Landru's Secret
Page 23
“What is surprising,” said Landru, “is that one has not recovered a single one of my supposed victims.”
Gilbert replied that the bone debris represented calcified human remains.
Landru now fell into his familiar trap of saying too much after scoring a point. He added pedantically that the police had only found an “infinitesimal” quantity of human material. It was “easier to believe” that he had not killed the missing women and besides, “it appears they are not exactly bone fragments, but phosphate of lime.”
“It’s the same thing, according to the experts,” said Gilbert.
“Eh bien! I will discuss this matter with the experts.”
“One has also found the charred remains of hair clips, suspender hooks and porcelain buttons,” Gilbert added.
“Just rubbish that I threw on the fire.”
“You drove around in your car at night and a witness saw you get out of it by a pond and drop a heavy package in the water”. Gilbert added that several other witnesses who would shortly appear had noticed dubious objects, possibly human flesh, floating around the same pond in the forest just east of Gambais.
***
After the interval, a parade of witnesses testified to mysterious goings-on at Landru’s house in Vernouillet, which he had rented from December 1914 to August 1915.
Mme Corbin, who lived on the same street, recalled the summer’s evening in 1915 when she saw thick, odorous smoke billowing out of Landru’s chimney. “I suspected espionage and alerted the local constable,” she said.
“Landru, what do you have to say?” Gilbert demanded.
Landru spread his arms. “I don’t know what to say. The summer of 1915, that’s really vague! I could have been burning some dirty old rubbish around the time I was moving out.”
Mme Picque, Landru’s immediate neighbour on the higher side of the property, remarked that he went out a lot in his car. “One morning he drove off carrying a heavy trunk,” she declared. Neither the car nor the trunk had been mentioned by Mme Picque in her original witness statement.
Émile Mercier, the elderly constable in Vernouillet, insisted that when he had visited The Lodge to follow up Mme Corbin’s complaint, a woman at an upstairs window had told him to go away.
“If, the previous evening, I was ‘incinerating’ a woman,” Landru said, “it is really astonishing that this woman was found alive and well next day by the constable.”
(“Laughter”: L’Ouest-Éclair)
Ernestine Guillerot, the maid who worked for Monsieur and Mme Vallet on the other side of The Lodge, remembered seeing a bonfire blazing in Landru’s rear garden. Ernestine said she and Mme Vallet had wondered whether Landru might be burning one of the ladies who visited his house. Neither woman had mentioned this conversation when they were originally interviewed by Dautel in April 1919.
Back then, Monsieur Vallet had told Dautel that he had not seen the bonfire because he was at his butcher’s shop in Vernouillet. Yet on the witness stand, Vallet recalled with disgust the fire’s nauseating stench. “In our trade,” Vallet added authoritatively, “we are familiar with this particular sickly, insipid aroma” of burning flesh.
Moro bided his time until Gilbert called a series of witnesses from Gambais who had similarly sinister tales to relate.
Two peasant women, Mme Auchet, who was very old, and her friend Mme David, a little younger, recalled how one day in late October or early November 1918 they had separately passed the Villa Tric on their way back from the village bathhouse. Each of them had seen horrible, foul smoke churning out of the chimney.
“That must have smelt terrible,” Moro commiserated with Mme Auchet. As Moro pointed out, Mme Auchet and Mme David’s timing of this incident did not fit the date of any of the alleged murders on the charge sheet. Their testimony was therefore worthless.
The two old ladies left the court, looking rather crestfallen. “The jurors are people of good sense,” Le Journal commented, “and will know how to identify the large part inevitably played in such depositions by gossiping in the village, scandal-mongering and imaginative hindsight.”
There was only one witness from Vernouillet or Gambais whose testimony directly corroborated the prosecution’s timing of a murder. Gustave Andrieux, the butcher in Gambais, was cycling home past the villa at 9.00 pm on 18 January 1919 when he saw a glow in Landru’s rear kitchen window. Looking up, Andrieux noticed foul smoke wafting out of the chimney. If the butcher’s date was correct, Andrieux made this sighting five days after Marie-Thérèse Marchadier’s disappearance and the same day that Landru’s carnet indicated that he had returned to the villa from Paris.
***
The detective Dautel was the last witness of the day, called to testify about the discovery of the bone fragments during the official search of the villa on 29 April 1919. Moro preferred to focus on the events leading up to this search.
“Monsieur le commissaire de police, I am astonished by one thing,” Moro began. “The villa at Gambais was searched for the first time on 13 April 1919. Why were the police seals not attached to the property until 25 April?”
“Bah! But what guarantees would the seals have provided?” Dautel replied scornfully.
Moro paused, allowing the court to absorb what Dautel had just said. Finally, Moro turned to the jurors:
“Permit me to put on record my great concern at seeing a police commissioner asking what purpose the seals would have served. Enfin, it is because 150 people were able to visit the villa between 13 April and 25 April.”
The jurors needed to pay attention to realise that Moro was only saying it had been possible for 150 people to visit the villa during this twelve-day period.
“Monsieur Dautel, tell us,” Moro continued, “did you conduct searches during the first investigation of the property?”
Dautel replied that he had only conducted a limited “survey” (“sondage”) on 13 April.
“‘Search’ and ‘survey’ are different words for the same thing. Do you want proof?” Moro read out extracts from Dautel’s report on his “survey” of the villa, when he had also used the word “search” (“fouille”) several times.
“During the first descent on the villa by the police, no seals were attached. Grave omission!” Moro chastised Dautel. “A second investigation was conducted without the presence of the suspect. Another irregularity!”
Moro turned to Godefroy:
“Monsieur l’avocat général, I will not hide from you that in my closing speech I intend to report on the singular difference between the negative result of the first investigation and the discoveries made during the second.”
Next, Moro addressed Gilbert:
“In the light of what monsieur le commissaire de police Dautel has just told us, I now request that the four workers who were put at his disposal for digging during the first investigation should be summoned to testify.”
Gilbert agreed to Moro’s request and ended a session that had gone better for the defence than the prosecution. Ominously for Godefroy, the press was starting to doubt his chances of securing guilty verdicts on the 11 counts of murder.
“The more the trial advances,” the evening daily La Justice remarked, “the more one realises that the investigation has remained powerless to produce material proofs.”
Chapter 19
A Veritable Puzzle
Day Sixteen: Thursday, 24 November
On Thursday morning, Le Petit Parisien ran a cartoon on its front page showing two little children stuffing a doll into an oven while their mother glared down at them. “We’re only playing at being Landru,” they explained.
Gaston Bayle, the senior forensic chemist at the Paris police laboratory, had played the same game with Landru’s real-life oven, using the decapitated head of a sheep. It had taken only 45 minutes to incinerate the head, allowing Bayle to conclude that a severed human head would have burned just as easily.
“Fatty flesh is an excellent fuel,” Bayle explained to
the jurors, several of whom looked queasy. “It’s like ‘putting oil on the fire’, as the vulgar expression goes.”
Landru initially declined Gilbert’s invitation to put questions to Bayle, saying he would leave the task to Moro.
“No, speak Landru,” Moro said. “For reasons that I will make known when I deliver my closing speech, I will only take the most minimal part in the debates from today onwards.”
Moro started doodling cartoons, apparently oblivious to the hubbub provoked by his announcement.
Landru did a poor job of cross-examining Bayle. He began well enough, forcing Bayle to concede that the bloodstains in the cellar were of animal origin. Landru then speculated ludicrously that the bone debris beneath the leaves could have been blown into the open hangar by “the four winds” and that the scraps of burnt women’s apparel found in the same place could easily have belonged to a man.
Moro suddenly stood up, alarmed that Landru might incriminate himself.
“I am abandoning my somewhat grumpy silence,” Moro declared.
“I thought that wouldn’t last,” said Gilbert tartly.
Moro plunged into a contemptuous cross-examination of Bayle and his colleague Dr Kling, who had helped Bayle conduct his grisly experiments with sheeps’ heads and other animal parts. Moro argued that these tests were meaningless, because the prosecution had no proof that Landru had burnt any human remains in his oven.
Godefroy reminded Moro that the prosecution was only “imputing” this fact to Landru.
“Precisely,” said Moro, seizing on Godefroy’s blunder. “And will you not tell us where the other remains are to be found?”
“Landru only has to say the word.”
“Non!” Moro was outraged, or certainly looked so to the jurors. “He has nothing to say, it is for the prosecution to produce the evidence. Messieurs les jurés, who are people of good sense, will reckon that this question of ‘flesh combustion’ is a matter for the chimney trade, not forensic experts. God help me if I ever confuse the two professions.”
Gilbert called an interval.
***
“The hearing resumed amid a certain tumult,” L’Excelsior reported. “The whole courtroom was completely overrun as people waited for Dr Paul’s deposition.” The public, like the press, was anticipating a mighty confrontation between Moro, France’s most famous defence barrister, and Dr Paul, the country’s leading forensic pathologist, over the significance of the bone debris found at Gambais.
“Dr Paul wears a gallant face, a swaggering moustache and a cavalry officer’s jacket,” Le Petit Parisien noted. “He seizes the bar with both hands, like a horse’s reins, tips backwards, bends his legs, stands up again and smiles.”
For the record, Paul confirmed that the three dead dogs found in Landru’s garden had been strangled. He proceeded to the human bone debris.
As in his report, Paul conflated the total volume of animal and human fragments discovered in various locations with the human debris that had only been retrieved from the ashes in the hangar. Paul also said that bone debris had been sifted from cinders in an oven drawer, without making clear that he was only talking in this context about animal matter. He had not lied, but nor had Paul made it easy for the jury to understand the origin of the charred fragments that court officials had arranged in trays on the evidence table.
Landru listened closely to Paul’s fluent presentation, “not a muscle trembling on his impassive, mysterious face”, Le Figaro observed. Le Temps sensed “relief ” rippling around the court, as at last the trial entered “the domain of the real and the certain”.
This was not quite true. In his closing remarks, Paul described the task of identifying all the human skeletal fragments as a “veritable puzzle” and cautioned the jury “not to ask him for conclusions that were more affirmative than those he could deliver ‘in all conscience’”.
Moro took note of Paul’s remark and drew the jury’s attention to the absence of pelvic bone matter. Grudgingly, Paul acknowledged that he could not confirm with “absolute precision” that the debris had come from female skeletons.
“You do not know, in other words, if any of the skeletons are female,” Moro stated as a matter of fact.
“Everything leads one to believe that the corpses were of the female sex.”
“Why?”
Paul replied unconvincingly that the teeth from one of the skeletons were quite small, suggesting that they had belonged to a young woman.
Moro could have asked Paul whether he could confirm that the debris came from the skeletons of women on the charge sheet, knowing the forensic pathologist would have to say no. But Moro refrained from scoring an easy point, since it would raise another possibility: that the fragments came from other, unknown victims.
Paul remained on the witness stand as Gilbert asked Landru why he had recorded several times in his carnet that he had purchased metal saws.
He had needed the saws for various “industrial” enterprises at the villa, Landru said.
Why, then, had part of a saw blade been found in the cinders in the oven drawer?
Nothing was more easily explained, Landru replied. The saw had snapped while he was repairing the iron grille on the front gates to the villa. “I imagine the fragment that I threw away was not the only one I picked up.”
Landru declined Gilbert’s invitation to say something about the bone fragments, remarking that he had confidence in the competence of Dr Paul. “I am in agreement with what he has stated,” Landru declared, forgetting that Paul had confirmed the presence of human bone matter.
Godefroy now asked Paul an obviously pre-scripted question, designed to block a potential opening for Moro.
“Are you astonished by the complete absence of human blood in the villa and on the clothes of the accused?”
Paul admitted that the lack of blood had “perplexed” him for several weeks. Eventually, he had found a recent coroner’s report that explained how a corpse could be dismembered with no trace of blood, provided the stains were washed away rapidly. In effect, Paul was asking the jury to believe that Landru had performed this “rapid” clean-up seven times at the villa, without leaving even the tiniest bloodstain.
For once, Godefroy had outwitted Moro, who should have asked Paul about the absence of blood. Perhaps realising his mistake, Moro changed the subject, asking Paul whether any of the human bone fragments had saw marks.
No, Paul replied tersely.
Moro smiled at the jury. “Eh bien! That’s Landru’s answer as well.” Landru threw “an anxious glance at the jurors’ bench at this exclamation from his lawyer”, Le Journal reported. “It was as if he wanted to scrutinise the soul of those who hold his fate in his hands.”
***
Days Seventeen and Eighteen: Friday, 25 November; Saturday, 26 November
The next two days were an anti-climax, as the public and the press waited for the trial’s grand finale: the closing speeches for the prosecution and the defence, followed by the jury’s verdict. First, though, Gilbert had to clear the rest of the hearing’s unfinished business.
On Friday the remaining witnesses were called, including three for the defence (from an original list of six), all requested by Landru. They were a gardener who had seen nothing amiss at the villa when he mowed the lawn; a local official in Gambais who was supposed to confirm that the villa had not been properly guarded by the police (he said the opposite); and a man who claimed Landru had defrauded him when he enquired about subletting the villa in the summer of 1918.
For the prosecution, Godefroy read a witness statement by a young army doctor called Jean Monteilhet who was reportedly ill and could not testify in person. On paper, Monteilhet told a vivid and sinister story.
He had been cycling back to his barracks one evening, past the Villa Tric. As he approached the house, Monteilhet had seen a glow that he had thought at first were car headlights. He had stopped outside the front gate, where a grey camionnette van was parked, and real
ised that the light was coming from the house. At this moment, Monteilhet had also noticed thick, foul smoke belching from the chimney and wondered what dreadful meal was being cooked. Then he had continued on his way.
About an hour later, Monteilhet had been repairing a tyre puncture by the pond in the forest beyond Gambais when he had seen the same camionnette approaching from the village and pull up by the side of the road. Without noticing Monteilhet (who was hidden down a bank), a man matching Landru’s description had lugged a large package to the far side of the pond and dumped it in the water. The man had then returned to the camionnette and driven back to Gambais.
Le Petit Parisien assumed that Monteilhet was a self-publicist who wanted to get his name in the papers. Furthermore, Monteilhet’s testimony did not fit the prosecution’s chronology for the murders.
“What crime do you situate at this time?” Moro asked Godefroy.
“None,” Godefroy had to say.
Inconveniently, Monteilhet had originally dated the incident in late May or early June 1915, six months before Landru had rented the Villa Tric. Monteilhet’s aunt, whom he had been visiting, had then confirmed that he had seen her in late May or early June 1916. But this revised date still did not help the prosecution, which maintained that Landru had not killed anyone between December 1915 (Berthe Héon) and December 1916 (Anna Collomb).
Godefroy conceded this point to Moro, ensuring that the absent Monteilhet’s statement would have no influence on the jury.
On Saturday, the whole session was set aside for the lawyers representing the civil plaintiffs to deliver their closing speeches, called plaidoiries: first Robert Surcouf, an accomplished, well-known barrister representing Jeanne Cuchet’s sister Philomène, who had decided to file her suit halfway through the trial; and then Louis Lagasse, acting for Annette Pascal’s sister Louise.
For almost four hours Surcouf and Lagasse thundered away, as Philomène and Louise wept on the benches beside them.