The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot

by Thomas Maeder

  Patients without money were treated for a fraction of the cost or for free, and he was known to open his office on Sunday for those whose work prevented them from coming during the week, and to travel great distances late at night to treat sick children. His treatments were successful and his tone reassuring. He seemed able to diagnose an ailment and write the necessary prescription even before the patient had a chance to describe his symptoms: “No, don’t tell me. I know all about it. You have this, this, this, and that. Take a bit of this and you will feel better in no time.” More often, Petiot would persuade his patients that there was really nothing wrong with them at all. Many of his patients were flattered by the interest Petiot took in their lives. Something about him drew out their confidence, and he enjoyed hearing about their social lives, their finances, their small worries in life. A patient would sometimes realize, after being ushered to the door with a prescription in his hand, that during the entire consultation he had spoken about nothing but his life and had never mentioned his ailment.

  As it turned out, Petiot was not quite so self-sacrificing as it seemed. It was learned later that he enrolled virtually all of his patients in Medical Assistance without their knowledge, so that he was reimbursed by the State for those who did not pay, and was paid twice for some who did. Although patients went to see him in ever increasing numbers, local pharmacists occasionally complained about his prescriptions, which all too frequently contained potent doses of narcotics. Once a pharmacist telephoned Petiot to correct a prescription that called for a near-lethal dose of a dangerous drug. Petiot replied that since the pharmaceutical companies and druggists watered down the products, it was only by prescribing excessive amounts that he could compensate and obtain the required dose. Another pharmacist refused to fill a prescription for a child that would have killed an adult. When he complained to the doctor, Petiot replied: “What difference does it make to you anyway? Isn’t it better to do away with this kid who’s not doing anything in the world but pestering its mother?” Still, not one of his patients seems to have died, and none complained.

  In his private life, Petiot was taciturn and distant. The main feature of his personality seemed to be scorn: scorn for people, institutions, sickness, danger, life, and the law. Beneath his seductive charm and professional devotion, there appeared to be nothing but cold amusement and detached interest. A turbulent inner life there was, which made him nervous and tense, and sometimes plunged him into sudden despair and fits of weeping. The cause of these crises was never communicated to those around him. He did not smoke, drink, or frequent cafés, had few friends, and shared none of the simple problems, joys, and casual conversations that draw people together and form the tissue of daily life. When he did speak, his talk did not seem to emerge from amiability, but from a desire to manipulate people. “To succeed in life,” he once told a friend, “one must have a fortune or a powerful position. One must want to dominate those who might cause one problems, and impose one’s will on them.”

  A conversation with Petiot was a debate in which he always seized the upper hand. René Nézondet described him in his 1950 book about Petiot:

  Logic and common sense were his personal enemies and had no place in his mind. Even when faced with firm evidence, he did not know how to give in. On the contrary; he was always prepared with ten answers to prove that you were in the most complete error. I, who had time to study the depths of his mind, I am convinced that his greatest pleasure was to play with men’s minds.… He knew how to create doubt, even though you often suspected that he was saying the opposite of what he truly believed. He forced his way of seeing things upon you. When you asked his advice, he was never at a loose end. He invariably replied: “But it’s exceedingly simple, you have only to …” Then he launched into endless explanations, definitions and rationalizations. He laid out a veritable encyclopedia of ideas, so simple to comprehend that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you hadn’t understood a single thing, but out of politeness or in order not to seem more ignorant than he, you did not press the matter.

  Petiot lived very modestly—too modestly perhaps, villagers thought, for a man in his position. An old woman came to clean house and prepare meals. His clothes were not in the latest style except for his neckties, in which he took some pride. Besides being poorly cut, his suits were often covered with grease stains; he made his own automobile repairs and never troubled to change before burying himself in the engine or sliding under the car. His light-yellow sports car was his only luxury and also the greatest danger to the townspeople. He would drive without headlights, and over several years caused dozens of accidents; and though the car gradually lost bumpers, mudguards, paint, and all respectability, Petiot himself was, miraculously, never injured.

  Mostly Petiot kept to himself when not working. He read voraciously—generally police stories and pulp literature, which he would devour at a rate of three hundred pages an hour, reading a page at a time and fixing it so firmly in his memory that he could quote long extracts of unbelievable tripe. He went out little, and then mostly at night. He could see well in the darkness, was able to pick up a pin in near-total obscurity, and often walked the streets for hours long after the lights were out and the village asleep. He seemed born of the night, it was said, and his personality changed when he plunged into his element. He was more alive, his movements supple and feline, his carriage different, his face more relaxed, his smile more frank and open. It hardly seemed that he slept at all. His peculiarities conspired to make people uneasy at the same time that they trusted him. At certain moments he overflowed with a sort of exuberant vitality that scarcely seemed to come from within him. Nézondet likened him to a man possessed.

  Though his style of living was far from lavish and he scarcely needed money, Petiot displayed an acquisitive streak—a need to accumulate and possess that would grow with the years. He was a kleptomaniac, and frequently took something besides himself when he left a house after a visit. Maurice Petiot told Nézondet he always searched his brother’s pockets at the door before bidding him farewell. The items the doctor stole were never very expensive or important, and the village people excused or overlooked his quirk. In later years, Petiot’s wife and son surreptitiously returned stolen objects to their rightful owners and Marcel apparently never missed them. But these small thefts seemed indicative of other, still largely hidden aspects of Petiot’s personality. The Mongins, from whom Petiot rented his rue Carnot house, had given him a one-year lease, and it was understood that at the end of that time he would move elsewhere and they would move back into the house. But when the lease expired, Petiot refused to leave; the couple had to evict him with a court order, and when they regained possession they discovered that he had removed a number of ornaments and pieces of their furniture and had replaced an antique stove worth F25,000 with a clever imitation. When the Mongins threatened him with a lawsuit, he pointed out that, being a certified lunatic, no court would find him legally responsible. They were convinced he had robbed them out of sheer perversity, since most of the things he had taken were of no use to him whatsoever.

  Much worse suspicions were aroused several years later, in 1926. One of Petiot’s patients was an aged woman, a Madame Fleury, who had a beautiful twenty-six-year-old housekeeper named Louise, or Louisette, Delaveau. When Madame Fleury made an extended visit to Paris, Louisette decided to stay behind. A few days later the people of Villeneuve were surprised to discover that Petiot had dismissed his old housekeeper and Louisette had moved in. Ostensibly she was employed only as cook and housekeeper, but soon it was common knowledge that she had also become his mistress—a surprising change for Petiot, who had never previously shown much interest in any of the women who lavished their attention on the eligible young bachelor. Soon after Louisette moved in, the house next door to the Fleury home was burglarized, and several days later the Fleury house itself was robbed and set on fire to cover the traces of the burglary—incidents significant, perhaps, in the light of later events.
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  For several months the communal life chez Petiot went on more happily than anyone would have suspected, and Nézondet himself noticed that Petiot seemed calm and relaxed for a change. The only problem was that Louisette seemed to be gaining weight, and gossips murmured that she was pregnant. Then on the Monday after Pentecost, in mid-May, Louisette disappeared. Several days later, while attending a funeral in the village, Petiot asked a local gendarme if the people of Villeneuve were not concerned about Louisette’s departure; his manner of asking was so odd that the officer mentioned the incident to his chief. Someone then reported he had recently seen Petiot loading a large trunk into his car. A similar trunk, containing a decapitated and unidentifiable young female corpse was found floating in the river not long afterward. The brief police search for Louisette ended, however, without official suspicion seriously cast on the respectable Dr. Petiot.

  René Nézondet fended off unpleasant rumors. He said he had met Petiot on the street one day. He was weeping in a state of utmost misery, bemoaning the fact that Louisette had abandoned him. Throughout lunch, Petiot stared straight ahead, his hands trembled, and he barely spoke as he seemed to search for some kind of solution to his woeful state. Suddenly he appeared to find it. He calmed down, poured himself a drink, and announced to Nézondet: “I think I will get involved in politics.” Nézondet also angrily rebutted local newspaper stories that he and Petiot had been seen late one night pushing a corpse-shaped package in a handcart. He said that Petiot had an automobile and he had a van, and if they wanted to tote corpse-shaped parcels about under cover of darkness they would not do so in a wheelbarrow.

  Nézondet thought Petiot was joking when he announced his intention to run for office, but several weeks later his friend’s name appeared on the ballots as Socialist candidate for mayor of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. The campaign was long, hard, and not always scrupulously honest. At his best, Petiot was an excellent speaker and actor who knew how to amuse, cajole, and seduce an audience that was already largely indebted to him for his medical services. At one performance he dragged himself painfully onto the platform with the air of a man crushed by guilt and sorrow, and said, “I confess that I am guilty of a serious crime.” The crowd gasped, and waited breathlessly while he stood, head bowed, eyes moist, seemingly overcome by emotion. “I stand accused of loving the people too much. I confess: it is true.”

  As the campaign neared its close, the tireless Petiot seemed to be everywhere, and his tactics took on a more perfunctory tone. On the evening of a major electoral debate at the town hall, Petiot furnished a supporter with a length of copper cable and a set of detailed instructions. Petiot spoke first and had timed his speech to the minute. At 9:45 P.M., as his opponent stepped to the podium, Petiot’s aide short-circuited the main power supply of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. The town and hall were blacked out, a few small fires were started, and the opponent’s speech came to a swift end. On July 25, 1926, Marcel Petiot was elected by a landslide.

  Not everyone was pleased with the new mayor. Besides the small but vocal political opposition, some townspeople took umbrage at Petiot’s campaign tactics and his blatant dishonesty. A Monsieur Gandy wrote to the Commission de Réforme complaining that during his campaign Petiot publicly boasted of having feigned insanity to fool the army into discharging him with a pension. The commission went back over the medical records and upheld their earlier decisions. Petiot really was sick, though as their conclusions depicted it, his sickness was curiously flexible:

  The very fact mentioned by Monsieur Gandy—the alleged admission of a fraud perpetrated to obtain a pension—is but another manifestation of the subject’s mentally unbalanced state.…

  This form of mental disorder can very easily escape detection by lay persons who are inclined, as Monsieur Gandy, to attribute the same significance to the words and actions of someone mentally ill as they would to those of a perfectly normal individual.

  In addition, to fully appreciate this sort of infirmity, one must take into consideration the fact that in the course of its evolution, the affliction can show rather long periods of remission which might lead lay persons to believe it has actually been cured.

  As far as the degree of invalidity, the previous evaluation of the experts and the commission is equitable.

  In conclusion, there is no cause to review Monsieur Petiot’s pension, and the matter should be closed.

  Petiot was officially established as a part-time lunatic. Conveniently, he was quite sane enough to carry on a normal political and professional life, but not always sufficiently responsible to be prosecuted for his misdemeanors. This would serve Petiot well again.

  As mayor of the town, Petiot’s petty offenses took on greater breadth. City funds were stolen from the town clerk’s (Nézondet’s) desk, and rumor accused the mayor. An ultrapatriotic band whose music and political orientation were distasteful to Petiot and his friends discovered one day that their bass drum had been stolen. A few days later Petiot founded another band and donated a similar, freshly painted drum. He complained that a stone cross at the entrance to the town cemetery—a cross eight feet high and weighing nearly twelve hundred pounds—was ugly and obstructed the hearses. One Christmas Eve he warned the police that the cross just might vanish that night. The police laughed. The next morning the cross was gone. When Petiot was questioned, he laughed: “I don’t believe I have it on me. Besides, what on earth would I ever do with it?”

  Dr. Eugène Duran, a physician from Villeneuve who was called as a character witness during the police investigation in 1945, would state: “Petiot, Marcel, was a politician to the depths of his soul, knowing how to flatter the people and make them love him. Nonetheless, his altruism was but an appearance, since his overriding passions were money and personal power. He was very intelligent, but had occasional mental lapses which made him seem truly abnormal.… He was never honest as a mayor, as a doctor, or as an individual.” Former city-hall employee Léon Pinau said he had quit his job for fear of being dragged into some awful scandal by the mayor and because he could not tolerate Petiot’s many thefts and innumerable exhibitions of odd behavior. Once, he said, Petiot hurled himself off the express train from Paris, which did not happen to stop in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne.

  If Petiot did leap from the train, it may have been to make a point, for at the time Monsieur Pinau resigned, Petiot was trying to persuade the railroad company to schedule more stops in his town. However unorthodox his methods, Petiot did get things done. He installed a sewer system, completely renovated the elementary school, and constantly lobbied for State-funded improvements—sometimes beginning work on them before the necessary authorizations came through. An anti-Petiotist newspaper complained that Villeneuve did not really have a municipal government: it had nothing but Marcel Petiot, filling the roles of mayor, municipal council, street commissioner, commissioner of everything else, director of public works, municipal court, and representative for the canton. Nor was the newspaper far wrong. The municipal council, theoretically a balancing power, functioned merely as a rubber stamp. In 1926 Petiot decided to revive an 1881 proposal to construct a slaughterhouse. The municipal council gave its unanimous approval. The following year, after plans had been drawn and approved, Petiot abruptly changed his mind and the councillors voted thirteen to seven against it—solely, it appears, to prove their complete sympathy with the mayor’s decisions and their willingness to obey his every whim. Some time later, when Petiot was in disfavor, a new municipal council unanimously voted the project in again and castigated its predecessors for a ridiculous action that simultaneously proved their unthinking allegiance to the mayor and their complete disregard for the wishes and interests of the townspeople. Petiot’s rule was absolute, efficient, and highly irregular. Twenty years later, the Villeneuvians were still sharply divided among themselves. Some bemoaned the loss of the best mayor they had ever had—the only one who got things done. Others claimed with equal vehemence that he was the most unscrupulous scoundrel ever to sully t
heir town.

  Petiot himself loudly proclaimed his innocence of all crimes and irregularities. He accused nameless “political enemies,” who resented his progressive Socialist stand, of resorting to slander because they had been impotent against him in an honest election. Many people believed him. Petiot seemed able to convince people of almost anything, and some credited him with hypnotic powers. Once when he was arrested for driving without headlights and led before the judge, he was so commanding that Captain Mourrot, the confused and intimidated arresting officer, who began with clear certainty of the charge, ended up by strangely testifying that Petiot’s headlights had indeed been lit but that no one could see them.

  On June 4, 1927, Petiot married Georgette Valentine Lablais, twenty-three, the beautiful daughter of a wealthy landowner from the nearby town of Seignelay. Monsieur Lablais, who initially opposed the marriage, was commonly known as Long Arm because of his powerful connections. From 1918 to 1936 he owned one of the most expensive restaurants in Paris—on the rue de Bourgogne, right next to the Chambre des députés (now the Assemblée Nationale) and amidst half the ministries in France—and many of the country’s most influential politicians were his steady customers and friends. It was intimated that Petiot, scarcely a wild romantic, had been partly attracted to Georgette by the possibility of using her father’s influence to his own benefit, since his own political ambitions did not seem limited to a small town. At first, though, the couple led a quiet existence, and their household was augmented by the birth of Gerhardt Georges Claude Félix Petiot on April 19 of the following year. Petiot never did use the influence apparently at his disposal; or perhaps he never had the opportunity.