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

Acknowledgments

AMONG the many people who helped me over the years I spent researching and writing this book, I would like to thank, first of all, Suzanne Gluck at William Morris Endeavor. Suzanne is the best agent on the planet, and it is an immense privilege and pleasure to work with her. I am also most fortunate to have John Glusman as my editor. John has supported this project in every possible way, and I am grateful for his many outstanding suggestions.

It is also my pleasure to thank someone else whose help has been extraordinarily beneficial: Françoise Gicquel, Commissaire Divisionnaire of the Service de la Mémoire et des Affaires Culturelles, who granted me access to the entire Petiot dossier, which has been classified and locked away since the discovery of the crimes. Thanks to her support, I was able to read the Brigade Criminelle’s original reports, interrogations, and searches, not to mention Petiot’s own personal notebooks and some of his poetry. I am forever grateful for this opportunity. I would also like to thank Oliver Accarie-Pierson, Magali Androuin, Emmanuelle Broux-Foucaud, Orlanda Scheiber, and Jean-Daniel Girard for their expertise, professionalism, and hospitality. All of you did so much to welcome me at the Archives de la Préfecture de Police, and you made my stays in Paris so valuable.

I would like to thank Jacques Delarue, who, in addition to his pioneering works of scholarship that have long helped historians understand the Occupation, kindly gave me access to some sensitive archives at the Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine. Thank you, Aldo Battaglia and the team at BDIC for making this possible. I would also like to thank the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine for allowing me to read captured Gestapo records, and for their kindness and expertise. Sincere thanks, too, to everyone at the Archives de Paris for the opportunity to read the material on the Petiot trial that they had available and the Archives Nationales for an invaluable stenographic account that supposedly never existed. Thanks to Jason Clingerman at the National Archives in College Park and Mark Stout at the International Spy Museum for helpful advice. I would also like to thank Pete Kandianis, a detective whom I am proud to call a friend; his reading suggestions and book loans certainly helped me gain a better understanding of challenges Commissaire Massu and the Brigade Criminelle faced in their hunt for Dr. Petiot. A special thank-you also goes to Professor David Olster for sharing his scholarship and friendship over the years, and to the late Professor Raymond F. Betts for his profound influence, not least his infectious love of France. I would also like to thank many dear friends, both in Lexington and around the globe, who have shown such keen interest in this project, many of them since I first became fascinated by this story years ago when I was preparing one of my World War II lectures at the University of Kentucky.

I would like to thank everyone in the interlibrary loan department at the University of Kentucky for providing me with many rare books from dozens of libraries around the world. These included a wide variety of memoirs and diaries written by doctors; diplomats; detectives; historians; actresses; Americans; sons of gangsters; Resistance fighters; rescuers; Gestapo, Abwehr, and Wehrmacht officers; a millionaire son of a founder of a major bank; a brothel madam; and many others. For books that were rarer and apparently not owned by any of the ten thousand libraries in the system, I would like to thank my antiquarian book dealers. It was exciting to open each new package, which included no less than Commissaire Massu’s “other” memoir, the memoir of Dr. Petiot’s oldest friend, a forgotten book on Petiot (the first major book on the subject and actually published in Berlin), and a fascinating small book published just three weeks after the discovery of the crimes at rue Le Sueur—this last one proving far more valuable than I’d expected. Of course, any remaining errors in this book are my responsibility alone.

I would also like to thank my parents, Van and Cheryl King, for all their love and encouragement over the years, and I am deeply grateful for everything. As always, it is a joy to thank my wife, Sara, for all her love and excitement. She is an exceptional critic, and her many suggestions were hugely valuable. Thanks, and I love you! Finally, a special thank-you to Julia and Max for enlivening and enriching my world, and it is to you that I dedicate this book with all my love.