Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris
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A pharmacist later told how he once refused to fill one of Petiot’s unorthodox prescriptions—a dose for a child, he said, “that could kill an adult.” Petiot’s alleged response was chilling, if he was serious, as his enemies claimed that he had been: Isn’t it better to do away with this kid who does nothing but annoy his mother?
It was curious that Marcel Petiot, known to be frugal to excess, would offer so many discounts and waive so many fees in his practice. Actually, Petiot had found a way to beat the system, which was something that appealed to him immensely. So while he enjoyed the reputation of offering free or discounted medical service, Petiot was signing up his patients for public assistance without their knowledge, and being reimbursed by the state. Even a few people who paid him in goods, trinkets, or produce, including cheese, eggs, and poultry, were added to the social register. In those cases, the “people’s doctor” was receiving double payment for his services.
But there was another implication to this fraud.
RENÉ-GUSTAVE Nézondet, a clerk at the town hall of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, was Petiot’s oldest known friend. They had met in 1924, when Petiot came to an auction looking to buy furniture for his newly purchased house, a three-story structure on rue Carnot. “It was a veritable bewitchment,” Nézondet said, trying to describe the sense of camaraderie that the two bachelors shared. “I could never find the cause of this voiceless attraction that drew me towards him, almost despite myself and any rational consideration which would have called for me to stay out of his way.”
Curiosity piqued, Nézondet came to see more of his new friend. Petiot was polite, eloquent, charming, an excellent conversationist, and above all, very intelligent. At the same time, Nézondet said his “exuberant vitality” could soon disappear, plunging him into severe “childlike rages and despair.” The two men enjoyed weekend trips to surrounding villages for dinner, which Nézondet always paid for. They also spent long hours at cafés, Nézondet always drinking wine and Petiot a small black coffee. Again, Nézondet picked up the tab.
In 1926, over one of these meals, Petiot suddenly turned to his friend and said, “I think I will get involved in politics.” It was such an abrupt and unexpected announcement that Nézondet doubted that he was serious. But sure enough Petiot registered as a candidate for that spring’s council election and hit the campaign trail with ferocity. He would run as a member of the Socialist Party, which in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, as in many parts of France in the mid-1920s, was thriving. Petiot believed that this was the party of the future. The increasing power of the “have-nots,” with whom he identified, would, he thought, eventually overwhelm rivals with the strength of numbers.
Petiot had gotten to know many of these have-nots in his medical practice. He paid attention to his patients’ concerns and put many of them in his debt for “free” medical care. Now, if elected, Petiot promised to make the rich and privileged citizens pay for more social services, ranging from a new sewer system to playgrounds for the children. Many people listened. Petiot developed a reputation for lively conversation, both far-ranging and free-spirited, punctuated only by a bizarre unrestrained laughter that came at unexpected or awkward moments. It was compared to the howl of a shipwrecked man who had lost everything.
So far from hurting his chances at election, Petiot’s eccentricities sometimes proved beneficial on the campaign trail. He was a night owl who slept little and often had great difficulty winding down. He poured this restless energy into the campaign. His mind always seemed to be racing ahead to solve the next problem. In the meantime, he continued providing free and discounted medical service to patients, thereby building his practice and political base of loyal supporters, all the while keeping on, secretly, being reimbursed for his services by the state.
Petiot, no surprise, won the election; the only surprise was the margin of victory. It was a landslide. Marcel Petiot, only thirty years old, was about to be inaugurated as mayor. He would soon follow up this success by winning an election for Yonne’s conseil général, the approximate equivalent of a US congressman. When one friend congratulated him, Petiot was blunt. “That’s nothing. I am going to go very far.”
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.
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.”