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

by David King

  Indeed the climate in autumn of 1944—when Petiot presented himself to Communist leaders at the Reuilly armory—was dramatically different from the one that prevailed a few years before, when he was luring people to his town house on rue Le Sueur. Although the evidence is tenuous at best, there was probably a different protector at that time, and another possibility for where he hid his wealth.

  IN early February 1944, two shiny black cars had pulled up in front of a small house in the town of Joigny, on the bank of the Yonne River. Among the arrivals was Marcel Petiot. He was accompanied by six men in flashy suits, flaunting gaudy rings on every finger. They had arrived for the funeral of the physician’s distant cousin, Céline Petiot, a reclusive widow who had died poor and without children.

  That night, Petiot volunteered to keep watch at the vigil while the members of the deceased’s extended family got some much-needed rest. As the relatives went into the kitchen for a late snack, the physician entered the room where he would spend the night alone with the casket. He brought two large, bulging suitcases.

  The next morning, when the pallbearers arrived, they discovered that the coffin, already nailed shut, was extraordinarily heavy. Immediately after the burial, Petiot and his entourage filed into their cars and sped away. The doctor’s suitcases, this time, appeared to be very light.

  One of the men in the car with Petiot was very curious about what Petiot had buried in the grave of this relative. Several months later, in the autumn after the Liberation, he decided to take a look. Bringing along a friend, he returned to the grave site, removed the tombstone, and went to work with shovel and pickaxe. The two men opened the coffin. No treasure. Remarkably, however, there was no skeleton, either. There was nothing at all inside. Someone, they believed, had beaten them to the loot.

  Whether Petiot actually hid his treasure, or more likely a part of it, in the grave of his relative is hard to say. But this small country funeral raises a number of questions. For one, only a couple of weeks earlier, Petiot had been released from Fresnes prison by the Gestapo. No one has ever adequately explained this release—arguments that the Gestapo would suddenly free him for only 100,000 francs or, as Jodkum said, by virtue of his insanity, strain credibility. The hypothesis that someone intervened on his behalf seems more plausible, but if so, then who was it, and more to the point, why did this protector allow Petiot to be arrested in the first place, let alone endure almost eight months of prison, including torture?

  The timing of the funeral and the presence of the strange men at his side, on the other hand, suggest that the Gestapo men of office IV B-4 might well have released Petiot in order to follow him—not, as Petiot said at his interrogation, to arrest his so-called Resistance comrades, but rather to track down his treasure. Given that these Gestapo men sometimes tried to profit from their positions of authority, and unquestionably suspected that Petiot had accumulated a fortune, it is difficult to imagine that they would not have tried to lay their hands on it. A token payment would suffice to free their prisoner, and then Jodkum’s men could follow him to the real source of his wealth, which Jodkum had hoped to seize from the moment they began seriously to investigate Dr. Eugène’s organization.

  Perhaps this attempt to conceal the treasure gives insight into another curiosity about the Petiot case that has never been adequately explained: the dangling panels, the ripped-up floorboards, cut-open divans, and holes in the walls found at rue Le Sueur when the French police arrived on March 11, 1944 (and later, too, at rue des Lombards in Auxerre). Was this evidence of a search of Petiot’s property for concealed wealth?

  But by whom? The Gestapo? As remarkable as it sounds given their interrogations and attempts to follow him after prison, there is no evidence that Jodkum and his men actually knew of his property at 21 rue Le Sueur before March 11. Someone else in Occupied Paris, however, did, and this brings us back to the men who accompanied Petiot to the funeral. Clearly they seem to have been providing protection, as one of them later admitted, and their identity would suggest that whatever Petiot carried in those suitcases was of significant value. This is because one of the men with the physician was Abel Danos, “The Mammoth” or “The Bloodthirsty.”

  A giant, cruel man with a long history of burglaries including a famous train robbery in 1936 and the first major holdup of the Occupation, a coup in February 1941 that resulted in some 8 million francs, Danos served the gangster Henri Lafont. In fact, Danos was one of Lafont’s most valued toughs, belonging to the crime boss’s inner circle or “war council” and selected to take on Lafont’s most important tasks. The other men in Petiot’s entourage—Gé les Yeux Bleus, François-le-Marseillais, André or Dédé-la-Mitraillette, Jo la Remonte—also worked for Lafont.

  So if the coffin at Joigny might take us one step farther in seeing how Petiot dispersed his wealth, it does not ultimately reveal the fate of his treasure, which, alas, remains unknown. What it does offer, however, is support for an allegation first made by Adrien the Basque’s brother, Emile Estébétéguy, of a Petiot-Lafont connection. Estébétéguy, also a member of Lafont’s gang, claimed that Lafont had sent Adrien the Basque to Petiot. Lafont officially denied any knowledge of Petiot or rue Le Sueur, and the physician’s name never appeared on the list of payments made by the French Gestapo. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to establish links between the two men.

  One of Dr. Petiot’s patients was Paul Jean Marie Joseph Clavié, a short, violent man who showed up at his office on rue Caumartin in the late 1930s, probably 1938, for treatment of gonorrhea. Clavié, then aged twenty-three, had selected Petiot, he said, because he was a respected “physician of the pissoir.” Clavié was at this time a small-time hoodlum. A couple of years later, however, he was one of the most powerful men in the criminal underworld. Clavié was the nephew of Henri Lafont.

  Lafont had, at this time, no immediate family, and he treated Clavié almost like a son. On January 10, 1941, while on an early mission with Lafont to establish an espionage center with radio transmitter-receptor at Cap Doumia, outside Algier, Clavié wrote a letter to Dr. Petiot, concluding with the postscript “my uncle greets you and will see you on his return.” Lafont had just received permission from the Abwehr to expand his gang, along with hundreds of thousands of francs to finance his search for new recruits. By April 15, 1941, he was back in Paris doing just that, and by the end of May, he had moved into his office at rue Lauriston. That was the same week that Petiot purchased the property at rue Le Sueur. The physician paid the bulk of the price in cash, the source of which neither he nor anyone has ever been able to explain.

  This, of course, does not mean that Lafont supplied or secured any of the funds for the town house. But assuming for the moment that Petiot could have raised the money from the profits of his medical practice, antiques dealing, and other assets, which is by no means certain, it is striking that he would choose to invest in that particular location. The Germans had already requisitioned numerous buildings in the neighborhood. What made Petiot so sure his newly purchased property would be immune from the ever-expanding ambitions of Occupation authorities to take over buildings in that area?

  Oral testimony from a former member of the French Gestapo suggests that the relationship between Petiot and Lafont developed more significantly the following year. In early 1942, after breaking up a false escape organization in Tournus that pretended to take Jews across the line of demarcation (run by a police inspector who brought down the anger of the Germans when he stopped sharing his profits), the French Gestapo had been encouraged to continue this work, more actively seeking passeurs and escape organizations alike. By the early summer, an informer reported another such agency run by an unidentified physician who helped people escape Occupied Paris. Lafont’s associate, Pierre Bonny, decided to investigate.

  He sent three British men, who had served the gang since their desertion, to pose as downed Royal Air Force pilots hoping to flee to Spain. After a lengthy process, including help from Eryane Kahan to arrang
e the meeting, the physician, Dr. Eugène, received the pilots, heard their pleas, and then promptly doubled the asking price to 50,000 francs apiece. At the next meeting, in late June 1942, also arranged by Kahan, Bonny sent a team to follow the false pilots. Dr. Eugène inadvertently led the thugs straight to rue Le Sueur.

  The men seized the physician, threw him to the ground, and snapped handcuffs on his wrists. At this point, Paul Clavié and an associate, Pierre Loutrel (later the notorious “Pierrot-le-Fou”), arrived, each wielding two pistols. Clavié was astonished. Dr. Eugène of the underworld was none other than his friend Marcel Petiot. The physician was released. With the tension diffused, Petiot offered everyone a drink. Before leaving rue Le Sueur, Bonny decided to take a look around the town house. It was his turn to be shocked. He saw jars with genitals in Formol, and two bodies in the process of being chopped up in the basement. Lafont, hearing of the butchery, apparently realized that he could make use of this doctor’s scalpel and his willingness to wield it.

  Lafont could not only take a cut from the profitable escape agency, but also use the opportunity to extend his reach farther. For instance, when a gang member committed a breach of confidence that could not be atoned for with the payment of a fine (he charged 1,000 to 10,000 francs for minor infractions), he soon realized that the only way to escape Lafont’s wrath was to follow Jo the Boxer, Adrien the Basque, and their colleagues out of Occupied Paris. Alternatively, if Lafont did not want to make an example out of the offender, he could magnanimously allow that person to escape with his life, provided he left the country. Either way, Lafont would win, punishing irregularities that threatened to undermine his discipline and, at the same, turning a profit. And given the valuables that many gangsters were certain to carry, this could be substantial.

  It was indeed this time—from the summer of 1942 to Petiot’s arrest in May 1943—that represented the height of the Petiot reign of terror, when Dr. Paul started finding the first dismembered body parts, with the signature scalpel marks, pulled out of trunks from the Seine or parcels dropped around town. It was also after this summer confrontation that every known gangster sought Petiot’s escape agency. Every one of them, too, had ties to Lafont. Indeed, given the extent of Lafont’s power and knowledge of the criminal world, which was fueled by many informers, it is difficult to believe that an operation with the ambitions of Petiot’s agency could have flourished without his awareness or approval.

  The Liberation ended the golden age of crime for Lafont and his gang. The French Gestapo went on the run, its members fleeing to Spain, South America, Quebec, pre-Castro Cuba, or sometimes into the underground or hiding inside the Resistance. After handing out false papers to his own men, and insisting on the destruction of his gang files, Lafont fled to a small estate some forty-five miles from Paris, outside Bazoches. There, thanks to a tip from one of his own men, Joseph Joinovici, Lafont and Bonny and Paul Clavié were arrested on August 30, 1944.

  One of Clavié’s letters from his prison cell 120 on the quai de l’Horloge was intercepted by authorities. Writing to an unknown recipient, as he awaited his upcoming trial for treason, Clavié now urged that a certain “Dr. P” be immediately arrested. Clavié described how he had worked with him since 1938, and the physician was “very guilty.” After confessing that he had found the doctor frightening, Clavié identified the reason why this man must be immediately arrested: the doctor “knows everything.”

  EPILOGUE

  DESPITE winning a conviction for twenty-six murders, the prosecution never satisfactorily explained how the defendant was supposed to have killed his victims. In the opinion of the vast majority of biographers, Petiot used an injection, perhaps of strychnine or, as John V. Grombach proposed, an injection of an air bubble into the victim’s veins. Other suggestions have included a distance-operated syringe, poison gas, or even a simple glass of wine laced with poison and drunk in a toast to the upcoming journey to freedom. Few, however, have offered any arguments or evidence for their theories.

  Throughout the narrative, I have attempted to make clear what is fact and what is speculation. What follows is speculation, because no one knows for certain what Petiot did to his victims. He never made a full confession and authorities never cleared up the mystery.

  There are good reasons for suspecting that Petiot used an injection. As a doctor, he could easily obtain poison and concoct a credible excuse to administer it. As both Renée Guschinow and Jean Gouedo testified, Joachim Guschinow was told by Petiot that he would require injections before his journey to South America. Ilse Gang also heard that the Wolff family would receive injections, and Michel Cadoret de l’Epinguen said that Petiot had personally told him that health regulations for entry into Argentina mandated them. The press latched on to the theory of injections, circulating it widely by the time of the trial, leaving a lasting impression on Petiot biographers for sixty-five years.

  When I began researching this book, I also assumed that Petiot’s modus operandi was an injection. I have since qualified my stance. Petiot did use one, but the aim was probably not to kill. Under the guise of vaccinations or inoculations for the journey, or visa health requirements, or some other excuse, Petiot probably used an injection to weaken the resistance of his victim. It was not poison—after all, no poison was ever found on the premises at rue Le Sueur, rue Caumartin, or any of his other properties. Morphine and peyote, on the other hand, were present in vast quantities.

  These particular narcotics have powerful sedative effects. They would allow the victim to cooperate with Petiot’s demands, whatever these might have been. At the same time, either of these drugs would allow the victim to remain coherent enough to copy a text or take dictation. The victims then wrote out the short letters to relatives, which Petiot said he would send once he had confirmed their safe arrival. This use of drugs would also account for the curious claims in many of the letters (Braunberger’s, Guschinow’s, and Kneller’s, for example) that the writer or a family member had fallen sick on their journey, thereby explaining in advance any irregularities in the handwriting. Then, after writing the cards, the victim would be moved into the triangular room. The use of morphine or peyote would also explain another fact that puzzled observers, namely, how Petiot could handle strong gangsters like Adrien the Basque—and then also why investigators never found any physical evidence of anyone having attempted to break out of the small room.

  As for the triangular room, was it really necessary for Petiot to make extensive renovations if he simply planned to kill by injection? Was it by chance that he had hired a firm that had just that year finished the construction of a major municipal slaughterhouse in Limoges? The particular changes he made are indeed curious: Petiot was creating a small room, located separately from the main building, with no windows, very thick, reinforced walls with a viewing lens on the outside, and all of this also being soundproof and almost airtight—and it could be made so, Professor Griffon testified at the trial, by the mere insertion of a rug under the door. Even if the prosecution could not produce a rug, Petiot, a dealer in antiques, would not have had any difficulty. As for the gas masks inspectors found, all of these did not necessarily have to have belonged to the victims, and the gas mask found in Petiot’s office may not have been only for covering the stench of the cadavers. And when Petiot explained his renovations to the builders, he told them he was constructing a radiation chamber—a good alibi, I suspect, for his real purpose: a gas chamber.

  My doubts about death by injection grew over the years, but increased most of all when I had the good fortune of unearthing a rare source about Marcel Petiot, published in Belgium in March 1944, only a couple of weeks after the discovery of the remains at rue Le Sueur. The small book, Albert Massui’s Le cas du Dr Petiot, was indeed valuable, but it had one piece of extraordinary testimony: a firsthand account of a young man who applied to Petiot’s escape organization and claimed to have lived through the entire selection process. Could this possibly be genuine? After much consid
eration, I believe so.

  The man was identified only as Raphaël K. His last name was withheld because at the time of publication, the Nazis still occupied Paris and he hoped to find a way to flee Europe. His family urged him to remain quiet. People would be skeptical, he was told, and indeed, this was an all-too-frequent occurrence at that time (1942), when the first Jews who escaped from Nazi camps tried to warn other people about the shocking, incomprehensible atrocities that they had experienced. Note, too, that this young man’s account appeared in print before Petiot’s methods were widely known.

  In June 1942, Raphaël K applied to Petiot’s escape organization. After paying his fees, which were lower than any other known charge (5,000 francs), Raphaël received instructions very similar to other clients’. He was told to arrive at the corner of rue Championnet and rue Damrémont, in the 18th arrondissement, where he was taken in a disorienting way across the city until he arrived at the hair salon. There, in a back room, Raphael reconfirmed his intention to leave Paris. “I do not have to know why,” the doctor told him. “I am sure it is for excellent reasons.”

  After learning that the young man wished to leave as soon as possible, the doctor told him of his “extraordinary luck” in that a group was leaving the following morning. He would travel through Casablanca, as Guschinow had been told five months earlier. “Given the circumstances,” Petiot said, “I would advise you to take with you as much money as possible.”