Landru's Secret
Page 25
No one had a clue how many people had managed to force their way past the guards at the front entrance into the courtroom. Newspaper estimates varied from around 800, a physical impossibility, to about 500, a more likely figure. Meanwhile, the trains from Paris were still disgorging more people hoping to see the Bluebeard of Gambais sentenced to death.
***
At 1.00 pm Landru made his entrance, wearing his familiar tunic and bowler hat, with today’s colour-coded dossiers tucked under his arm. He halted on his way to his seat and stared at a group of women near the front of the audience who were complaining that they could not see him above the heads of other spectators.
“If those ladies want my place, they are welcome to it,” Landru remarked sourly to one of his guards.
Gilbert cautioned the public that he would not tolerate any disturbance and ordered them to remain calm. Moro waited for the noise to subside and then rose to complete his plaidoirie.
He confronted a new difficulty as he sought to re-engage the jury’s attention. Louis Lagasse, the lawyer acting for Annette Pascal’s sister Louise, had placed Louise on the bench in front of Moro, next to Jeanne Cuchet’s sister Philomène. Both women, already tearful, were bound to distract the jurors, as Lagasse surely intended.
Moro spent most of the first hour reminding the jurors of the main points of his speech so far. “You told me, ‘I will show you the corpses’,” Moro mocked Godefroy. “Have you, monsieur l’avocat-général, renounced your famous thesis?”
Ashes, charred bone debris and “expert” opinions did not equal corpses, Moro said. Nor did the jury “have the right to suppose” that around 1 kilogram of debris was of human origin, given that more than 4 kilograms had not been identified.
As Moro probably knew, his assertion conflated two separate quantifications by Dr Paul and his colleagues. Paul’s report stated that 4.2 kilograms of bone debris had been identified, including nearly 1.2 kilograms of human fragments. Separately, the report noted that an unspecified quantity of charred debris could have been human or animal matter.
Moro returned to the flawed investigation of the Villa Tric. He remarked on the “extreme irregularity” of Dautel’s failure to seal the Villa Tric after the police’s first, hasty “survey” of the property on 13 April 1919. In Moro’s view, the house was as open as “a windmill” during the crucial fortnight between the two searches.
Moro was equally struck by the failure to find any trace of human blood at the villa; not one tiny speck. “You represent this house as a monstrous butcher’s slab,” Moro ridiculed Godefroy, yet where was the proof to support the prosecution’s claim?
Le Journal thought Landru seemed strained and anxious as he listened to Moro - “extremely pale, with pinched nostrils and lifeless eyes”.
“He is a crook,” Moro stated, nodding dismissively at Landru. “He has all the signs, so be it. But that this man has been able to incinerate calmly 11 victims; that this duffer has the strength of someone who does not fear blood: I do not believe it.”
It was 2.30 pm. Moro had been going for an hour and a half and he could see that some of the jurors were drifting. He requested a brief interval, granted by Gilbert.
***
During the break, spectators took out flasks of coffee, lit cigarettes, and ate patisseries. “People even talked about fripperies, since the feminine element dominated,” Le Journal observed with distaste.
The hearing resumed at 3.05 pm. In rapid succession, Moro revisited The Lodge, the Villa Tric and the ponds in the forest near Gambais, seemingly without notes, as Navières fed him prompt lines out of the jury’s sight.
“One has poked through the ashes, dredged the ponds, one has searched everywhere, even the graveyard, and one has discovered nothing, nothing, nothing,” Moro reiterated. “One has gone as far as asking the village gossips about nuisance smoke and smells,” – an unkind jab at the two old women from Gambais, Mme Auchet and Mme David, who would not be budged from their story.
The carnet, described by Godefroy as a “mute witness”, was nothing of the sort. What to make, for instance, of Godefroy’s vaunted “hour of the executioner”, the times recorded by Landru beneath certain dates in the carnet? On each occasion, the same carnet indicated that Landru had caught the train to Paris almost immediately, leaving him no time to dispose of the alleged corpse.
What, then, of Landru’s suspicious bonfire at Vernouillet in the summer of 1915? Moro asked the jurors to consider whether a man in possession of his senses would choose to burn a corpse in a trunk in broad daylight in full view of his neighbours.
“You cannot escape this dilemma: either the defendant is mad, or he has not killed.” Yet the psychiatrists had confirmed that Landru was sane.
What of the women’s identity papers, which Landru had kept in his garages and lock-ups? “These papers, they were the arsenal of a meat trader, not an assassin,” Moro said; in short, Landru was a pimp. “I tell you this, and I feel at this instant Landru detests me with all his heart.”
In truth, it was hard to tell what Landru was thinking or feeling. “He has the immobility of a statue,” Le Journal remarked. “His trunk stiff, he sits up and literally drinks in the words of his barrister.”
Moro looked down at Annette Pascal’s niece Marie-Jeanne, seated next to her weeping mother Louise. “This charming young woman from Toulon, who testified with such pluck, was not ‘disappeared’ by Landru,” Moro said. “So, did Mlle Marie-Jeanne Fauchet know the secrets of Landru’s house?”
It was a crude but effective swipe at Marie-Jeanne, reminding the jurors that she had never been to Gambais, for all her damning evidence about Landru’s deceit of Annette.
How, finally, to explain the ten women’s silence since they vanished? Moro warned the jurors that he was about to raise a “delicate” subject. The willingness of Landru’s fiancées to give him their papers and cut all ties with their families might indicate that he had sold them into the “white slave trade”.
“Abominable!” Louis Lagasse bellowed at Moro, over the noise from the audience.
“What?” Moro looked in astonishment at Lagasse. “Do not say that I am insulting these women,” Moro scolded him.
It was certain, Moro told the jurors, that most of Landru’s fiancées had split from their families. Moro’s claim was questionable: in different ways, the typist Anna Collomb, the teenage nanny Andrée Babelay, the housekeeper Célestine Buisson and the dressmaker Annette Pascal had all had close relations with parents, siblings or offspring.
According to Moro, most of the missing women had also talked about going abroad after their marriage to Landru to start a new life. Moro asked the jurors merely to note that the law on the white slave trade had been passed to protect respectable women from being drawn into prostitution overseas, on the false assumption that an “honest job” awaited them. If his hypothesis had caused offence, so be it: “I am defending a head and nothing will prevent the defence from doing its duty until the very end.”
Moro added other sinister elements to the phantasmagoria he was conjuring up for the jurors. In 1909, a murdered child’s skeleton had been washed up on a beach in Normandy, or so the forensic pathologist had concluded. Actually, it was the corpse of an artist’s pet monkey. So much for the authority of “experts”.
What, finally, of the famous bone debris? Moro observed that the previous tenant of the Villa Tric – a Belgian, no less – had been a funerary mason who designed tombstones. This Belgian had enjoyed access to the ossuary in the village graveyard across the fields from the house. Could there be a connection here, Moro wondered aloud: an innocent, no doubt accidental reason why the debris had ended up in the hangar?
It was almost 6.00 pm. The jurors were starting to look at their watches, aware that Gilbert had ruled that the court would stay in session into the evening, to allow them to reach their verdict. Sensing the jury’s impatience, Moro plunged into his peroration:
“Messieurs les jurés, it is not
your mission to shed light. My mission has been to denounce obscurity to you, and I have done so. From the depths of my heart, I say to you: do not do something irreparable. What if tomorrow just one of the women reappears, just one?”
He paused for a long time, waiting for the audience to fall quiet.
“So, tell me,” Moro eventually resumed, looking hard at the jurors, “where is the strength of character that will allow you to confront an icy ghost who appears in the night and tells you: ‘I have not killed and you have killed me.’ If posterity records, ‘They handed down death and they were mistaken’, it will not be on my conscience. Look to yours.”
Moro sat down. Applause broke out around the gallery. Through the noise, Gilbert ordered Landru to stand up.
“Do you have anything to say?” Gilbert demanded.
“I have a declaration to make,” Landru said calmly. “Yesterday, I was accused of all kinds of crimes and misdeeds, but monsieur l’avocat-général nonetheless recognised one virtue in me, that of a father and a husband. On the heads of my family I swear that I have killed no one.”
Even before Landru had finished, the crowd had started to chatter again.
“This is shameful,” Gilbert erupted, threatening yet again to clear the court.
“Abominable!” Godefroy shouted above the din.
***
Still the audience carried on talking, with the odd jeer directed at Landru, as Gilbert read out the 48 charges for the jury to consider: 11 counts of murder and 37 counts of theft and fraud. Landru strained to hear Gilbert above “the brouhaha all around the courtroom”.
When Gilbert had finished, Moro requested the floor again. He explained to the jurors that if they found Landru guilty on all 48 charges he would be sentenced to death. If, however, they only found Landru guilty of theft and fraud, he would be sentenced to 20 years’ hard labour and transportation for life. The subtext of Moro’s message was clear. The jurors could either choose to kill Landru swiftly via the guillotine or slowly, breaking rocks and clearing jungle in Guyane.
Lagasse was up the moment Moro was down. Lagasse informed the jurors that if they did as Moro requested, and acquitted Landru on the murder charges, the full 100,000 francs cost of the trial would fall on the civil plaintiffs, Mme Fauchet and Mme Friedman.
“That is not true and it is intolerable that you should introduce such an error into the proceedings,” Moro protested to Lagasse. Moro demanded that the prosecution dissociate itself from Lagasse’s misinterpretation of the law. Godefroy willingly agreed, appalled by Lagasse’s cheap trick. Only the cost of the civil action fell to the litigants, Godefroy told the jurors, who finally retired to consider their verdict.
It was just after 6.30 pm. In two hours’ time, Mistinguett and Maurice Chevalier were due on stage at the Casino de Paris for the next performance of Paris en l’Air. Reluctantly they slipped out of the courtroom, forced to miss the grand finale.
***
Landru’s guards took him down to a holding cell in the vaults of the Palais de Justice to have supper, pursued by several photographers who snapped him after his meal, bowler-hatted and inscrutable. Upstairs, an enterprising reporter fitted a 900-candle-power lamp with a reflector directly above the spot where Landru would stand to hear the verdict: “The brutal light will reveal pitilessly his emotion or his nerve.”
While the jurors deliberated, Godefroy retired with the two lawyers acting for the civil plaintiffs. Moro preferred to wait for the verdict in the courtroom, lighting up his pipe and sketching more of his vivid cartoons. A spectator who approached him to ask about the case got nowhere. He had every faith in “justice”, Moro said blandly, puffing away.
At 9.20 pm, an official rang a handbell up and down the corridors, the signal that the jurors had reached their verdict.
Moro knew he had lost as soon as he saw the jurors’ grim expressions. The jury foreman, Jacques Martin, a stolid farmer with a waxed moustache, frowned at the piece of paper in his hand to make sure he did not fluff his lines. The announcement Martin had to make to the court was not straightforward. By a majority of nine to three, the jury found Landru guilty of all 11 murder charges, Martin said. By a unanimous verdict, they also found him guilty of all the theft and fraud counts, bar two. None of the jurors believed that Landru had defrauded and robbed 19-year-old Andrée Babelay, for the simple reason that she had been destitute.
Gilbert ordered the clerk of the court to bring Landru up from his holding cell. Moro pushed his way past the journalists crowded round the little door where Landru would reappear, determined to be the first to break the terrible news to his client.
“It is bad, very bad, have courage,” Moro said to Landru when he emerged with his guards. Landru nodded politely at Moro, as if they had been exchanging courtesies.
He stood beneath the newly installed lamp, his bald head glinting in the light, as Gilbert read the jury’s verdicts. Moro clapped his hand over his face in a gesture of incredulity, holding his pose long enough for the photographers to get their picture. By contrast, Landru “seemed not to have heard or understood” what was being said to him, L’Echo de Paris remarked.
Gilbert retired again with the two assistant judges to draft the formal sentence. Landru leant over and consoled Moro, who was still theatrically upset, in full view of the jurors. Around the court, spectators cracked open bottles of wine and lit more cigarettes, gossiping and joking while they waited for the climax of the drama.
Suddenly Godefroy smashed his fist on his lectern. “Do you feel nothing in your hearts?” he yelled at the audience. “This man is going to be sentenced to death! Is that what has brought you here? Just shut your mouths, you shameless scum!”
Gilbert swept back into court with the assistant judges. The crowd fell quiet. Once again, Gilbert ordered Landru to stand up.
“Landru,” Gilbert intoned, “the court condemns you to death. In accordance with the law, you will be taken to a public place in Versailles where you will have your head sliced at the neck.”
The audience gasped. Landru did not flinch.
Moro was busy again, forcing a passage through the crowd in the well of the court towards Godefroy, who shook his hand. Godefroy told Moro he was “very moved”.
Calmly, as if it was a piece of routine procedure, Moro handed a predrafted appeal for clemency to Jacques Martin, the foreman of the jury. Moro explained patiently to Martin why he believed the jurors should sign the appeal, even though a majority of them had found Landru guilty of murder. Moro reminded them that Landru was destined in any case to spend the rest of his life in the swamps of Guyane.
“You must sign if you have any doubts,” Godefroy advised the jurors, assuming that only the three who had found Landru not guilty of murder would do so.
One by one, the appeal was passed around the jurors; one by one, they all signed, as Godefroy looked on helplessly.
Moro marched over to Lagasse, who was as confused as Godefroy by Moro’s swift manoeuvring; for having demanded Landru’s head, Lagasse now advised Annette Pascal’s bewildered sister Louise Fauchet to sign the clemency appeal.
“She hesitates, she cries and enfin, she signs,” Le Figaro observed in astonishment.
Jeanne Cuchet’s sister Philomène was not so easily fooled. When Moro approached her, she flapped him angrily away.
Landru was not going to be taken in either. He refused to put his signature on the appeal, which could not go forward without it.
“A man like me would never appeal for clemency or pity,” Landru told Moro, who decided to hold off persuading his client until the morning.
Once Moro had returned to his seat, Gilbert informed Landru that he had three days to sign the appeal or his death sentence would be carried out. Landru’s guards prepared to take him back to his prison cell. Landru put up his hand; there was something he still wished to say.
“The hearing is over,” Gilbert said firmly. “I just told you that you have three clear days to appeal. Once this de
adline is passed, the sentence is definitive.”
“One minute, monsieur le président.” Landru stood his ground. “I am sorry for detaining you, but I have just one word to tell you.”
“Well, make it quick.”
“It’s that the tribunal has made a mistake, I have never killed anyone. This is my final protest.”
Then he was off with his guards, through the little exit door and into the freezing night.
Chapter 22
A Terrible Doubt Came to You
Landru lost his cool the instant he got back to his cell; not at the verdict, but at the “revolting spectacle” of all the women who had cheered when Gilbert read out the sentence. “Now these women will be able to contemplate at leisure ‘Landru the ladykiller’,” he complained to his guards.
Over the next few days, the press tried to make sense of why three jurors had acquitted Landru on the murder counts and then all the jury had signed the clemency appeal. The actor and writer Jean Kolb thought the split verdict was entirely due to the brilliance of Moro’s closing speech. “I shudder to think what might have happened if the great lawyer had given an even more powerful plaidoirie,” Kolb remarked in his column for La Presse.
Regarding the appeal for clemency, L’Echo d’Alger thought the jurors “could not be certain that Landru was either guilty or innocent” and like Pontius Pilate had washed their hands of the case. The jurors stayed quiet, apart from one, who confusingly told a journalist that they had all believed Landru was guilty of murder and had then signed the clemency appeal out of “respect” for Moro’s performance.
Landru still refused to stoop to appealing for his life. Moro and Navières visited his cell, with no success. In the end, Moro bought some more time for Landru to reconsider his position by appealing against the sentence itself, with his client’s reluctant approval.
As Christmas approached Landru sank into a depression, telling the prison doctor that he had exhausted his energy during the trial. He would not eat and lay all day on his bunk, gazing blankly at the ceiling. Apart from Moro and Navières, he received no visitors from outside.