by Landru's Secret- The Deadly Seductions of France's Lonely Hearts Serial Killer (retail) (epub)
Suppressing her fury, Marie dutifully wrote to the mayor of Gambais, Alexandre Tirlet, who repeated his obstructive performance of eighteen months earlier when Anna Collomb’s sister Ryno had made an almost identical enquiry. With regret, Tirlet’s secretary, the village schoolteacher François Bournérias, informed Marie that no man called “Frémyet” was known in the village.
At this moment, Tirlet had his little crise de conscience and ordered Bournérias to add Ryno’s name and address, in case Marie wanted to compare notes with her.
***
Marie and Ryno were not natural comrades in arms; one, a lowly, unmarried domestique from southern France, the other a beautiful, recently married Parisienne. When the two women met in late January at Ryno’s parents’ apartment on Boulevard Voltaire, it took a while for Marie to feel at ease with this bourgeois family. What drew Marie and Ryno together was the similarity between their two sisters’ disappearances and the brush-off they had both received from police and village officials.
Tellingly, Ryno did not put her name on the formal complaint about Anna’s disappearance that her elderly father filed at the start of February in Mantes, the capital of Seine-et-Oise, where Gambais was located. Monsieur Moreau had played almost no part in Ryno’s quest to find Anna. However, he had the priceless advantage of being a man and was therefore more likely to be taken seriously by the authorities than Ryno. Following up next day, Marie sent her own, handwritten complaint, copying much of the language from Moreau’s lawsuit.
Ryno’s use of her father as a frontman worked. The public prosecutor in Mantes opened two case files on Anna and Célestine and after a week, sent the dossiers to a police officer in Versailles who was charged with tracing missing persons. This detective then put the two complaints to one side until he had time to pursue them properly.
***
In Paris “Mlle L.”, the factory girl who had faked her pregnancy, was pestering Landru again. She had just lost her job and kept calling at Rue de Rochechouart, demanding an increase in her allowance. If he was out, she took care not to reveal her identity to Fernande. When he was in, she would not budge from the landing until he slipped her some money to go away. He tried another tack, proposing that she come down to his country retreat for a nice, relaxing time. She declined his invitation. “He told me the house was isolated and I didn’t like the sound of this adventure,” she recalled tartly.
Mme Falque also kept appearing at Rue de Rochechouart, demanding that he repay her overdue loan, with full interest. On one occasion, Fernande answered the door when Landru was out and Mme Falque introduced herself by name, without explaining the nature of her business. On his return, Landru told the disbelieving Fernande that Mme Falque was his boss at police headquarters, come to discuss his latest top secret assignment.
He finally paid back Mme Falque in the middle of March, using some of his profit from his dealings with Marie-Thérèse Marchadier. Meanwhile in Houdan, the Collomb and Buisson case files had at last landed on the desk of Jules Hebbé, a mounted gendarme whose beat included Gambais.
On 14 March, Hebbé saddled his horse and set off along the road to Gambais to investigate the Collomb and Buisson cases. Hebbé’s route took him straight past the Villa Tric but he did not stop, because he had no arrest warrant for the man known as “Dupont”. Besides, Hebbé could see that the shuttered house was empty.
In Gambais, Hebbé interviewed the 73-year-old village constable, who did not realise that he had once seen Célestine at the villa, when he paid a call in the summer of 1917 to remind Dupont about a local tax he had not paid. Hebbé also interviewed the cobbler who was the part-time janitor at the villa; he said he barely knew Dupont. It was a similar story with the mayor, the schoolmaster and the grocer’s wife. There seemed a general consensus in the village that the man was dodgy, often seen with women, and therefore might well be a spy.
All things considered, Hebbé thought the man sounded like a suspicious customer. “I could not tell you what happened in this house but there is something strange going on,” he wrote in his report to the prosecutor in Mantes, 30 kilometres north of Gambais. Hebbé noted that he had ordered the constable in the village to alert the authorities the next time he saw Dupont.
Hebbé’s report contained one detail whose significance he failed to recognise. In August 1917, when the constable had visited the Villa Tric to enquire about unpaid taxes, Landru had given the address of Célestine’s apartment near the Porte de Clignancourt as his permanent residence. The prosecutor in Mantes noticed the same address in Marie’s carefully assembled dossier and decided to refer the two cases back to Paris. They landed on the desk of Inspector Jules Belin of the Paris flying squad (brigade mobile).
***
At the age of 34, the unmarried Belin ate, drank and smoked the life of a full-time detective. Belin was a fan of Sherlock Holmes, whose adventures he had read in translation, and fancied himself as a similarly cerebral investigator. Where Holmes wore a deerstalker and puffed on a pipe, Belin favoured a crumpled Homburg hat and half-smoked cigarette, perched perilously on his lower lip. Yet unlike his fictional hero, Belin had a carefree relationship with facts.
Belin claimed in an internal police report that he visited Gambais and interviewed villagers about the dubious tenant at the Villa Tric. All the facts gleaned from these “interviews” came from Hebbé’s report, while the “multiple and difficult researches” Belin said he had conducted in Paris were lifted almost entirely from Ryno and especially Marie’s research.
On 4 April, while Belin pursued his desultory enquiry, the constable in Gambais failed to notice the arrival by car of Landru, Fernande and Landru’s blond-haired “apprentice” turned chauffeur. They stayed one night, and then drove back to Paris.
By the afternoon of Friday, 11 April, Belin was obliged to concede that the trail had run cold. He did not know that Marie’s friend and fellow maid Laure Bonhoure was about to crack open the case.
Laure had gone shopping that afternoon and was in a crockery shop on Rue de Rivoli when she spotted the man she knew as Frémyet at the counter, accompanied by a young woman. Quickly, Laure hid behind a display stand and watched the monsieur as he purchased a tea set, left his business card for home delivery, and walked out of the shop with his girlfriend. Laure followed the couple a few blocks west along the Rue de Rivoli to the Place du Châtelet, where the monsieur and his companion got onto a bus heading north towards Montmartre.
At the last moment Laure hopped on board, only to jump off again when Landru caught her eye. Convinced he had recognised her, Laure ran east along the Rue de Rivoli, past the Hôtel de Ville, and then north until she made it to Rue du Plâtre, gasping for breath, and relayed her news to Marie.
Marie had no confidence in Belin, who had interviewed her the previous week and made a poor impression. She did, however, have his phone number. Marie now called Belin, who went to the crockery shop, where the sales assistant retrieved the man’s business card. It read: “Lucien Guillet, 76 Rue de Rochechouart”. When Belin arrived at this address, the concierge confirmed that Guillet rented an apartment on the first floor.
Much later, Belin gave various explanations for why he did not proceed upstairs and arrest Landru on the spot. In one version, Belin said he learned from the concierge that “Guillet” and Mlle Segret had departed for their country villa. According to Belin, he had to wait three weeks to make the arrest. In reality, Belin needed an arrest warrant, which he collected next morning. Belin had not considered the possibility that Landru might leave the apartment before the detective returned to Rue de Rochechouart with two fellow officers as back-up. Yet this is exactly what happened.
At about 10.15 am on Saturday, 12 April 1919, 35-year-old Adrienne Deschamps was travelling on the metro between the Réamur and Opéra stations when she was accosted by a bearded man who introduced himself as Lucien Guillet. Adrienne was interested in Guillet’s proposal but did not wish to continue their discussion in front of the other passen
gers. The two of them got off at Opéra where they carried on chatting for some time on the platform.
They fixed a rendezvous for the following Wednesday, outside Denfert-Rochereau metro station in southern Paris. Landru also gave Adrienne his fake name card, with the address of a room he rented near the Gare du Nord – the same lodging where he had taken the teenage nanny Andrée Babelay in the spring of 1917. His business done, Landru returned to Fernande at Rue de Rochechouart.
Belin subsequently gave two different times for Landru’s arrest: 10.00 am and 11.00 am. However, if Adrienne’s testimony was accurate, Landru could not have returned to the apartment before about 11.30 am. In all likelihood, Belin and his fellow detectives did not show up until almost midday, suggesting a distinct lack of urgency on their part. As far as Belin was concerned, he had come to arrest a run-of-the-mill marriage swindler, not a serial killer.
Eventually, Landru unlocked the door and the police officers barged in. Landru refused to answer any questions and demanded a lawyer. He also declined to produce any identity papers. Years later, Belin put out a story that Fernande chose this moment to collapse “stark naked on the floor”. However, Belin did not mention this probably invented melodrama in his internal police report.
What is certain is that Landru and Fernande were brought back to Belin’s police station on Rue Greffulhe, a quiet side street just south of Boulevard Haussmann. Here, Belin’s commanding officer immediately took charge.
Commissioner Amédée Dautel sized up the silent suspect, dressed in a bowler hat and dull yellow tunic, and ordered him to empty his pockets.
PART TWO
THE INVESTIGATION
April 1919 – November 1921
Chapter 9
The Enigma of Gambais
Item by item, Landru dumped his bits and pieces on the table: here a fake driver’s licence in the name of “Chapelle”; there a blank identity document, waiting to be completed; here a couple of letters from women answering lonely hearts adverts. Dautel, 39, had seen plenty of marriage swindlers and this surly individual looked like another. Then Dautel came to a little black moleskin carnet.
He flicked through the notebook, trying to make sense of the jottings, until he reached the list of 11 names that Landru had written neatly on a clean page, seemingly in one sitting: “Cuchet, J. Idem, Brésil, Crozatier, Havre, Collomb, Babelay, Buisson, Jaume, Pascal, Marchadier”.
Dautel deduced from “Collomb” and “Buisson” that the rest of the list referred to other women. He tried to get the silent suspect to explain the list but Landru calmly demanded a lawyer before he would speak, refusing even to confirm his name, which the officers still thought was Guillet.
Getting nowhere, Dautel decided to go back to Rue de Rochechouart with Belin to search the apartment more thoroughly, leaving Landru behind at the police station. In his own mind, Dautel mitigated this breach of the arrested man’s rights by calling the search a “summary visit” and bringing the weeping Fernande along as a witness.
At the apartment, the detectives found a letter from Marie-Thérèse Marchadier, plus a patent application for an automobile radiator made out in the name of “Henri Landru”. Back at Rue Greffulhe, a phone call to Paris police headquarters rapidly established that Landru had a string of convictions for fraud and should have been deported to New Caledonia.
It was now late afternoon. Landru was still mute, at times pretending to sleep, so Dautel switched his attention to Fernande. He could not stop her talking: on and on she rambled, about broken marriage vows, gifts of jewellery, the doubts of her mother, “mysterious meetings” with other women, and the day when “Lucien” administered ricin oil after she fell ill with food poisoning. Fernande gave Dautel plenty of sinister leads, but nothing to indicate that Landru was more than a petty crook. Even the ricin oil, lethal in large doses, was a commonly used laxative.
Dautel released Fernande without charge late on Saturday evening, when she was collected by her equally distressed mother. With Fernande off his hands, Dautel then made a reckless decision.
The few surviving photographs of Amédée Dautel show a thin man with a toothbrush moustache and worry lines on his forehead. He looks anxious and out of his depth and that is how he now behaved. Dautel sensed that he was circling a serial killer, easily the biggest case of his rather humdrum career to date. He also knew that time was running out to make a breakthrough, especially given Landru’s obdurate silence. By noon on Sunday, 13 April, 24 hours after Landru’s arrest, Dautel had to deliver the suspect to the public prosecutor’s office in the town of Mantes, where Anna Collomb’s father and Célestine Buisson’s sister Marie had filed their complaints.
Without consulting his superiors, Dautel decided to transport Landru to Mantes via Gambais, in order to conduct a brief inspection of the Villa Tric. Dautel had no time to recruit any forensic experts for what he was careful to call a preliminary “survey” of the property, rather than an official “search”. In reality, Dautel and Belin wanted a pretext that would allow them to find the bodies of Anna Collomb, Célestine Buisson and perhaps the other names on Landru’s list, before the department of Seine-et-Oise took control of the case.
***
They began the “survey” just after 9.30 am on 13 April, watched by a trail of curious locals who had seen the small police convoy as it passed through Gambais and followed the cars up to the villa. Dautel had brought only half a dozen officers down from Paris and chose not to assign one of them to guard the front gates. As a result, the villagers were able to walk straight into the garden and even into the house.
Upstairs, Dautel told the handcuffed Landru to stand in one corner while he and Belin rummaged through the sparsely furnished bedrooms. They found nothing of interest. Downstairs, the two detectives spotted what they thought might be a tiny bloodstain on the kitchen wall above the oven. They peered inside the oven but saw nothing suspicious. Next, they descended to the cellar, where they identified another possible speck of dried blood on a wall.
Moving outside, Dautel ordered a rapid search of the enclosed kitchen garden at the rear of the villa. According to Dautel’s subsequent report, Landru suddenly started to become agitated as the officers approached a patch of disturbed soil near the washhouse adjoining the kitchen. Dautel instructed some local men he had hired as diggers to get to work with their spades and they soon unearthed the strangled corpses of Marie-Thérèse Marchadier’s three little griffon dogs.
At first, Landru pretended that the dogs had belonged to him. One of the diggers interrupted, saying he had seen a woman walking the dogs in the village only a few months before.
“Is this true?” Dautel asked Landru.
“The dogs belonged to a lady friend whose name I have to withhold,” Landru replied primly. “She authorised me to put them to death.”
In any case, it was no big deal, Landru continued nonchalantly, for he had also strangled a vicious stray cat he had found in the garden. Helpfully, he pointed at the spot where two years before he had buried Annette Pascal’s pet angora Minette.
Dautel had no time to investigate this second grave or search the hangar and the locked sheds at the bottom of the main garden beyond the enclosure. Mantes lay 30 kilometres north of Gambais along poor country roads and Dautel was already cutting it fine to get to the prosecutor’s office by noon. The police briefly inspected the garage by the villa, where they found Célestine’s battered old trunk, with more of her initialled linen. Dautel then called off his “survey”, reasoning that he could always come back and do a more thorough job once Landru had been formally charged.
Dautel was in such a hurry that he did not bother to attach official police seals to the property, as the law required. Instead he told Landru’s guard to bundle the suspect back into one of the waiting cars, which sped off down the road to Mantes, leaving the onlookers to wonder what other macabre secrets might yet be discovered at the villa.
***
After the handover in Mantes, Dautel an
d Belin drove straight to the garage in the north-west Paris suburb of Clichy where Landru rented space. They arrived at about 2.30 pm and finding the garage open, began searching through what initially looked like a pile of junk behind a dismantled automobile.
The two detectives soon uncovered an astounding trove of incriminating material, including identity documents matching several of the names on the list in Landru’s carnet. Delving further, Dautel and Belin pulled out photographs of various women, cheap jewellery, dusty old petticoats, bloomers and chemises, a chestnut wig, a solitary denture, all stuffed together with dressing tables, chairs and various knick-knacks, as if for a jumble sale. Most sinister of all, they came across a length of knotted cord, perfect for strangling victims.
There were scores of letters from women replying to Landru’s lonely hearts adverts, sorted according to his level of interest into different categories: “suspicion of fortune”, “no money”, “don’t follow up”, and so on. The detectives also found draft replies by Landru to his correspondents.
“Madame,” one template began, “I have received your letter of XXX and thank you for the information that you have given me. Rest assured, whatever befalls these projects, of my absolute discretion…”
“Madame,” Landru wrote, if the woman had sent her photograph, “There is indeed always a little curiosity on the part of a man, being able to appreciate the culture and education of une personne amiable, to become acquainted with her physical charms. Do I need to tell you that, in your case, they are all to your advantage and have only increased my desire to merit your esteem.”
“Madame,” he wrote, if a woman complained about not hearing from him, “Your little note of XXX has covered me in confusion in making me understand that I have been impolite in not responding immediately. Must I confess the truth? It would nonetheless give me pleasure; there was something about you that spoke to me of a gracious correspondent whose image I cannot forget.”