had offered to allow Eustache to store this cargo at his brother’s town house at rue Le Sueur while they waited on repairs or the arrival of a new vehicle. He had not mentioned this incident earlier, he said, because he could not have imagined that it could have had any significance for the investigation.

As for his brother’s whereabouts, Maurice said that he did not know. He had not received any news and could only guess, envisioning three possibilities: he was hiding out with the Resistance, he had taken flight abroad, or he had committed suicide.

Massu asked an officer to lead Maurice into a holding cell. How long would he be held? he asked.

“As long as I am permitted by law.” Massu needed to follow up on details, which “however unimportant for you, are essential for the investigation.” Maurice Petiot, protesting his innocence, was led away.

At this time, almost midnight, Massu returned home. Bernard, he knew, would still be awake, studying in his room and waiting to hear the latest news about the case. Massu felt that they were approaching a major breakthrough. That night, he and Bernard discussed serial killers. Petiot had not killed over a long period of time like Henri Landru, the commissaire said. Instead Petiot had attempted too much too soon, and as a result, his killing spree had lasted only a short while. Massu, clearly, had a lot to learn about this case.