by Landru's Secret- The Deadly Seductions of France's Lonely Hearts Serial Killer (retail) (epub)
“If you persist with the system of defence that you used during the investigation, the gentlemen of the jury will appreciate your silence,” Gilbert observed sarcastically.
(“Sensation prolongée”: L’Ouest-Éclair)
Moro stood up, desperate to limit the damage caused by Landru’s nonsense about “private conventions”.
“If you please, maître,” Gilbert addressed Moro with silky formality, “let your client reply himself. He is defending himself on his own very well indeed and with great precision when he is able. Any objection that you might be able to produce would only lengthen these exchanges.”
Gilbert had no interest in probing Landru’s relationship with Jeanne’s son André. As portrayed by the réquisitoire, André was just a harmless youth whom Landru had killed because the son was a witness to his mother’s murder. Yet André had clearly irritated Landru. He sneered at the teenager’s “juvenile patriotism”, and in particular regarded André’s letter in January 1915 to his best friend Max Morin as “badly misjudged”. André should not have greeted his imminent call-up with such eagerness, Landru said severely.
***
Jeanne’s friend from her married days, Mme Louise Bazire, slim, sombre and dressed in black, came to the witness stand. After taking the oath, Mme Bazire made a point of staring straight at Landru, a procedure she repeated several times during her testimony. She was not going to be intimidated by the man she was convinced had killed Jeanne.
Mme Bazire told Gilbert that Landru had struck her as a well-educated man when she met him at Jeanne’s apartment in the autumn of 1914.
Moro stood up, and this time Gilbert allowed him to interject.
“Did Mme Cuchet ever display an intention to go to America?” Moro asked Mme Bazire.
“Yes, she did very often, but she never went.”
Moro asked if Mme Bazire could shed any light on the murky issue of Jeanne’s financial situation. Mme Bazire explained that she was well placed to answer, because her husband had been one of the administrators of Martin Cuchet’s paltry estate, which had been wiped out by his medical and funeral costs. Jeanne did not have a fortune, Mme Bazire stated firmly, yet thanks to hard work she had built up “some savings” after her husband’s death.
Moro suggested that Jeanne’s savings must have been quite small as a lowly seamstress earning a few hundred francs per month. Mme Bazire tried to be more specific. Jeanne’s situation had been “precarious” when her husband had died, but she had still managed to accumulate a modest nest egg.
Albert Folvary, the dress shop manager who had employed Jeanne, was next on the witness stand. He was 55 but looked rather older, with white hair, thick bottle-glass spectacles, and a genial, stooping manner. Folvary was pleased to assist the court in any way he could, for he had been fond of Jeanne and sorry when she had handed in her notice to live with her fiancé.
“Was Mme Cuchet sincere in her marriage plans?” Gilbert asked him. “Oh! Absolutely sincere. She loved her son very much and was happy to marry again in order to assure his future.”
This was not quite the answer Gilbert had been expecting. According to the réquisitoire, Jeanne had pursued Landru because she was naïvely infatuated with him, not on account of André.
Like Mme Bazire, Folvary recalled how Jeanne had often talked about starting a new life with André in America or England. Folvary had never taken Jeanne’s chatter seriously, because she could not speak English, and besides, she had possessed “very little savings”.
Jeanne’s brother-in-law Georges Friedman strode to the witness stand, informing the photographers gathered around that he did not want to have his picture in the newspapers. Friedman could not prevent a courtroom artist drawing him as he testified: a paunchy, balding middle-aged man, with a thick black moustache and a double chin that spilled over his stiff white collar.
Friedman said Landru had made “a poor impression” on him when they had met at Jeanne’s apartment in the spring of 1914. Repeating his witness statement, he remarked that he knew Landru was fishy when Landru had obviously lied about doing his military service in Indo-China, where Friedman had also been stationed.
Gilbert took Friedman through his two visits to La Chaussée at Jeanne’s request in August 1914, after Landru had vanished. Friedman said that he, not Jeanne, had discovered Landru’s identity papers inside the little locked chest and that he and Mme Friedman had advised Jeanne to break off her engagement. Friedman then told a curious story about how Landru had turned up on their doorstep a day or two later, asking after Jeanne. According to Friedman, Landru had been given such an earful by Philomène that he had turned and fled.
At this point, Gilbert asked Landru if he wished to give his side of the story. Landru looked up briefly from a thick red dossier he was annotating and shook his head, as if this was a needless distraction from more important work. Nor did Moro wish to cross-examine Friedman, who was obviously relieved. Friedman was thanked by Gilbert and dismissed.
There was plenty in Friedman’s testimony that Moro could have challenged on cross-examination. Friedman’s dates for his two visits to La Chaussée, 2 and 9 August 1914, clashed with the absent Mme Hardy’s recollection that Landru had returned to the village on 2 August and then driven Jeanne to Chantilly station to catch the train to Paris. According to Mme Hardy, Landru had then spent the night of 2–3 August at the villa.
It was not a trivial inconsistency, because France had mobilised on the weekend of 1–2 August and declared war on Germany on Monday, 3 August. If Friedman’s dates were correct, Jeanne must have returned to Paris to be reunited with André before the mobilisation; yet this was certainly not Mme Hardy’s memory.
Friedman’s story about Landru turning up at his home on 10 or 11 August, asking after Jeanne, also appeared suspect. Jeanne’s concierge was sure Jeanne had been at her own apartment on the days in question, and therefore easy for Landru to track down.
None of the inconsistencies in Friedman’s testimony, however, had any bearing on whether Landru had murdered Jeanne and André. Moro did not want to give Friedman the chance to express his certainty of Landru’s guilt or cast doubt on Mme Bazire’s well-founded belief that Jeanne had possessed very little for Landru to steal.
So far, the session had gone well for Moro. He was expecting to do even better with Jeanne’s sister Philomène, the next witness to be summoned.
Like her husband, Philomène did not want her photograph in the papers. An artist’s sketch for Le Petit Parisien showed a homely, middle-aged woman with gentle, rounded features, peeking out from under her bonnet at the court. It was just possible to detect a passing resemblance with her younger sister Jeanne, whose love life had been such a worry to Philomène.
Gilbert asked Philomène whether the tatty furniture next to the witness stand had belonged to Jeanne. Philomène nodded and started to cry silently, her head bowed. Seeing her distress, Gilbert ordered the clerk of the court to bring her a chair, so she could testify sitting down.
Encouraged by Gilbert to take her time, Philomène recovered her composure. She told a story about joining Jeanne and Landru on a day trip in his camionnette to the town of Fresnes, 15 kilometres south of Paris, where the two sisters had been born. The car had broken down, and after repairing it, Landru had driven back to Paris at breakneck speed, causing Philomène to express her alarm. Jeanne, by contrast, had not been afraid at all.
“My sister reassured me that with ‘Monsieur Diard’ one fears nothing,” Philomène recalled.
Philomène had either invented or imagined this anecdote, which was not in her witness statement. In fact, she had only met Landru once, during a day trip to La Chaussée in July 1914.
Landru stood up, in the mood to be his own attorney.
“Madame,” he addressed Philomène, “you told the juge d’instruction [Bonin] that you had the impression I had killed your sister.”
“That’s correct.”
“On what do you base your impression?
”
“A woman would never abandon her earrings,” said Philomène, gesturing at Jeanne’s jewellery on the evidence table. “If one sees them here, it’s because they were taken from her after her death.”
She started crying again. “And because she would be here!” she sobbed at Landru. “Because she would not let a man she loved be condemned! She had a heart, my sister.”
Philomène scanned Jeanne’s clothes, all in a heap on the table, searching for something she could not see. Her sister had made a scanty sky-blue nightdress “to please this man”, Philomène said, pointing contemptuously at Landru. “What became of it?”
Gently, Gilbert informed Philomène that the nightdress had been found in Mlle Fernande Segret’s possession.
(“Émotion”: Le Petit Parisien)
Moro had so far refrained from cross-examining Philomène about the reliability of her testimony. He decided he could not hold off any longer, despite the agonies she was going through. With Gilbert’s permission, Moro asked her about another episode she had described to the police.
“You had a dream, I believe, madame. Would you care to tell messieurs les jurés about it?”
Philomène seemed puzzled for a moment; a dream – yes, of course:
“I had a dream, and in this dream my sister appeared to me, pale and bloodless. She had been cut – right here.” Philomène made a slashing motion across her throat.
‘“It was him, Landru, who did this,’ my sister told me.
“‘Did you suffer?’ I asked her.
“‘No, I was asleep,’ she replied.”
Philomène broke down, unable to help herself now.
“Oh, my sister,” she wept. “Oh, my poor, poor sister.”
Moro had no further questions, realising that he had just made his first serious mistake of the trial. Philomène’s dream was exactly that: a fantasy unsupported by any evidence. But the reality Moro had summoned for the jurors was a woman lost in wrenching, uncontrollable grief for a sister whose life she might have saved.
Chapter 15
Her Private Life Does Not Concern Me
Day Four: Thursday, 10 November
Among the reporters covering the trial was Lucien Coulond, a prominent former war correspondent who had travelled widely in the Middle East. Coulond, 38, was married to an actress and had once hoped to pursue a career on the stage. Writing for Le Journal under his pen name “Edouard Helsey”, he saw the trial as an unfolding drama rather than a dry legal process.
Despite Moro’s misstep with Philomène, Coulond thought the prosecution case had got off to an uncertain start. Coulond was particularly struck by the prosecution’s failure so far to produce any firm evidence that Landru had killed Jeanne and André Cuchet. It was all just conjecture: “The prosecution has told us nothing about the immediate circumstances of this first disappearance.” In Coulond’s view, if the case against Landru depended on l’affaire Cuchet, then it would be difficult to make the murder counts stick.
Coulond’s commentary led the front page of Le Journal on 10 November, followed by a long despatch by the newspaper’s trial reporter. All the other dailies featured Landru on their front pages, as they would continue to do for the rest of the trial. Even L’Humanité, which had initially sneered at the trial as a bourgeois divertissement, felt obliged to satisfy its readers on 10 November with a front-page report, illustrated by a cartoon of Gilbert.
Commentators and feature writers, looking for an excuse to write even more about Landru, attempted to invest his trial with a wider significance. The “Bluebeard of Gambais” was variously depicted as a distraction for a nation still in mourning for 1.3 million war casualties, a proxy for France’s frustrated need to avenge those deaths, and in the conservative press, a terrible warning of what could happen when the “feeble sex” was led astray.
With his thespian eye, Coulond came closest to the truth. Viewed as theatre, the trial was a lurid, unpredictable show, perfect for selling newspapers. Here was the lumbering Godefroy, out of his depth, “flapping his arms and shouting too loudly in an awkward voice which he quickly stifles.” Here was Moro, who “corners, strikes and disarms his adversary”. Here was Philomène and her “horrible dream” (Le Petit Parisien), weeping for her lost sister. Above all, here was a monster with a “savage audacity”, accused of slaughtering ten fiancées, repulsive, volatile and even comic; for when the audience heard that Landru had romanced 283 women, people had “burst out laughing”.
***
The star of the show arrived in court just before 1.00 pm on Thursday, laden down with green, red and yellow dossiers. He was soon absorbed in his notes, as the last of the witnesses in l’affaire Cuchet came and went in rapid succession.
Jeanne’s other brother-in-law, Louis Germain, “podgy and pleased with himself ”, was soon punctured by Moro. Germain (married to the late Martin Cuchet’s sister) denied that Jeanne had ever spoken to him about wanting to leave France with André for a new life in America. Moro pointed out that Germain had reported her comment to Bonin.
“Monsieur Germain was distraught,” Le Populaire reported. “His whole performance had been wiped out.”
Mme Pelletier, Jeanne’s former concierge, a short, stout woman in her late fifties, declared bluntly that Mme Cuchet had “worked a lot but wasn’t rich”. She then told a story about Landru turning up one day at the apartment with two little girls, aged about ten, who he said were his daughters.
“Landru, what do you say?” Gilbert demanded.
Landru ruminated for a moment. It was possible he had made this remark to Mme Pelletier, he said, “but that isn’t a reason why they might have been my daughters.”
A juror raised his hand, wanting to check something Philomène had said.
“Did Mme Cuchet wear earrings and what were they made of?” he asked Mme Pelletier.
“Oui, oui,” she replied, “I think they were made of gold.”
A thin, grey-haired woman, dressed in full mourning, was next on the witness stand. Mme Louise Morin, the mother of André Cuchet’s best friend Max, was allowed to sit, removing her veil and gripping the bar with her black-gloved hand to steady her nerves.
“André wanted to volunteer to fight in the war like my son, but his mother refused to let him go until his contingent was called up,” Mme Morin recalled, her voice almost inaudible. “One day, André declared full of joy that an imminent mobilisation law would allow him to go off without his mother’s consent. She was heartbroken and it was thus that we knew each other.”
Mme Morin told Gilbert how she had warned Jeanne not to marry “such a bandit”, following Jeanne’s discovery of Landru’s identity. “Later, this individual came to tell me that Mme Cuchet and André had left for England, but claimed not to know their address. I never received any more news of the mother. As for my son…”
She paused, sinking back into her misery.
“We know, madame,” said Gilbert, “that your son fell on the field of honour. Please believe that we too bow before your sorrow.”
“The defence, too,” Moro added, rising with his fellow veteran Navières.
Max Morin, André’s hero, had retrained during the war as an aviator. In March 1918 Max’s plane had crashed on take-off, probably from engine failure.
Mme Morin could not continue and was helped from her chair by the clerk of the court. She had offered a glimpse of Jeanne as a more complicated person than the supposedly besotted woman depicted by the prosecution: ambivalent about Landru after discovering his true identity and concerned above all to keep her naïve son André out of the war.
Mme Oudry, the elderly estate agent in Vernouillet, was too ill to testify about how she came to rent The Lodge to Landru in December 1914. Instead, Godefroy read out her witness statement, in which she noted that Landru had signed the contract as “Monsieur Cuchet”.
For some reason, Landru tried to deny what he called this “lie” by Mme Oudry. Moro, who had seen the contract, firmly corrected
Landru.
“Let me speak!” Landru admonished Moro, who with the help of Navières finally got his furious client to sit down.
One of the jurors wanted to know why Landru had pretended in Vernouillet that he was Jeanne’s husband. It was a clever question that tricked Landru into tacitly conceding that he had used the name “Cuchet” on the contract.
“I was being pursued for an ‘indelicacy’ [criminal offence] and needed a false identity as cover,” Landru explained. “It was wartime. A man arriving in a small neighbourhood with a stranger could have seemed peculiar.” Landru stared at the twelve solid, provincial jurors and sensed their dissatisfaction with his answer. “Country folk are excessively curious and suspicious,” he informed them, with all the hauteur of a born Parisian.
***
Landru was beyond Moro’s reach for the rest of the afternoon. At 3.30 pm Gilbert moved on to the Argentinian-born Thérèse Laborde-Line, the third of Landru’s alleged victims. Thérèse had been 46 when she vanished at Vernouillet in July 1915.
Why did Thérèse’s concierge and several neighbours recall her speaking of being engaged to him, a fact that he denied?
Landru smiled: “Monsieur le président, here one has to make a little study in feminine psychology.”
(“Laughter”: Le Journal)
“Women do not like to admit they are financially embarrassed; they prefer to believe in a beautiful marriage. But this little lie proves nothing.”
Where was Thérèse now? Gilbert asked.
“I don’t want to know, it’s none of my business, I’m just a furniture dealer,” Landru snapped. “Don’t ask me about matters beyond my station.”
“Why, Landru,” Godefroy mocked, “you answer very well on certain points, but refuse to respond to others which have the potential to make your head fall off.”
Landru leant forward, “very on edge”, L’Ouest-Éclair reported. “This belongs to the domain of my private life. These women sold me their furniture. I paid them. I do not wish to know what became of them next.”