Landru's Secret
Page 12
At 3.00 pm the car pulled up in front of the headquarters of the Paris police, an imposing three-storey edifice on the Île de la Cité. Landru got out and saw the photographers gathered on the forecourt.
“He walked hesitantly,” Le Journal reported, “panicked by the flashing cameras aimed at him. He turned his head, raised his hand, shielded his eyes; he ended up by using a large red-check handkerchief to cover his face, which allowed one to see that he had a strong hand with a long, very splayed thumb, the criminal thumb observed by Lombroso [an Italian criminologist].”
***
Bonin and the police had carefully scripted the next few hours, determined to take advantage of Landru’s lack of a defence counsel to provoke or trick him into a confession or at least some incriminating remark.
First, the desk sergeant informed Landru that he was being charged with the murders of all the missing women so far identified. This was a lie, because Bonin still had to establish whether Landru had a murder case to answer. Landru was outraged, demanding to make a formal statement. “Why would I have killed them?” Landru asked, since all the women had been his friends: “it seems certain that they have disappeared, but I am sure that you will find them.”
Landru continued to harangue his opening interrogators, senior police commissioners Mouton of the brigade mobile and Tanguy of the police judiciare. “If I killed the women, one would find their corpses,” Landru protested. “The fact of looking for these persons and not finding them does not indicate that they are dead.”
In his fury, Landru got carried away. He explained that he had “invited” Jeanne and André Cuchet to Vernouillet in December 1914 in order to “rest”. Jeanne had wanted to get a job in England, Landru said, while André had expressed a desire to enlist in the British army. Indeed, Landru went on, Jeanne had given him a British poste restante address.
Mouton pounced: “What was the address?”
Landru shrugged, realising his mistake. He could not remember, he said. All he knew was that he had written to Jeanne, who had never replied.
Tanguy and Mouton went through all the other nine names on the telltale list in Landru’s carnet. Again and again, Landru refused to answer their questions, clearly aware of his right to remain silent. At 6.00 pm, the commissioners gave up. Now it was Bonin’s turn to try to break Landru.
Bonin’s bureau was situated in the adjacent Palais de Justice, at the other end of a maze of internal corridors. When Landru arrived, escorted by Riboulet and Belin, Bonin was sitting at his desk surrounded by fake Rodin sculptures, the booty from another enquiry into a counterfeit art scam. Bonin waved Landru to a seat and laboriously took down his name, age and most recent address, a piece of theatre designed to put the suspect on edge. Finally Bonin looked up.
“I don’t want to interrogate you today,” he announced briskly. “Have you chosen a defence lawyer?”
Landru said that he had written to “Maître de Moro Giafferri” but had not yet received a reply. No matter, Bonin said: today he and Landru were only going to have an informal “chat”. Caught off guard, Landru relaxed enough to protest his innocence again to Bonin. He was especially offended by Tanguy and Mouton’s “disgusting” slur that he might have sold the missing women into prostitution.
“I have never been engaged in that ignoble trade,” Landru declared loftily.
He said nothing more for the best part of an hour, pretending to admire the fake Rodins as Bonin peppered him with questions. At about 7.00 pm, Bonin abandoned his attempt to coax an indiscretion out of Landru and tried another ploy. Riboulet and Belin took Landru to the police headquarters canteen, where he ate a hearty dinner while declining the offer of a carafe of wine. Landru told the officers that he rarely, if ever, drank alcohol, alive to this familiar police trick to loosen his tongue.
Next, Landru was escorted to a cell to digest his meal and invited to get some rest. For two hours he stayed rigidly awake, staring disdainfully at his guards.
At 10.30 pm, he was abruptly summoned for a second interview with Tanguy, who got nothing more out of Landru. Shortly before midnight, Tanguy threw in the towel, ordering Belin and Riboulet to take Landru to the Santé, the city’s main jail for prisoners on remand. So far, the full resources of the Paris police and judiciary had got no further with Landru than the prosecutor’s office in Mantes.
***
Moro knew he had to get on Landru’s case as soon as he heard about Bonin’s “chat” with his client. He was fully occupied with the trial of Charles Humbert, the newspaper tycoon accused of treason, so on Tuesday, 29 April Moro despatched another lawyer in his cabinet to the Santé for an initial interview with Landru.
Auguste Navières du Treuil, 38, was a spruce, tidy man with a trim moustache that accurately expressed his punctilious character. Navières had spent most of the war in a German prisoner-of-war camp, an experience that had wrecked his health, and on this chilly spring morning, he was wearing his army greatcoat for extra warmth. When Landru was brought into the Santé’s interview room, Navières felt the full force of his client’s contemptuous glare. Landru was appalled; he had been expecting “le grand Moro”, not this shivering milksop.
Navières decided to put Landru in his place: “I ended up by telling him that having commanded a company of soldiers under fire, I could withstand such staring perfectly well.” Landru instantly softened, noting that he too had once been a sous-officier, so they were really comrades in arms.
“We parted on the best of terms,” Navières recalled of this introductory meeting. “He offered to help me on with my coat and handed me my sword and cap. I left after giving him a military salute.”
***
Unknown to Moro, Navières or Landru, Bonin had a few hours earlier begun a full-scale police and forensic investigation of the Villa Tric. Once again, Landru’s legal right to witness a search of his property had been violated. In the absence of Landru or his defence counsel, the mayor of Gambais was in attendance, supposedly to “guarantee” Landru’s rights. Other officials who deemed their presence essential included the two police commissioners Mouton and Tanguy, three senior Paris prosecutors and the prosecutor in Mantes, representing the department of Seine-et-Oise. Dautel and Belin were also on hand, largely to verify their cursory “survey” of the villa a fortnight before.
Bonin knew that if the searchers found evidence of murder, perhaps even corpses, there was only one member of the party whose opinion counted. Born in Boulogne, Dr Charles Paul, 40, was one of a new breed of forensic pathologists who exuded an aura of scientific infallibility in court. Paul’s closest peer was his British contemporary Bernard Spilsbury, another masterful expert witness; but where Spilsbury was a lean ascetic loner, the bullishly built Paul was a team player, willing to share out the work at the Paris police laboratory he headed.
At Vernouillet, Paul had hung around with little to do. Now, like Bonin and the watching press, Paul was eager for the search to begin, because the Villa Tric was potentially a critical crime scene. Landru had rented the house for more than four years and had made his last visit less than a month before. Furthermore, even the hapless Dautel and Belin had found three strangled dogs – perhaps a sinister portent of human remains elsewhere on the property.
Inside the house, the journalists noted Landru’s cheap, tattered print of the wolf and the lamb (“a symbol”, Le Figaro thought), his makeshift kitchen table, his tin cutlery, his grimy blue apron, and his rickety little oven – the domestic appareil of a cheapskate. Dautel and Belin showed Dr Paul the tiny “blood stains” they had spotted on the kitchen and cellar walls. Paul ordered samples of these stains to be removed for closer inspection in the police laboratory, as well as scrapings of soot from the wall of the oven.
Outside in the kitchen enclosure, light rain drifted down as the diggers excavated the remains of Annette Pascal’s cat Minette, whose grave had been identified a fortnight before by Landru. The search team moved on to the expansive, unkempt lawn beyond the enclo
sure, creeping methodically towards the open hangar and adjacent sheds at the far corner of the garden.
Inside the hangar, “in an angle at the back, a dark corner, there was a little pile of ashes and cinders mixed up with dead leaves,” Le Journal reported:
Everything was passed through a sieve and this is what was found: Debris from small calcified bone fragments, one of them appearing to be the phalanx of a toe; molten glass, hair clips and pins; the remains of a whale-bone from a corset. All of this was charred. Finally, there was a human tooth, a molar, as proved by the four roots.
Dr Paul pronounced that the bone fragments were definitely of human origin. Bonin had made his breakthrough, or so it appeared.
A few minutes later, Bonin called off the search for the day. It was raining steadily, and having found the charred bone debris and women’s accessories, Bonin wanted to comb the whole property without journalists and high-ups disrupting the operation.
Out of curiosity, rather than any serious suspicion, Bonin and Paul went off to check the church and adjacent cemetery, a five-minute walk along the road to Houdan. Here, the sexton “verified and affirmed” that Landru could not possibly have buried any of his victims in the graveyard. “I know my own digging style,” the sexton stated authoritatively.
Bonin was sure the searchers would find more human remains in the villa’s garden when they returned next morning. He even remarked confidently on the way back to the house that he expected to wrap up the whole case “in less than three days”. Yet over the next week, while the police found many animal bone fragments scattered around the property, no further human debris was uncovered. As Le Figaro observed drily, one toe bone did not seem much to brag about in a murder case that officially numbered “eleven entire corpses”.
There was another conundrum that Bonin had hardly begun to address: Was Landru a lone serial killer or did he have accomplices? And might those accomplices be his wife and four children?
Chapter 11
I Will Tell You Something Horrible
“So,” Mme Landru declared, “people want me to give my defence. It appears they accuse me… It’s a confession, then, that I’m going to give you,” she told the reporter from Le Journal.
It was 20 May 1919, a fortnight after her first police interrogation, and Marie-Catherine Landru was ready to set the record straight at the family’s apartment in Clichy.
“Landru’s wife, the great culprit, is going to tell you the story of her life. People can judge for themselves.”
Her story was true in parts. It was also incomplete and broke off just at the point where she risked incriminating herself and her four children.
She was born in 1868 near Strasbourg, the eldest daughter of a workingclass couple who moved to Paris in 1871 at the end of the Franco-Prussian War. The Rémys settled on the Île Saint-Louis in central Paris, worshipping en famille at the local parish church.
One Sunday morning, when she was 19, Marie-Catherine’s eye wandered during Mass. It fell on a young sub-deacon with a “fine bearing and discreet demeanour… We got talking as we were leaving church and so my love story began.”
Henri Désiré Landru, born in 1869, grew up on the adjacent Île de la Cité, opposite the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. His mother took in laundry while his father was a furnace stoker at a tool factory, a skilled industrial job. Landru had one elder sister, Florentine, born in 1862.
Like the Rémys, the Landrus were ardent Catholics and when their son was five they sent him to the nearby church school on the Île Saint-Louis. He soon became an altar boy, graduating in his late teens to sub-deacon, a secular post where he helped the priest on with his vestments, lit candles and performed other tasks around the church.
In 1887, when Marie-Catherine first met Landru, he had just started work as an architect’s clerk, drafting letters and sometimes copying designs for clients. Two years later, he got her pregnant with their first, illegitimate daughter Marie, a mildly embarrassing detail that Marie-Catherine did not reveal to Le Journal. A few months after Marie’s birth, Landru left Paris to perform his obligatory military service in the northern town of Saint-Quentin, close to the Belgian border. Still unmarried, Marie-Catherine remained with the baby at her parents’ home in Paris, making ends meet as a laundress while seeing Landru from time to time when he came back on military leave.
In his 1889 novel Sous-Offs (slang for sous-officiers), the author Lucien Desclaves described the brutal all-male culture of barracks life, based on his own experience of military service in Le Havre. The hero, a Parisian bank clerk, is robbed on his first night in the conscripts’ dormitory by another soldier, the prelude to a procession of crooks, blackmailers and sadistic sergeants who prey on the new recruits.
Landru thrived in this criminalised environment during his three years in Saint-Quentin. He was promoted twice, from private to adjutant (sous-officier) and then to deputy-quartermaster, a position that taught him basic accounting and bookkeeping. He was so well-liked by his superiors that he even gained an early discharge in the autumn of 1893, on the specious medical grounds that he was suffering from sunburn. The real reason, not mentioned by Marie-Catherine to Le Journal, was that he needed to marry her quickly, because she was pregnant with their second child.
Maurice was born in May 1894, seven months after the wedding, followed by Suzanne in 1896 and Charles in 1900. For the benefit of Le Journal, Marie-Catherine described Landru during these years as a “model husband” and father, “gentle and caring”, a reliable breadwinner. Yet in her police interview, she had complained sourly that Landru was always “a skirt chaser”, from the very start of the marriage.
“Mme Landru collected her memories for a moment,” Le Journal’s man observed. “She resumed in a shaky, nervous voice.”
Landru’s character gradually altered, she said. “He invented machines, he didn’t sleep anymore,” as he poured their savings into fantastic projects that he promised would make them rich. “He invented a motorbike and exhibited it and registered a patent, but others stole his idea.” Next, mechanical dolls; once again he was ripped off “by people who deceived him”.
She slid past the fact that it was Landru, not his alleged “deceivers”, who was acquiring a police record. In 1898 he designed and exhibited a primitive motorbike, called “La Landru”, at a machinery show in the Tuileries gardens. He then duped a group of gullible investors into advancing him funds to build a factory to manufacture the motorcycle. Having pocketed the money, Landru vanished.
“Soon the police called at my home,” Marie-Catherine carried on. “They were looking for my husband; he had stolen, pulled off a swindle! I thought I was going mad; I couldn’t believe it.”
Between 1900 and 1904 Landru was constantly on the run from the police, spending a year in Le Havre when it got too hot for him in Paris. His luck ran out in early 1904 when he fell in the street while fleeing a bank in central Paris he had just tried to defraud. He was charged with multiple offences, dating back to the motorbike scam, and remanded in custody at the Santé.
So far, Landru seemed an oddity; a reasonably well-educated, inventive man from a decent working-class family who had chosen to become an incompetent petty crook. His strange downhill journey now took him into darker territory.
Shortly after Landru’s arrival at the Santé, a guard entered his cell and found him standing on a chair, apparently poised to slip his head through a noose made from his sheet. Landru meekly handed the noose to the guard and stepped off the chair. It looked like a fake suicide attempt, staged by Landru to secure his release on medical grounds. As Landru probably intended, the prison authorities summoned a psychiatrist to assess his mental state.
Dr Charles Vallon, director of the nearby Sainte-Anne asylum, made an ambivalent diagnosis. Vallon observed that at times Landru behaved like a typical swindler, rueing the “misunderstandings” that had led to his arrest. On other occasions, Landru exhibited signs of depression and was not entirely rational. Hedging his opi
nion, Vallon concluded that Landru was “on the frontiers of madness, but had not yet crossed them”.
Vallon’s tentative report failed to satisfy the court, which wanted clearer guidance about whether Landru was mentally fit to stand trial. Two other eminent psychiatrists, Dr Joseph Rogues de Fursac and Dr Jacques Roubinovitch, examined Landru and concurred with Vallon. They decided that Landru was on the threshold of insanity, with diminished responsibility; like Vallon, they thought Landru should be treated leniently by the court.
At the trial that followed, Landru’s lawyer argued that his client was gripped by an irrational “mania for invention” and had lost “all sense of responsibility for his actions”, as he tried to raise funds by any means for his projects. He was obviously a bit unhinged, Landru’s counsel argued. The judge preferred to see Landru as just another lowlife, sentencing him to two years in jail at a prison near Paris.
Something about Landru troubled Dr Vallon. After the trial, he wrote to Marie-Catherine, asking her to come to see him at his asylum. Vallon warned her that while he thought Landru was still sane, he could not answer for her husband’s actions in future.
“Thus was I threatened with a husband who was a madman,” Marie-Catherine told Le Journal. “What was I to do? Should I abandon this unhappy man completely? He was the father of my children.”
According to Marie-Catherine, she spent the next miserable decade working as a laundress and wine shop manager, living with her children in a series of cheap lodgings in and around Paris. “I had to provide for my four poor little ones,” she said, because Landru was in and out of jail for yet more frauds and thefts. On his rare visits home he scrounged off his family, “eating up” the 3,000 francs that Marie-Catherine had saved.