Landru's Secret

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

  Next, the psychiatrists observed that Landru’s maternal greatgrandfather had been committed to an asylum and that his mother had become seriously depressed after the death of a baby son in 1867. With no supporting evidence, Vallon and his colleagues also remarked that Landru’s elder sister Florentine was a “neuropath”, a label that could have indicated a mental disorder or just that she was highly strung.

  A physical examination of Landru followed. The doctors recorded the two serious head injuries that Landru had suffered, without exploring how these accidents might have affected his mental faculties. In the same superficial fashion, the authors merely reported Landru’s complaints about severe headaches “at the top of his skull”, accompanied by dizzy spells and disturbed vision.

  Viewed in the round, the doctors thought Landru resembled “a minor employee whose eyes are full of intelligence, with correct manners, neatly dressed, his hair and beard well groomed”. They did not see him as prone to euphoria (“un excité”), or depressed or delusional. On the other hand, “conversation with Landru is interesting because of its richness and variety.”

  They arrived at the delicate matter of Landru’s “morals”. Landru insisted that he had never indulged in “sexual excesses”; nor did he have “impulses of a sadistic nature”. Rather than discuss his sex life, Landru much preferred to talk about his family, displaying “affectionate feelings” for his wife and children:

  “On several occasions he set out for us his ideas on the rights and duties of the father of a family, with the clear intention of proving to us that he was imbued with the patriarchal principle.”

  Once again, Landru denied that any of the missing women had been his mistress. “What a joke!” the doctors quoted him as saying, “Look at my ugly head.”

  Abruptly, the psychiatrists delivered their verdict on Landru’s mental state in four emphatic sentences. Landru had “no trace of psychosis, obsession or pathological impulsion, of a weakening of the intellectual faculties or a state of confusion”. His mentality was “in all points normal, once all questions of criminality are excluded”, a strange caveat that was not explained. They concluded: “Landru is not affected by any mental illness. He must, in consequence, be considered as responsible for his acts.”

  In effect, the psychiatrists were asking the court to trust their judgement that a man on the threshold of insanity in 1904 was perfectly “normal” sixteen years later, even though he had been charged with 11 murders. Only one point was clear at the end of their unsatisfactory report. Vallon, Roubinovitch and Rogues de Fursac had given Bonin the answer he wanted. Moro’s attempt to get Landru committed to an asylum had failed.

  ***

  On the morning of 1 August 1920, a trunk arrived at Nancy station on the overnight train from Paris, travelling first class. Since no passenger claimed the trunk, a porter took it to the station’s left luggage depot. Though Bonin did not yet know it, the trunk was about to disrupt his plans to conclude the investigation of Landru.

  Two days later, the left luggage clerk noticed red stains seeping through the joints of the trunk, which had also started to smell. The trunk was prised open, to reveal a decomposing male corpse, shot through the head. Because the body had begun its journey in Paris, the forensic pathologist Dr Paul was summoned from the capital to Nancy.

  So began l’affaire Bessarabo, featuring a minor writer and journalist called Héra Mirtel, who was charged by Bonin with murdering her second husband, a rich Romanian emigré called Bessarabo. Mme Bessarabo and her daughter by her first marriage had bundled the body into a trunk and put it on the train to Nancy, in the futile hope that no one at the other end would be able to identify the corpse.

  The challenge of dealing with both Landru and Mme Bessarabo (who was also arguably insane) may explain why Bonin made a seemingly strange decision in early September. He formally concluded his investigation of Landru and went on holiday for several weeks to Corrèze. Meanwhile, Bonin assigned another government lawyer called Gazier to draft the réquisitoire définitif, the key judicial text that would set out the case against Landru.

  It was quite common for a busy juge d’instruction to delegate this task to a so-called “substitute”. Yet l’affaire Landru was no ordinary case, as Gazier could tell when he surveyed the mass of paperwork in Bonin’s office. At the latest rough count, more than 7,000 pages of material had piled up in the year and a half since Landru’s arrest: everything from witness statements and medical reports to police expenses claims. Even with Bonin’s guidance, Gazier faced a daunting task.

  Gazier finally delivered his 364-page réquisitoire définitif in December 1920. From the outset, it was impossible to disguise the gaps and inconsistencies in the case. In the preamble, Gazier declared that Landru was a monster in human form, endowed with a “savage energy”; and yet, he was “not at all deranged”, ruling out any suggestion of madness. One by one, Gazier considered the missing fiancées, trying his best to stick to Bonin’s theory that Landru had killed all of them for financial gain. Gazier finally tripped up when he came to penniless 19-year-old Andrée Babelay, who had vanished in April 1917. The reason Landru killed her “escapes us”, Gazier noted tersely.

  Probably on Bonin’s advice, Gazier implicitly acknowledged that the charred bone debris could not be directly tied to any of the seven women known to have disappeared at the Villa Tric. The réquisitoire did not mention the key forensic evidence in the case until page 161, and only then in the form of a rhetorical question about Anna Collomb’s disappearance in December 1916:

  “Will we really need now to confirm her death and her murder by joining the experts in searching the calcified bone debris in the garden at Gambais, where some parts cannot fail to arise from her corpse?”

  The next reference to the debris came on page 322, when the réquisitoire incorrectly stated that “a little bone from a human foot” had been discovered in the oven. In another error, Gazier asserted that human bone fragments had been found in the garden as well as the hangar.

  A bound copy of the réquisitoire was sent to Landru’s defence counsel, as required by law. Moro’s copious notes in the margin told their own story. Overall, the case against Landru did not seem “definitive” at all.

  ***

  Moro was intent on delaying the trial for as long as possible, for two reasons. Firstly, Moro hoped that Landru might start to exhibit such obvious signs of madness that he would have to be sent to a mental asylum. Secondly, with the passage of time, witnesses would find it harder to remember the events in question, offering Moro the opportunity to cast doubt on their testimony.

  In the autumn of 1920, Moro launched a drawn-out appeal against Landru’s sentence in 1914 to exile with hard labour on the island of New Caledonia. The appeal was bound to fail, but until it had been completed, Landru’s murder trial could not take place.

  At the hearing in February 1921, the press and the public got a taste of Landru’s caustic wit.

  “Why were you living under a false name in 1914?” the prosecutor asked at one point.

  “When one is sought by the police,” Landru shot back, “one is not in the habit of leaving one’s calling card at the préfecture.”

  Several journalists were shocked by Landru’s appearance. After almost two years in prison, his beard had gone grey, his muscles had wasted away, and despite his scrawny physique, he had the beginnings of a pot belly. It was hard to imagine that such a wreck of a man had seduced so many women.

  The appeal failed. Landru would still be bound for exile with hard labour, even if he was acquitted of all pending 11 counts of murder and associated thefts and frauds.

  More delays followed, as the authorities in Paris and the department of Seine-et-Oise argued over where the trial would be held. Eventually a compromise was reached. The trial would take place in Versailles, the largest town in Seine-et-Oise, before a local jury and a presiding judge from Paris.

  In June, Landru was transferred from the Santé to the Prison Sain
t-Pierre in Versailles, next door to the Palais de Justice. Landru was incensed. He had grown to like the Santé and took a dim view of the whole idea of a trial. It was clear he was the victim of a “judicial error”, Landru told the prison governor on his arrival. The governor thought differently, dumping Landru in a cell reserved for prisoners awaiting execution.

  Landru set about trying to postpone the trial forever. He insisted on his right to scrutinise every single item of evidence in the case, by which he meant all 7,000 pages of documents, right there in his cell. Through the summer and into the autumn, the documents kept arriving, organised by Landru into a special filing system, which he repeatedly adjusted.

  At the end of September, he complained that his spectacles were too weak for the “work of rehabilitation” he was undertaking. A stronger pair was brought for him.

  The opening day of the trial was finally fixed for Monday, 7 November; Landru objected that he had barely begun to master his brief. When this delaying tactic failed, Landru wrote to the judge at the end of October to explain that he was too ill and weak to appear in court. Dr Paul conducted one of his useful medical examinations and declared that Landru was fit enough to face justice. As a precaution, the prison put Landru on a special diet with plenty of meat to keep up his strength.

  On Monday, 31 October, Le Journal splashed with its curtain-raiser for the trial. “This is not a novel,” Landru’s mistress Fernande Segret informed the newspaper’s one million readers across France. “It has seemed right to me to pull out from my memories the personality of a Landru unknown to all, except me, and to shed light on a personage whose case, unique in judicial annals, has spilt so much ink and provoked so much curiosity.”

  Fernande’s ghostwritten memoir, Souvenirs of a Survivor, ran for the rest of the week, as she poured out a torrent of “secrets” from her “intimate life” with Landru: “the most seductive companion, the most fervent and attentive lover one could possibly find”.

  Rival newspapers ignored Fernande and focused on Landru’s chances of avoiding the death penalty. Le Gaulois, a right-wing daily, had no doubt concerning the verdict. “Conscience recoils before the image of such a monster,” it commented. “Eleven lives” had come to Landru “full of strength, confidence, even sometimes love, only to be annihilated abruptly without leaving the shadow of a trace.”

  Unintentionally, Le Gaulois had made the defence’s argument. Here was a case with no bodies, no “definitive proof ”, nothing but “presumptions”, Moro told the colonial L’Echo d’Alger, one of the few newspapers to keep an open mind.

  On Sunday, 6 November, the eve of the trial, Moro travelled to Versailles to check that Landru really was prepared for what lay ahead. He found Landru in one of his upbeat moods. “Never has my confidence in a happy outcome to my trial been so great,” Landru enthused to a guard after Moro departed. “You will see that everything will be resolved.”

  Next morning, in freezing, overcast weather, Moro’s chauffeur-driven car arrived at the Palais de Justice just before noon. Moro stepped out, greeted the waiting press, and was ushered with Navières through a side door reserved for lawyers and witnesses.

  Moro knew exactly how he would construct Landru’s defence. He would not dispute the many charges of theft and fraud, even though Landru maintained that he had not stolen anything from the missing women. True to his hatred of the death penalty, Moro’s sole aim would be to save a man he despised from the guillotine.

  PART THREE

  THE TRIAL

  7 – 30 November 1921

  Chapter 13

  Chivalry No Longer Exists

  A little door, almost hidden behind the defendant’s bench, pops open and the man everyone awaits is there. The public lets out an “Ah!” of satisfaction; everyone stands up to catch a glimpse of the accused. Landru appears flattered by this curiosity; he smiles, strokes his beard and obediently follows the three gendarmes who direct him to his bench.

  Le Petit Parisien

  Day One: Monday, 7 November

  He laid out his colour-coded dossiers on the bench, next to his bowler hat and thick, steel-framed glasses. He took out his pens, leaving one in the left breast pocket of his tunic as a back-up. And then he surveyed the scene before him.

  The jurors sat directly across the well of the court from Landru: 12 men drawn from the villages and small towns of the department of Seine-et-Oise. They were farmers, shopkeepers and municipal officials who the previous Friday, in the same court, had found a cobbler guilty of setting fire to a haystack, believing his wife and her lover were concealed in the bales.

  To Landru’s left, the press sat on several rows of reserved benches at the front of the audience. All the reporters were men apart from the novelist Sidonie Colette, swathed in furs, who had been commissioned by Le Matin to write a profile of Landru. Colette could already imagine Landru at work on the bodies of his victims, carving up the bones; “then, his job done,” she whispered to another journalist, “his tools wiped and cleared away, going out to feed some bread to the little birds gathered by the door.”

  When Landru looked up from his notes, he could see the audience taking their places in the two-tier public gallery, which had seats for about 250 spectators; among them his recently divorced former wife, come to observe him discreetly.

  Most of the lower gallery had been set aside to accommodate 153 prosecution witnesses and six defence witnesses who would be individually sworn in before the hearing began. They looked grim, as if to remind Landru of all his alleged atrocities against their loved ones since he first romanced Jeanne Cuchet in 1914.

  Philomène and Georges Friedman sat near to Andrée Babelay’s mother Mme Colin, who sobbed noisily into her handkerchief at the memory of her lost teenage daughter. Célestine Buisson’s housemaid sister Marie and Anna Collomb’s sister Ryno, whose joint detective work had finally trapped Landru, nodded when they recognised each other. Only Fernande Segret, basking in her new-found fame, seemed happy to be in court; she wore the “beatific expression of a showgirl”, one reporter noted unkindly.

  No one noticed the absence of witnesses whose stories did not fit the prosecution case. Jeanne Cuchet’s shirtmaker friend Pierre Capdevieille, who had first-hand knowledge of her poverty, had not been called. Nor had Mme Hardy, Jeanne and Landru’s inquisitive neighbour in the village of La Chaussée, whose recollection of the couple’s movements in the summer of 1914 contradicted the Friedmans’ account. One potential witness had never been located by the police, a shopgirl who had faithfully tended the grave of Berthe Héon’s daughter Marcelle. Juliette Auger’s moment would nonetheless come.

  To the jury’s left, the chief prosecuting attorney Robert Godefroy, dressed in scarlet robes, sat hunched over his notes. Born in Le Havre, Godefroy, 54, was a steady barrister on the Paris circuit whose solid, thickset appearance hinted at his ponderous style in court. He seemed a safe pair of hands to guide the jurors through the case set out in the réquisitoire définitif, which he had read and annotated in great detail. Godefroy was not without a little vanity. He had a coiffed goatee beard and during the trial would assemble a thick volume of press cuttings as a personal souvenir.

  Yet Godefroy was not Landru’s main adversary, as would soon become clear. Under the French judicial system, the presiding judge Maurice Gilbert would lead the examination of Landru and the witnesses, exposing the strengths and weaknesses of their testimony for the benefit of the jury. Gilbert, 50, and Moro went back a long way. In 1912, Gilbert had been the investigating magistrate who constructed the false case against the entirely innocent anarchist Eugène Dieudonné, represented by Moro. Since then, Gilbert had risen to become a senior judge in Paris who looked the part, with a waxed moustache, luxuriant beard and an Olympian manner in court.

  Gilbert had done his best to satisfy the needs of the press. Nine telephone booths in the corridor outside the courtroom would enable reporters to dictate their copy back to Paris in time for the overnight editions. Gilbert had als
o admitted press photographers to the hearing. Two of them were already snapping Landru from directly in front of the judges’ bench.

  A photograph of the court taken from the upper gallery, minutes before the start of the trial, showed Moro gazing nonchalantly at one of the chandeliers suspended from the ceiling, his mind seemingly elsewhere. It was a performance, like everything Moro did in court, designed to show the jurors that he had done his homework and had no need even to consult his brief.

  This illusion was sustained by Navières, sitting to Moro’s left, who was busy making the first of hundreds of notes that he would slide across to Moro during the trial. Directly behind Moro and Navières, Landru was also scribbling away in his colour-coded dossiers. From Moro’s point of view, Landru’s absorption in these files was desirable. Over the next three weeks, the scheduled duration of the trial, one of Moro’s main challenges would be to make his volatile, caustic client keep his mouth shut.

  It was 12.30 pm. Gilbert called the court to order.

  ***

  Gilbert read out to the jurors the oath that each of them had to swear. They must listen to the evidence “without hatred or malice, fear or favour” and reach a verdict “following your conscience or your intimate conviction (‘intime conviction’) with the firmness that becomes an upright free man”.

  As each juror stood and raised his right arm to take the oath, Moro inspected them through his tortoiseshell spectacles. Behind Moro, Landru leafed through his dossiers, making notes, his glasses suspended at the end of his beaky nose, oblivious to the photographers jostling to take his picture.

  The clerk of the court now read out the acte d’accusation, a 76-page charge sheet that catalogued in exhaustive, repetitive detail the 11 counts of murder and 37 related counts of theft and fraud. After half an hour of this tedium, the novelist Colette’s patience snapped. She was here to write about Landru for Le Matin (edited by her husband) and time was short if she wanted to get a good look at the Bluebeard of Gambais. While the clerk droned on, Colette strolled across the well of the court and sat on a step in front of the jury box, straight opposite Landru. Godefroy flapped furiously at Colette to go back to her seat and when she ignored him, he signalled to an official to make her move: