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

by David King

  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.

  4.

  TWO WITNESSES

  THE REIGN OF BEASTS HAS BEGUN.

  —Albert Camus, Notebook, September 7, 1939

  MARCEL Petiot had indeed been selling drugs. By March 1944, no fewer than ninety-five registered drug addicts were attending his “detoxication program” at rue Caumartin, ostensibly to be cured of their addiction by a series of increasingly smaller doses. Petiot had gained a reputation for this treatment and also for being a sympathetic doctor who indulged his patients. His waiting room was regularly packed. Georgette, who did the bookkeeping for the practice, was busier than ever.

  Massu now learned that Petiot had a sizable file with the Brigade Mondaine, a specialized force of the Police Judiciaire that dealt with, among other things, prostitution, procurement, pornography, and drugs. In early 1942, in another periodic clamp-down on the rampant illicit drug trade in Paris, the Brigade Mondaine had launched a campaign to arrest suspected addicts. Among the people taken into custody was one of Petiot’s patients, and the subsequent inquiry had raised a number of questions about the physician, which, in light of the later investigation, would prove to be a key piece of evidence.

  The patient was Jean-Marc Van Bever, a forty-one-year-old coal deliverer. This was his first steady job, gained only a few months before, with the rising demand for this scarce resource to heat offices, apartments, and other buildings. Previously Van Bever had invested his inheritance into a number of printing businesses that had gone bust. For most of the late 1930s, he had lived in poverty, eking out an existence thanks to social welfare and various charities. This was an unexpected result for a man of his background.

  After graduating from the prestigious Louis-le-Grand Lycée, Van Bever had studied at university, including a year in law school. He spoke English and knew a smattering of Spanish and Italian. His father, Adolphe Van Bever, had coedited a noted anthology of French poets, and his great-uncle was the painter La Quintinie.

  At the time of his arrest, Van Bever had protested that he was not an addict himself, claiming only to have mixed in the environment thanks to his relationship with a prostitute named Jeannette Gaul. At thirty-four years of age, Gaul had a severe addiction to morphine and one of its more potent derivatives, heroin, which had grown in popularity in Paris after expand
ing beyond its original use as a cough suppressant and cure for a variety of diseases of the “air passages,” ranging from bronchitis to pneumonia. Both morphine and heroin flourished in the demimonde, not least among prostitutes trying to escape hazards of the trade.

  After working as a chambermaid with a family in Fontainebleau and later moving on to a number of brothels in Nantes, Clamecy, and Auxerre, Gaul had arrived in Paris just after the Occupation. Her last pimp, Henri “The Jailbird” Baldenweek, had abandoned her and she became an unlicensed streetwalker, the most exposed and dangerous of the main types of prostitution that flourished in the Occupation. In November 1941, not far from La Madeleine, Gaul met Van Bever. After three weeks of regular visits, he asked her to move in with him in his small rented room at 56 rue Piat in the 20th arrondissement. She promised to quit her job. This was two days before Christmas 1941.

  Gaul, however, remained an addict. To obtain narcotics, she had exploited the lack of control in the system by obtaining heroin prescriptions from five different doctors. One of them was Marcel Petiot. In the first month and a half of 1942, specifically the last twenty-two days, Petiot had written five prescriptions for her and two more in the name of Van Bever.

  On February 19, 1942, Inspectors Dupont and Gautier of the Brigade Mondaine arrested Gaul in her room. Van Bever was also apprehended, and then after being held in custody for almost four weeks, he was released on bail. Discovering Petiot’s name as the physician who prescribed the drugs, the Brigade Mondaine sent this information to Achille Olmi, the juge d’instruction, an investigating magistrate who would decide whether or not the state would prosecute. Olmi summoned Petiot for questioning.

  The prescriptions were legal, Petiot argued. He was merely attempting to cure his patient by prescribing progressively smaller doses of the drug. This method was superior to having the addict “go out and steal, or even kill to get it” and, even more, remained “the only known cure.” The state was wrong to suspect him of trafficking. If he had been doing that, Petiot said, he would not have charged a mere 50 francs for a visit and 200 for a substance that would fetch far more on the black market.

  As for writing prescriptions to Van Bever, Petiot said that he had been told that he was an addict, and after a physical examination, he had believed it was true. He had, however, become suspicious on their third visit, when Van Bever, claiming to be deaf, answered the doctor’s questions only after his girlfriend whispered in his ear. At this point, Petiot refused to sign any more prescriptions. Both Van Bever and Gaul later acknowledged that this was accurate. Van Bever defended his deception by saying that he had been surprised when his girlfriend claimed that he was a deaf addict and had not known what to do. On the spur of the moment, he had gone along with the scheme.

  Van Bever and Gaul later changed their story in certain respects to create just enough confusion that the magistrate felt compelled to indict the patients as well as the physician. The crux of the matter was that Van Bever now claimed that Petiot knew all along that he was no drug addict and that the drugs in his name would go to his lover. If the patients were found guilty, they would go to prison; if Petiot were found guilty, he would, at minimum, lose his medical practice. The trial, which would take place at the Tribunal Correctionnel, was set for May 26, 1942.

  Two months before the trial, however, Van Bever disappeared.

  VAN Bever was last seen at a café on rue Piat on the morning of March 22. He was having a drink with his friend and fellow coal deliverer, a former Italian hatter named Ugo Papini. During their conversation, Van Bever was called away to meet a tall man in his mid-forties, dark-haired, clean-shaven, and wearing a beret. Not long afterward, Van Bever returned and said that he had to leave with the stranger. It was all very mysterious, Papini acknowledged. Van Bever said only that the man was a friend of Jeannette Gaul, or more exactly, the husband of one of her friends. “Perhaps Jeannette had some debts that they want me to pay,” Van Bever said, promising not to be gone long.

  When Van Bever failed to return that night, or show up for work the following day, Papini entered his room, which looked untidy as usual. Strangely, Van Bever, a smoker, had not taken his tobacco with him. Earlier, he had told Papini that he had to mail an urgent letter, but it was still in the room. Papini wrote immediately to Van Bever’s lawyer, Maître Michel Menard, who suggested that he report the missing person to the procureur de la République, or public prosecutor.

  On March 26, 1942, Papini filed a report, elaborating on his fears for his friend’s safety. He never suspected Dr. Petiot, nor did the police. At the time, there was a more likely suspect.

  Over the past few months, Van Bever had been visiting another prostitute, France Mignot. In November 1941, he had accompanied her to her family’s house in Troyes. As he prepared to have sex with her, Mignot’s brothers and mother attacked. Van Bever was stabbed, beaten, and robbed. After his release from the hospital, he pressed charges. The girl, her mother, and her brothers had all been arrested, with a trial scheduled to begin on Tuesday, March 24, 1942. So when Van Bever suddenly disappeared two days before that, Papini suspected that the culprit was someone in or close to that family.

  But then, on March 26, while Petiot’s case was still pending, an unknown man delivered two letters to the office of Jeannette Gaul’s public defender, Maître Françoise Pavie on Boulevard Saint-Germain. Both letters were purportedly written by Van Bever. The first one, addressed to his attorney, Maître Menard, informed him that his services were no longer needed—an odd way to end a business relationship with an old family friend. The second letter, addressed to Jeannette Gaul, was even more peculiar.

  “It is no longer necessary to tell any stories,” the writer began. He then claimed to be a drug addict who required one to four shots a day and admonished her to tell the truth. There was little here about Van Bever’s lover, but a great deal instead about his physician:

  You know that Dr. Petiot examined me in the next room. The proof is that he saw the scabs of my hypos. If I made false statements, it was to get temporary freedom to make a new life for myself somewhere else. We will meet on your release to try to make a new life together, far from all filth. I kiss you warmly.

  The letter was signed “Jean Marc van Bever.”

  Why would Van Bever go to the trouble of writing to his lover only to spend two-thirds of his letter confessing to an addiction that either he did not have or that, if he did, would not be news, and then proceed to make points that corroborated Petiot’s position? Why, too, in a letter to his lover, was he signing his full name? Van Bever’s attorney, for one, doubted that these letters were written by his client.

  The police continued to search for Van Bever in bars, prisons, hospitals, asylums, morgues, and other likely places around the capital and surrounding country, without success. His trial with Petiot, meanwhile, came up, as scheduled, at the Tenth Police Court. Van Bever was pronounced guilty in absentia and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment with a fine of 10,000 francs. He was never found.

  As for Jeannette Gaul, she received a fine of 2,400 francs and a sentence of six months in prison, though she would be released after serving only three months (in May 1942), counting from her arrest in February. She returned to the streets and her drug habit, even visiting Dr. Petiot again. She died three months later of tetanus, a complication from an unclean hypodermic needle.

  Petiot argued that Van Bever’s disappearance—“he did not dare to show up”—was proof of his own innocence. He was let off with a fine of 10,000 francs, which his lawyer, René Floriot, appealed and soon managed to reduce to 2,400 francs. Dr. Petiot had emerged from a potentially disastrous narcotics charge with his record untarnished.

  AS the Van Bever–Gaul investigation was winding down, Petiot was implicated in a second narcotics case. The circumstances were similar. He was allegedly attempting to cure a patient, who had then tried to circumvent his treatment and gain more drugs by deception. But as the case emerged, there would be even more stri
king similarities.

  The patient in the investigation was the twenty-eight-year-old Régine or Raymonde Baudet. In early 1942, when Petiot had prescribed Sonéryl, a mild sleeping pill, Baudet had attempted to replace the word “Sonéryl” with “14 vials of heroin.” The pharmacist on rue des Écoles was not fooled by the unsophisticated tactic. He notified the police. Baudet was taken into custody on March 16, 1942, her fourth arrest on drug charges, two of which had previously led to convictions.

  Once again hauled into court for a drug case, Petiot freely admitted trying to cure Baudet of her addiction. He had written four prescriptions for heroin for her already under the name that she had given him, Raymonde Khaït, the last name borrowed from her stepfather. Petiot had refused, he further stated, to write any more prescriptions, offering instead a sedative. It was hardly his fault that his patient, in conjunction with one of her lovers, a man named Daniel Desrouët, had tried to alter his prescription.

  There is no evidence that Petiot was involved in the attempted forgery, but what he did next was surprising to say the least, and the case becomes more convoluted. According to the police report filed by Raymonde’s half brother, Fernand Lavie, a thirty-six-year-old clerk at the Préfecture de Police, Petiot went over to the home of their mother, fifty-three-year-old Marthe Antoinette Khaït, at 27 rue de la Huchette, in the Latin Quarter. Passing the cabaret El Djezair in the same building, an Abwehr-controlled establishment, Petiot entered the apartment and berated Khaït for her daughter’s preposterous mistakes. Then Petiot offered to help. They would first need to hire a good attorney, and he offered to pay the expenses.

  The physician then advised that Raymonde could best escape a long prison sentence if Madame Khaït claimed that she was herself a drug addict. The authorities would believe it, he explained, because Raymonde had already told the police that she and her mother shared the prescriptions, which had been made to the name of Khaït. Then, to make this claim more credible should the police examine her, Petiot offered to make a dozen injections in her thigh. The injections, he promised, would be innocuous.