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

32.

THE HAIRDRESSER, THE MAKEUP ARTIST, AND THE ADVENTURESS

PEOPLE WANT TO PORTRAY ME AS A PROCURER, PEOPLE WANT TO PORTRAY ME AS AN ACCOMPLICE; WORSE, THEY WANT TO PORTRAY ME AS AN AGENT OF THE GESTAPO. THEY’VE CALLED ME A LOOSE WOMAN. I’VE BEEN CALLED EVERYTHING. THEY’VE RUINED ME, AND NOW THEY WANT TO DESTROY ME.

—Eryane Kahan

THE ninth day of the trial, March 27, the prosecution called Petiot’s alleged accomplices to the stand, including the hairdresser Raoul Fourrier, the makeup artist Edmond Pintard, Marcel’s brother Maurice, and his old friend René Nézondet. The witnesses certainly had a wealth of relevant information, but the challenge for both prosecution and defense was ferreting it out and making sense of testimony that often obscured more than it revealed.

When a guarded and taciturn Fourrier took the stand, Président Leser returned to the question of his motives for bringing clients to Petiot. Fourrier would not admit to anything other than that he had helped what he believed was a patriotic organization. His confidence in the integrity of the group was confirmed, he said, when the Gestapo arrested Petiot and held him in prison for almost eight months.

Asked about the disappearance of the gangsters and their mistresses, Fourrier said that he did not know that the men would bring the women with them. No, he had not asked many questions, because Petiot told him that the matter was confidential. He emphasized how little he in fact knew of the organization and that it was actually his colleague, Edmond Pintard, who went looking for travelers.

Pintard admitted scouring the bars and cafés of Montmartre for potential clients, generally soliciting by speaking “neither of business nor politics, but of everything and nothing.” He confessed to recruiting all nine of the gangsters and their girlfriends. Like Fourrier, he seemed to believe that he was only helping people escape Nazi oppression.

At one point, Pintard testified that Fourrier showed him a letter or note from Jo the Boxer confirming his arrival in Buenos Aires. Petiot smirked and then, almost off the cuff, admitted that he had imitated Jo’s handwriting and forged the note. This was a surprising confession, coming out, as it did, after the handwriting expert had concluded that other similar surviving letters were genuine. Petiot was apparently enjoying the sensation of showing up an authority, even one whose testimony might be said to work in his favor.

Marcel Petiot’s oldest friend, René Nézondet, took the stand. His testimony—if not much more enlightening—was more damaging to the defendant. Just as he had told the Gestapo following his arrest with Petiot in May 1943, Nézondet said that he did not know anything at that time about Petiot’s activities. It was in prison, he said, that he learned that the physician conducted “clandestine passages” and expected the Germans to shoot him. It was after his own release from prison, Nézondet said, that he learned what Petiot was really doing to his clients.

The realization had come in a conversation with Maurice Petiot. “The journeys begin and end at rue Le Sueur,” Petiot had allegedly told him, before describing the “many suitcases, postdated letters, syringes, a formula for poison, and some bodies” that he found on the property. When Nézondet expressed his shock, calling the doctor a “monster,” the younger Petiot had defended his brother as “a sick man” who needed treatment and insisted that Nézondet keep quiet about the information. Otherwise, he said, everyone would be shot.

Nézondet’s date for this conversation with Maurice, July 1943, differed from the time of December 1943 that he had indicated to the police. Still, this was the most harmful testimony to Petiot that day, coming from a source close to the defendant. At the same time, Nézondet related how Maurice told him about finding several German uniforms at rue Le Sueur, though the question remained open whether this would ultimately help or hurt Petiot. Would this testimony, for instance, support his claim that he posed as a German policeman to arrest traitors, or did it perhaps indicate that the defendant had much closer ties to the Nazis than hitherto revealed?

When Maurice Petiot took the stand, he flat-out denied Nézondet’s statements. He spoke softly and with considerable difficulty; he was then suffering from the late stages of throat cancer. Petiot admitted seeing German uniforms at his brother’s property, but, he emphasized, he had never seen any bodies, poisons, syringes, or, in fact, anything disturbing. Certainly, he never said those things Nézondet claimed. Nézondet was simply carried away by his imagination.

Maître Charles Henry, the attorney representing the family of Paulette Grippay, asked the witness about the uniforms. “Were you not surprised to find all those clothes, particularly the German uniforms, as you stated?”

“No, I concluded that my brother had killed soldiers of the Wehrmacht.”

“And what conclusion did you draw from the presence of the civilian clothes?”

“None.”

Maurice Petiot would not, under any circumstances, provide testimony to hurt his brother, even if it came to the detriment of his own credibility. He admitted to delivering the lime to rue Le Sueur, as Marcel had asked, but maintained that the purpose was to whitewash the façade. He also admitted moving the suitcases to Courson-les-Carrières, claiming that he did not want them to fall into the hands of the Germans. Their origins and contents, he added, were never revealed to him. Maurice’s loyalty to his brother was clear. As he left the stand, he was observed giving a quick smile to Marcel. The defendant looked down, or away.

The next witnesses were no more helpful in unraveling the complicated affair. Both René Nézondet’s girlfriend, Aimée Lesage, and her friend, Marie Turpault, confirmed that Nézondet had told them about the bodies Maurice Petiot had found at rue Le Sueur. Lesage added that Georgette Petiot knew about them as well because Nézondet had told her in Aimée’s presence. As a nurse, Lesage was also convinced that Madame Petiot’s fainting bouts were contrived. Georgette Petiot, she believed, knew all along what her husband was doing.

The defense would dismiss this testimony as simply a witness protecting her boyfriend. The prosecution had not found any credible evidence, Floriot emphasized, to suggest that Georgette Petiot had any reason to doubt that her husband worked for the Resistance. Besides, despite the claims made on the stand that afternoon, no German uniforms were found in the suitcases, the basement closets of rue Le Sueur, or at any of Petiot’s other properties around the capital.

“The longer this trial goes,” Petiot said at this point, “the more confusing it becomes.”

“Voilà,” Leser said, to the amusement of the audience.

THE testimony of suspected recruiters and accomplices continued on the tenth day of the trial, when Eryane Kahan took the stand, looking every bit as glamorous as the newspapers had reported. Tall, with strawberry blond hair, Kahan wore a wide-lapeled brown suit, a wool crew-neck sweater, long silk gloves, and a fashionable round hat trimmed with otter fur and tipped at a slight angle. She walked up to the front of the courtroom slowly, carrying a stylish handbag. Her dark-tinted glasses made her resemble an incognito Greta Garbo. She looked like she was in her late twenties or early thirties, rather than her actual age of fifty.

This mysterious woman was suspected of sending nine victims, all of them fellow Jews, to the escape network. The defense would try to show that she worked for the Gestapo and only sent Petiot traitors attempting to infiltrate his organization. The prosecution would take the position that Kahan could have worked out of any number of motives, ranging from a desire for commission profit, to the altruistic hope that she was helping desperate people escape the Nazi Occupation. For the prosecution, she was no collaborator, and more to the point of the trial, neither were the people she sent Petiot. Audience and jury alike would hang on every word of this important witness.

Kahan was visibly nervous as she started to testify. In a husky voice with a strong Slavic accent, she described how she first met Petiot through her friend and lover, Dr. Saint-Pierre, a physician well known in the underground for his criminal clients and connections. The meeting took place in a back room at Fourrier’s hair salon, where Dr. Eugène, as she put it, questioned her about “the circumstances of my friends and me.” She admitted referring the Wolff, Basch, and Schonker families to the escape organization. All of these people, she said, were delightful.

Given the portrayal of these families by the defense, Leser asked the witness if they were really opposed to the Nazis.

“Of course, Mr. Président,” Kahan said. “They were not only anti-Nazi, but they also lived in terror of being arrested. There was no doubt of their sentiments.” Each of the Jewish families was so happy about the opportunity to leave Occupied Paris that they viewed Petiot “as their God.” They had praised the altruistic Frenchman who operated the escape agency, at great personal risk, to help Jews that he did not know. One journalist in the audience noted that the defendant stopped staring absentmindedly at the ceiling when he heard these words and looked like he felt a sudden sharp pain in his chest.

Kahan also testified to her desire to leave Paris, but Petiot had opposed it for the reason that she could be useful to the Resistance movement. “I understand now what a wonderful pawn I was.”

The witness proceeded to describe how she had adored Dr. Eugène for his patriotic work on behalf of the Resistance. Even when the story broke in March 1944, she testified, she had not made a connection. She had never known him under the name Marcel Petiot, only Dr. Eugène, and all the talk of “injections, nightclubs, drugs, loose women” did not match the man she knew, who was “serious, levelheaded, composed, and very sensible.” It was his photograph on the front page, she said, that caused her to discover the horrible truth.

As for why she did not simply go to the police with her story if she were as innocent as she claimed, Kahan reminded the prosecution that, as a Jew in the Occupation, she was “hunted as a harmful beast.” At one point, she had considered going to the police, but she said that the attorney she consulted, René Floriot, advised her to “stay put.”

Kahan’s story and her motives were soon questioned by Floriot, and a spirited debate followed over her professed work for the Resistance. She became defensive. She struck the railing with her fist, and as she appeared flustered, her accent became more pronounced. Dupin came to her aid, noting that the police had found no evidence disputing her claims of having served the Resistance.

Floriot asked about a certain police report dated November 30, 1945, that identified Eryane Kahan as “an adventuress … who lies with skill.” In the interviews following her arrest as an alleged Petiot accomplice in the autumn of 1944, Kahan could not name a single person she had worked with in the Resistance—and again, this was after the Liberation, when there was no lack of people claiming this distinction. Kahan had been found, Commissaire Poirier noted, with “many difficulties.” Indeed, she was living in the 16th arrondissement, under the fake name of Odette Motte.

Another thing that Floriot knew was that the former leader of the French Gestapo, Henri Lafont, had picked her out from a list of photographs as a woman who had informed his gang about the activities and whereabouts of fellow Jews. Specifically, in a deposition signed December 21, 1944, Lafont stated that Kahan “came to us to give tips on the passages to Spain arranged by a doctor.”

It was a lengthy cross-examination accompanied by a duel of glasses, as Floriot and Kahan removed and wiped their spectacles at regular intervals. Floriot focused first on establishing that Kahan had received a commission for every person she sent Dr. Petiot. He hounded the witness, citing the police report and the testimony of several witnesses. But Kahan refused to budge, and a heated exchange erupted between prosecution and defense attorneys. Insults and insinuations flew from both sides, prompting Leser to call a recess. When the court returned, Dupin withdrew his comments, which might have “offended the very legitimate sensitivities of my opponent.”

Floriot nodded and then launched into a series of rapid-fire questions, suggesting that Kahan had enjoyed a close relationship with Occupation authorities. He asked about her friend, the German officer, and the fact that she had been seen riding in a German truck, which she could not deny. Her apartment building, Floriot continued, was often visited by three or four German officers. He mentioned the deposition of a former friend who believed that Kahan caused her husband’s arrest by the Gestapo. Kahan countered that she had never heard that before.

When Floriot asked about Madame Cadoret’s testimony, namely that she had been worried when Kahan was “saluted by a number of German soldiers,” Kahan said that this was simply her friend Herbert Welsing and one or two of his Luftwaffe friends. Floriot noted that her memory had suddenly returned.

There was one last question, Floriot said. Kahan had been accused of “intelligence with the enemy” (Article 75 of the penal code), but what had happened to her dossier? Kahan denied having any knowledge of such a file. Jean-François Dominique, then covering the trial for Toulouse’s La Républic du Sud-Ouest, thought that she was taken aback by the question.

“Since you do not appear to remember, the dossier is number 16582.”

The prosecutor scribbled the number down with a great flourish, hoping to show the jurors that he intended to disprove this allegation. The judge ordered that this file, completed in April 1945, be retrieved and brought to the courtroom. It would not have any bombshells. But for the moment, it seemed that Kahan was a Gestapo agent.

Marcel Petiot had been unusually quiet. The president asked if he had any questions. Yes, he did, the defendant said. After inquiring about the baggage carried by the Wolff and Basch families and inviting the witness to clarify her financial situation, Petiot seemed most interested in the claim by Cadoret about his dirty hands. Had Kahan also noticed that? he asked.

“I have not looked at your hands,” she said. “They did not interest me.”

Perhaps they were dirty, Petiot responded. When he visited Kahan on rue Pasquier, he told the court, he had not felt safe and often changed the manual gearshift on his bicycle in case he needed to make a fast escape. Many people in the audience found it amusing to hear France’s alleged most deadly serial killer claim that he did not feel safe on that particular street.

“If I did have dirty hands,” Petiot then shouted, “at least I never dirtied them by raising them to swear an oath of loyalty to the traitor Pétain!”

“I forbid you to be insolent,” Leser warned the defendant.

“Toward whom?” Petiot laughed. “Pétain?”

Leser reminded the court that magistrates had been required to swear oaths of allegiance to German authorities. The Act Constitutionel No. 9, drafted on April 4, 1941, made it law. Petiot said that he knew someone who had refused. Paul Didier was the most famous example of a judge who lost his position for his principled refusal.

Leser dismissed the witness. In the audience, Jean Galtier-Boissière found her intriguing and rather puzzling: “Was she tortured by remorse for having delivered three Jewish families who had confided in her to a killer?” Did she perhaps serve the Germans? After listening to her testimony the last two hours, Galtier-Boissière said that he still could not decide between “these equally plausible hypotheses.”

The prosecution closed by calling a number of other witnesses to show that the Wolffs, the Basches, and the Schonkers could not have worked for the Gestapo. Three hotelkeepers from the quartier Saint-Sulpice testified that each of the Jewish families had fled the Nazis into France and were trying to flee again. Petiot had posed as their unfortunate answer.