The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot

by Thomas Maeder

  Perhaps Petiot was told of this warning, which was placed in his permanent police dossier, for he never used the same tactic again. For the moment it did not matter much, and on February 20, 1937, after seven months in the hospital, Petiot was again a free man.

  For the next several years Petiot was on his best behavior—at least he was not caught doing anything wrong except for cheating on his income taxes. The legal results of this fraud were negligible, but Petiot’s attitude toward it was interesting. For years he reported less than one-tenth of his earnings. In 1938, with an average annual income of F300,000–F500,000, he declared only F29,700. From this he deducted F16,600 as office expenses, leaving a mere F13,100—scarcely more than his annual rent at 66 rue Caumartin.

  The controller finally noticed this trend and fined Petiot F25,000 for fraud. Petiot defended himself with embarrassing fervor. He claimed that his returns were accurate. Business was terrible, he wrote to the controller, even though he worked incessantly. He made house calls on foot. He had not taken a vacation or bought a new suit in three years. He was so poor that he had not smoked or entered a café in five years, and didn’t even have a bedroom to sleep in (he had several). He said he was ashamed to admit that he supported his family only through loans from his family, his in-laws, and friends, and even so had to insist that his wife and son spend vacations with relatives in order to cut expenses. His income had suffered further when he was hospitalized for eight months (which, of course, he was—though not during that tax year), and he constantly dreaded the next catastrophe, which would wipe him out.

  The controller did not relent, and the fine had to be paid. Petiot seethed with anger, but he was fortunate that the controller’s office did not make an investigation. Even six years later, Judge Berry was able to piece together Petiot’s true 1938 financial status. Petiot owned several houses and properties in and out of Paris, though most of them were purchased in his son’s name (as the rue Le Sueur house would be). He bought and sold small fortunes’ worth of jewelry at the Paris auction house. Investigators even suspected that some of Maurice Petiot’s large purchases were made with his brother’s money. Whatever the total, the doctor’s income clearly seemed greater even than F300,000–F500,000 per year. Where it came from, no one has ever found out, but Petiot was certainly not particular about his methods. A few years later he would resort to wholesale murder, and despite psychiatric and criminal records that strongly hinted at danger, no one managed to stop him until it was much too late.

  * France’s Law of 1838, one of the earliest legal attempts to humanize the situation of the mental patient, required the opinions of two psychiatrists, the authorization of a government official, and periodic reports from a mental hospital to institute and maintain the forcible internment of a patient. One of the law’s main purposes was to avoid the prevalent abuse of internment such as by parents wishing to rid themselves of promiscuous or boisterous children by declaring them insane. It also contained a set of conditions for such legal internment—chief among them that the person must be medically diagnosed as dangerous to himself, to society, or both.

  10

  THE ARREST

  By April 1944, ten suspects in l’affaire Petiot were in prison: Maurice and Georgette Petiot, Fourrier, Pintard, Porchon, Nézondet, Malfet, Monsieur and Madame Albert Neuhausen, and Léone Arnoux. Charges against them ranged from murder and conspiracy for Maurice and Malfet down to receiving stolen goods. Curiously, while Maurice, Nézondet, and Neuhausen were held for over a year, Georgette, Fourrier, Pintard, and Malfet were released with the others after four or five months. Ultimately all charges against the “conspirators” were dropped. The prosecutor concluded that although Pintard, Fourrier, and the other procurors had played revolting roles and had accepted money under guise of patriotism, they appeared to have been ignorant of Petiot’s real activities. He signed the release for Maurice and Georgette with mixed feelings, consoling himself with the thought that “even if Justice can do nothing against them, the name that they bear and whose sad reputation affects them personally, may serve as a constant source of shame unless Petiot’s amoral numbness has conquered them as well.” The decision to release Maurice, who quite obviously knew much more than he cared to admit, was probably partly due to the fact that he was found to have terminal cancer (he would die not long after his brother’s trial). Above all, as the case against Petiot grew more complex, the prosecutor saw that trying to juggle ten incidental charges of complicity would only turn the trial into a circus and weaken his case against the one central figure.

  Meanwhile, where was Dr. Petiot? As the weeks and months went by, the police gained fairly thorough knowledge of who Petiot was and just what he had done, but the man himself had vanished without a trace when he hopped on his bicycle and rode away from the rue Le Sueur. The reported sightings inevitable following any well-publicized crime began pouring in. An occultist wrote that Petiot had escaped to Morocco via Marseille; another insisted that he was alive and living in the Neuilly section of Paris, at either number 4 or 20 boulevard Jukermann or else 2 or 4 rue de Chartres. Still another occultist said he lay dead on a country road in the Yonne. The police checked all of these leads, not because they believed them, but out of fear of looking ridiculous should they prove correct. People reported seeing Petiot all over France. It was simultaneously reported that he had been arrested at the Spanish and the Belgian borders, and that he had been seen boarding a ship for South America. A tip from a town in northwestern France led police to a stock of contraband tobacco, but not to Petiot. Papers were found at Nantes with the name Marcel Petiot and a rue Le Sueur address, but these proved to concern another Marcel Petiot, a cinematographer who had briefly lived at number 18. Among the rue Le Sueur mail forwarded to Massu were a coded letter—

  NE FINMXVCREI RSWV NI 15 PSXIOFTI C 14 LGYTIU – XKIPW – VSK TSIV

  RAVILO

  —which could have been a message from one of Petiot’s Resistance comrades or a ruse by Petiot to make one believe that it was; and a morbidly humorous notice from a fire-insurance company warning the owner of 21 rue Le Sueur that a F1,063.50 premium had not yet been paid. Several more “missing persons” were also identified as victims, but most of them subsequently returned from vacation and were surprised to find themselves listed among the dead.

  By the end of April 1944, Petiot was no longer front-page news. Every few days the newspapers published the results of Judge Berry’s latest interrogation or an updated list of victims, but there was not much else to report. On June 6 the Allies landed in Normandy, and from then on the Nazi-controlled press spoke of little but the shattering Allied defeats. The Germans were victorious everywhere, they said, yet each day the Allies paradoxically retreated from a point a little bit closer to Paris. On August 19, with General Jacques Leclerc’s French Second Armored Division still miles from the city, the Paris police went on strike and held the Préfecture against German tank attacks. The Resistance set up barricades and engaged in bloody street-fighting against the better-equipped but disorganized German troops. The city was surrendered to the French army on August 25.

  As the war moved east toward Germany, the purge began in France. Pétain, Laval, and the Vichy government, French Gestapists and collaborators of all kinds were hunted down. The collaborationist press had disappeared on August 18, and the new newspapers, many of them former clandestine publications, printed lists of collaborators and announced imminent purges: next week begins the purge of factory workers; the week after, the purge of writers; police, the following week; and so forth. The French historian Robert Aron estimates that more than 125,000 civilians were legally tried for collaboration, 120,000 functionaries and officers purged, dozens of thousands arrested and held for weeks or months, then released without trial, and dozens of thousands more marked for life by accusations neither proved nor dismissed. At least 30,000–40,000 Frenchmen were summarily tried and executed by vigilance committees that sometimes broadened their criteria to include
personal vendettas and business competition. Chaos reigned in a country with 500,000 dead, 1.5 million homes destroyed, and 3 million people returning from prison and labor camps. Finally, in 1945, the government decided that the unabated lust for vengeance was hurting the reconstruction of France; it disbanded the official anti-collaborationist offices and sealed, until 1995, the records on collaborators who had not yet been tried.

  In a sense, the spirit of the purge almost led to Petiot’s capture. On June 24, a man named Charles Rolland reportedly presented himself at Massu’s office and told the commissaire an incredible story. In November or December 1937, Rolland said, he had been in Marseille, where he met a prostitute who asked if, for F100, he would be willing to make love to her in front of one of her clients. Rolland did it, and he later talked with the voyeur, who identified himself as Dr. Marcel Petiot. Since Rolland was in difficult financial straits, his new friend the doctor helped him out by initiating him into the drug traffic. Petiot would meet Rolland at the Cintra-Bodega Bar and give him a packet of cocaine. Rolland would take it to the American Bar, hide it on top of the toilet tank in the men’s room, and signal to a waiting customer. The customer, sidling out of the toilet, slipped the money to Petiot, who was sidling in. These dealings lasted three weeks, until Rolland reported to Tunisia for his military service. He returned in October 1939, chanced upon Petiot again, and briefly resumed his old job of pushing drugs in Marseille bars. Petiot was only passing through Marseille at the time, and when he left he gave Rolland his Paris address at, as the latter told Massu, 21 or 23 rue Le Sueur.

  In early 1940, Rolland said, he went to Paris and decided to look up Petiot. He went to 23 rue Le Sueur, which he meticulously described to Massu. Petiot told Rolland never to come to his house again and promised to write to him care of general delivery at the rue Legendre post office if he required his services. Shortly afterward, Petiot did contact him, and Rolland recommenced the cocaine sales in a café on the place de l’Opéra. Subsequently Rolland was arrested for another crime; he did not see Petiot again until he returned to the rue Le Sueur in January 1943, at which time the doctor said he did not want to work with him anymore and ushered him out quickly. But Rolland ran across Petiot in Marseille in late February of that year. In the course of their conversation, Petiot claimed he possessed an infallible aphrodisiac, in suppository form, which he had successfully used on more than sixty women. Petiot also mentioned that he had joined the Parti Populaire Français, a French collaborationist political and military group known to work with the Germans to fight against Resistants. Rolland said he had later heard that Petiot, dressed in a German uniform, had left on March 7 for Pont-Saint-Esprit, near Avignon, to engage in “anti-terrorist” activities.

  Neither Massu nor any other police officer took this extraordinary statement seriously. They could prove that Petiot had been in Paris on most of the dates when Rolland presumably saw him in Marseille, and he was preparing to liquidate Adrien le Basque and his friends when he supposedly marched off in uniform. Petiot had ostensibly given Rolland the rue Le Sueur address almost two years before he bought the house, and the building in which Rolland claimed to have met Petiot in 1940 (still a year before its purchase) differed from 21 rue Le Sueur in every possible detail. Among other errors, he said it was in the fifteenth arrondissement, that it was a corner building, that there was a concierge, and that Petiot lived in an apartment there. He even had the house number wrong. A real mythomaniac could have woven a more convincing tale by using facts from the newspapers. This, combined with the ludicrous extravagance of the story and the fact that Rolland was never called at the trial or confronted with Petiot, made some people suspect that Charles Rolland never existed at all, and that Commissaire Massu had composed the entire story himself in the hope that it would provoke the proud Dr. Petiot into doing something foolish. Not inconsistent with this theory is the additional fact that Massu took the strange step of turning over Rolland’s complete deposition, and no other, to Jacques Yonnet, a journalist for Résistance, a major daily newspaper. Yonnet published it on September 19, 1944, under the heading “Petiot, Soldier of the Reich,” and prefaced it with the remark that he assumed no responsibility for the truth of its contents.

  The ruse, if such it was, succeeded. Several days later a letter was given to Résistance via Petiot’s lawyer, René Floriot, which the newspaper published on October 18. The letter explained in detail Petiot’s Resistance activity, claimed Rolland existed only in some policeman’s sick imagination, and ended with these noble words:

  The author of these lines, far from having committed dishonorable acts, far from having forgiven his torturers and even farther from having aided them, adopted a new pseudonym immediately after his release by the Germans [in January 1944] and asked for a more active role in the Resistance so that he could avenge the hundreds and thousands of Frenchmen killed and tortured by the Nazis. He remained in contact with his friends, and fought for the Liberation to the best of his abilities despite the constant fear of arrest. He is still doing all he can for the cause, and begs your pardon if he cannot take the time to get involved in polemics on this matter. Having lost everything but his life, he is selflessly risking even that under an assumed name, scarcely hoping that pens and tongues finally freed from their shackles will now tell a truth so easy to guess, and forget the filthy kraut lies that it takes about two grains of good French common sense to see through.

  [signed] PETIOT

  The police were elated. Certain oblique references and the rapidity of his reply made them suspect that he was still in Paris and probably serving in the French Forces of the Interior (FFI). In a mass effort, with the help of military security, they decided to compare the handwriting in the letter with samples from thousands of FFI officers in Paris. Meanwhile they asked several well-placed army officers to keep an eye out among their men for someone matching Petiot’s description. Among those assigned to this task was Captain Henri Valéri, in charge of counterespionage and interrogations at the army base in the Reuilly section of Paris.

  This tactic did not have the chance to succeed. On October 31, 1944, a Captain Simonin and three other military officers went to the métro station Saint-Mandé-Tourelles, just outside the eastern city limits, at 7:00 A.M. and loitered there inconspicuously for more than three hours. At 10:15, Dr. Petiot, alias Henri Valéri, entered the station and walked toward the platform. One of Captain Simonin’s men asked him the time. As he raised his arm to look at the late Joseph Réocreux’s watch, handcuffs were slapped on his wrist. A violent kick sent him to the ground, and the four men pounced on him and bound his feet, then carried him out to a waiting car. Simonin conducted the first interrogation before turning him over to military security, which in turn sent him to Police Judiciaire headquarters. It was only later that people began to wonder how Simonin had identified Petiot, why he had arrested him without telling any of his superiors, and why he had conducted the interrogation—something he had no reason or right to do. When they thought of this, it was too late. Simonin had disappeared and would never be found. Soon afterward police learned that his real name was Soutif, and that he was a notorious collaborator who had been responsible for hundreds of deportations and the execution of dozens of patriots.

  11

  CAPTAIN HENRI VALÉRI

  The Petiot case had been the major news story for months after it broke, and now that the manhunt had reached a conclusion, few people were interested. The fact that the Occupied press had used it to boost circulation, and that the Germans had apparently favored it as a harmless diversion for the French people, was now a prime reason to shun it. At a time when self-righteousness was the order of the day, when Resistants were glorified, collaborators legally or illegally purged, and when everyone who had simply “managed to get by” during the Occupation dredged his memory for some small action he could boast as an example of his Resistance activity, Petiot was not a particularly popular topic, and the newspapers treated him cursorily or with di
sdain. The former underground publication Combat, which had become a daily paper after the Liberation, scarcely mentioned Petiot’s capture at all except to point out that it did not intend to give it further coverage:

  Doctor Petiot, whom the Occupation press, for its own reasons of strategic necessity, rendered inordinately famous, was arrested yesterday and turned over to the Police Judiciaire. His first declarations depict him, too, as a hero of the Resistance.… We believe we have fulfilled our journalistic obligations by relaying this news without commentary. We will do the same each day, but we refuse to glorify an affair which is repugnant from so many points of view. Too many tragic or urgent problems demand our attention for us to permit ourselves to go into the scandalous details of sensational news items.

  After the first few days following Petiot’s capture, neither Combat nor any other paper continued to “do the same each day” in reporting on his case. There were no stupendous new developments, and there was not much to report. For nearly a year and a half, until the opening of the trial, the Petiot case sank into the obscurity of the juge d’instruction’s chambers.

  Captain Valéri was leaner than the photographs of Dr. Petiot, and a heavy beard concealed his features. In his pockets police found a loaded 6.35mm automatic, F31,700, and fifty documents, including a Communist-party card issued only eight days previously, identification papers in the names Valéri, Wetterwald, Gilbert, de Frutos, Bonnasseau, and Cacheux, and a set of orders indicating that he would be assigned to duty in Indochina. Another few weeks or months, and he might never have been found. The Valéri papers gave various addresses in Paris or the suburbs, and bore photographs of Petiot both with and without his beard. One ration card would prove particularly embarrassing to Petiot: it was in the name René, rather than Henri, Valéri, and stated that its bearer had been born on May 8, 1935, at Issy-les-Moulineaux. The entire surface of the card had been damaged by water, apparently to conceal the fact that the original name, Kneller, had been rubbed out and replaced. Petiot showed uncanny nerve in keeping this obvious clue; what, then, was one to think of two other documents he was carrying—the original and carbon of a tract Petiot had written demanding that an official accusation of collaboration be drawn up against Commissaire Georges Massu.