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

3.

PRELIMINARY FINDINGS

ALL EVENING, I HAVE RECEIVED TELEPHONE CALLS AND REPORTS. IT IS CLEAR THAT WE ARE IN THE PRESENCE OF A STRANGE AFFAIR WHOSE SIGNIFICANCE IS GOING TO INCREASE.

—Amédée Bussière, prefect of police

IT was the afternoon of March 12, 1944, that the first printed account of the sinister discovery on rue Le Sueur hit the streets. The brief mention in Paris-Midi managed to garble the few facts known at the time. According to this report, employees of the gas company, investigating a gaslike odor, entered the building and discovered “the charred remains of two people in the boiler.” No other information was provided, other than the equally false statement that several tramps had been found on the premises, and one of them started the fire.

Outside 21 rue Le Sueur, the crowd had begun to grow. The smell—described as a sickening sweet smell that permeated everything—was now worse than it had been the previous night. One First World War veteran outside the property was reminded of his experience spending several days in a shell hole with five dead bodies. “After two days,” he said to Jean-François Dominique, a young journalist with Toulouse’s La Républic du Sud-Ouest, “it smelled just like this.”

About two dozen police officers, faces pale with fear, tried in vain to usher along the crowd. Behind the barricades, while Massu showed police and legal dignitaries around the property, pointing out where they had found “a pile of skulls, tibias, humeri, broken thigh bones, and human debris of all kinds,” a team of four men continued the excruciating work of sifting out the remains from the lime pit. Massu’s assistants were horrified at the task, so the commissaire had hired gravediggers from Passy cemetery.

Petiot’s neighbors talked to the police and to one another. Some residents claimed not to know that the house at No. 21 was inhabited, or at least not regularly by “respectable people.” Others discussed the owner’s strange behavior. A nearby concierge described how Petiot would enter or depart from his courtyard, invariably on a bicycle with a cart in tow. Each time, the physician nervously glanced over his shoulder and all around him to check that no one was watching him. The concierge at No. 22, Marie Lombre, agreed, noting that the man came almost daily and usually wore a Basque beret and workman’s clothes. His cart was often filled with furniture, works of art, and items of value. But sometimes, she said, “it was impossible to tell.”

Victor Avenelle, a fifty-three-year-old professor of Romance languages who lived on the sixth floor of 23 rue Le Sueur, claimed often to hear shouts and disturbing “cries for help.” He had heard this screaming three or four times since Christmas, usually between eleven and midnight or perhaps one in the morning. The voice was always female. Another tenant in that building, Count de Saunis, said that he sometimes could not sleep for the yelling, or the odd hammerlike sounds that emanated from the house. Others claimed to hear laughter of women, strange popping noises that resembled the uncorking of champagne bottles, or even the sounds of an old horse-drawn carriage clip-clopping down rue Le Sueur about eleven thirty at night before stopping outside No. 21. The police, at this point, had no idea what to make of these statements.

Massu’s detectives powdered for fingerprints and continued to search through the town house for any evidence of the crime or its victims. In one of the buildings in the back of the courtyard, police found a second, smaller pile of lime about fifteen to twenty inches high, six feet wide, and six to nine feet long. It, too, was filled with human bones. Nearby was a cart lacking a wheel. Was this the one neighbors had seen? At various other places of the mansion, agents found workman’s clothes, soiled with lime. In the entrance was a darkly stained brown suitcase that contained a nail file, an eyelash brush, the sheath of an umbrella, and eleven pairs of women’s shoes. The dark stains on the suitcase were almost certainly blood.

In Dr. Petiot’s consulting room, police found a Czechoslovakian-made gas mask, which, they concluded, was used as protection against “the odors of the cadavers” as he transported them to the stove. A “needle for injections” was also found, as was a small bust of a woman made in wax.

Agents Petit and Renonciat discovered a black satin dress with deep décolletage and adorned with two golden swallows, designed by Silvy-Rosa at rue Estelle in Marseille. The garment was still scented with perfume. Another officer uncovered a small, round, old-fashioned woman’s hat, in brown velvet with a peacock feather, made by Suzanne Talbot, at 14 rue Royale in Paris. A woman’s nightgown with the initial “T” was also discovered in Dr. Petiot’s consulting room, along with a man’s gray dress shirt with red stripes and red embroidered initials “K.K.,” which someone had tried to remove. Two other items bearing the same initials were also found: a white shirt with dark blue stripes and a pair of undershorts.

It was another find, however, that underlined the sheer extent of the human tragedy. Concealed in a cupboard in Petiot’s basement were some twenty-two toothbrushes, twenty-two bottles of perfume, twenty-two combs and pocket combs, sixteen cases of lipstick, fifteen boxes of face powder, and thirty-six tubes of makeup, mascara, and other beauty products. There were also ten scalpels, nine fingernail files, eight hand mirrors, eight ice bags, seven pairs of eyeglasses, six powder puffs, five cigarette holders, five gas masks, four pairs of tweezers, two umbrellas, a walking cane, a penknife, a pillowcase, a lighter, and a woman’s bathing suit. Clearly there were many women among the victims, and the killer appeared to be hoarding their personal belongings. Had he also been sadistically inflicting pain or sexually abusing them before chopping them into pieces and dumping the remains into a lime pit?

The question became more charged when police found something else at rue Le Sueur: two specimens of human genitals preserved in jars of Formol.

AT some point that morning—the time is disputed—a black Citroën pulled up to 21 rue Le Sueur with four German officers, obviously of high rank. They entered the building and then quickly returned to the car. By the early afternoon, the time also unclear, a telegram from the High Command of the German Military Occupation reached Massu’s offices on the Quai des Orfèvres. It read in full: “Order from German Authorities. Arrest Petiot. Dangerous Madman.”

As Commissaire Massu prepared his arrest warrant, an officer telephoned police headquarters with something he’d uncovered in Petiot’s home region of Yonne. In 1926, just one year before he married Georgette, Petiot’s lover, Louisette Delaveau, had disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

Louisette Delaveau, or Louise as he called her, had worked as a housekeeper with one of Petiot’s patients. She and the doctor had met at a dinner in 1924, when Delaveau, then a twenty-four-year-old brunette with dark eyes, served the meal. Petiot was obviously attracted. His friend René Nézondet said that he had never seen him so carefree.

Petiot had used his contacts around town to find out more about this woman. He learned that she liked to shop on rue Carnot, attend mass at Notre Dame, and occasionally relax at Frascot’s bistro. The proprietor of that establishment, Léon Fiscot, or “Old Man Frascot,” also happened to be one of Petiot’s patients. Surprised and apparently enjoying the opportunity to play matchmaker, Frascot agreed to serve as a go-between. Petiot wrote her a letter and asked his friend to deliver it. Louise, if she was interested, should telephone him at his medical practice or show up at his house on rue Carnot.

When she called the next day, they arranged a meeting for the evening at Frascot’s bistro. The date went well, ending with a romantic walk back to Petiot’s house. They would continue to sneak away for arranged and impromptu dalliances, until not long afterward, Louisette moved in with the doctor. For the sake of appearances, she became his cook and maid.

The difficulties of living with Petiot—obsessive, compulsive, and already demonstrating a passion for purchasing “bargains” at auctions—soon took their toll. Other sources of tension surfaced, not least of which was that Petiot had begun an affair with another patient. Delaveau may have been pregnant, too, as she had confided to one of her friends, adding that Petiot would take care of it. The young physician was already suspected of supplementing his income with illegal abortions.

But in May 1926, Louisette Delaveau disappeared. To friends, Petiot explained her departure as the result of a quarrel so uproarious that she had stormed out of town without saying where she was headed. René Nézondet remembered how distraught his friend appeared after her disappearance. At one meeting over lunch not long afterward, Petiot had been weeping. He stared into the distance aimlessly. His hands trembled even more than usual.

Apparently Louisette had not said good-bye to her friends or anyone else in town, either. She left no forwarding address and did not pack her personal belongings. “If she returns to the house when I am not here,” Petiot told Suzanne, who replaced her as cook and maid, “her things are there and you should give her this envelope.” The new employee did not know what was in the envelope. Louisette never returned.

Few at the time suspected anything sinister. One anonymous letter to the police did accuse Petiot of murdering his lover, but investigators did not find any evidence of foul play. The official search was abandoned after a few months.

Not long after Louisette’s disappearance, it had been reported, Petiot was seen loading a large wicker basket into the trunk of his sports car. This testimony gained additional relevance a few days later, when the body of a young woman in her mid-twenties was retrieved from the same kind of basket outside Dijon. What’s more, Commissaire Massu was in a position to appreciate the importance of something that had escaped investigators at the time. The corpse in the basket had been decapitated, the body had been dismembered, and the inner organs and intestines had been cut out.

MASSU approached crime methodically and with as little emotion as possible, trying not to differentiate between major and minor crimes, or what he called interesting and uninteresting ones. In each case, it was only a matter of victims and criminals—the former had to be identified and the latter apprehended and brought to justice. No more, no less. “A murder is a murder,” he said.

Massu was a native Parisian, born on December 9, 1889. His father had died in Massu’s second year, and his mother had supported the family by working at a grocer’s shop. At the age of thirteen, Massu had gone to work for a butcher on rue des Capucines. He would spend the next five or six years working for various butchers around the capital. In January 1908, just after his eighteenth birthday, Massu volunteered for the army, joining the 117th Infantry Regiment. He was discharged two years later with the rank of sergeant and eventually found work again in the credit office of the large department store Galeries Lafayette, just a few steps from Dr. Petiot’s future home. Massu stayed there until his application to the police was accepted.

On December 16, 1911, at age twenty-two, Massu began work under Charles Vallet in the Brigade Mobile, which had been established to supervise the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition. His first days on the force coincided with the pursuit of the infamous band of anarchists known as the Bonnot Gang.

Viewing theft as liberation, Jules-Joseph Bonnot and his men had stolen automobiles and rapid-reloading rifles, which they then used to burglarize everything from shops to homes. On December 21, 1911, for instance, when they robbed a Montmartre branch of the Société Génerale Bank, they fled in an automobile; the police, at the time, pursued criminals on horseback and bicycle. The reign of the “Motor Car Bandits,” as the press dubbed them, ended with its leaders killed or captured, all during Massu’s first year on the force.

After years of chasing pickpockets, which he called “good training” for teaching him how to follow a suspect, watch that person closely, and ultimately catch him or her in the act of committing a crime, Massu had developed into a patient and observant detective with a mastery of police procedure. He was praised for his psychological insight into the criminal mind. As he gained more responsibilities, rising to secretary in August 1921 and eventually commissaire of police in January 1933, Massu would also earn a reputation for his ability to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of the men who served on his team. Some superb interrogators, Massu said, could not catch a pickpocket, and many detectives, veritable bloodhounds in the hunt for a criminal, would be lost in the interrogation room. His job was to delegate the tasks of an investigation accordingly.

Massu’s own specialty was interrogation. He placed an enormous value on its importance to an investigation. Evidence at a crime scene was often complicated, subject to a variety of interpretations; witnesses may lie, mislead, or make mistakes, and science, even in the best of circumstances, was not infallible. But an interrogation could produce a detailed confession—and this, when corroborated by outside verification, represented the most certain way to determine if someone was guilty and, what’s more, ensure that justice was in fact being served.

Success in the interrogation room meant tailoring his strategy to suit the suspect sitting in the green velvet chair in his office. Whether dealing with a thug or a sophisticated swindler, it was always essential to create a calm environment for questioning. A glass of beer or a dry white wine, the commissaire said, was more productive than screaming in the suspect’s face, threatening reprisals, or resorting to blows. Massu prided himself not only on gaining the most confessions at the Quai des Orfèvres, but, more important, on the fact that he had achieved these results “without raising the voice or the hand.”

In 1937, when the International Exposition had returned to Paris, Massu established the “Brigade Volante,” a mobile police squad to fight crime, which had risen dramatically at the 185-day World’s Fair that drew some 31.5 million registered visitors. Massu tried to make sure that this “ritual of Peace and Progress” would not be scarred by murder or tragedy. He averaged about three hundred arrests per month, but in one key respect, Massu and all his colleagues had not succeeded.

A German drifter named Eugen Weidmann had been luring tourists away to a small villa west of Paris, at St. Cloud, where he killed and robbed his six victims and then buried most of them in his basement. Weidmann was eventually caught, sentenced to death, and guillotined in June 1939. The massive, unruly crowd outside St. Pierre’s prison at Versailles that day would prompt the French president LeBrun, nine days later, to abolish public executions.

Now, four and a half years after Weidmann, there was another serial killer in Paris, this one more prolific and far more disturbing.

WITH the order from the German authorities in hand, Commissaire Massu hurriedly drafted a warrant for the arrest of Marcel Petiot and his wife, Georgette. The latter was described as “about forty years old, small stature, light complexion, thin face.” Dr. Petiot, age forty-seven, was presented as being “about 180 cm [just under 5′11″], rather corpulent, dark chestnut brown hair, thrown back, slight frontal baldness, clean-shaven, strong jaw, chin slightly prominent, and wearing a large overcoat.” Petiot is, the notice warned, “considered dangerous.”

“The steps of an investigation,” Massu said, “are always the same: statements, interrogations of witnesses, picking up clues and fingerprints at the scene of the crime and everywhere it seems necessary.” All of this would be “compared and examined scientifically,” looking for “anything that can be useful to the demonstration of the truth.” As for finding the suspect, Massu was confident. No matter how clever a murderer had been, how perfect his plan, or flawless its execution, a murderer was always, at some point, “an idiot.” A mistake would eventually be made and he would pounce.

Investigator Marius Battut and a couple of homicide detectives headed to Petiot’s apartment on rue Caumartin, which was not too far from the métro stations Caumartin and Saint-Lazare. The apartment was in the middle of the lively Opera District, full of hotels, restaurants, cafés, theaters, nightclubs, brothels, and many other commercial establishments on and around the Boulevard Haussmann.

The officers walked up to the five-story building at No. 66. Two businesses were on the ground floor: the hairdresser salon Gaston Coiffure and the bistro La Chope du Printemps. An air raid shelter was in the basement. To the right of the front door was a black marble plaque with engraved gold letters advertising the medical practice and office hours of Dr. Petiot, a graduate of the University of Paris Medical School.

The bistro, the hair salon, and Petiot’s practice were all closed. The concierge, Raymonde Denis, happened to be away from her lodge when the police team arrived. Her twelve-year-old daughter, Alice, on the other hand, told the officers that she had seen Marcel Petiot and his wife, Georgette, about nine thirty the previous night, when they had returned home together on foot. She thought that they might still be in their apartment.

The officers walked up two flights of stairs and knocked. No one answered. The door, the officers discovered, was unlocked. Later the police would learn that Petiot never locked his doors, because a skilled burglar, he reasoned, would always find a way inside, and this way, he would not have to make repairs. The police, however, did not enter.

Although they held a warrant for the arrest of the couple, and authorization to search rue Le Sueur, they did not have permission to search Petiot’s apartment. The Germans might flaunt French laws, but Battut was determined to follow procedure. On their way back to the headquarters to obtain the necessary paperwork, the officers met Petiot’s concierge.

“Yesterday evening,” thirty-nine-year-old Raymond Denis said, “I saw Dr. Petiot for the last time at seven o’clock.” He was leaving the apartment on his bicycle. About eight o’clock, Georgette had stopped by the concierge lodge with some cakes for her daughter. Madame Denis did not know anything else about the evening, other than the fact that at about nine thirty p.m., after she had gone to bed, her daughter said that she had seen Marcel and Georgette come home.

When the police officers returned to rue Caumartin the following morning with the search warrant, there was no one there. In contrast to the chaos at rue Le Sueur, the rooms here were neat and tidy. Papers, personal belongings, and other objects of value were conspicuously absent. What they did find was a large supply of coffee, sugar, chocolate, and spirits, all difficult to obtain in wartime Paris—a veritable prewar café, Massu said. There was also a variety of prescription drugs and narcotics, including peyote, a hallucinogenic drug popular in Parisian nightclubs, and some 504 vials of morphine, worth a fortune on the black market.

This was a large amount, even for a physician who, as reports indicated, claimed to treat drug addicts in his practice. Was Petiot a drug user himself? Was he dealing in drugs on the side? Early rumors suggested that Petiot catered to a diverse clientele, and his office was located in a notorious drug district. Physicians, too, investigators knew, were the most readily available source of illegal drugs in Occupied Paris.

In addition, the inspectors found a collection of bizarre artwork and a number of masks described as “diabolical and grimacing.” On a pedestal in the doctor’s office, between the cupboard and the wall, was a wooden statue, about two feet in height, of a beast, a devilish or Pan-like creature with a grotesquely large phallus. Dr. Petiot, police soon learned, was the artist.