Landru's Secret
Page 14
A Passos brand sewing machine carrying the name of the sales agent, Chastel… a size 42 tailor’s dummy, very worn, lent to her by the maison for which she made fashion items… an old mirror, medium size… lingerie fantaisiste… a chemise de jour… a garnet-red satin-covered armchair embroidered with baskets of flowers… some lovely new bathroom towels…
“If anything else comes to mind, I will make haste to let you know,” Marie-Jeanne signed off helpfully.
Other letters in Bonin’s postbag were a reminder of the agony l’affaire Landru was causing an untold number of women across France.
The recently married Mme Zeegers wrote from the Paris suburb of Villemomble to explain why it was not necessary for Bonin to interview her. The discovery of her name in Landru’s files was misleading, she said:
“Six years ago, I believe, one of my friends asked me if I would be willing to receive her correspondence concerning certain matrimonial projects and to forward it to her… On one occasion I received a letter which I believed was for her, but which was personally addressed to me, in a very poetic, sentimental style and with a certain elevation in the thoughts and feelings expressed.”
Mme Zeegers admitted that she had replied to Landru’s letter, “but it was the only one I ever sent him… As you can see, monsieur le juge, I have nothing, absolutely nothing, to communicate to you that could possibly be useful to the case.”
Mlle Dutru, a 41-year-old spinster, wrote to Bonin from her home village near Fontainebleau, south of Paris. She had also been asked to testify about her correspondence with Landru.
“Please do not give my name or my deposition to the press,” Mlle Dutru pleaded. “I have committed no crime, it is very common these days for women to seek a home by this means [lonely hearts adverts]… I have always lived so discreetly and quietly that I dread this kind of publicity for all the hurt it can create for me in future and for my elderly parents (80 years old) who live so peacefully and in such esteem in a little village in Burgundy, as well as my sister, a war widow and mother of five children who is completely unaware of this affair…”
Mme Benoist, an elderly widow, wrote to Bonin from Marseille to enquire about her daughter, who had gone missing some years ago. The old lady had never given up hope that she would find her daughter again, and “perhaps this time I will have more luck.” Finally, Mme Benoist steeled herself to ask the terrible question: “I am desperate, my poor daughter, has she been identified?”
From Ecrouves, a small town in eastern France, Mme Romelot wrote to the prosecutor in Versailles, who forwarded her letter to Bonin. “The Landru case has interested me to a high degree for a certain time,” Mme Romelot began circuitously. She explained that in April 1916, a man describing himself as an engineer in the army had “captivated” her daughter Marie-Louise. The man had asked Mme Romelot for permission to marry Marie-Louise, but she had refused. “One day, the 10th August, exactement, my daughter disappeared and I never saw this famous engineer again.”
Mme Romelot finally got to the point. She had seen a picture of Landru in a newspaper and was struck by his similarity with the engineer. “I would be very happy if some light was shed on my unhappy anxiety,” she said. Mme Romelot attached a photograph of Marie-Louise before she was led astray: a plump young woman in a dark bonnet and buckled raincoat, handbag clutched tightly to her waist, staring dolefully at the camera.
Chapter 12
Conscience Recoils Before Such a Monster
Mme Romelot’s nightmare went on display in the summer of 1919 at the Musée Grevin, a waxwork gallery on Boulevard Montmartre. In the Chamber of Horrors, the Bluebeard of Gambais stood next to the nineteenth-century serial killers Joseph Vacher, known as “the French Ripper”, and Jean-Baptiste Troppmann, who had slaughtered eight members of the same family. Unlike Vacher and Troppmann, Landru had been judged but not yet tried.
The real Landru passed his days at the Santé reading popular novels, discussing his case with Navières and fretting about real or imagined ailments. At the end of August Landru wrote to Bonin to remind him about Dr Vallon’s conclusion in 1904 that he stood on “the frontiers of madness” and to request another psychiatric examination.
Bonin could see where this was heading: on Moro’s advice, Landru wanted to escape justice by getting himself committed to an asylum. In response, Bonin commissioned the three original psychiatrists who had seen Landru in 1904, Vallon, Roubinovitch and Rogues de Fursac, to examine him again.
At the psychiatrists’ request, Landru wrote a lengthy “autobiographical note”, which was mostly a catalogue of his many illnesses and injuries. As a little boy, he had smashed his head against the angle of a chimney breast and though the wound had healed, it still periodically gave him “quite a lot of pain”. At the age of 20, during his military service, Landru had been knocked unconscious by a bad fall on a route march.
A few years later, he had suffered an attack of paralysis down the left side of his body, a case of such interest to the doctors at the hospital that they had made “numerous studies, observations and charts” and prepared “a special report”. Finally in 1913, “I was on my back beneath a car I was repairing – the wheel had been removed – when following on from this fact the prop gave way and the car fell onto my head.” Fortunately, Landru wrote, the impact had been partly reduced by other parts of the car hitting the ground first.
Landru then mused about his increasingly “rebellious” memory and the way his past life flowed before him “like a dream”, as if it had been lived by a completely different person. He may have written more, but at this juncture the psychiatrists cut the text they eventually published.
Vallon, Roubinovitch and Rogues de Fursac showed no urgency in drafting their report, which would determine whether Landru was mentally fit to stand trial. Nor is there any surviving record of Bonin pressing the psychiatrists to rule whether Landru was insane. It was as if Bonin hoped the issue would go away of its own accord.
***
At the start of November, Bonin interrogated Landru’s youngest son Charles, still only 19. Bonin wanted to know why, shortly after Anna Collomb’s disappearance in December 1916, Charles had delivered a basket of flowers, purportedly sent by Anna, to the door of her parents’ apartment.
Unlike his self-assured elder brother Maurice, Charles betrayed his nerves whenever the police or Bonin questioned him. He stuttered to Bonin that he barely remembered the package, which he only had in his hands “for a few moments”. According to Charles, he had no idea about the purpose of his assignment.
Bonin brought in Landru, who was being held in an adjacent room. Why had he used Charles to help make Anna’s family think she was in southern France?
“I had reasons which I do not wish to make known,” Landru stated.
***
It was seven months since Bonin had forecast he would “wrap up” the case in days and he was now a national object of ridicule. At the parliamentary election in late November, around 4,000 voters across France put “Landru” as their candidate on the ballot paper, including several hundred in Corrèze, where Bonin failed to win a seat. His humiliation was completed by Moro winning a seat as a centre-left deputy for Corsica (a position that would take second place to Moro’s principal career at the Bar).
Bonin slogged on with Landru and his family. On 12 December, Bonin summoned Marie-Catherine for another interrogation. No, she knew nothing about the origin of the jewellery that Landru had given her; no, she had sold nothing on his behalf, apart from a small amount of linen; no, she had no idea about his activities; yes, she had received money from him, but only rarely. Bonin sent her away to reflect on whether it might be in her interest to come up with more convincing answers.
On 16 December, a grey, misty day, Bonin confronted Landru with Célestine Buisson’s housemaid sister Marie Lacoste, whose detective work had led to Landru’s arrest. As Marie watched him silently, Landru donned his glasses and read her detailed witness statement about his lon
g on-off relationship with Célestine.
“What do you have to say regarding Mlle Lacoste’s testimony?” Bonin asked when Landru had finished reading.
“I have absolutely nothing to say,” Landru replied placidly, “although there are inaccuracies in the witness’s declaration.”
“What inaccuracies?”
“Mme Buisson never said in my presence to the witness that we were engaged.”
Marie could not be bothered to correct Landru. In her view, it was up to Bonin to decide which of them was lying.
On 18 December, Bonin ordered the arrest of Marie-Catherine on suspicion of complicity in Landru’s thefts and frauds. The most damning evidence was the bank documents she had signed as “Célestine Buisson”, as confirmed by a handwriting expert.
“I demand a lawyer, I did not sign any of the documents you are showing me,” Marie-Catherine yelled at Bonin when she was brought to his office by the police. Bonin despatched her to the Prison Saint-Lazare, a women’s jail near the Gare du Nord, to consider whether she was digging herself further into a very deep hole.
The same day, the police also arrested Maurice Landru for complicity in his father’s thefts and frauds. Maurice kept his cool, denying all knowledge of anything generally. Bonin slung him in the Santé, where he was given a cell well away from his father.
At the family’s apartment in Clichy, Landru’s eldest daughter Marie was a picture of bewilderment when the press called. “My brother [Charles] and I do not understand these arrests,” Marie declared. “What are they guilty of and why?”
Marie Landru’s turn with Bonin came next. Bonin wanted to know why she had travelled to Gambais in August 1917, while Célestine Buisson and her sister were staying at the Villa Tric. The explanation was simple, Marie said. Her father had asked her to bid on his behalf at an auction in Gambais for a house in the woods near the village. When the bidding had gone above Landru’s limit, Marie had walked all the way back to Houdan station and returned to Paris.
No, she had not been aware that her father rented the Villa Tric, and no, she had not seen him after the auction. That was all she could say.
On 10 January 1920, Bonin tested whether a fortnight in jail might have persuaded Landru’s wife to admit that she had forged Célestine Buisson’s signature on bank documents.
“Landru’s carnet shows you caught a bus with him on 15 September 1917 to the Banque Alleaume. Is that correct?”
“Non!”
“Did you sign letters as Mme Buisson at the Banque Alleaume and also at a credit agent?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You committed a fraud, didn’t you?”
“I remember nothing about it.”
Bonin called for Landru to be brought into the magistrate’s office. As his wife looked on, he was shown the same evidence of her forgery. Landru refused to speak, except to demand a pen and paper. He wrote:
“I have received from Mme Buisson, for motives and usage that I cannot make known, diverse items with complete propriety.”
Unfortunately, Landru continued, Mme Buisson had been “indisposed” in the provinces when he needed to obtain her bank securities, so he had asked Mme Landru to sign for her. “If this act was unlawful, I am solely responsible for it, for my wife acted by order. She is an unconscious instrument.”
In February, Marie-Catherine Landru finally confessed on the advice of her lawyer to faking Célestine’s signature. She said her memory of the episode was “very imprecise” and she had never touched a sou. All she had done was obey her husband.
Having nailed Marie-Catherine, Bonin returned to Maurice and the question of how he had come to be selling Jeanne Cuchet’s jewellery in the autumn of 1915.
Why had Maurice told a military tribunal that the jewels had belonged to his grandmother?
“My father was being sought,” Maurice replied, “so I wasn’t able to say it was him who had given them to me.”
In April, Bonin assured the press that Marie-Catherine and Maurice would be “implicated” in Landru’s trial. In reality, they were slipping from his grasp. Bonin’s failure to pin down Marie-Catherine was summed up by one session with her in early June. Marie-Catherine acknowledged that she and two of her children, Charles and Suzanne, had visited the Villa Tric in 1917 “at the time of the hunting season” (“au moment de la chasse”). By one interpretation, Marie-Catherine could have meant the start of the annual hunting season on 1 September, the same day or the day after Célestine Buisson had vanished at the villa. Marie-Catherine recalled that the family had scarcely arrived when Landru left to catch the train to Paris, a detail that tallied with Landru’s carnet entry for 1 September 1917. Bonin overlooked this coincidence, seemingly content with Marie-Catherine’s story that she and her children had spent their two-day visit going for “walks” and had noticed “nothing in particular” at the property.
Bonin’s problem was trying to fit this evasive family into the story he wanted to tell. There was no question that Marie-Catherine and three of her children (Marie, Maurice and Charles) were guilty of complicity in Landru’s thefts. Yet the thought that they might also have been complicit in Landru’s murders was almost too awful to contemplate, even if the authorities had possessed proof of their involvement. Bonin’s prime concern was constructing a straightforward narrative about a lone killer that would persuade a jury to send Landru to the guillotine.
At some point in June, Bonin reached the embarrassing conclusion that he would have to drop the family from the case. His chance came in early July, when Marie-Catherine started complaining that she was suffering from terrible back pain. Bonin sent Dr Charles Paul to the Prison Saint-Lazare, where the forensic pathologist took one look at Marie-Catherine and diagnosed a severe attack of sciatica. Bonin promptly released Marie-Catherine on health grounds and closed her file. He also released Maurice Landru from the Santé, telling the press vaguely that he had let him go “because of the state of the investigation”.
“How I have suffered morally and physically in jail, how I have shed tears – I, who never knew what my husband was doing,” Marie-Catherine babbled to the press when she got home to Clichy. “In my misery, I was consoled many times by the guards in the notorious Saint-Lazare prison.” Maurice turned up a few minutes later, apparently untroubled by seven months in the Santé. “The only hassle,” he said, “was a prisoner directly above my cell who played the drums with his shoes all day and night.”
***
Shortly after Dr Paul’s helpful sciatica diagnosis, a far longer submission from the forensic pathologist landed on Bonin’s desk. This was Dr Paul’s 142-page report on the bone debris found at the Villa Tric, written with two other forensic experts. It was a formidable work of reconstruction. Paul and his two colleagues had painstakingly identified 256 human bone fragments, including 111 smashed-up sections of skull and 47 bits of teeth. Yet the report was also obscure and sometimes misleading about what this mass of evidence potentially signified.
The lack of clarity was evident on the first page, where the authors noted that Bonin had commissioned them “to examine the fragments of bone, teeth etc. discovered during the search made at the suspect’s house in the oven, beneath the hangar and in the garden.” This sentence gave the impression that some of the human bone fragments came from the garden and the oven. In fact, human skeletal debris had only been discovered beneath the pile of leaves in Landru’s hangar, mixed up with animal fragments (a point that the experts also did not make clear).
From one perspective this confusion did not matter, because the human fragments seemed to provide persuasive evidence of murder. Yet a reader of the report could easily miss several other important details that had some bearing on what to make of this sinister evidence. Measured by weight, only one-quarter (1.1 kilograms) of the total material was of human origin and in the absence of pelvic bone parts, the experts could not confirm that all the original corpses had been female. The only certainty was that the charred debris c
ame from three or more skeletons, based on careful examination of duplicate and triplicate fragments.
The burnt scraps of women’s apparel also found beneath the leaves pointed strongly to all the human debris being female. Yet there was another question the experts did not address, either because it fell beyond their remit, or because it did not occur to them: Why had Landru left this highly incriminating evidence beneath the leaves at all, rather than scatter it in the woods and fields around Gambais?
There was a deeper conundrum, which Bonin and the police do not appear to have considered. Since the debris had come from at least three skeletons, it was logical to suppose that some or all of the fragments were the remains of the last three victims on the charge sheet: Louise Jaume (who vanished in November 1917), Annette Pascal (April 1918) and Marie-Thérèse Marchadier (January 1919). If this was true, Landru had been a remarkably insouciant killer, happy to forget about the debris beneath the leaves for months and even years.
***
Another expert report landed on Bonin’s desk in the summer of 1920, easier to read but just as perplexing.
Ten months after their original commission, the psychiatrists Vallon, Roubinovitch and Rogues de Fursac finally produced their submission on Landru’s “mental state”. The doctors’ slim, 13-page report included a three-page summary of the case, which had no clinical relevance, plus Landru’s edited personal memoir, written in September 1919 and therefore not a current representation of his state of mind. The rest of the document amounted to little more than a brisk tour d’horizon of Landru from “a psychiatric point of view”.
The doctors began by noting their tentative conclusion in 1904 that Landru had been possibly “unbalanced” with diminished responsibility. They did not repeat Vallon’s striking phrase about Landru being “on the frontiers of madness”.