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

16.

THE ATTIC

I CANNOT SAY WHO I AM. STILL YOU KNOW ME.

EVERYONE KNOWS ME. IF I WERE TO TELL YOU MY NAME,

YOU WOULD BE TERRIFIED.

—Marcel Petiot to FFI Lieutenant André Rolet

DETERMINED to catch the killer, Commissaire Massu was dreaming of the moment he would place the handcuffs on Marcel Petiot. He would show the suspect to his seat near the window overlooking the green square below, offer him a cigarette, and then launch into what he called “the most passionate interrogation of [his] entire career.” By the end of this battle of wits, he would be able to put together the many loose pieces of the puzzle and ensure that cruelty, malice, and deviousness on such a horrific scale would not go unpunished.

But far from being close to a resolution, the case seemed only to be expanding. After François the Corsican and Jo the Boxer had “passed” to the new world, as it was called, news of the escape organization had circulated around rue de l’Echiquier and the many cafés, bars, and other hot spots of Faubourg Saint-Martin. Soon Pintard was approached by several of Jo’s associates, including the notorious gangster Adrien Estébétéguy, known as “Adrien the Basque,” “The Cold Hand,” or “The Right Hand.” A forty-five-year-old from Bayonne, Adrien had worked much of southwestern France, particularly Toulouse, racking up some eight prison sentences and seven current warrants for arrest, not to mention a string of assault charges over the years, four of them recently, against French policemen.

Packing two standard automatics, which he was said to draw at the slightest dispute in a poker game, Adrien had a reputation as a tough guy with a biting wit and a penchant for fine clothes. He particularly liked new suits, this at a time when one on the black market cost the equivalent of the annual salary of a ticket collector on the métro.

By early 1943, Adrien the Basque had many reasons for wanting to leave France. As part of his work with the Devisenschützkommando, an outfit that tracked down people selling currency and gold illegally, a highly profitable enterprise virtually annexed by Henri Lafont’s criminal gang, Adrien was accused of reselling for personal profit some of the gold he seized and then turning in an inferior gilt substitute. He was apparently making significant omissions in his reports of confiscated goods.

Some of the unreported profits probably also came from his work with Kurt von Behr of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) office, which was removing art and cultural property from “ownerless” Jewish homes. Adrien was involved in particular in the Möbel Aktion, or “Furniture Operation,” that involved retrieving furnishings in apartments where Jews had been deported, and then sending the loot to newly formed German administrations in the east. Later, after the Allied bombing of Cologne on the night of May 30, 1942, ERR authorities changed the stated mission, claiming that the seized property would be used to compensate German victims of the air raids. By the end of the Nazi Occupation, some thirty-eight thousand apartments in Paris alone would be looted by this organization.

Adrien the Basque was guilty of yet other omissions. Like Jo the Boxer, he had been using his German security identity card (a Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, card) and Gestapo uniform to impersonate a policeman and commit a number of robberies. This kind of crime, unfortunately, was on the rise. Approximately one thousand cases of false Gestapo agents were known, many of them targeting the most exposed residents with the least recourse, such as foreign-born Jews or small-time black marketers believed to have hidden away cash. Profits could be substantial. And Lafont was not one to tolerate being defrauded, or insulted, by men in his gang.

Adrien needed to leave Paris in a hurry, but he did not want to travel alone. He recruited one of his subordinates to join him: Joseph Didioni Sidissé Piereschi, known variously as Zé, Dionisi, or Joseph the Marseillais. This surprisingly handsome man, with a scar two inches long and one inch wide running from the base of his nose to his left cheek, came from a similar background. He had been imprisoned at age eighteen for his first murder. During World War I, he deserted twice and progressed to other crimes, such as stealing military supplies and selling arms on the black market. By the fall of 1940, he had been released from the Marseille prison by the Germans, and he soon began running a series of brothels for German soldiers.

As with Jo and François before them, Adrien and Zé brought along their mistresses. Adrien’s was Gisèle Charlotte Rossmy, a petite brunette, aged thirty-four, who had worked as a typist and performed on stage as “Gine Volna.” Zé sported Joséphine, or Paulette, Grippay, “La Chinoise,” a star from an exclusive brothel in Marseille and a recent arrival in Paris. Planning to open a new brothel in South America, they were believed to have carried some 800,000 francs in cash.

The gangsters again traded lovers to ensure honesty. On the last Sunday of March 1943, Adrien left with Paulette; a few days later, Zé followed with Gisèle. The group used a sign for communicating their safe arrival in Argentina: they took a 100-franc note, drew a flaming sun on it, and ripped it into two, each group taking a half. Adrien and Paulette would send their piece back through the organization to prove that they had arrived in South America. Not long after their departure, Petiot handed Fourrier the half note. “My men got them through,” he said.

In March 1944, Massu’s detectives found the other half of the note in a drawer at Petiot’s office on rue Caumartin.

PETIOT’S closest friend, the forty-nine-year-old René Nézondet, was now brought into custody. Tall and slender, with his dark hair slicked back over his high forehead, Nézondet had known Petiot longer and arguably more intimately than anyone else outside his family.

As Massu already knew, Petiot and Nézondet had often dined together in their bachelor days in Yonne. They had been arrested together, twenty years later, by the Gestapo. In between, Nézondet had left his position as a clerk after injuring his arm. He started breeding trout and growing watercress at a ranch outside of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. He also operated a restaurant and entertainment center, La Fontaine-Rouge. The Petiots liked to attend his Saturday night dances, invariably on Georgette’s urging. Marcel Petiot hated dancing.

By 1936, after the end of his first marriage and losing his investment in a fire, Nézondet had moved to Paris and begun working as a concierge for Le Figaro. He had started to see Petiot again after consulting him for a throat condition that developed in the First World War. Nézondet was also in a new relationship with a nurse at Hôpital Cochin named Aimée Lesage, and they soon began to dine often with the Petiots. The Nazi Occupation, however, prompted Le Figaro to move to Lyon; Nézondet followed, only to be sacked shortly afterward for his alleged black market dealings. In 1942, he had returned to Paris and reconnected a third time with Petiot. It was his old friend who helped him obtain a job with the father of one of Petiot’s patients, Victor Braun, who ran a pharmaceutical company that sold many supplies to the German army.

An inspector observing Nézondet told Massu beforehand that he would probably prove a difficult interviewee, likely to tense up at the least provocation and force the commissaire to have to draw out each monosyllabic reply. Massu, thus warned, began slowly. He walked behind the suspect without saying a word. He stood there, still silent, at his cabinet, pretending to search through papers. Nézondet remained tense. His raised shoulders, Massu noted, had not moved.

The inspector was right about Nézondet’s lack of candor. When Massu asked if he liked his friend Petiot, Nézondet did not answer. When he asked about his line of work, Nézondet was evasive. Massu, tiring of the charade, pressed a button and told the secretary who entered the room to watch the witness. He went for a drink at a nearby bistro on the place de Dauphine. Nézondet was left, as he put it, “to simmer.”

An hour and a half later, when he returned, Massu asked Nézondet again about his relationship with Dr. Petiot. This time, Nézondet spoke of his friend’s love of art, furniture, and deal making. For instance, sometime last spring, Petiot had asked him to offer his boss the opportunity to buy “1000 to 2000 bottles of cognac,” which he in turn could sell to the German army. Braun had declined because the military had stopped making bulk purchases of alcohol. What an interesting proposition from a so-called member of the Resistance.

Massu then asked Nézondet about the claims of the trucking company owner and secondhand furniture dealer Roland Porchon—namely, that he had seen sixteen bodies at rue Le Sueur. Nézondet dismissed this allegation with a laugh. It was outrageous, he said. He had not seen any bodies personally; Porchon must have been mistaken. He had merely reported what someone else had told him. Who was that? Nézondet stalled and hedged, before finally admitting that the source of the information was Maurice Petiot. On March 22, after many evasions and denials, he said that he would now tell the truth.

In late 1943, either November or December, Nézondet began, he met Maurice Petiot at the Hôtel Alicot to negotiate the purchase of radio equipment. Petiot arrived an hour late and nervous unlike any time Nézondet could remember. He looked as “white as a sheet,” Nézondet said.

“I have just come from my brother’s house,” Maurice allegedly told him. “There’s enough there to have us all shot.”

“Enough what? Hidden weapons? A secret radio transmitter?”

“I wish that’s all it was. The journeys [to South America] begin and end at the rue Le Sueur.”

At this time, with Petiot still held in prison by the Germans, Maurice had also discovered “a pit full of bodies and quicklime—all of them were naked, with hair and eyebrows shaved off.” A book was found nearby, containing the names and addresses of all the victims, along with the dates and other notes about the executions. He found a syringe, a hypodermic needle, poison, and many bodies. “There must have been fifty to sixty victims.” Maurice also allegedly found a great deal of clothing, including suits, dresses, and German military uniforms.

Nézondet had been astonished, he told Massu, claiming that it was not possible, that “it’s a nightmare!” But Maurice’s demeanor seemed to confirm the horrors. Nézondet noted how his hands quivered as he related his discovery.

What’s more, according to Nézondet, Maurice Petiot proceeded to describe the means of execution as some sort of distance-operated syringe. The victim, locked in the triangular room, would eventually press a button in the wall, which activated the lethal device. A miniature needle hidden inside the button pricked the finger with poison. That way, Petiot had not technically killed his victims; they had done it to themselves.

“Why did you not inform the police?” Massu asked. “It’s your duty.” The Law of 25 October 1941 had established the legal obligation to denounce a crime or the intent to commit a crime. The failure to comply carried a penalty of three months to five years in prison.

“I know that well,” Nézondet said. “But Marcel Petiot was my best friend. I also thought of his wife and his son.”

Commissaire Massu asked how much Georgette Petiot knew of her husband’s activities. After a slight hesitation, Nézondet said that she knew everything because, as he feared for her safety, he had told her “the horrible truth” himself. In early January 1944, a few weeks after his meeting with Maurice Petiot, he had invited Georgette and Gérard Petiot to dinner at his apartment at 15 rue Pauly. They had discussed her husband, who she was sure would soon be released by the Germans, as indeed he was. Nézondet waited until the two of them were away from the teenager. As Nézondet put it, she “fainted, or almost fainted three times and threatened to commit suicide.”

Georgette Petiot would later confirm that the events that evening were substantially true as Nézondet described them. She added, however, that she had not believed a word of his story. He seemed to be lying. In addition, Nézondet had suggested that she should divorce her murderous husband and the two of them have an affair, and this, she told Massu, further convinced her that he had made up everything to seduce her. (Nézondet countered unconvincingly that he only said she needed to have an affair, though not necessarily with him.)

Maurice had been furious at him, Nézondet said, for telling Georgette about the dead bodies. The last he heard, Maurice was trying to figure out what to do about them, and also find a truck to haul away the many suitcases he’d found at his brother’s property.

Since that initial conversation at the Hôtel Alicot, Nézondet said that he had lived in mortal fear of his former friend. Not long after the physician’s release from the Germans, which Nézondet said had astonished him, Marcel Petiot invited him to rue Le Sueur. He politely declined, but when the physician, with his charm, refused to take no for an answer, Nézondet had relented. It was his lover, Aimée Lesage, who put a stop to the meeting, insisting that he never go to rue Le Sueur alone. She was certain, she believed, that she had saved his life.

THE French police continued to question neighbors of the reclusive physician. Augusta Debarre, a thirty-nine-year-old woman who lived on the third floor of 22 rue Le Sueur, had some information for the detectives. About nine or nine thirty one night the previous summer, Debarre had seen an old truck, probably a Ford, parked outside Dr. Petiot’s building across the street, and a couple of men had loaded a number of suitcases into it.

Other neighbors had witnessed the same event. Andrée Marçais, the thirty-four-year-old woman in No. 22 whose husband had made the first call to the police about the smoke, remembered that the vehicle was gray, and there were two or three men piling luggage into the truck. Yvonne Staeffen on the fifth floor believed that one of the men was the stranger who came regularly on the bicycle. “With my daughter,” Staeffen said, “we have amused ourselves by counting the suitcases.” They reached forty-seven, but they had not started from the beginning.

It was the eyewitness account of Angèle Lalanne of 26 rue Le Sueur that brought the police one crucial step closer to finding the truck. She reported seeing a sign on the old vehicle: TRANSPORTS AVENUE DAUMESNIL. Massu now had something tangible to pursue.

An investigation into the transport companies and garages on the two-mile-long avenue, however, did not immediately turn up any valuable information. At one point, the detectives stopped by the Hôtel Alicot and struck up a conversation with a group of truckers. One of them, Emile Henri Pintrand, remembered that the man in the police photograph, Maurice Petiot, had approached him the previous summer about a delivery. Pintrand had declined because he was already busy that day. His friend, Leopold Sturlèse, had accepted.

But when Sturlèse arrived at the rendezvous at the Hôtel Alicot as planned, he learned that Maurice had hired someone else and the delivery had already been made. After a wild-goose chase to find this person, the inspectors discovered that the driver of the truck had been Maurice Lion of the Manjeard Company.

Lion verified that he and Maurice had loaded a number of suitcases onto his gray Renault truck and driven them to Gare de Lyon. A quick visit to the baggage office at that station revealed that, on May 26, 1943, train number 2001 had carried three separate shipments of a total of forty-five suitcases, weighing 683 kilograms, to the nearby town of Courson-les-Carrières:

Group No. 18

11 suitcases

160 kilograms

Group No. 235

18 suitcases

280 kilograms

Group No. 436

16 suitcases

243 kilograms

All of these suitcases were signed for by Albert Neuhausen, the man both Monique and Maurice Petiot had claimed slept in their property in Auxerre. Neuhausen immediately became a key figure in the ongoing investigation.

On March 30, 1944, when the police came to search his electronics shop in Courson-les-Carrières, he was not there. His wife, Simone-Andrée, however, admitted knowing about the suitcases. Maurice had brought them to the house the previous summer, claiming that they belonged to his brother, who had been arrested by the Germans. The arrest had happened just five days before. Had Maurice moved the suitcases to avoid seizure by the Gestapo?

Madame Neuhausen promptly escorted Massu, Inspector Battut, and a couple other detectives up to the attic, which was filled with suitcases stacked neatly in rows. Some were made of leather, a few still in dustcovers or carrying labels such as grand hotel amsterdam; others were plain, even plywood, like many made during the Occupation. Several of the suitcases still carried baggage tickets from Gare de Lyon.

There were, in fact, forty-nine pieces of luggage in Neuhausen’s attic. Thirty-seven of these were from the shipment from Gare de Lyon; the other twelve were not previously known. There were a few trunks, which were so heavy that they could not be carried down the steps and had to be lowered by rope through the dormer window. The suitcases were placed on the police truck for delivery to the station. Half of the village, Massu said, seemed to be standing outside watching.

As rain poured down, police cars brought what Massu called “the most tragic cargo” to the headquarters at 36 quai des Orfèvres.

Reporters, sensing a scoop, descended on the building. As cameras popped, Massu, umbrella in hand, helped unload the suitcases. Rain splashed on the evidence, threatening to rub off the ink of the luggage tags. Five inspectors carried the trunks up to the third floor, which, as Massu put it, soon looked like a hotel lobby, while his office resembled a luggage room in a train station.

The contents of the suitcases would prove remarkable. Inside, in no apparent order, were a total of 79 dresses, 26 skirts, 42 blouses, 48 scarves, 52 nightgowns, 46 pairs of panties, 14 dressing gowns, 13 negligées, 77 pairs of gloves, 35 belts, 25 handbags, 26 hats (women’s), 10 pairs of boots, 6 jackets, 5 fur coats, 3 mink stoles, and 311 handkerchiefs. There were also 115 men’s shirts, 104 cuffs, 82 pairs of socks, 66 pairs of shoes, 29 men’s suits, 14 overcoats, 4 pairs of slippers, and 3 pairs of swimming trunks, in addition to an assortment of towels, tablecloths, sheets, pillowcases, pajamas, nightshirts, raincoats, eyeglasses, handbags, hairnets, hatpins, nail files, cigarette cases, and bus tickets. In short, there were 1,760 items in the inventory.

Analysis of the contents of these suitcases, Massu hoped, would provide clues to catch the killer and evidence to prosecute him afterward. It might also, with a great deal of time and perseverance, help identify the many victims and perhaps even answer the most difficult question of all: namely, the motives for the grisly murders.