by David King
2.
THE PEOPLE’S DOCTOR
ALL THINGS TRULY WICKED START FROM AN INNOCENCE.
—Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
DR. Marcel André Henri Félix Petiot had seemed a respectable family physician with a flourishing medical practice. He adored his wife, Georgette Lablais Petiot, an attractive thirty-nine-year-old brunette whom he had married almost seventeen years before. They played bridge, often went to the theater or the cinema, and doted on their only son, Gérard (Gerhardt Georges Claude Félix), one month from his sixteenth birthday. All of this made the discoveries at rue Le Sueur even more inconceivable.
The physician had grown up in Auxerre, an old medieval town just under one hundred miles southeast of Paris. At its center, amid the half-timbered buildings on the winding cobbled streets, stood the imposing Gothic Cathedral of St. Étienne and the large Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Germain, with its late-fifteenth-century clock tower. The Yonne River runs through this wine-growing district famous for its Chablis, branching out into the surrounding wooded region that produces its second-leading export, timber.
Petiot’s father, Félix Iréné Mustiole, worked at the Auxerre postal and telegraph office. His mother, Marthe Marie Constance Joséphine Bourdon, or Clémence as she preferred to call herself, had also worked there, as a young postal clerk before his birth. Petiot, the older of two children, was born January 17, 1897, just over ten years before his brother Maurice was born in December 1906. Petiot had lived his earliest years in the family’s rented apartment on the top floor of a house at 100 rue de Paris.
In 1912, his mother died from complications of a surgery. “At the death of my sister,” Henriette Bourdon Gaston told the police in March 1944, “I raised my nephews.” Many villagers, on the other hand, would claim that the brothers had lived with her much longer, Marcel for extended periods of time since the age of two. Was Gaston ashamed of the man he had become and therefore downplaying her involvement in his upbringing?
It was difficult, for Massu and historians alike, to navigate through the layers of rumor, gossip, and myth that surrounded Petiot’s childhood. As with many other accused murderers, former neighbors dwelled upon tales of his sadism and antisocial behavior. Young Petiot, it was said, liked to capture insects and pull off their legs and heads. He snatched baby birds from nests, poked out their eyes, and laughed as they shrieked in pain and stumbled into the side of the cage. Then, withholding food, he watched them starve to death.
Even his favorite cat was not immune to his cruelty. In one of several variants of the story, when Henriette Gaston was preparing to wash clothes, she put a tub of water on the stove and went to fetch the linen. Marcel was playing on the kitchen floor with the cat. When Gaston returned, the young boy was holding the animal by the neck and attempting to dip its paws in the scalding water. She screamed. Marcel, changing abruptly, hugged the cat to his chest and yelled back that he hated her and wished she were dead. The next morning, after she tried to teach him a lesson in empathy by allowing him to sleep with the cat, she awoke to find the boy covered with scratches and bites. The cat had been smothered to death.
A plethora of anecdotes was easily obtained in the gossip that circulated about the physician, but they were often difficult to verify. By most accounts, Petiot was precocious and highly intelligent. He read at an advanced level all his early years, and later, it was said, he devoured a book a night. His reading was said to be wide-ranging, though this was not reflected in his library, which had a disproportionate number of police novels, studies in criminology, and books about murderers, such as Henri Landru, Jack the Ripper, and Dr. Crippen.
As a child, Petiot had been easily bored in the classroom and often got into trouble. The French police would later learn that he was disciplined for bringing pornographic materials into his elementary school. As several of his former classmates would inform inspectors, young Petiot liked to read about the sexual habits of famous people, dwelling upon what was often then regarded as aberrational behavior. He spoke with relish about the homosexuality of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, or the bisexuality of Giacomo Casanova. One of his personal favorites was the Chevalier d’Eon, the transvestite fencer and spy who dazzled eighteenth-century French aristocratic circles.
The Petiot patriarch wanted his boys to follow him into the postal service. But Marcel was not interested in, as he put it, wasting away in an office waiting for old age. He wanted something greater.
Petiot had been an ambitious boy who yearned for power, wealth, and fame, and yet, ultimately, he proved to be a loner. Few friends from childhood would be uncovered. One friend was known only for allowing Petiot to stab a knife between his outstretched fingers on a table or throw them at him, like a circus performer. A former lover was found, a cabaret dancer named Denise, whom he met in his teens in Dijon. She left him one day, prompting Petiot later to quip that that was the only disappearance the police or press did not blame on him.
One former classmate, Jean Delanove, remembered how Petiot sometimes took a gun to school, showing it off to other children on the playground and pointing it at stray cats. Petiot was eventually expelled for bringing the weapon into the classroom and then, in the middle of a lecture, firing it into the ceiling.
Athanise Berthelot, a teacher at Auxerre who knew Petiot between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, summed him up as “intelligent, but not enjoying all his mental faculties. In a word, he was a bizarre character.” The assistant principal, Marcel Letrait, agreed. Petiot was smart, but when it came to his studies, he was “incapable of [making] a sustained application.”
At age seventeen, Petiot was arrested. In a crime that must have particularly angered his father, still a postal employee, Petiot was caught stealing mail with a contraption he made from a fishing pole with an adhesive at the end. He was believed to be looking for cash, money orders, or just salacious gossip, which he could spread in anonymous letters, perhaps even accompanied by threats of blackmail. The psychiatrist appointed to examine the young delinquent, as required by French law, concluded that Petiot suffered from hereditary mental illness. Petiot’s father protested that that was not possible.
Young Petiot seemed to crave attention. As he later said, he had felt abandoned by his parents. When his mother died, his father, grieving, shut himself off further from his two boys. Marcel Petiot would say that he believed that he had been conceived by mistake, and his birth had probably been illegitimate. In any case, he had felt lonely, rejected, and unloved. His first known close relationship was with his younger brother, Maurice. The Petiot brothers would, for the most part, remain close their entire lives.
AFTER a few more unsuccessful stints in school, with probably additional expulsions at Joigny and Dijon, Petiot received his secondary school diploma (Bachot d’Enseignement Secondaire) on July 10, 1915, by studying at home in Auxerre with his uncle, Vidal Gaston, a mathematics teacher. By this time, with the First World War raging, Petiot had volunteered for the army, receiving the early enlistment number at Auxerre of 1097. On January 11, 1916, he began his military training at Sens, a tranquil village with a cathedral designed by the architect William of Sens, better known for his supposed work on Canterbury Cathedral.
Ten months later, Petiot saw his first action, in the muddy, bloody, rat-infested trenches of the Western Front. This was the beginning of four grim months of aerial bombardments, artillery shellings, and vicious close-range fighting. All around young Petiot, in the Eighty-ninth Infantry Regiment, bodies were mangled, bones smashed, and entrails disgorged. The ghastly slaughter of the war of attrition was immense. The Parisian doctor Sumner Jackson, who drove an ambulance on the same battlefield as Petiot’s regiment, estimated that the French there lost one hundred men a minute. On May 20, 1917, in a trench at Craonne, along the Chemin des Dames, a strategic passageway to the Aisne, Petiot was wounded. A hand grenade tore an almost three-inch gash in his left foot.
This was a curious wound. A hand grenade, lobbed in
to a trench, would likely explode upward, not downward into his foot, and indeed, at least one soldier in his unit claimed that Petiot had wounded himself. According to this allegation, Petiot had placed a grenade into a pipe and then put his foot in front of its opening. Petiot adamantly denied this accusation, dismissing it as a malicious fabrication of a man who envied his education.
It was at this time that Petiot started to show pronounced signs of imbalance. Like many shell-shocked soldiers, a term that derives from the First World War, Petiot could not sleep or eat, and he suffered agonizing headaches and vertigo. He lost weight. He would tremble, or startle at the slightest noise. He also burst into fits of unrestrained crying and suffered bronchial complications, probably from an earlier poison-gas attack. The head of the medical team at the hospital in Orléans diagnosed Petiot as showing “mental disequilibrium, neurasthenia, depression, melancholia, obsessions, and phobias.”
Over the last twenty-four months of the war, Petiot was shuffled between medical clinics, army barracks, mental asylums, and even a military jail for theft. He was accused of stealing blankets, morphine, and other army supplies, as well as wallets, photographs, and letters. One soldier remembered encountering Petiot for the first time when he returned to his hut and found the smiling stranger stretched out on a nearby cot, reading a book by candlelight. The soldier recognized the book as his own, as was the candle. Petiot, showing no embarrassment, said only, “Here, what is yours is mine.” The soldier asked if that principle worked both ways and, receiving the answer that it did, went to rummage through Petiot’s haversack. He found only a miniature chess set.
After Petiot’s arrival, the unit began to enjoy an unaccustomed variety of dry sausages, cheeses, candy, wine, and other luxuries, no doubt obtained from daily and nightly foraging excursions. Petiot seemed to glow after each triumph. The soldier remembered one conversation about the morality of theft, Petiot arguing that it was completely natural. “How do you think that the great fortunes and colonies have been made? By theft, war, and conquest.” Then morality does not exist? No, Petiot answered, “it is the law of the jungle, always. Morality has been created for those who possess so that you do not retake the things gained from their own rapines.” Petiot would later claim that he learned a lot from war.
He would have one last stint (September 1918) in active duty, as a machine gunner with the Ninety-first Infantry Regiment at Charleville in the Ardennes. This was in the Second Battle of the Marne, and the Germans were coming as close to taking Paris as they had since the First Battle of the Marne four years before. But here, too, Petiot ran into trouble with authorities, and his panic attacks returned. The physician later claimed that he had faked mental illness to avoid combat and had used knowledge gained in the hospital’s library, particularly its medical journals, to embellish his performances. The doctors who diagnosed him, on the other hand, were convinced it was no act.
Petiot would be institutionalized in not one, but several different mental hospitals over the next three years, including Fleury-les-Aubrais, Bagnères, Évreux, and Rennes. Five months after the armistice, Petiot was still institutionalized in the psychiatric division of Rennes Military Hospital. He was diagnosed as suffering from “mental imbalance, along with sleepwalking, melancholia, and depression marked by a tendency towards ideas of persecution and suicide.” Petiot was discharged in July 1919 with a 40 percent disability pension, though in September 1920 he was given full disability. Examiners believed that Petiot was unable to work and required institutionalization with “continuous surveillance.” After later medical tests, his disability was reduced in March 1922 to 50 percent. This rate was confirmed again in July 1923.
In evaluating his mental health, army investigators had interviewed many family members. His grandmother, Jeannquin Constance Bourdon, told them that Petiot had always been a “delicate and nervous” child. He wet the bed and soiled his clothes until the age of ten or twelve. At night, he would not sleep, but always wanted to “go for a walk.” His uncle and teacher, Vidal Gaston, described him as “very intelligent and understands well,” but added, “what bizarre behavior.” No friends visited him, and Gaston had not seen him either since he helped him pass his exams. He said that he could “provide no information on his mental state.”
But the army board was not the only institution evaluating the patient at this time. Petiot was also, remarkably, a medical student at the University of Paris. After his discharge from the military, he had joined an accelerated course intended to help French veterans readjust to civilian life. The first two years of the program were at Dijon, where he studied osteology, histology, anatomy, biological chemistry, physiology, and dissection. He completed his third and final year in Paris, graduating on December 15, 1921, with honors. His thesis, A Contribution to the Study of Acute Progressive Paralysis, discussed “Landry’s disease,” named after the physician who, in 1859, first diagnosed the symptoms of nerve degeneration.
Questions were later raised about his degree. Could he really have passed the exams after such a brief period of study? The eminent psychiatrist Paul Gouriou later expressed skepticism that Petiot had written his thesis, noting a lively market for buying and selling theses near the university. But he did not cite any evidence for this claim, nor has anyone else. In fact, as the dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris confirmed to the French police, Petiot was a legitimate degree-holder. Whether he deserved the distinction of honors for the thesis, which was a mere twenty-six pages in length and described by a later physician as “very banal,” is more debatable.
At any rate, Petiot now enjoyed a moment of triumph. His father organized a celebratory dinner for his graduation, borrowing silver from neighbors and bringing out china not used since his mother’s death. Maurice, too, waited anxiously for the return of the older brother he adored. Petiot, who still felt that his father had never expected much of him, arrived punctually and behaved in a formal, if cold and distant, manner. He initiated no conversation and answered most inquiries with only a few words. Then, before the dessert was served, the older Petiot son announced that he had an appointment elsewhere and walked out of the room.
TWENTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD Marcel Petiot first set up his medical practice in the old town of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, some seventy-five miles southeast of Paris and just over twenty-five miles from Auxerre. He moved into a small house on the cobbled rue Carnot, which was flanked on one end by the Gothic Church of Notre Dame, begun by Pope Alexander for the king of France Louis VII in 1163, and on the other by the “House of Seven Heads,” a mansion with marble busts looking out from under second-floor windows.
Petiot had chosen this small town mainly because it lay close to home and had fewer doctors in residence. Indeed, there were only two, and both were elderly. Petiot’s advertisement, which he distributed upon arrival, summed up his talents at the expense of his rivals: “Dr. Petiot is young, and only a young doctor can remain up to date on the latest methods born of a progress which marches with giant strides.” Petiot promised to treat, not exploit, his patients. He soon flourished, drawing a variety of patients who praised his work.
The young physician was kind, courteous, and charming. He listened well and, for many, seemed remarkably adept at diagnosing illnesses. “I know exactly what you mean,” he often said, “I know just what your trouble is,” before launching into a description of his patients’ suffering, often with astonishing accuracy. One recurring rumor was that Petiot had hidden a small microphone under a table in the waiting room. Petiot comforted many patients with his uncanny diagnostic abilities and convinced many Villeneuve-sur-Yonne residents that he was the best doctor in town.
Madame Husson later told how he, with the help of a homemade ointment, managed to remove a growth on a child’s forehead that had long defied medical treatment. Monsieur Fritsch recalled how Petiot offered to treat one of his neighbors who had been diagnosed with an unidentified terminal illness. Petiot said that he knew of a new, risky expe
rimental drug that could either kill or cure, and asked if the patient wished to try it. He did. The patient would live another quarter of a century.
What’s more, Petiot opened his office on Sunday, for workers who could not visit him during the week, and made house calls, riding his bicycle long distances to treat the sick, particularly children. He gave discounts to older and poorer patients, and sometimes waived the fees entirely. Veterans of the First World War also paid much less, if anything. Petiot became known as the “worker’s doctor” or “people’s doctor.” He soon traded his bicycle for a yellow sports car, a Renault 40CV. Over the next few years, Petiot would own a series of them, including an Amilcar, Salmson, and a Butterosi.
Petiot was enjoying his newfound success. He dined regularly at the Hôtel du Dauphin on rue Carnot and delved into the history of his adopted town, reading books by its famous residents, such as the philosophe Joseph Joubert and the romantic poet François-René de Chateaubriand. Petiot sang, sculpted, painted, played chess, and one year he won the town’s checkers tournament. He took pride in his cravats, the one item of fashion he permitted himself, and often indulged in late-night walks, usually wrapped up in a black coat with his hat pulled down over his eyes.
Yet there were already concerns about the brash young doctor. Advertising his services was frowned upon by colleagues as undignified, and the way he presented himself at the expense of his rivals was deemed even more so. Petiot’s tendency to prescribe strong, unorthodox medications worried Villeneuve-sur-Yonne’s pharmacists. “Horse cures!” Dr. Paul Mayaud called them. Unfazed, Petiot replied that pharmacists and drug companies had long diluted their medications to increase profits, and this forced him to strengthen the dosage to obtain its intended effect. Pharmacists, besides, had no right to criticize medical treatment ordered by a licensed physician.