The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot

by Thomas Maeder

  Neighbors were surprised to see lights in the supposedly powerless Petiot house and to hear the radio playing. Complaints were lodged, and on July 26 and 27, Maître Guttin, Petiot’s old foe, decided to find out what was going on. Guttin’s tactics, if not evidence that Petiot did have rabid political enemies, at least indicate the peculiarity of politics in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne in that era. On the twenty-sixth, Guttin arranged with Mouret to have the power to several houses in Petiot’s neighborhood turned off at 9:00 A.M. Guttin climbed to the attic of a building that faced Petiot’s house and watched to see whether Petiot’s lights went off at the same time or whether Petiot had his own generator. Guttin thought a light in the back remained on, but could not be sure that it was not a reflection from an adjacent building. The next morning the same performance was repeated while Guttin and two witnesses stationed themselves down the street. This time he claimed he distinctly saw an electric light going off and on. Later that evening, a company inspector discovered a wire running from the main power line to Petiot’s attic window. A few days later, another wire appeared in front of Petiot’s house running to the lines on the rue Carnot. Criminal charges were filed on August 20, 1932.

  Petiot fought the case for all he was worth. “He protests,” wrote a prosecutor later, “he denies, he becomes indignant, he refuses to answer, he paints himself as a victim, he portrays himself as the object of vicious, suspicious and scurrilous political attacks, he qualifies as idiotic the testimony of expert witnesses, he sidesteps the questions, he changes the subject. After the hearing, while the case was under deliberation, he did not hesitate to approach the magistrate who was sitting in judgment.” Petiot spoke plausibly, as long as the facts could not contradict him and he could manufacture the ones he chose. “I questioned him,” said the assistant prefect who began the investigation, “I spoke with him, and at the end of an hour I was convinced of his perfect innocence. Two days later, I had ironclad proof of his guilt.”

  The court, finally, was not deceived. The evidence was overwhelming. The judge found Petiot’s explanations “pure fantasy” and his two defense witnesses vague, uneasy, and suspicious. On July 19, 1933, Petiot was sentenced to fifteen days in prison and a F300 fine. Petiot appealed to the Cour d’Appel de Paris—the highest appeal court in the country—where the case lingered for more than a year. On July 26, 1934, the earlier conviction was upheld, though the jail sentence was suspended and the fine reduced to F100. “I’ve been convicted,” Petiot said, “but that doesn’t prove that I’m guilty.”

  As a result of his conviction, Petiot temporarily lost his right to vote, and since according to French law a person without voting rights is not entitled to hold an elected post, Petiot was officially removed from office as general councillor on October 17. Certain of his fate well before the administrative details were complete, Petiot repeated his earlier performance and addressed a letter to the departmental assembly on October 10: “I have the regret to inform you that my current professional obligations and my absence from the department no longer permit me to fulfill my duties as General Councillor. In consequence, I would ask you to accept my resignation as of this day.” In fact, Petiot had not fulfilled his duties for some time; in January 1933 he and his family had moved to Paris, and he had not attended any assemblies for an entire year. Nonetheless, several years later, when it suited his convenience, Petiot would still list among his current occupations “General Councillor of the Yonne.”

  * Apparently the Paris police did not try to compare the fingerprints in the Debauve dossier with Petiot’s. At the author’s request, William H. Kelly, Temple University criminalistics instructor and former fingerprint expert for the Philadelphia police, did compare copies of the two sets of prints. Both sets are fairly clear, and could be used for identification, but whereas the Police Judiciaire’s file card on Petiot shows first-joint, or fingertip, prints, those left in blood at the scene of the Debauve murder were made by the second joint of the fingers, and there is very little overlap for comparison. Both sets show similar loop-type patterns on the right index, middle, and ring fingers, but there are not enough common points to conclude with any confidence that the prints either do or do not match. Had someone been curious in 1946, he could have taken a set of second-joint fingerprints from Petiot and solved this mystery.

  9

  THE DOCTOR IN PARIS

  The Petiot family moved into an apartment at 66 rue Caumartin in the Saint-Lazare district of Paris. Located next to the Printemps and Galeries Lafayette department stores, the neighborhood was a busy commercial district during the day, while at night it was deserted except for the busy café life around the Gare Saint-Lazare. The doctor passed several months without working while he rallied a new clientele. The tract he printed and personally placed in every mailbox in the quartier was far more extravagant than the one he had circulated at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. He boasted of many credentials, real and imaginary, and even played on the fact that accents in French are often not placed over capital letters, to advertise his experience as an INTERNE (an intern) at a mental hospital where he had, in reality, been an interné (a patient). He offered painless child-births and drug cures, mysterious nonanesthetic pain relief that helped sciatica, rheumatism, neuralgia, ulcers, and cancer pain. With X rays, ultraviolet rays, infrared rays, electrotherapy, ionization therapy, diathermy, aerotherapy, surgery, artificial fevers, and a host of other techniques, he claimed he could remove, relieve, and generally cure fungi, red spots, goiter, tattoos, scars, tumors either benign or malignant, arteriosclerosis, anemia, obesity, diabetes, cardiac and renal deficiencies, arthritis, nervous depression, senility, colds, pneumonia, emphysema, asthma, tuberculosis, appendicitis, ulcers, syphilis, bone diseases, ailments of the heart, liver, and stomach, and even plain fatigue. He mounted a huge brass plaque outside his building listing so many improbable credentials that another doctor in the area complained to the medical association and he was forced to take it down.

  However preposterous his claims may have been, Petiot once again attracted, retained, and pleased a huge clientele and gained a reputation for selfless devotion. He would ride his bicycle fifteen miles in the night to treat a poor patient in the suburbs, and his wife claimed that if she hadn’t done his accounting for him he would never have billed anyone at all. When in 1944 the police interviewed two thousand of Petiot’s former patients they heard nothing but praise about him, and as late as 1960 a gynecologist who took an office in Petiot’s old building and received several dozen former patients was told how wonderful Petiot had been to them. It was impossible, they said, that such a fine man and doctor could ever have committed a crime. But apparently police did not hear out everyone, for occasionally there were complaints. Rumor had it that Petiot performed abortions and that under guise of furnishing drug cures he was actually supplying drugs to addicts. In 1935, Madame Anna Coquille lodged a complaint with the police about the mysterious death of her daughter, Raymonde Hanss, age thirty, who had gone to Petiot the previous year to have an abscess in her mouth lanced. She had not regained consciousness after the anesthetic was administered; Petiot had driven her home, where she died several hours later. Madame Coquille requested an autopsy. The coroner found the circumstances suspicious and refused to authorize burial until a thorough investigation had been made, but although significant quantities of morphine were found in the body, the case was dismissed. Madame Coquille tried to reopen it in 1942, but after so many years the court was unwilling to hear witnesses and upheld the earlier ruling.

  Nor was this Petiot’s only involvement with narcotics before the Gaul and Baudet cases in 1942. On July 30, 1935, he was investigated for infraction of the narcotics laws. There were several other police inquiries, and Petiot himself claimed that, during one of them, he had offered to denounce a narcotics dealer who had come to see him in exchange for having the charges dropped. No firm evidence was found in any case, and far from being the subject of lingering suspicions, Petiot was able, in 1936, to ap
ply successfully for the position of médecin d’etat-civil for the ninth arrondissement of Paris, which gave him certain minor administrative duties, a degree of prestige, and entitled him to sign death certificates. It would seem that Petiot used even this position for unscrupulous ends. In December 1942, when called to attest to the decease of a prominent attorney, he was suspected of removing F74,000 from the drawers of the lawyer’s desk while the bereaved widow was absent from the room.

  In 1936 Petiot ran into more serious difficulties. At 12:30 P.M. on April 4, a store detective at the Joseph Gibert bookstore on the boulevard Saint-Michel noticed a man pick up a book from the outside racks, slip it under his arm, and stroll off. The detective accosted the man, who produced papers in the name of Dr. Marcel Petiot, feigned surprise at finding the book under his arm, and insisted he must have taken it in a moment of absentmindedness. He offered to pay for the book, an elementary text on electricity and mechanics worth only twenty-five francs, and hoped the store could forget the whole thing. The detective, René Cotteret, said he would just as soon they take a little stroll to the nearest police station and he firmly held the doctor’s arm. At that point, Petiot threatened to “bash his face in,” grabbed Cotteret by the necktie and throat, and began to strangle him; he then broke loose and fled three blocks, where he disappeared into the Odéon métro station.

  Cotteret lodged a complaint for theft and assault at the commissariat de police. The commissaire telephoned the rue Caumartin apartment designated on the papers Petiot had produced, and a man’s voice told him Dr. Petiot was not there and had been out of town for several weeks. The commissariat in Petiot’s quartier was asked to make inquiries, and Petiot himself opened the door when two policemen arrived and requested him to appear at the commissariat at 3:00 on April 6. At 4:00 P.M. on that day, Petiot, claiming he was too upset and confused to answer questions lucidly, arrived bearing a letter he said would explain everything. Sobbing, he begged the commissaire not to tell his wife and mentioned that he had suffered from depression and spent time in mental hospitals. He said he was disgusted with life and would rather commit suicide than spend more time in an asylum.

  If the police found Petiot’s manner strange, they found his letter even more so. On the day of the so-called theft, the letter related, Petiot was wandering in the Quartier Latin, exhausted, depressed, and obsessed with the problem of what sort of pumping mechanism to use to attain an alternating positive pressure and suction in a machine intended to cure chronic constipation. He included an elaborate description and diagram, and to prove he was an inventor offered receipts from medical-equipment suppliers and mentioned that he had recently invented a perpetual-motion machine “based on a very simple principle and which will run until the end of time.” Engrossed in this problem, he may inadvertently have picked up the book, though he had no intention of buying and certainly none of stealing it, since he had already leafed through it and found it useless for his purpose. Insisting that he had offered to pay and had willingly given his name (“and if I hadn’t given it, you never would have found me”), he denied the assault charge and said he had refused to go to the commissariat simply because there had been no crime, he had nothing to say, and because his wife and eight-year-old son had been waiting for him to take them to the train station and he was already late when stopped. A few days after presenting this strange letter, he was questioned in person at home. He repeated the same story, showed police inspectors his army discharge papers to prove his mental abnormality, and added that he had been suffering from migraine on the day of the “alleged” theft.

  The commissaire found Petiot’s behavior peculiar—even dangerous, in a man responsible for people’s lives—and he ordered a psychiatric examination before deciding what legal course to pursue. The appointed psychiatrist, Dr. Ceillier, found Petiot agitated, anxious, depressed, weeping, sobbing, and constitutionally unbalanced. He reviewed the army records, commented on the impossible inventions of constipation cures and perpetual-motion machines, and expressed concern over Petiot’s letterhead, which looked like alphabet soup and was little more meaningful. Dr. Ceillier and his colleagues found their subject “dangerous to himself and to others” according to the 1838 formula,* and since Petiot refused to enter a hospital of his own free will, he recommended forcible internment in a psychiatric institution. Consequently, René Cotteret dropped the assault charge, and Petiot was found not guilty of shoplifting by reason of insanity.

  Georgette Petiot arranged to have her husband interned not at a regular state mental hospital, the usual procedure in such cases, but at the Maison de Santé d’Ivry, a private sanatorium on the grounds of an old estate just outside Paris run by Dr. Achille Delmas. Delmas was a notoriously easygoing psychiatrist. A decade later, for example, the poets Roger Gilbert-Lecomte and Antonin Artaud were placed there by friends because of Delmas’s willingness to give supervised doses of narcotics to incurable drug addicts without trying to cure them. Petiot may have thought Delmas would be an easy dupe. The court acquiesced in the choice, but insisted that state-appointed doctors from outside the clinic must periodically examine the patient and evaluate his progress.

  As soon as Petiot was officially interned on August 1 and the police charges had been dropped, he demanded his release and persuaded Dr. Delmas that, if he had ever been suffering from a disorder, it was temporary and had now disappeared. Delmas was convinced. He had initially diagnosed Petiot as cyclothymic, an old term for someone suffering from a form of mild manic-depressive psychosis, but rest and daily hydrotherapy seemed to have banished his few abnormalities, so Delmas petitioned the court for Petiot’s release. On August 18, only two weeks after Petiot’s admission to the hospital, the court psychiatrist, Dr. Rogues de Fursac, found the patient calm, lucid, and free from delirium; on September 2, he stated that though Petiot was “chronically unbalanced,” he was not presently delirious, depressed, overly excited, or conspicuously abnormal in any way, and recommended his release.

  Several months passed; Petiot was not released and he soon began to fire a barrage of letters at the judge, the procureur de la République, and even the president of France complaining of his unjust and inhumane treatment. The court appointed three well-known psychiatrists—Drs. Claude, Laignel-Lavastine, and Génil-Perrin—to examine the patient. They were instructed to recommend either further hospitalization or immediate release.

  “When one compares Dr. Petiot’s various statements with each other,” their report began, “and examines his version of objective facts, one finds obscurities and contradictions leading to strong doubts as to his good faith at any point during this affair.” They went on to note that although Petiot had pointedly told the police and the court that his army hospitalizations had been for psychiatric reasons, as soon as his internment was a certainty, he had denied it all, claiming to have been treated for suspected syphilis in nonpsychiatric military wards that just happened to be located in mental hospitals. Speaking to the psychiatrists, he maintained that he had never had troubles with the law previously, despite firm evidence to the contrary. When asked about the death of his patient Raymonde Hanss, he replied—in a mocking tone that offended the panel—that the girl had killed herself by stupidly taking ten times the prescribed dose of her medication and that her mother was a nasty German who had accused him out of spite. The psychiatrists did not like Petiot, did not believe him, and strongly suspected he had feigned insanity to obtain his acquittal. “But in our present report,” they concluded,

  it is not our job to shed light on these obscure matters.… The aim of the preceding exposition was to present the true nature of Petiot, who is an individual without scruples and devoid of all moral sensibility.… This picture of an amoral and unbalanced person corresponds closely to that depicted by Dr. Rogues de Fursac who, in August-September 1936, deemed that Petiot was no more or less sick, no different than he had been throughout his life, and, we might add, from what he shall be for the rest of it.…

  At present,
though, we are simply presented with a hospitalized subject, and we are required to evaluate his current state to determine whether he exhibits mental disorders necessitating the continuation of his internment. As did Dr. Rogues de Fursac, we find that he does not. Petiot is free from delirium, hallucinations, mental confusion, intellectual disability, and pathological excitation or depression. In consequence, he does not fall within the limits of the Law of 1838 and should be released.

  Petiot, they knew, was far from insane, and they had no wish to keep him. What irritated them was that he had used a transparent ruse to elude justice. It was too late to do anything about his acquittal now, but they took the unusual step of adding a warning in hopes of preventing such a thing from happening again.

  … it is in the public interest that we draw attention to his very peculiar situation, and point out that in the event of a future criminal indictment, the present internment should not weigh excessively in the deliberations of whatever panel of experts may be assigned to evaluate him. Such panel should go back to the beginning and examine in detail the question of Petiot’s criminal responsibility.