by Landru's Secret- The Deadly Seductions of France's Lonely Hearts Serial Killer (retail) (epub)
“Mme Colette protests; she can only get a good view of Landru from here. The official insists. However, out of deference to her, the clerk of the court stops reading his enormous dossier.”
At last, Colette grudgingly agreed to return to the press benches where she soon fell asleep, snoring loudly.
The reporter from Le Figaro was struck by Landru’s equanimity in the face of the terrible crimes that the clerk was slowly itemising:
“Sometimes he looks in his pocket for the new spectacles that his doctors have prescribed for him. He puts them nearer or further from his notes in order to clean the lenses… Then he settles back, joins his hands together and listens to the charges that he must know by heart.”
The communist daily L’Humanité, keen to attack the government, deplored the “poverty of information” and “puerile editing” of the acte d’accusation. The mass market daily Le Journal thought the charge sheet was “littered with sententious phrases and melodramatic paragraphs”.
Such press commentary was a particular concern for the prosecution because the jurors were not cut off from the outside world in any meaningful way. At the end of each day they were free to go home, some of them travelling on the same train as journalists covering the trial. Next morning, the jurors would be free to read the newspapers and discuss the case with their families and friends.
Colette’s sketch, cobbled together once she had woken up, left Le Matin’s readers no wiser about what Landru was really like. She had “searched in vain for any sign of cruelty in his deeply entrenched eyes”, Colette reported, but all she had found was “the same unfathomable disdain one sees in caged beasts”. Confusingly, Colette also felt that Landru resembled a tailor’s dummy in a shop window.
***
At 4.15 pm the clerk sat down, his voice hoarse with the effort. Moro rose to make his first intervention.
He wished to alert the court to a strange piece of news that had come to light in the past few days: a chambermaid called Désirée Guillin had also made contact with Landru during the war. “In the interests of justice”, Moro could refute press speculation that Landru’s missing fiancée Marie-Angélique Guillin might have been found. The shared surname was just a coincidence.
Speaking for the defence, Moro was struck by how Désirée Guillin’s belated emergence illustrated the gaps in the police investigation. Moro could have also pointed out that Désirée Guillin was living proof that the police had not traced all the women who had contacted Landru during the war, as the prosecution suggested. Yet Moro refrained from drawing this inference, since it was bound to lead the jurors to wonder whether Landru had killed more fiancées than the ten names on the charge sheet.
Gilbert thanked Moro and turned to Landru: Did the defendant have anything to say in answer to the charges? Landru stood up; he did indeed have something important to announce to the court:
“I will only say a simple thing. I have always protested my innocence. I have never ceased to do so since the first day. Always in the absolute secrecy to which I was bound, I have demanded proofs. I have received no reply. You have just heard an eloquent submission, but of proofs, not a single one! With the greatest energy, I maintain my innocence and count on the hearing to establish it.”
Landru had said too much. In referring to his duty of “absolute secrecy”, he had hinted that he knew more about the fate of the missing women than he was willing to reveal. With their lawyers’ eyes, Godefroy and Gilbert had also gleaned a useful fact from Landru’s verbose statement. Moro evidently had no control over Landru, who would have been better advised to declare his innocence and say nothing else.
***
Day Two: Tuesday, 8 November
Light snow fell overnight, turning to slush in the morning. Moro arrived half an hour late for the start of the second day’s session, hurrying into the courtroom with Navières in tow. His car had broken down en route from Paris, Moro explained. He apologised in turn to the jurors, Gilbert, Godefroy and Landru, adding that if he was late in future the hearing should begin without him.
Moro began to sketch cartoons of the press photographers, seemingly indifferent to the first moment of real danger for Landru as Gilbert began his examination of the defendant.
Moro’s powerlessness to intervene was underscored when he tried to stop the judge from asking Landru about his early criminal career, on the grounds that it was irrelevant to the present case.
“I register your objection,” Gilbert replied smoothly, “but I believe it necessary, for the clarity of these debates and the edification of messieurs les jurés, to recall the methods Landru used to attract dupes, methods which he subsequently perfected but which were always the same.”
Gilbert ordered Landru to stand up.
“Your parents were honest workers,” Gilbert began. “Not far from your home there was a Mme Rémy, who had a daughter.”
“She even had two,” Landru corrected Gilbert.
“Let us say two then. In any case, you married one of them, Marie-Catherine.” Rapidly, Gilbert ran through Landru’s descent into petty crime and lack of a regular, respectable profession.
“That just shows the police didn’t research me properly,” Landru retorted. “You’re incriminating the police?”
“Only their prestige,” Landru replied cryptically. “Did they ever discover me during the war? No, it was the alleged victims who found me.”
“It is worth remembering that this entire investigation was conducted in spite of you. When monsieur le juge d’instruction [Bonin] informed you about the evidence gathered by the police, you said nothing.”
“It isn’t for me to enlighten the police or guide this court. For the past three years I have been accused of things that the missing women never did.”
“You perhaps made it impossible for them to complain. But let us not get too far ahead of the story,” Gilbert went on, riled by Landru’s pedantry.
Gilbert reached the 283 women who the police estimated had made contact with Landru during the war, via lonely hearts adverts and matrimonial agencies. Why had Landru, a husband with four children, pretended to be interested in marrying them?
Landru had already figured out his answer to this inevitable question:
“Messieurs les jurés, it was an innocent, little commercial ruse. Because of the war, many single women who were hard up were looking to sell their furniture, just as many people in the occupied zone would be looking for second-hand furniture after the war. Here was an opportunity for me to exploit. But lots of these women were embarrassed by their situation. Discussing marriage was a simple way to introduce myself to them, after which it became easy to get down to business.”
Several jurors could not help smiling as Landru ploughed on:
“In commercial matters, any publicity is permissible in order to attract customers. My advertising system was matrimonial notices.”
The same “simple” system explained the suspicious, neatly written list of ten women, plus one young man, in his carnet.
“It was a list made by a good merchant, or rather, a personal indication allowing him to remember the clients with whom he had business,” Landru said.
Why, then, Gilbert asked, did Landru use code names for three of the women: “Brésil”, “Crozatier” and “Havre”?
“When I forgot the woman’s name, I wrote down the name of the street or the country where she came from.”
Landru was into his stride, acting as his own defence counsel, while
Moro sketched frenetic cartoons as a distraction.
“Only these 11 names count,” Landru carried on. “One hasn’t wished to seek any other victims, but perhaps there are some,” he smirked.
Laughter rippled around the public gallery, prompting Moro to protest about the noise. Gilbert ordered silence in court and the examination resumed.
The judge read out one of the pre-written love letters that the police had found in Landru’s garage in Clichy. Were these really just a fur
niture dealer’s calling card? Gilbert asked.
“They’re just drafts. Show me one which is signed by me.”
“You were quite the cavalier, Landru,” Gilbert persisted.
“Chivalry no longer exists,” Landru replied, as if he was stating the obvious.
***
Mme Jeanne Isoré from Lille was ushered into the courtroom, her thin features half-hidden by a black demi-veil. The first witness of the trial had “the air of a provincial haberdasher’s wife”, L’Excelsior observed with Parisian disdain, as Mme Isoré nervously took the oath.
She had remarried since her disastrous encounter with Landru more than a decade ago and did not wish to reveal her new name; nor did she want her picture taken. To cap her misery, Mme Isoré had a heavy cold and several times had to repeat her testimony in a croaky voice because the jurors could not hear her.
In 1909, recently widowed, Mme Isoré had been seduced by Landru, who had pretended to be a businessman from the northern town of Amiens. Shortly afterwards, Mme Isoré had accepted his proposal of marriage.
Gilbert chose to humiliate her further by reading one of Landru’s love letters.
“I hope, my dear Jeanne,” Landru had written, “that your good mother lives long enough to be assured that she has consigned her daughter to a tender heart that is worthy of her own.”
Foolishly, Mme Isoré had let Landru get his hands on her savings, worth about 10,000 francs, via a bogus premarital “contract”. He had been caught almost immediately with her investment deeds when he attempted to cash them in at a bank. Tried and convicted, Landru had spent the next two and a half years in jail on the outskirts of Lille.
“What do you have to say, Landru?” Gilbert asked, once Mme Isoré had finished her testimony.
“It was ten years ago and I repaid the money,” Landru remarked, adding that he had “atoned” for his “error”.
Mme Isoré was dismissed, having played a minor, but important role in the prosecution’s narrative. As cast, Mme Isoré was an early victim of Landru, before he “perfected” his distinctive marriage swindle by killing his fiancées so they could not go to the police. She was lucky, in short, to be alive.
From the defence’s perspective, Mme Isoré’s survival supported the argument that Landru’s fiancées were missing rather than dead. Yet Moro refrained from making this point, aware that Landru steadfastly refused to say what had happened to the ten women on the charge sheet.
***
Amédée Dautel, the next witness to appear, offered Moro his first opportunity to go on to the attack. Visibly nervous, the detective recalled Landru’s behaviour in the hours after his arrest on 12 April 1919. Dautel said that when Landru was asked to empty his pockets on his arrival at the police station, the suspect made a gesture to hide his carnet.
Landru rose to protest, but Moro waved him down.
If what Dautel said was correct, Moro asked politely, why had he not mentioned this incriminating incident in his original police report? Dautel shrugged; he had no answer, for Moro had caught him embellishing his testimony.
Dautel was followed by his deputy, Jules Belin, well known to the reporters in court as a colourful police source. Moro set about exposing Belin as an unreliable loudmouth, reinforcing the impression left by Dautel that the police could not be trusted to tell the truth.
Belin’s credibility collapsed as soon as Gilbert began to examine him. Belin claimed that he had conducted a search of Landru’s apartment at Rue de Rochechouart, with Landru in attendance. Moro cut in, accusing Belin of misleading the court. In fact, Moro observed, the official search of the apartment had been conducted by Brigadier Riboulet of the Paris police judiciaire, almost a month after Landru’s arrest. On the day of Riboulet’s search, 10 May 1919, Belin and Dautel had been in Gambais, supervising the drainage of two ponds in the woods near the village.
Belin tried to correct Moro: he had been referring, of course, to his and Dautel’s search of the apartment in Landru’s presence on the day of the arrest, 12 April 1919.
“Impossible!” Landru barked, wagging his finger at Belin; the record clearly showed that he, Landru, had not returned to the apartment until Riboulet’s search on 10 May 1919.
“So did you attend the search on 12 April?” Moro asked Landru.
“Not at Rue de Rochechouart,” Landru replied.
For the past twenty minutes, Godefroy had watched Moro’s demolition of Dautel and Belin with mounting alarm. Godefroy now panicked, rising to “clarify” Inspector Belin’s account, as he put it.
Moro leapt on Godefroy’s error. “I am shocked that the prosecution is attempting to pull back the testimony of one of its witnesses,” he said pointedly to the jurors.
“I will not permit you to say that I tried to pull back evidence,” Godefroy hurled back, enraged by Moro’s slur on his integrity.
“If the rights of the defence are breached in this fashion again,” Moro warned Godefroy, “I will take my hat and briefcase and abandon the trial.”
Godefroy shouted something at Moro, which none of the journalists heard, for “the uproar around the court was intense”. It did not occur to the press that Moro had achieved exactly the effect he wanted. Seen through the eyes of the startled jurors, it looked as if the prosecution was trying to undermine due process.
Unable to restore order, Gilbert suddenly called time on the day’s session, half an hour before the scheduled close at 5.00 pm.
Moro looked stunned. “Monsieur le président, you have given me the floor. I will continue. I will protest in the name of the defence.”
Gilbert made clear his decision was final but Landru was still not done. “I accuse this man of having arrested me illegally,” Landru yelled across the court at Belin. Then Landru was off, escorted by his three guards, back along the cobbled interior alleyway that led to his prison cell.
Chapter 14
Philomène’s Dream
Day Three: Wednesday, 9 November
“Ripped, stained mattresses, an oil lamp and flower vases… dirty linen, pitiful dusty umbrellas”: one by one, Le Petit Parisien recorded Jeanne Cuchet’s meagre possessions, laid out on the evidence table in front of the jurors. Most poignant of all was Jeanne’s battered sewing machine, her only source of income before she had met Landru in early 1914.
Gilbert began by drawing a pen portrait of Jeanne for the jury’s benefit. Summarising the réquisitoire, the judge noted that the widowed Jeanne had discussed her “dream of remarrying” with her sister Philomène and her brother-in-law Georges Friedman. Gilbert chose to ignore Friedman’s claim that Jeanne had been worth 100,000 francs, merely commenting that unnamed witnesses put her fortune at somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 francs.
“Let us just say that she enjoyed an easy situation,” Gilbert observed, as if that settled the question.
The judge assumed that Jeanne had owned the substantial sum of 5,609 francs deposited by Landru in a bank in Chantilly in June 1914.
“It is really extraordinary that an orderly man like you did not record the sum in your carnet,” Gilbert remarked to Landru, forgetting that Landru did not acquire the notebook until 1915.
Landru replied that the deposit represented the “residue” of his legacy from his late father.
“And where was the rest of this inheritance?” Gilbert asked.
“In my pocket!” Landru protested, appealing to the jurors’ common sense.
Gilbert turned to Landru’s travels on the eve of the war between La Chaussée, Paris, and the farm in Normandy where he installed his family. Landru claimed that he had wanted to get his wife and children to “a sheltered place” when France mobilised at the start of August 1914. The truth was more complicated. Gilbert was apparently unaware that Landru had made an earlier journey with his wife to Le Havre in late July, in order to get her out of Paris during his trial in absentia for fraud.
The judge presented Jeanne as a vulnerable woman deceived by a lethal marriage swindler. Land
ru’s pretence that he was only interested in Jeanne’s furniture seemed especially weak, given that they had lived together for several months in La Chaussée and Vernouillet.
Gradually he flagged under Gilbert’s relentless probing. At 3.15 pm, when Gilbert called an interval, a reporter from Le Petit Parisien found that most of the spectators stretching their legs in the corridor thought Landru was making a poor fist of defending himself.
After the break, Gilbert addressed Landru’s move with Jeanne and her 17-year-old son André to Vernouillet in December 1914. Landru said that Jeanne had offered to be his housekeeper at Vernouillet because her apartment in Paris was too big for her and André. Gilbert asked why Landru had signed the rental agreement as “Monsieur Cuchet”.
“To keep up appearances for André’s sake,” Landru replied matter-offactly.
Gilbert got to the point. “How do you explain the disappearance of Mme Cuchet and her son?”
Landru looked up wearily at Gilbert, “visibly tired”, according to L’Ouest-Éclair. “Suddenly he decided to speak amid a deep silence around the court.”
“I arrive at facts that I have never been able to tell the investigation,” Landru said melodramatically.
(“Sensation”: L’Ouest-Éclair)
“There existed between Mme Cuchet, Monsieur Cuchet [André] and me certain private conventions. We did nothing, neither her nor me, which was contrary to the law or morality.”
“You refuse to explain the nature of these conventions?” Gilbert asked. “But absolutely, monsieur le président.”