by Landru's Secret- The Deadly Seductions of France's Lonely Hearts Serial Killer (retail) (epub)
Juliette recalled that Berthe had been alone when she arrived at the apartment. Berthe had told Juliette that she had just laid fresh flowers on Marcelle’s grave and then spoke of her “joy” at sailing soon for Tunis with Monsieur Petit. It would be a whole new life after all her sorrows, Berthe had said.
Landru, alias Petit, had then returned, just as Berthe was giving Juliette some jewellery that had belonged to Marcelle:
“All of a sudden she began to sob, as she talked about the death of her daughter. Monsieur Petit interrupted and remarked to her that one could not live with the dead who did not leave their tombs. I was deeply shocked by his comment.”
Berthe had obediently wiped her tears away but Landru, alias Petit, had not finished chastising her. He told Berthe that they would be in Tunisia for at least three years before his next trip back to Paris, so there would be no chance for her to visit Marcelle’s grave in the meantime. Berthe had begun to cry again.
A few minutes later, Berthe had accompanied Juliette to the nearby metro station. Before saying goodbye, Berthe had told Juliette that her fiancé had promised to pay for a marble headstone for Marcelle’s grave. Berthe had asked Juliette to look after Marcelle’s grave, a commission that Juliette had gladly fulfilled.
Juliette’s story, heard in silence, was over. Landru rose slowly to his feet and nodded courteously at her:
“I do not doubt the sincerity of the witness but I take note that she is the only witness who has come to speak of Mme Héon having lived at Avenue des Ternes.”
“Do you recognise the witness?” Godefroy asked Landru.
“Not at all.”
“Do you recognise nonetheless that Mme Héon lived at Avenue des Ternes?”
“I never saw her there.” Landru suggested that perhaps the witness was confused about events that had happened seven years ago.
Moro tried to contain the severe damage caused by Juliette’s exposure of Landru’s lies and cruelty towards Berthe. Overruling Landru, Moro said the defence accepted that Berthe had lived with Landru at 45 Avenue des Ternes. Moro would add only one comment: the police had failed to trace Landru and a woman to this address and it was not the defence’s task to fill the gaps in the investigation.
***
Annette Pascal’s elder sister Louise Fauchet returned to the witness stand, determined to keep her palpable anxiety at bay for long enough to give her evidence. In a faltering voice, Louise recalled how she had invited Annette to come to Toulon in the spring of 1918, when the Germans were bombing Paris. Louise had even sent Annette 80 francs for the train ticket.
“I had brought her up and she used to call me her ‘little maman’,” Louise explained, adding bleakly: “I never received a reply.”
Gilbert thanked Louise for her helpful testimony and moved on to the next witness.
So far, the women witnesses had worn sober shades of grey, brown and black. Louise’s daughter Marie-Jeanne came dressed to kill in a tight-waisted skirt cut just below the knee, high-heeled laced boots and a dazzling white stole, the whole ensemble set off by a sombrero in honour of her late aunt. Marie-Jeanne took the oath, flashed an icy glance at Landru, and looked up at Gilbert. She was ready to answer any questions he might wish to ask her, Marie-Jeanne announced to Gilbert in her sing-song Mediterranean accent – “like a little bird”, according to Le Figaro.
“This gentleman was very gallant,” Marie-Jeanne said, flicking her little finger in Landru’s direction. “He used to bring us cakes.”
“Monsieur Mystère”, as Marie-Jeanne called him, had for a long time refused to give Annette his address. He had also declined to sleep with Annette at her apartment while Marie-Jeanne was there.
“He once took her off to a hotel to spend the night with him,” Marie-Jeanne remembered. “Next morning my aunt told me he had been – oh! so gentle with her.” Landru’s love letters to Annette, which Marie-Jeanne had also enjoyed reading, had been “oh, so beautifully written”.
“He asked me, ‘When are you leaving Paris, little Marie?’” Here, she mimicked Landru’s suburban drawl.
(“Laughter”: Le Petit Parisien)
She waved her hand at Landru. “It is perhaps because I knew too many things about the monsieur present here that he paid the cost of my journey home.”
(“Laughter”: Le Rappel)
Marie-Jeanne recalled how she had visited Rue de Rochechouart in January 1918, bearing a note from Annette for the man they had known as “Lucien Forest”; how she had learned from the concierge that he used another alias, “Lucien Guillet”; and how she had slipped the note under his door, without knocking – a mistake, Marie-Jeanne acknowledged.
Lagasse, the lawyer acting for Marie-Jeanne’s mother, asked whether they would have heard from Annette if she had still been alive.
“Oh! monsieur. She would have written to us even if she could only have used her blood.”
(“Murmuring”: Le Rappel)
Moro stood up, tired of Marie-Jeanne’s deliberately provocative performance.
“Was it true, mademoiselle,” he enquired blandly, “that you visited Gambais with Landru?”
“There was never any question of me going to Gambais with the defendant,” Marie-Jeanne retorted.
Clearly, then, Moro continued, she had no first-hand knowledge of the house where Annette had supposedly vanished.
Marie-Jeanne could not deny his point. With one simple question, Moro had exposed to the jury that she knew nothing about what had passed between Landru and Annette in Gambais.
***
Having dealt with l’affaire Pascal, Gilbert went back to the interrupted hearing on Marie-Thérèse Marchadier, the last of the missing fiancées, who had vanished at Gambais in January 1919. Several of Marie-Thérèse’s friends, all middle-aged prostitutes, were called in turn to testify.
The first, Adrienne Poillot, had gone to great trouble to make sure the authorities could obtain her testimony. In the spring of 1919, after giving a statement to police, Adrienne had left Paris for Strasbourg, her home city, where she had been admitted to hospital for an operation on her leg. While she was convalescing, Adrienne had been interviewed again by the Strasbourg police about her friendship with Marie-Thérèse.
Nine months later, Adrienne was told that the investigating magistrate Bonin wished to interview her in Paris. Adrienne had written to explain that she could not afford the train fare, but could answer Bonin’s questions by letter and would of course testify at Landru’s trial.
And here she was, mustering all her dignity as she took the oath.
Gilbert treated Adrienne as a necessary evil, in the absence of more respectable witnesses. He scarcely bothered to question her about why she had lent Marie-Thérèse one of her griffon dogs to take to Gambais, even though Adrienne’s testimony contained a curious detail. According to Adrienne, Marie-Thérèse had promised to return the dog in a few days’ time. If true, Marie-Thérèse’s pledge cast some doubt on whether she had seriously intended to settle in the country as Landru’s wife.
Adrienne was dismissed and a muddle ensued, as the court bailiff mistakenly summoned Fernande Segret rather than Marie-Thérèse’s best friend Yvonne Le Gallo. Fernande tottered to the witness stand, already in tears, and apparently on the verge of fainting. A chair was brought and in a shaky voice she took the oath, confirming she was “Fernande Segret, 28 years old, artiste lyrique”. At this point the clerk realised the bailiff ’s error. Offering the court’s apologies, Gilbert told Fernande that her testimony would be heard tomorrow and she was led away, “amid ‘ahs!’ of compassion and disappointment from the audience”.
Yvonne Le Gallo, 48, now took the oath, describing herself as a seamstress. Moro decided to have some fun at her expense.
“Mme Le Gallo has indicated that she exercises the profession of dressmaker,” Moro remarked. “Does she perhaps have another profession?”
“Mind your own business!” Yvonne shot back.
(“Laughter”: Le Gauloi
s)
Like Adrienne, Yvonne was on and off the witness stand in a few minutes, despite knowing far more about Marie-Thérèse’s rackety life than anyone else. The only subject of interest to Gilbert and Godefroy was Yvonne’s remark that Marie-Thérèse had displayed “a mania for marriage”. Still smarting from her needless humiliation by Moro, Yvonne did not explain exactly what Marie-Thérèse had meant.
***
Day Fourteen: Tuesday, 22 November
“It is a ridiculous utensil, scarcely bigger than a bedside table,” Lucien Coulond wrote of Landru’s rusty little oven, plonked on Tuesday morning in front of the jury box. Coulond thought the oven was far too small to burn human corpses.
The prosecution had hoped to call Mme Falque, the comfortably off widow who had lent Landru money at an extortionate rate in the winter of 1918–19. However, Mme Falque was ill, so Gilbert referred to her witness statement, in which she remembered being unimpressed by Landru’s oven (cuisinière) during her only visit to Gambais.
According to Mme Falque, Landru had retorted that one could burn anything in his cuisinière. His remark was relevant to the case, Gilbert suggested to Landru, who objected that “upwards of 5,000 Parisian concierges” might say the same thing when showing a new tenant around their apartment.
Fernande now made her second appearance of the trial. Mistinguett, once again in the audience, watched agog with the rest of the gallery as Fernande walked unsteadily to her chair on the witness stand, looking at any moment as if she might faint.
“What is your profession?” Gilbert asked Fernande.
“Artiste lyrique,” she murmured.
Encouraged by Gilbert, Fernande recalled her literary discussions with Landru on a boating pond in the Bois de Boulogne, their evenings out at the Opéra-Comique, his proposals of marriage; and then suddenly she clutched her throat.
“I’m choking! I’m choking!” Fernande gasped, subsiding backwards into the arms of the clerk of the court. He whipped out a bottle of smelling salts that he had secreted in his robes, having observed Fernande at close quarters the previous day. A doctor came forward from the audience and Fernande gradually came round, watched intently by Landru.
After twenty minutes, she felt strong enough to answer more questions from Gilbert.
Yes, she had visited the Villa Tric six or seven times and had seen the rifle that Landru kept there, plus some cartridges. No, she had never noticed any strange smells or fumes at the property. Yes, she had seen other women’s clothes in the bedrooms. She had accepted Landru’s explanation that they belonged to an occasional female tenant.
Gilbert asked Landru if he had anything to say to the witness. Landru shook his head. Moro stood up, exuding geniality. He had a question for Mlle Segret, if she could oblige him.
“One day, at Gambais, you cooked a meal in this oven, did you not?” Moro enquired, pointing at the cuisinière.
“Oui, maître,” Fernande replied meekly, using Moro’s formal title. “What did you see when you opened the oven door? A human skull, some bone fragments, perhaps?”
Fernande smiled nervously.
“This is my client’s trial” Moro said coldly, all courtesy gone. “You have to answer my question. Did you see bone fragments in the cuisinière?”
“Non, non,” Fernande mumbled, looking as if she might faint again.
Moro sat down; he had no further questions. Fernande was led out of court, still muttering “non, non” through her tears.
***
Fernande’s exit marked a staging post in the trial. Behind lay all the relatives, concierges, friends and acquaintances who had testified to the women’s disappearances. None of them had any direct evidence of murder to offer the court – not even Célestine Buisson’s sister Marie, who had visited the Villa Tric. Still to come were the experts who the prosecution hoped would add some essential forensic ballast to the case.
Lucien Coulond of Le Journal was no longer the only reporter struck by the dearth of firm proof that Landru had killed the missing women. In a report with the telling headline “The Enigma of Gambais”, Félix Belle of Le Gaulois noted that the prosecution’s case rested “on one thing only: the discovery of the bone fragments and the confirmation by experts that they are indeed human bones”. Yet it was impossible to say conclusively that the fragments had come from the skeletons of any of the seven women known to have vanished at the Villa Tric.
Under the French criminal code, the jury could convict Landru of murder purely on the mass of circumstantial evidence that pointed to his guilt. Léon Bailby, editor of L’Intransigeant, went further in a front-page commentary. Bailby did not know “for a fact” that Landru had murdered the women but argued that a “presumption” of guilt was good enough to send him to the guillotine. In Bailby’s view, the war had killed so many young men who should have lived that “one’s scrupules have become blunted”.
No other journalist dared go as far in dismissing due process as Bailby, who two decades later would become a leading propagandist for the Vichy regime. What the press wanted was hard evidence that situated Landru at the scene of a murder. Instead, Godefroy kept promising “proofs” and “powerful arguments”, which he had so far conspicuously failed to deliver.
***
Dr Charles Vallon, 69, was a slight man with a grey beard and a pronounced limp, the result of a knife attack by a patient at his mental asylum in 1904, shortly after his first examination of Landru. The inmate had stabbed Vallon in the neck, leaving him partially paralysed. Despite his frailty, Vallon spoke with the clinical authority of a criminal psychiatrist accustomed to delivering opinions in court that brooked no argument.
Vallon reminded the jury that in 1904 he had been clear that Landru had not yet crossed the “frontiers of madness”. He did not mention his warning to Landru’s wife about her husband’s future behaviour. On the contrary, Vallon maintained that he and his fellow psychiatrists were sure Landru was now completely “normal”. After Vallon, his colleagues Dr Joseph Rogues de Fursac and Dr Jacques Roubinovitch confirmed his diagnosis, having examined Landru “from head to toes”.
Gilbert and Godefroy did not ask the three psychiatrists why they had excluded “all questions of criminality” from their diagnosis. More curiously, neither did Moro.
The inconsistency between the doctors’ assessment of Landru’s mental state in 1904 and 1919 looked at first sight like an ideal opportunity for Moro to revive the whole question of whether Landru was fit to stand trial. It was plain from Landru’s erratic behaviour in court that he was not “normal” in any common understanding of the word. Yet Moro did not cross-examine the psychiatrists. Moro perhaps feared that if he suggested Landru was mad, the jury might infer that the defendant was a deranged serial killer and convict him anyway.
Landru grasped this point with impeccable logic. “I wish to thank messieurs les experts,” he observed, “because the crimes of which I am accused are so monstrous and perverse that only a madman could have committed them. Since they have declared me of sound mind, then I could not have committed these crimes.”
***
Day Fifteen: Wednesday, 23 November
Maurice Chevalier, currently starring with Mistinguett in Paris en l’Air, made his first appearance at the trial on Wednesday. The 33-year-old singer and actor took his seat just as Gilbert made an extraordinary admission.
“In all honesty, the prosecution acknowledges that it is unaware of the means by which you committed the deeds of which you are accused,” Gilbert told Landru. “It is reduced to hypotheses.”
“False hypotheses,” Landru remarked.
Gilbert ignored this counter-thrust and proceeded to speculate for the jury’s benefit about how Landru might have killed his victims. The judge referred to Landru’s rifle, which he had kept at the Villa Tric, while at Rue de Rochechouart the police had found a book about notorious female poisoners.
“One does not kill someone with a book,” Landru retorted.
Gilbe
rt observed that glass phials had been found in the cellar at Vernouillet, supporting the theory that Landru might have poisoned his fiancées. Finally, Landru had let slip that strangulation had been “the gentlest of deaths” for the dogs he had killed in the garden at Gambais.
“Oh, look!” Landru exclaimed, incredulous at Gilbert’s theorising.
Gilbert moved on to how Landru had disposed of the women’s remains. The judge said the prosecution took it as “a given” that Landru had burnt his victims; indeed, several witnesses had noticed “a suspicious glow and smell” while passing the Villa Tric.
Landru raised a bony finger: “I would very much like to know what distinguishes a suspicious glow and a suspicious smell from glows and smells that are normal.” Furthermore, why had he not been allowed to witness the experiments on his oven conducted by the forensic scientists?
Gilbert stated that it was not the “custom” for the accused to be present at such experiments and that the court had full confidence in the experts’ integrity.
“That’s not what Landru is protesting about,” Navières said, making a rare intervention. According to Navières, the key issue “was the origin of the bone fragments that were collected in his absence”.
Navières had touched on an extremely sensitive subject for the prosecution. On 13 April 1919, the day after his arrest, Landru had attended the detective Dautel’s initial “survey” of the villa. However, Landru had not witnessed the full-scale official search of the house and grounds on 29 April 1919, when the bone fragments and charred scraps of women’s clothing had been discovered beneath the leaves. In the meantime, the police had failed to attach seals to the property, as required by law. It was a bad mistake, allowing the defence to argue that the fragments might have been planted as false “proof ” of murder.
Gilbert sidestepped Navières by noting irrelevantly that Landru had attended Dautel’s “investigation” of the villa on 13 April 1919, whose purpose had been “to find the corpses”.