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

11.

SIGHTINGS

BLOOD, MORE BLOOD, STILL MORE BLOOD.

—Commissaire Massu

THE extensive coverage of the Petiot affair soon escalated into a full-blown media circus. Newspapers dubbed the doctor the Butcher of Paris, the Scalper of the Étoile, the Monster of rue Le Sueur, the Demonic Ogre, and Doctor Satan. One of the first and more popular sobriquets was the Modern Bluebeard, comparing Petiot to the rich aristocrat in a late-seventeenth-century folk tale who killed his wives and hung their bodies on hooks in a room underneath his castle. Later, other names would be proposed for the murder suspect, from the Underground Assassin to the Werewolf of Paris.

Speculation was rampant. Petiot was discussed in sidewalk cafés, smoky cabarets, and brothels that flourished day and night around the city. In the métro during an air raid alert on March 24, 1944, a journalist for Paris-Soir noted that people spoke only about Marcel Petiot. Many Parisians were reminded of a popular movie, two years before, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s L’Assassin habite au 21 (The Murderer Lives at No. 21). In the film, Scotland Yard struggled to catch an elusive London killer who teased authorities by leaving behind his calling card “Monsieur Durand.” The motive for the murders in the film was profit. Petiot’s motive, on the other hand, was not so easily determined.

Rumors circulated that the physician was an “insane sadist” who tortured his victims savagely before burying them alive in quicklime. He was, it was also asserted, a sexual predator who slaughtered for thrills or, as Jean Boissel put it in Le Réveil du Peuple, sought raw material for his black mass ceremonies. Le Cri du Peuple was focusing on his scalping of the victims. Other people suggested that the suspect was a mad inventor who conducted gruesome experiments to perfect his torture devices, including a distance-operated syringe that injected poison into his victim. The police, Le Cri du Peuple reported, were trying to track down the craftsman Petiot supposedly hired to build the machine.

Photos of the grinning monster with the hypnotic eyes appeared regularly on the front pages. Le Petit Parisien reported that Petiot took “sadistic pleasure in listening to the pitiful confidences” of his patients in drug treatment before finally writing them a prescription, which, Paris-Soir noted, was often adorned with obscene rhymes. Petiot was “Satan in person,” a former schoolmate at Auxerre told a journalist for A Matin. Sales of French newspapers soared, soon reaching their highest levels since the Occupation.

The sensational tales, however, hardly helped the police sort through the layers of mystery that surrounded the case. Readers sent in tips, some of them bizarre. A psychic claimed that Petiot was hiding in the Neuilly district of Paris, either at No. 4 or No. 20 boulevard d’Inkermann, or No. 2 or 4 rue de Chartres. A radiesthesist, using his pendulum to detect energy vibrations from a map, declared that Petiot had fled to his home region of Auxerre. Another seer reported having visions of the dead physician, poisoned and abandoned on a country road in Yonne. Other people speculated that he had committed suicide, perhaps using one of his own injections.

A small book printed on rue d’Enghien in Brussels that March noted the widespread belief that Petiot would likely soon die at the hands of his drug suppliers or some other shady accomplice who would be unnerved by the prospect of Petiot revealing everything he knew. Many policemen had already expressed a similar fear, not least Massu. “If Petiot is still alive,” the commissaire said, “we will not take long to catch him.” In the meantime, the sightings continued. Fifty thousand concierges and countless shop workers across Paris would be on the lookout for the serial killer, predicted Maurice Toesca of the Préfecture de Police.

The lack of information on the doctor’s whereabouts only fueled the rumors. Someone believed he had seen Petiot handing out candy to children in a Parisian square, and an anonymous caller to the police reported seeing him enter a building in the northwestern suburb of Asnières. A journalist at L’Oeuvre thought that he spotted Petiot on a métro quay, wearing dark glasses and a beard.

Petiot was spotted all over Paris, or headed north to Brussels, west to Andorra, or south to Morocco or Algeria. A man in Orléans was sure he had seen Petiot at his inn. The physician, he said, had arrived on a black bicycle, breathless and lost in his thoughts. Intrigued, the innkeeper had invited him for dinner. Petiot had said nothing coherent other than ask where he might obtain a boat. The innkeeper was certain that he had dined with the Vampire of rue Le Sueur.

It was not always easy to confirm or refute the many stories that circulated in the aftermath of the discovery. Two women, for instance, were also positive that they had spotted Petiot that March at a central train station, booking passage to Anvers. While one of them followed the suspect, keeping him in sight, her friend rushed to a nearby kiosk for reinforcements. The crowd accosted the fellow, only to find that the alleged mass murderer was a Spanish merchant on a business trip. “Pity,” one of the women was overheard saying, “I would have liked so much to have seen him.”

The reason no one had found Petiot, some Parisians speculated, was that he dressed up as a woman, adding new relevance to the collection of blouses, skirts, and lingerie uncovered in his closets at rue Le Sueur. Other people believed that he had evaded detection by moving in with a lover, one of his “freemason brothers,” or, as the press initially reported, with a band of Resistance fighters in the countryside. Still others, hardened by years of press manipulation, believed that the real Petiot had already been arrested in Vichy, or that he never existed other than as a fabrication by the German authorities to distract Parisians from the hardships of war. “It is a myth inspired by the Landru Affair,” the historian Léon Werth wrote, noting the rumor in his diary March 29, 1944. “There has never been the shadow of a cadaver at rue Le Sueur.”

As the police stumbled on in the search, appearing no closer to finding Petiot, the bestselling mystery novelist and creator of Inspector Maigret, Georges Simenon, volunteered his detective skills to his old friend Commissaire Massu. The French police certainly looked like they could use the help. Petiot seemed to be taunting them. Was he really the person who sent authorities cryptic notes of his whereabouts or teasing reminders that “Petiot, he runs, he runs, he runs”? Massu certainly thought so.

The international press also seized on the story. In Switzerland, Belgium, and Scandinavia, the Petiot affair dominated headlines on a daily basis. In the issue of March 27, 1944, Time magazine traced the source of the killings to “fatal injections” with the victim “chained to the wall of a soundproof ‘death chamber’ ” and the murderer watching “the last agonies through a peephole.” The report continued:

In the underheated rooms and overcrowded subways, clerks and salesgirls read the gory details. Fleshy black-marketeers and their flashy molls exchanged sadistic tidbits over champagne and caviar

.

The slaughterhouse on rue Le Sueur, Time correctly noted, “crowded war news from headlines.”

Cabaret acts incorporated the grisly material into its shows. “Madame, your bones need some lime” was one example. “La femme au foyer …” was another. The story of the “real-life equivalent of Jekyll and Hyde” gave Parisians, in the words of Steward Robertson of the St. Petersburg Times, “a thrill, running second only to the feats of Allied bombers.” No one yet knew the scale of the crimes, but Paris seemed obsessed with Petiot Mania. “Will Dr. Petiot be found?” Paris-Soir asked on March 18, 1944, only to answer that it was doubtful.

“WHO would have believed that this is possible,” the concierge at 66 rue Caumartin, Raymonde Denis, told Massu when he and one of his officers returned to the suspect’s apartment. Petiot, she said, “was so nice, so sweet”—he was one of her kindest tenants. She was still in disbelief. Massu muttered something polite about how it is possible to rub shoulders with someone for years without ever realizing that that person conceals dark secrets, but the concierge stuck to her opinion of the alleged killer.

Not far away, at 17 rue Darcet, the location of a bistro that had until recently been run by Petiot’s patients and friends Louis Albert and Emilie-Justine Bézayrie, Inspector Battut questioned someone who might have seen the murder suspect on the night of the discovery. The new bistro manager, Maria Vic, said that a man had come into her establishment about nine fifteen or nine twenty p.m. and asked to use the telephone. When she agreed, he told her the call was to the region of Yonne. She was not sure who he was, whom he called, or what they discussed. She went to wash the dishes. At some point, she thought she heard the words “Burn the papers!”

Was this perhaps the call that Maurice admitted receiving? Massu put a trace on it, and by the end of March, he would have confirmation that the call from the Parisian bistro had in fact been to Maurice Petiot. Vic stood by her statement that the man who borrowed the telephone was Dr. Petiot.

Detectives now wanted to speak with the previous owners of the establishment, Louis and Emilie Bézayrie, who had operated the bistro from 1935 to December 1943, when they moved to a new location, on rue de la Jonquière in the 17th arrondissement.

Louis Bézayrie had known Petiot since September or October 1940. His wife Emilie was then pregnant, and as her doctor had been taken prisoner by the Germans, she had consulted Petiot on a recommendation from a friend. He had assisted at the birth of their son, and, as the baby was often sick, she continued to see him regularly. Petiot also was a customer at the bistro, sometimes buying coal in bulk (many bistros during the Occupation supplemented their income by selling coal). Bézayrie had not seen him for some time, he said, and he had not sold him coal since September 1942, when he arrived with his cart and purchased about three hundred kilos.

The owners of the café had more information for the detectives. In fact, Louis Bézayrie would provide a lead that might well have resulted in an early apprehension of the suspect, had investigators pursued it. He suggested that the detectives question “old man Redouté,” a housepainter in his mid-fifties who often shared a drink with the physician. The French police later defended this failure to investigate on the extraordinary grounds that they believed Redouté was the man’s first name and could not locate him.

Petiot had indeed been hiding with Georges Redouté in his small apartment at 83 rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis. The exact date of his arrival was never determined, but it was early in the manhunt. Redouté would later claim that it was March 25, 1944; Petiot would say it was the twelfth or thirteenth. The police would never clarify his first movements before he arrived at Redouté’s apartment, suitcases in hand, claiming to be a member of the Resistance on the run from the Gestapo.

Redouté, of course, knew about the murder allegations, as they had been plastered in every Parisian newspaper. But he believed Petiot’s tales of fighting the Germans and agreed to allow him to stay in his apartment. The murder suspect slept on a mattress on the floor of Redouté’s dining room.

During the day, Petiot tended to remain inside reading newspapers, working crossword puzzles, and listening to clandestine BBC radio broadcasts. He continued to devour police novels, and created special dice for making a range of probability calculations, something that would soon absorb his attention. Generally he refused to let anyone inside the apartment. The concierge, Henriette Kraeber, later recalled the difficulty of convincing him that a man sent around to fix a leak was actually a plumber. Redouté’s guest, she said, “only went out for food and books.” Petiot, “a convincing talker,” would spend many evenings regaling his host with stories of his alleged Resistance activities.

He was also growing a beard and often wearing dark glasses to disguise his profile, raising the question of whether the L’Oeuvre journalist who believed he had seen Petiot on a Parisian métro quay in late March had not in fact come across the suspect.

AFTER hours of searching rue Le Sueur or reading police reports, Massu would often enjoy a brisk walk, even if it was only to a nearby bistro. Along the way, he tried to imagine how Petiot murdered his victims, disposed of the bodies, and evaded detection for so long in the middle of Paris. He started thinking of various possible poisons. If only, he mused, the people he passed by at the secondhand bookstalls on the quays could read his thoughts.

For a homicide detective, however, Massu believed that “a single small piece of uncovered evidence is better than a thousand ideas,” and he would often simply leave his office with the urge to visit the site, or, as he put it, “speak to the walls.” On the way there, he frequently encountered sightseers pleading to be shown inside the town house. Most of them, he believed, would probably pass out after five minutes.

His son, Bernard, would continue to follow him to the crime scene. “He had youth, I had experience,” the commissaire said, and the clash of the two perspectives would often lead to valuable results. Bernard had another quality that his father admired: When it came to finding answers, he was as “impatient as a young dog.” All of this would be crucial to the task of reconstructing the ways the killer lured victims to the house for a horrific odyssey that somehow involved the triangular room, the dissection table, the basement furnace, and the lime pit.

On one visit to rue Le Sueur with his secretary, Canitrot; his deputy, Battut; Dr. Paul; the examining magistrate, Georges Berry; and several other inspectors, Massu drove up past a crowd of about one hundred spectators on the sidewalk. The first stop was the pit, which was still ghastly, despite the fact that the gravediggers had already sifted through the remains and the firefighters, on Massu’s instructions, had aired out the surrounding coach house. Indeed, the forensic team had now scraped the bottom of the pit and retrieved the last lime-coated “debris of bones and bundles of muscles.”

Massu showed the inspectors the triangular room, or “torture chamber,” as the press had dubbed it. The wallpaper had been peeled and the thick walls had been examined for other decoys or secret rooms. Massu said that he knew the macabre room better than his own bedroom. Except, of course, the commissaire still did not fully understand its significance.

To demonstrate the Lumvisor viewer, named after the German company that manufactured it, Massu asked his secretary to stand near a pair of iron hooks in the “field of vision” and then went to the adjacent room to take a look. The hole was above his height, but when he stood on the electric heater, which was placed directly underneath, he could look into the lens. His eyes fell right on the face of his secretary. When he checked the range of the device, the view did not shift more than a few centimeters either way. Massu imagined the victim, incapacitated, perhaps drugged, and then hanging there, suspended by the hooks, while the doctor watched every move of the victim’s face in magnified perspective.

One magistrate asked Massu how Petiot killed his victims. The commissaire explained that the police had found no trace of blood in the room, and the forensic experts had thus far found no evidence either of stabbing, shooting, or strangling. Massu was inclined to think of poison, injected perhaps in the guise of being anesthesia or medicine. But with the lack of viscera for examination, toxicologists had found no trace of poison. Was there perhaps another method that Petiot used that eluded detection? Massu was still, as he put it, “reduced to hypotheses.”

Another official asked about the last moments of life, where the survival instinct took control, resulting in a final, desperate fight for existence. But again, the triangular room showed no signs of struggle. The group, no strangers to horror, turned silent on yet another mystery in the case.

Asked about the events after the murder, Massu explained that Petiot probably took the victim’s body across the courtyard to the basement. The high walls he had constructed would have shielded him from the view of his neighbors. At the kitchen workstation in the basement, he probably scalped and disinterred the corpse. He used the two large and deep sinks, joined by a slender draining table that was stained a dark red or brownish tint. The entire setup, which rested against the tiled wall, was certainly large enough for this work. Water could flow across the draining board and then into the second sink, where a side container was placed. The drain under the larger, higher sink, police had discovered, led directly to the sewer.

At one point during the visit, Dr. Paul approached the commissaire, grinning, his hand extended. Massu knew that the forensic expert often added a few details in person that he did not insert into his report. Sure enough, Paul had some news. “It’s like two years ago,” he said. Paul was referring to a period between May 1942 and January 1943 when a number of arms, legs, torsos, and other body parts had been fished out of the Seine or dropped in parcels around town.

The first of these packages had been found on May 7, 1942, when a trunk, tied with a rope, had been hauled out of the Seine under a bridge near a canal at Saint-Ouen. It contained a body of a male approximately forty-five to fifty years old without head, hands, or feet. The head had been removed, the police report detailed, “at the level of the neck, with a sharp cutting instrument, just short of the shoulders.” The hands had been cut off at the wrist, or the radioulnar carpal joint, the feet just below the shin, at the tibiotarsal joint. Apart from the dismemberment, there was no scar, fracture, or “trace of violence.” The body was never identified.

There would be many other horrific finds over the next eight months: July 2 at Neuilly, just outside the 16th arrondissement; August 6 at Asnières, northwest of the city center; August 10 at Saint-Denis, north of the center; August 19 again at Asnières; and so on. On August 22, 1942, investigators found a trunk on the northwest outskirts of Paris, at Courbevoie, containing two human hands without skin or fingertips, two feet without toenails, the skin of two legs including the heel, and three scalps, the first with reddish-blond hair, the second almost black, and the third gray. There was also a chest wall, a left ear with part of the skin of the face, the point of a nose without any cartilage, a penis with two testicles in a lacerated scrotum, and an entire face mask, with the point of a nose, mouth, lips, and both ears. Four other mutilated fragments of human bodies could not be identified.

Bodies and body parts continued to emerge from the Seine in bulging trunks tied shut with ropes. In each find, the decapitation and dismemberment had been expertly administered, the perpetrator wielding his scalpel like “a man of the lecture hall.” What’s more, each one was treated in a strikingly similar way.

As far as authorities could tell from the recovered body parts, the hair was shaved, the eyebrows were removed, and the face mask peeled away in a single smooth cut. Even the fingerprints on the severed hands had been meticulously filed off or dosed with acid. Everything was done with such skill and precision that Dr. Paul had more than once feared that someone on his own staff had been committing the murders.

But Dr. Paul saw something else in the dissection and dismemberment. He explained:

We forensic scientists are in the habit, in a dissection, of not passing our scalpel on the table of operation when we stop in the middle of our work, but instead stick it in the thigh of the cadaver

.

He had found such marks on the first find of human remains in May 1942 and then on many others pulled from the Seine—four thighs alone, for example, on October 4, 1942. He had seen those marks again in the “shreds of flesh” sent over to him from the lime pit. He suspected that this was the work of the same man, a well-trained physician who was also remarkably talented at covering his tracks.

While the police looked around rue Le Sueur, a number of reporters had joined the crowd outside the town house, swarming, Massu thought, like “a storm cloud of mosquitoes.” They could not wait to question the commissaire. How many victims were there in the case? Were there really fifty murders, as some newspapers were now reporting? What other accomplices, if any, were involved, and what had been decided about Madame Petiot? Could the commissaire confirm that the murderer was scalping his victims and decorating his basement with a sinister ring of skulls?

Did Petiot really have a folio copy of the Marquis de Sade with a cover made of human skin? What about the rumor that the killer, before finishing off the victim, donned a frightening rubber mask? The reporters, eager for any tidbit of information, virtually blocked Massu’s path to the car. The commissaire felt like he was throwing crumbs to pigeons outside Notre Dame.

“Is it tomorrow, then, that you will arrest the doctor?” one reporter asked Massu. Where was Petiot, and why had he still not been found? The press, impatient for more details, was exerting a considerable amount of pressure on the Brigade Criminelle. Paris was devouring the tale of horror in the heart of this chic neighborhood.

German authorities, by contrast, were being surprisingly aloof. After the initial order to arrest Petiot, the Gestapo had not yet obstructed, facilitated, or otherwise directly interfered in the search. It turned out, however, that a suboffice of the Gestapo had quite a file on Marcel Petiot. On March 15, 1944, this dossier was forwarded to Commissaire Massu.