Landru's Secret

by Landru's Secret- The Deadly Seductions of France's Lonely Hearts Serial Killer (retail) (epub)

  As Dautel and Belin sifted through this correspondence, a slim youth with blond hair strolled into the garage. He saw the policemen and tried to bolt, but they grabbed him and asked for his name.

  “Charles Frémyet”, the young man stuttered, explaining that he worked as an apprentice for “Monsieur Frémyet”. It did not take long for Dautel and Belin to get “Charles Frémyet” to change his story. He admitted to being Landru’s youngest son Charles, aged 19, living with the rest of his father’s family a few blocks away.

  Charles’s mother, “Mme Frémyet”, was at home when her son arrived with Dautel and Belin. She was a dumpy woman in her early fifties with brown hair scraped back in a tight bun, the beginnings of a double chin and an air of being defeated by life. Seeing the detectives, she acknowledged that she was in reality Mme Marie-Catherine Landru, while insisting she had not seen her husband since before the war. Her 27-year-old daughter Marie, a laundress like Mme Landru, similarly disclaimed any knowledge of his activities, as did Marie’s 22-year-old sister Suzanne, who lived with her fiancé on another floor in the same nondescript apartment block. Only 24-year-old Maurice, Charles’s elder brother and a convicted swindler, was not at home because he was still waiting to be demobilised.

  Disconcertingly for the detectives, it was common knowledge among the family’s neighbours that “Monsieur Frémyet” was in trouble with the law. Furthermore, he had been seen visiting the family at irregular intervals, contrary to what Landru’s wife had just said. Nobody in the quartier had felt the need to alert the authorities.

  ***

  While Dautel tried to fathom this family of imposters, Landru was giving the authorities in Mantes the runaround. On Monday morning (14 April) he was brought from the town jail to the public prosecutor’s office for his first formal interrogation. Under French law, criminal enquiries were led by an investigating magistrate (“juge d’instruction”), who weighed the evidence against a suspect to determine whether there was a case that would stand up in court.

  One juge d’instruction immediately withdrew from the case, pleading illness. His replacement, a provincial magistrate called Rossignol, struggled to make any headway with Landru.

  “Is it true that you have three or four country houses?” Rossignol asked inaccurately.

  “I adore the countryside,” Landru replied.

  “A cheque book has been found showing that you deposited money in a bank near Chantilly. Why?”

  “It’s a business requirement.”

  “For what motive do you go by the name of Dupont in Gambais?”

  “But I have many other names.”

  “What was the purpose of this piece of cord, carefully knotted, which was found in your garage at Clichy?”

  “Mais monsieur le juge, one perhaps could find one of those at your house. It’s simply a piece of twine.”

  “This jewellery, which belonged to women who were your mistresses, why was it in your possession?”

  “Because I lent them money! The jewels were security.”

  “Enfin,” said Rossignol, “what has become of these women who have been sought for months?”

  “Ah! monsieur!” Landru exclaimed, “does one ever know where women go after they leave you?”

  A local lawyer had been temporarily assigned to represent Landru at this interrogation. Landru, however, had someone better in mind to act as his permanent defence counsel. Shortly after his interview with Rossignol, Landru wrote an urgent note, addressed to “Maître de Moro Giafferri, barrister at the Court, Paris.” He scribbled:

  I will be obliged to you where appropriate to let me know if you will accept to take over my defence, before all jurisdictions where my current case may lead.

  Please accept, monsieur, my respectful assurances.

  Landru did not include an address, but there was no need. He had just requested the services of the most famous lawyer in France.

  Chapter 10

  Why Would I Have Killed Them?

  When he was seven or eight, Vincent de Moro Giafferri’s parents took him one morning from their village on the northern tip of Corsica to watch his barrister uncle defending a client in court.

  “My whole life has been illuminated by this spectacle,” Moro recalled at the end of his illustrious career. “I saw the majesty of Justice, the reaction of the gallery, the unfurling of the witnesses, the pursuit of the truth… Above all, I saw the poor trapped devil whom everyone seemed to be trying to tear to pieces: in front of him, a black robe, protecting him, the symbol of humanity and pity: the robe that my uncle wore. My vocation was born on that day.”

  Moro (as everyone knew him) grew up to be a staggeringly precocious defence lawyer, called to the Paris Bar in 1898 at the age of only 20. He posed soon afterwards for a studio portrait, a slim, boyish figure with black curly hair and a troubadour’s moustache, his clever eyes twinkling at the camera. Moro could have been a mere salon wit, straight out of the pages of Proust, especially after he married a beautiful Corsican heiress and developed a taste for fighting duels. What rescued Moro from absurdity was the moral passion he brought to his cases. He sought out the “wretches” who swarmed across belle époque Paris – pickpockets, swindlers, drunks, pimps, and thugs – convinced that justice had no meaning if it did not apply impartially to everyone.

  Fellow barristers came to watch Moro defend these “indefensibles”, marvelling at his ability to envelop even open-and-shut prosecution cases in clouds of doubt. To that end, Moro could be in turn eloquent, humorous, solemn, forensic, magisterial, chilly and warm, as he transfixed the twelve jurors sitting in judgement on his miserable clients. He almost always won. At the Palais de Justice in Paris, rival lawyers joked that Moro was on a oneman mission to make trial by jury pointless.

  Moro’s great cause was the abolition of the death penalty, which he regarded as an outrage against his abstract ideal of justice. “Let us decapitate the guillotine,” Moro demanded in 1902, arguing that it was impossible to reverse the fall of the blade if the condemned criminal was subsequently found to be innocent.

  Moro’s hatred of capital punishment was crystallised by the case of Eugène Dieudonné, a peaceable young house decorator he defended in 1913 against a charge of attempting to murder a Paris bank messenger. Dieudonné was an anarchist, rounded up with a gang of bank robbers, some of whom professed anarchist tendencies. The gang swore that Dieudonné had nothing to do with them, and a friend of Dieudonné confirmed that they had met for a drink in the eastern city of Nancy on the day of the shooting near Paris’s Gare du Nord. However, the investigating magistrate maintained that Dieudonné could have shot the bank courier at 9.00 am and then caught a train to Nancy in time to bump into his friend by chance on the street at 2.30 pm.

  Dieudonné’s wife Louise mounted a one-woman campaign to prove his innocence, even though the couple had been estranged because of his anarchist views about free love. “I love him even more now that he is overwhelmed by misfortune,” she informed the press defiantly. Still the authorities persisted in charging Dieudonné.

  “In pleading for Dieudonné, Maître de Moro Giafferri made tears flow,” Le Figaro reported at the end of the trial. Despite Moro’s eloquence, Dieudonné was sentenced to death, obliging Moro to appeal in person for clemency to the President of France, Raymond Poincaré. A former barrister, Poincaré was persuaded by Moro’s arguments. Hours before Dieudonné’s scheduled execution, Poincaré commuted the sentence to life imprisonment with hard labour in the French Caribbean colony of Guyane.

  Before leaving France, Dieudonné insisted on divorcing Louise. He did not want the rest of her life to be ruined by his shadow, he told her; she needed to be free of him.

  ***

  Moro certainly knew all about Landru by the time Landru’s handwritten note arrived at the barrister’s cabinet on Boulevard Saint-Germain. Within days of his arrest, Landru was all over the front pages, labelled the “Bluebeard of Gambais” after the mythical medieval French nobleman who ha
d tricked and slaughtered his wives. One evening newspaper, Bonsoir, even suggested half-seriously that l’affaire Landru had been cooked up by the government to distract the public from its feeble performance at the Paris Peace Conference:

  Why the devil worry about war and peace, our admirable government insinuates. Occupy yourself with Landru, an astonishing, prodigious man.

  Landru was in a sense Moro’s dream client – the ultimate wretch, condemned by the press, requiring all Moro’s formidable array of courtroom skills to escape the guillotine. Moro made it known to the press that he would defend Landru pro bono, but he then failed in his duty to Landru.

  In April and early May 1919, Moro was fully engaged as defence counsel for Charles Humbert, an immensely rich businessman and politician who was accused by the army of taking “German” money during the war to fund his acquisition of the mass circulation daily Le Journal. Denied access to newspapers, Landru did not learn that Moro had agreed to represent him until the end of April, more than two weeks after his arrest. While Landru remained literally defenceless, the police and the judiciary raced to assemble a case that not even Moro could demolish.

  ***

  On the morning of Tuesday, 15 April, three days after Landru’s arrest, Gabriel Bonin, 40, stood in the back garden of The Lodge at Vernouillet and surveyed the site he was about to search. Plump and bald, with a sallow, unhealthy complexion, Bonin was a senior juge d’instruction in Paris, his investigative energies fuelled by the hand-rolled cigarettes that he chainsmoked all day.

  The weather was blustery, with rain forecast later. Bonin decided nonetheless to start in the house, hoping it would remain dry for any excavation work outside. Dautel, Belin and a detachment of police officers were on hand, as was Dr Charles Paul, head of the Paris police laboratory, who had brought a team of forensic experts. Bonin noticed irritably that a clutch of reporters and photographers were also on the premises, tipped off about the search by police contacts and hoping to get their first sight of Landru. They were disappointed to hear that Bonin had decided to leave Landru at the town jail in Mantes – in strict law, a further breach of the suspect’s rights.

  Bonin and Paul rapidly realised that the chances of finding any usable forensic evidence at The Lodge were slim. It was more than four and a half years since Landru had lived at The Lodge and in the intervening period, a series of short-term tenants had tramped all over the property. The Lodge’s latest tenant, a chirpy young widow called Mme Calendini, was enthralled by the thought of a mass murderer at large in her home, alerting Bonin to a particularly suspicious “subsidence” in the cellar. Yet as the morning continued, it gradually became clear even to Mme Calendini that the investigators had drawn a blank.

  For form’s sake, Paul took away a few charred scraps of rags from the ashes of an ancient bonfire at the end of the garden. Under the microscope at the Paris police laboratory, the material yielded nothing of interest. Bonin could have ordered the whole garden dug up, but his impatient eye saw nothing except overgrown grass and weeds.

  After the search, Dautel went off to interview the neighbours, accompanied by the press. Monsieur Vallet, the local butcher, who lived at the foot of Rue de Mantes, had never seen or smelt nauseous smoke coming from a bonfire lit by Landru in the garden. Even so, Vallet continued, his wife and maid had assured him the stench was “frightful”. Mme Vallet had nothing to add to her husband’s observations.

  Mme Picque, who lived on the uphill side of The Lodge, dimly recalled a man who looked like Landru living there in 1915 or 1916 with a woman and a youth. She remembered seeing another woman in the garden sometime later. As for the smoke, Mme Picque’s memory failed her. “Everything was mysterious about this man and one supposed he must have been a spy,” she remarked darkly.

  Émile Mercier, 58, the local constable, remembered going to The Lodge after receiving complaints about the smoke. It would have been sometime in 1915 or 1916, Mercier said vaguely. He was only sure of one fact about this incident: It was a woman, not a man, who had popped her head out of an upstairs window and told him to buzz off; which he had, Mercier explained, seeing no reason to enquire further.

  ***

  While Dautel was struggling to extract anything useful from the locals in Vernouillet, two far more promising witnesses had just surfaced in Paris. Jeanne Cuchet’s sister Philomène and brother-in-law Georges Friedman had known Landru’s identity since August 1914, when Jeanne and Georges had discovered his personal papers at the villa in La Chaussée. The Friedmans had also known that Landru was a convicted criminal, on the run from the law, following Philomène and Jeanne’s visit to Landru’s abandoned garage in the southern suburb of Malakoff. It seemed odd, therefore, that the Friedmans had stayed quiet throughout the war, rather than take their information about Landru to the police.

  The Friedmans probably felt ashamed that Jeanne had eloped with a crook and fearful that she was now in serious legal trouble. But this was not the story Georges Friedman gave to the press on 15 April, the same day as the search in Vernouillet, when he and Philomène emerged from giving witness statements at Paris police headquarters. Friedman merely said that he and his wife had come forward after recognising Landru’s photograph in that morning’s edition of Le Journal.

  The reporter from Le Journal wondered all the same why the Friedmans had not alerted the police in 1915 about the disappearance of Mme Cuchet and her son.

  “I was mobilised and I have only just come back,” Friedman replied. “My wife and I supposed that Mme Cuchet had become Mme Diard so we were not particularly worried.”

  Friedman blustered that he and Philomène were aware that Mme Cuchet had been “worth” about 100,000 francs (roughly 310,000 euros) and was therefore never going to be in need. Friedman’s steer to the reporter was plain: Jeanne had been duped and then killed by a lethal marriage swindler.

  ***

  Over the next week, other relatives and friends of the ten missing women on Landru’s list approached the authorities with their stories. In Toulon, Annette Pascal’s elder sister Louise Fauchet, her surrogate “maman”, wrote directly to Bonin:

  “I am in the most dreadful despair,” Louise announced, “having already the agony of knowing her [Annette’s] name is inscribed on the famous list of victims, I was more than a sister for her, I was a mother.”

  In Paris, Mme Colin, whose 19-year-old daughter Andrée Babelay had disappeared at Gambais two years before, was just as desperate for news. “My daughter Andrée had good morality and was full of respectful sentiments,” Mme Colin told the police loyally, while conceding that her wayward teenager “was also a fantasist who loved change.”

  Day by day, the authorites were gathering more evidence of Landru’s thefts from his fiancées, as police gradually located his network of garages and storage depots around Paris. He seemed more a human magpie than a systematic thief, stashing at random furniture, identity papers, wigs, hair clips, shoes and even André Cuchet’s treasured propeller pen, a gift from his Aunt Philomène.

  Bonin, meanwhile, was exasperated by a legal tug of war over Landru. The prosecutor in Mantes maintained that the department of Seine-et-Oise should take charge of the case because all the missing women had disappeared in its jurisdiction. It was obvious, though, that the local police and judiciary were out of their depth with Landru, who had just seen off a second investigating magistrate. Rossignol, the poorly briefed juge d’instruction in Mantes, had resigned immediately after his futile interrogation of Landru, pleading pressure of work.

  On 24 April, the justice ministry formally appointed Bonin as juge d’instruction for the whole case, on the specious grounds that all the missing women had lived in Paris when Landru first met them. Bonin was appalled by Dautel and Belin’s sloppy “survey” of the Villa Tric and failure to secure the property with official police seals, an error he immediately rectified. He now lobbied successfully for Brigadier Louis Riboulet of Paris’s police judiciare to take charge of the enquiry in the Fren
ch capital, leaving the smaller brigade mobile, led by Dautel and Belin, to focus on Vernouillet and Gambais.

  It looked on paper like a neat geographical division of labour. Yet it soon became clear that Riboulet, Dautel and Belin had no intention of steering clear of each other’s territory.

  ***

  On Sunday, 27 April, in cloudy, cool weather, Riboulet drove down to Mantes with Belin and two other officers to collect Landru from the local prison and bring him back to Paris. Riboulet, 42, shared Belin’s taste for Homburg hats and trench coats but was more of a dandy, with a waxed, twirly moustache and a penchant for tailored suits. Like Belin, Riboulet was also prone to fanciful deductions that were not always supported by facts.

  Riboulet suggested they should offer Landru cigarettes on the return journey to put him at ease and encourage him to talk.

  “Useless, he doesn’t smoke,” Belin retorted, putting Riboulet in his place.

  Instead, they stopped on the way to buy a large box of chocolates, which both officers were confident would loosen Landru’s tongue. First they had to extract Landru from the jail without the prisoner being lynched.

  All morning, the police in Mantes had tried in vain to clear a mob outside the prison gates, as news percolated down from Paris that Landru was about to be transferred. When Riboulet and Belin emerged with Landru – instantly recognisable in his bowler hat and grubby yellow tunic – the crowd surged forward past the police cordon. Landru ducked into the waiting police car, followed by his escort, and the driver hurtled off down the street, narrowly avoiding a hail of stones and rotten food.

  Sitting in the back, Landru worked his way through the box of chocolates, with no evident change to his surly mood. He was not happy about his transfer, he grumbled; indeed, he would have been perfectly content to stay in Mantes until the police had rectified their obvious “error” in arresting him. That was all he had to say about his case. He spent the rest of the journey to Paris munching chocolates and gazing out of the window.