At 8:00 P.M. on March 11, 1930—fourteen years almost to the hour before the rue Le Sueur discovery—an incident erupted that was to trouble Villeneuve for many years. Armand Debauve, the director of the local dairy cooperative, returned home that evening to find his house on fire. He raised an alarm and smashed into the kitchen, where he stumbled over the body of his wife Henriette. She was carried outside and artificial respiration was begun before someone noticed that one side of her head had been completely smashed by blows with a heavy instrument. As firemen extinguished the blaze and police examined the grounds, Marcel and Georgette Petiot drove by. They stopped for a few moments, but to the great indignation of spectators who believed the mayor’s and a doctor’s place was at the scene of the tragedy, they continued on to a movie theater in nearby Sens, where other patrons noted Petiot’s unusually nervous and distracted air.
The great depth of the wounds and the area over which blood had spattered testified to the viciousness of the assault on Madame Debauve. The killer had poured gasoline around the house and set it alight in a poor attempt to conceal the crime. Recent footprints led from the dairy across marshy fields, along the river, and toward the town of Villeneuve, confirming the suspicion that the killer was someone from the town. Only someone who knew the terrain well could have negotiated the path in the dark. It was obvious, too, that the criminal knew that Armand Debauve went to a café every evening and did not return home until 7:30 or 7:45. The heat of the fire had stopped the kitchen clock at 7:13.
The murderer also seemed to know that on the second Wednesday of every month the Debauves made payment for the milk they had collected from neighboring regions. That day would have been March 12, meaning that on the evening of the crime an entire month’s take, F235,000, would be in the house. The murderer had not found the money, which was hidden under a kitchen counter; instead he had tried to force open a safe in the bedroom with an engraving tool taken from the daily toolshed. Police found the tool buried in the folds of an eiderdown quilt where the killer apparently laid it while he searched a closet. He took F20,000 from the closet, leaving three distinct bloody fingerprints on a cardboard box during his search. The only other objects missing were a hammer and a wallet containing several hundred francs. The hammer, which perfectly fit Madame Debauve’s skull wounds, was subsequently found in a small stream the killer had crossed in his flight. By the time it was discovered, the hammer was so covered with rust and slime that it was impossible to lift any fingerprints or detect traces of blood.
In a town of forty-two hundred inhabitants, it was frightening to know that a neighbor was the author of such a brutal crime. There were dozens of denunciations: anonymous messages composed of cut and pasted newsprint, a groundless accusation of his former mistress by a jealous man whom she in turn accused, muttered stories about mysterious strangers glimpsed lurking in the trees by the river, and speculations such as those about a local café owner, Léon Fiscot, who suddenly paid long-standing debts the day after the crime. The twenty-one employees of the dairy were fingerprinted, as were most others whom popular opinion accused, but no solid leads turned up. A series of newspaper articles in Le Petit Régional made snide comments about the inefficiency of the police, cast aspersions on the character of Madame Debauve, described in intimate detail the nature of the wounds made by each blow, and concluded with the observation that the crime would doubtless remain unsolved, as had the Fleury theft and arson, several other burglaries, and the disappearance of Louisette Delaveau. People were offended by the ironic tone of the articles. An inspector helping to investigate Petiot’s past read them in 1945 and was sufficiently impressed to make inquiries at the newspaper’s offices. The anonymous author of the articles, it turned out, had been Dr. Marcel Petiot. It seemed surprising that Petiot could have known all the details of the wounds, since they had never been made public and the man who had been coroner at that time never cared for Petiot and would not have been likely to discuss the case with him.
Some weeks after the crime, Monsieur Fiscot, who had himself been a suspect, was heard to say that he had seen Dr. Petiot near the Debauve house at the time the murder was committed and that he intended to speak with the Brigade Mobile of Dijon, which had taken charge of the investigation. There were already vague rumors that the forty-five-year-old Madame Debauve had been young Dr. Petiot’s mistress. Fiscot suffered from rheumatism. One afternoon he met Dr. Petiot, who sympathized with the man’s misery and said he had just received a miraculous new drug from Paris that did wonders for just that ailment. Fiscot let himself be led to Petiot’s office, where the doctor gave him an injection. Three hours later, Fiscot was dead. This struck some as an odd coincidence, but it was established that Fiscot had died of an aneurism. By another odd coincidence, the doctor who determined the cause of death, signed the certificate, and authorized burial was also Marcel Petiot.
A month after his wife’s death, Armand Debauve went to the police. He informed them that a Maurice Parigot had told him that a Victor Tissandier had told him that Petiot knew who had murdered Madame Debauve. The Villeneuve gendarme who received this information, Urbain Couraux, was reluctant to question the mayor or to involve himself in the affair in any way. He reasoned, and wrote in his report, that “since Messieurs Tissandier and Petiot have not deemed it opportune to confide their information to the local gendarmerie, it is obvious that they prefer to deal directly with the Police Mobile.… We thus think it prudent not to approach Messieurs Parigot, Tissandier and Petiot and risk disclosing their revelations prematurely.” It is difficult to imagine how the information could be spread about if it was heard only by Couraux, but the gendarme chose not to press the matter. Instead he sent a letter to the regional commissaire in Dijon outlining the situation. What action resulted will never be known. In 1944 the Paris police tried to locate the Debauve dossier but were unable to find it; they were immediately suspicious that Petiot, as mayor, had contrived to spirit it away. Subsequently the folder was found; it had been filed not under D, for Debauve, as they expected, but under M, for murder. The last item in the file was Gendarme Couraux’s report. Certainly the Brigade Mobile must have investigated, but their results are not there. In any event, by the time the dossier arrived in Paris on April 5, 1946, Petiot’s trial had just ended and by then no one particularly cared whether he had murdered one person more or less.*
At the time of the Debauve affair, Petiot was involved in another legal matter, a less serious one than murder, but one that would have more definite consequences. On January 29, 1930, the Tribunal de Prèmiere Instance in Sens, a local court dealing with minor offenses, sentenced him to three months in prison and a F200 fine for attempted fraud. About a year earlier, in December 1928, the police had investigated a report that Petiot had stolen some tins of oil from the Villeneuve-sur-Yonne railroad-station platform. As it turned out, Petiot had ordered the oil for himself from a firm in Issoudun, and it had been duly sent. The trucker charged with taking the cans from the station to Petiot’s house, however, did not like Petiot (he was a political enemy, the mayor later claimed) and left them sitting on the platform for nearly a week. Petiot seized an opportunity when the baggagemaster was absent to pick up his order himself. This was irregular, but not altogether illegal, except for the fact that Petiot subsequently claimed he had never received the oil at all and demanded reimbursement of the money he had already paid.
The court did not find the crime a serious one, but felt obliged to be particularly severe since it had been committed by the town’s mayor and chief representative of administrative order. Petiot, finding that the evidence against him was too strong to be denied, may have resorted to his tactic of pleading temporary insanity: one can scarcely imagine that the court would spontaneously have ordered a psychiatric examination in such an unimportant and obvious case. The appointed psychiatrist concluded that Petiot had not been in a “demented state” at the time the crime was committed, but that for some unspecified reason his responsibility could
be considered as “attenuated.” Though Petiot’s guilt was clear and he was found guilty, this medical opinion persuaded the court to suspend the prison sentence.
On February 6, 1930, as a result of Petiot’s conviction, the departmental prefect suspended him from his mayoral duties for one month. This was the harshest penalty a prefect was entitled to impose, but he petitioned the president of the Republic to increase this suspension to three months. Minister of the Interior Pierre Laval authorized the extension a week later. Petiot, however, appealed the original case, and on April 16 the Appeals Court reversed the earlier conviction, concluding that there was insufficient proof that the oil had ever been delivered to the Villeneuve station or, if it had, that Petiot had taken it. Petiot’s certified mental state also contributed to the court’s justification for acquittal, a seemingly superfluous point in light of its stand on the evidence. Mayor Petiot resumed office.
During the next year the prefect heard various complaints about the mayor of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. Irregularities in Medical Assistance applications and payments, the disappearance of city-hall property, peculiar purchasing orders for scholastic material, and the mysterious evaporation of gasoline that ran the town’s water pump were but a few. They were absurdly small complaints for the most part, but what they lacked in quality was made up in quantity. Then in mid-July 1931, in the course of a routine audit, the departmental auditor from Auxerre found gross improprieties in the town records. The prefect was informed and the affair was turned over to the public prosecutor to determine whether there was cause for criminal proceedings.
The inspectors charged with the investigation found several additional irregularities, notably concerning 138 alien-registration applications and F2,890 in related fees that had been held at the city hall for several years rather than forwarded to the appropriate authorities. The consequence was that a number of resident aliens found themselves without the identity papers so necessary in France. The prosecutor decided that there had been negligence, but nothing serious enough to merit criminal prosecution. The prefect was not content, however, and on August 26 he and the auditor went to question Petiot. The mayor denied all knowledge of the matter; he laid the blame on his secretary and provocatively added that if either the foreigners or the public treasury took action against him, he was completely covered and would simply refer them to his insurance agent. The secretary totally supported Petiot, insisting that the mayor knew nothing about the matter in question and that if he himself had made any mistakes, it was because he was old, ill, and overworked.
Petiot accused the prefecture of political compromise and “permanent hostility” toward himself, and claimed he was now forced to defend “my tranquillity, my honor and my life,” though it is hard to see how the latter was endangered. In an indignant letter to the prefect in Auxerre, he wrote:
Monsieur le Préfet,
I can no longer resist the pleasure of handing you my resignation. I am not well known at the Préfecture, and you obviously take me for a man against whom one can do anything with impunity. You will see by the present letter that the reality is nothing of the sort. When things go too far, I, too, know how to protest.
The prefect was unimpressed by such juvenile sword-rattling, particularly since Petiot could “no longer resist the pleasure” of resigning on August 27, and the prefect had suspended him from office on the evening of the twenty-sixth. Again, the prefect was entitled to inflict only a one-month suspension. This time he asked the president of the Republic for Petiot’s definitive removal from office. Once more, it was the soon-to-be-infamous Minister of the Interior Laval who answered in the president’s stead. Petiot’s removal was finalized on September 9.
The municipal council of Villeneuve met on the last day of August and unanimously decided to resign in sympathy with the mayor. The proceedings of their meeting were published in a “weekly” bulletin, “Les Amis de la Constitution,” which, in fact, appeared solely on this occasion. The council repeated Petiot’s charges of obstructionism and hostility on the part of the prefecture, and pointed out that the constitution gave the voters the right to evaluate and choose their officials. For the prefect to override the will of the people was nothing short of dictatorship.
According to law, when the municipal council resigns in a community of fewer than thirty-five thousand inhabitants, a three-member delegation must be appointed to serve for two months, after which new elections must be held. One of the first duties of the delegation in this case was to check records and insure that the city hall was in order. They found that the files were a mess and the accounting slovenly; there were unusually large expenses for books and office supplies and irregular gasoline allotments, and a number of bills bore corrections and erasures, or had been crossed out and written over in Petiot’s own hand. Major public-works projects had been undertaken without the necessary approvals and supervision, and the money for them frequently passed from hand to hand in a dizzying fashion that seemed, now and then, to lead back to the mayor. The provisional delegation asked the prefect and treasurer to investigate these irregularities, but it would seem that no action was taken, since in May 1932, Maître Henri Guttin, the most bitter anti-Petiotist among the three delegates, again brought the matter up with the prefect and public prosecutor.
French elections are held in two rounds one week apart; the dates for the 1931 mayoral election to replace Petiot were set for November 15 and 22. One of the prime candidates was Henri Guttin, who wished to remain in office after the dissolution of the provisional delegation and undo the evil he felt Petiot had wrought on the community. The main issue in his platform seems to have been a strong personal attack on Petiot. Among other charges he pointed out that a search of Petiot’s secretary’s house had uncovered a duplicating machine stolen from the city hall, which, adding insult to injury, had been used to print the single issue of the municipal council’s “weekly” bulletin. He was joined vociferously by much of the press, which raked up mountains of scandal about Petiot and insisted that, contrary to the ex-mayor’s claims, prefects do not go about impeaching small-town mayors on mere whim.
The other chief candidate for mayor was Dr. Marcel Petiot. The fact that he had been thrown out of office in no way prevented him from running for the same post a mere two months later. The electoral campaign was all the more heated for its brevity, and during the entire week before the election Petiot reportedly did not sleep at all. People who had never previously taken an interest in politics were drawn into the impassioned battle, and the town found itself sharply divided. Once again, Petiot overwhelmed Villeneuve with his speeches, and he was more seductive than ever as he enumerated the great improvements he had made in the town. Slowly he convinced many voters that he was, in reality, the victim of a vicious campaign: he was a Socialist, and his efficiency embarrassed corrupt politicians. It is testimony to Petiot’s extraordinary personality that he could persuade people of his innocence in the face of repeated and almost irrefutable proof against him. Maître Guttin and several others complained to the telephone company about leaks of official conversations with the gendarmerie; Petiot, far from denying it, publicly boasted in one campaign speech that he had an efficient private police force at his disposal that “kept him posted on everything that happened in the community, and particularly of all the telephone conversations concerning him.”
In the November 15 preliminary election, Guttin was defeated, leaving the field to Petiot, five of his sympathizers, and a single member of the opposition. The campaign grew more feverish yet in the week before the second round, which would determine the winner. On November 22, in an abrupt voting reversal, Dr. Eugène Duran, Petiot’s medical and political competitor, won a resounding victory. Petiot may have been disappointed, but he did not act like a defeated candidate. Being mayor was not his only ambition, nor was it the only office for which he had run. A month earlier, on October 18, 1931, he had been elected the youngest of the thirty-four general councillors serving the entire Yonn
e—a position comparable to congressman in the United States. He had received 1,054 votes to his opponent’s 810, and out of the eight communes voting, he had lost, by a small margin, in only one—and that the farthest from Villeneuve. In his own town, he had won by 528 to 467.
As a general councillor, wrote Pierre Manière, a recent prefect of the Yonne who studied the case, Petiot gave the impression of a man “dynamic, conscientious, attentive to all departmental problems and particularly to those concerning his electors. [He presented] a sympathetic and reassuring image—one that he maintained throughout his participation in the departmental assembly and that hardly led one to suspect any hidden Machiavellianism in his character.” He relentlessly pursued programs of public safety and convenience, and was meticulous in carrying out the committee work assigned to him. In his role as general councillor, there was not a single reproach leveled against him, and given his industry, ambition, and ability to persuade, people felt he could have become a minister had he wanted.
If his new position did not show the same irregularities as the old, Petiot had in no way totally reformed. Soon after his election, he was accused of stealing electricity. As mayor of Villeneuve, one of Petiot’s duties had been the supervision of the power system. In exchange for this duty, he was provided with electricity free of charge. On September 9, 1931, the date of his official revocation as mayor, Petiot announced that he was giving up his rights to free power and asked that an individual electric meter be installed in his home. He did not, however, wait for power-company employees to make the installation, but instead performed the work himself, and did it in a defective and dangerous way. A Monsieur Mouret, the director of the electric company, consequently decided to inspect the meter on June 18, 1932. He was not allowed to enter the house. The same thing happened on June 27, so on June 30 he sent a registered letter of complaint, which Dr. Petiot refused to accept. On July 15, Mouret obtained a court order stating that unless company inspectors were allowed to enter the building within forty-eight hours, the power would be turned off. Petiot responded with a series of letters to the prefect; he disputed the validity of Mouret’s appointment as director and claimed that the whole incident was further evidence of his persecution by political enemies. Since he still would not admit the inspectors, his electricity, according to Mouret, was shut off at 1:00 P.M. on July 19. Petiot claimed this was not true—his power had been turned off on July 4, well before the court order was even obtained.
The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot Page 13