by Landru's Secret- The Deadly Seductions of France's Lonely Hearts Serial Killer (retail) (epub)
At his family’s apartment in Clichy, Marie-Catherine told neighbours that she and her children had renounced Landru and would be known in future as the Rémys. Landru’s former mistress Fernande was more ambivalent. She was still in love with him, so she said, but too busy capitalising on the success of her ghosted memoirs to visit Landru in Versailles. A few days after the trial, a Paris music hall announced that Fernande would be performing “in flesh and bones” in a new revue specially written for her called Psst! Montez-vous?
Landru remained inert until the start of February when his appeal against his death sentence was rejected. Surprisingly, this news galvanised him into action. He recovered his appetite and was at last persuaded by Moro to sign his appeal for clemency.
A short hiatus ensued, because Moro was committed to pleading a case in the provinces and would not be back in Paris till 19 February. Landru was unconcerned by Moro’s absence, since he felt perfectly capable of handling his own appeal. He went back to work again in his cell, annotating his colour-coded dossiers and endlessly reorganising his filing system, only taking time out to devour the meals that would keep up his strength for the coming battle.
Landru soon arrived at a considered opinion: a mistrial must be declared and the whole process begun again, he informed Navières. On the evening of 16 February, Navières told Landru that this futile request had been rejected. Landru showed no surprise at the decision, while insisting that he was innocent. He spent the next three days compiling a memorandum on the authenticity of the bone fragments at Gambais and the police’s failure to attach seals to the Villa Tric. These were both matters of great concern to him, Landru told a colleague of Navières who came to collect his latest submission.
Full of energy, Landru launched a second demand for a mistrial. “You will see,” Landru told the prison doctor giving him his daily check-up, “one by one the missing women will be discovered.”
On the afternoon of 22 February, Navières brought Landru’s sons Charles and Maurice down from Paris to see their father. Charles and Maurice had come to say goodbye, even though Landru’s appeal for clemency had not yet been heard. Landru told his boys to be brave.
On 23 February, just after 4.00 pm, Moro arrived by car at the Elysée Palace to plead the appeal before the President of France, Alexandre Millerand. Moro spent 90 minutes closeted with Millerand, telling the press when he emerged that the president had listened carefully to his points.
It took Millerand only a few hours to reach a decision. On Friday, 24 February, Anatole Deibler, France’s chief executioner, was ordered to guillotine Landru at dawn on 25 February, outside the prison gates.
***
Like Landru, Deibler, 58, owned a carnet in which he recorded his executions. Landru would be the 147th prisoner Deibler had guillotined.
At about 1.00 am on 25 February, Deibler set off from Paris with his two assistants in his customary horse-drawn black van; inside were the various parts of the guillotine. The night was clear, and Deibler planned to reach Versailles by 4.00 am, two hours before sunrise, allowing ample time to assemble his contraption.
In Versailles, the police were clearing the Rue Saint-Pierre in front of the prison gates where the guillotine would be erected. The street was not especially wide and a packed café opposite the gates overlooked the execution site. The gendarmes moved in, sweeping the press out of the bar and ejecting customers who had hidden in the toilets and the bedrooms upstairs.
Under the normal procedure for executions, Landru would only be told his appeal had failed a few minutes before being marched to the guillotine. In a breach of protocol, Landru had heard his fate by the time Deibler set off from Paris, along with the news that Godefroy would not be attending the execution. Instead, a “substitute” lawyer would represent the prosecution at the scaffold.
Landru could not believe it. Now he would have to go to all the trouble of writing Godefroy a farewell letter.
“Astonished at first (a rare thing in a prosecutor) by the neatness of my replies, doubt came to you, a terrible doubt for you who were responsible for establishing the proof,” Landru began. “This doubt, I saw it being born, and you, who scarcely stopped looking at me, you sensed that I understood.”
On and on Landru rambled: “you understood that the frightful atrocities of which you accused me could not have happened”; “you had too much good sense to value the gossip of concierges”; “you saw the pathetic little oven, better suited for a toy dinner-set that you must have made as a child with your little sister, and you understood that the appalling atrocities of which you accused me did not, could not, have taken place.”
Finally, he ran out of accusations to heap on Godefroy. “Adieu, monsieur, our common history will finish tomorrow, no doubt. I die with an innocent, peaceful soul. Please accept, with my respects, my wishes that yours will be the same. Landru”.
At 4.00 am, the prison almoner Abbé Loisel, “still young, with a gentle face”, rang the bell at the main entrance and was let inside, along with the barber assigned to cut Landru’s beloved beard to shreds. Five minutes later, Deibler’s horse and cart rattled up to the gates. Deibler got out, set up two portable gas lamps and put on a pair of spectacles. He identified the spot prescribed by law for the guillotine, 3.5 metres outside the prison entrance, and the three executioners, dressed in overalls, began bolting the different bits of the scaffold together.
They finished just before 5.00 am. Deibler checked the base of the guillotine with his spirit level and then retreated with his assistants into the back of the van to exchange their overalls for dark suits and bowler hats. At a word from Deibler, the two assistants went into the jail to size up Landru, while he kept watch on the guillotine.
At 5.20 am, Moro, Navières and Godefroy’s “substitute”, a government prosecutor called Béguin, were admitted to the prison and taken to Landru’s cell.
Landru was roused from his bunk by Béguin, who told him that his appeal had been rejected and that he needed to “have courage”. According to Navières, Landru looked indignantly at Béguin and said: “Monsieur, you insult me, one doesn’t exhort an innocent man to have courage.”
Moro and Navières made small talk with Landru while he dressed, watched by Deibler’s two assistants. In line with the rules, Landru was made to wear a collarless shirt to ensure the blade met no obstruction before it cut through his neck. He was also told to remain barefoot.
Landru declined Abbé Loisel’s offer to take confession; according to one account, Landru told Loisel that while he was “not without religious feelings he did not wish to keep these gentlemen waiting”, nodding at the bowler-hatted executioners. He thanked Moro and Navières for all their efforts, expressing regret that his cause had eventually turned out so badly for them.
Deibler’s assistants grabbed his wrists and frogmarched him to the prison registry office, just inside the prison gates, followed by Moro, Navières, Béguin and various other officials, including the investigating magistrate Gabriel Bonin. On his arrival at the registry office, Landru was offered the ritual glass of rum and a cigarette to strengthen his nerves, both declined. The executioners now shackled his legs and trussed his arms behind his back so tightly that Landru yelped with pain; at the front, the prison barber sheared Landru’s beard to a length where no stray hairs could possibly catch the guillotine.
It was almost 6.00 am. Outside the gates, Deibler was getting nervous about the growing crowd gathered behind the barricade, 30 metres back from the scaffold. Worse, a tram was clattering up the street towards the prison, carrying factory workers on their way to start the morning shift. Deibler flapped at the guards to open the barricade and the tram rattled past the guillotine, as the passengers hurled abuse at Landru over the prison wall.
At 6.04 am the gates swung open. Landru emerged, a blur of wild eyes, ragged beard and scrawny neck, caught by a newspaper artist as he was bustled towards the scaffold.
Deibler’s deputies pressed Landru down on his knees a
nd locked his head in position. If he kept his eyes open, he was now staring at the open wicker basket that would catch his head, lined with cloth to absorb the blood. The assistants withdrew a few paces and waited for Deibler to release the blade.
Nothing happened. Perhaps the tram had disturbed Deibler’s delicate mechanism, or perhaps Deibler was in no hurry: whatever the reason, one journalist counted a delay of seven seconds. Finally the blade dropped.
Once Landru’s decapitated body had been dumped in a cheap wooden coffin, Moro, Navières and Godefroy’s “substitute” Béguin went back inside the prison to complete the post-execution formalities. A few minutes later, Moro re-emerged into a pack of reporters, one of whom asked if Landru had made a last-minute confession.
Moro raised his arm for silence; he wished to answer a different question. “An irreparable verdict presupposes an infallible judge,” Moro declared, quoting Victor Hugo. Then Moro got into his waiting car, sickened by what he had just seen.
***
Life went on. That evening, Fernande Segret performed her latest cabaret sketch, The Survivor, at a music hall in north-west Paris.
PART FOUR
LANDRU’S SECRET
Chapter 23
The Signpost
Seven months after Landru’s execution, Moro gave an interview to a newspaper in Marseille. Inevitably, the reporter asked Moro whether he thought Landru was guilty. To deflect further enquiry, Moro told a story. He said that as he accompanied Landru to the guillotine, he had whispered in his client’s ear:
“Look, Landru, I have defended you with all my energy and I’m your last remaining friend. I need to know if I must now defend your memory. Tell me the secret of your life.”
“Non, maître,” Landru had supposedly replied, “my secret is all the luggage that I am taking with me.”
There are several reasons for doubting Moro’s anecdote. In the final, terrifying seconds of his life, Landru was in no fit state to think up such an elegant metaphor. He had also just written his tirade against Godefroy, insisting on his innocence. And besides, Moro later told a more plausible story to another journalist. Moro spoke of his instant regret that he had bid Landru “au revoir” as the prison gates swung open, while Landru, correctly, had grunted “adieu”.
Landru’s “secret” – the truth about what had happened at Vernouillet and Gambais, and why – seemed to have been buried with Landru in the Cimitière des Gonards at Versailles.
***
The Villa Tric, abandoned and derelict, stood as a monument to the official version of Landru’s terrible crimes. During the months following his execution, forensic experts returned several times to search the garden, “in the vain hope of finding something more than pebbles”. The authorities were still persuaded that more human remains could be found to add to the charred bone debris.
In early 1923, Landru’s infamous little oven was sold at auction for 4,200 francs, with the proceeds going to public funds. The entrepreneur who bought the oven hoped to put it on display in the Italian city of Turin, beyond French jurisdiction. However, the Turin police banned this potentially lucrative horror show and the cuisinière disappeared, possibly acquired by another private collector.
Shortly after the auction, the government granted the villa’s owner, Monsieur Tric, 5,000 francs in compensation for the damage caused to his property by vandals and souvenir hunters. Tric then put the house on the market, but struggled for several years to find a purchaser. In 1930, the villa was finally acquired by a commercially minded young couple who converted it into a Landru-themed restaurant.
“The Kitchen Grill” (“Au Grillon du Foyer”) offered customers home cooking from an oven located exactly where Landru had allegedly burnt the remains of his fiancées. For a little extra, guests could sleep in one of the bedrooms that Landru had shared with Anna Collomb, Annette Pascal and his other fiancées. The restaurant survived until 1940, exploiting what had become France’s most famous murder brand.
Between the wars, the French press regularly stamped Landru’s name on any serial killer whose victims were female. There was a “Landru of Nancy”, a “Landru of Marseille” and other supposed Landru copycats in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Britain and the United States. Yet the legend of the Bluebeard of Gambais remained almost unknown outside France, largely because almost all the literature on the case was in French.
Somehow the American actor-director Orson Welles alighted on Landru as a possible film project, soon after the release of Citizen Kane in 1941. Welles wanted to cast Charlie Chaplin against type as Landru and wrote the outlines of a script for Chaplin to read. Chaplin decided he would rather direct the film himself and bought the rights to Welles’s script. The result was a movie that bore almost no relation to the real story. In Monsieur Verdoux, Chaplin (playing the title role) reinvented Landru as an unemployed bank clerk who bigamously marries and kills a succession of wealthy widows in order to support his family. Monsieur Verdoux was a flop except in France, where the public’s appetite for both Chaplin and Landru remained insatiable.
In 1963, the French new wave director Claude Chabrol offered an inaccurate, facetious take on Landru from a script by the novelist Françoise Sagan. Chabrol’s Landru, played by Charles Denner, was a bourgeois antiques dealer whose fiancées were all fashionable, moneyed women. To speed up the action, Chabrol started with Berthe Héon, Landru’s fifth known victim, transformed from a humble domestique into an elegant Parisienne.
A 71-year-old woman saw the film and decided to sue for defamation. For almost four decades, Landru’s former mistress Fernande Segret had lived in complete obscurity. Her theatre bookings had soon dried up after Landru’s execution and eventually she had taken a job as a children’s governess with a French colonial family in Lebanon. At some point in the mid-1950s, Fernande had finally returned to France, having never married or got over the man she still called “Lucien”.
Fernande was outraged by her portrayal in Chabrol’s film by Stéphane Audran, who was everything Fernande had once wanted to be: sexy, sophisticated, a star in the making (and about to marry Chabrol). In 1964, a civil court refused Fernande’s enormous claim for 200,000 francs in damages while awarding her 10,000 francs for several scenes that the judge ruled had invaded her privacy.
Fernande withdrew to an old people’s home in the small Norman town of Flers, where she spent her days brooding about the past, afflicted by chronic backache. One day in January 1968, Fernande made her way to the sixteenth-century chateau on the outskirts of the town, entered the park and walked slowly and deliberately towards the castle moat. She carried on, over the edge, and drowned in the freezing water.
***
It had never been clear how much Fernande had glimpsed and understood about Landru behind his self-declared “wall” of privacy. Fernande’s Souvenirs of a Survivor confused intimacy with knowledge of Landru, while her testimony at his trial was incoherent and self-serving.
Another woman knew more about Landru than Fernande. In the years following Landru’s execution, she maintained her own barricade against all enquiries regarding her former husband.
“Monsieur, don’t speak to me about Landru, it’s finished, okay,” Marie-Catherine snapped at one reporter in 1924 who doorstepped her at the family’s apartment in Clichy. “I was never aware of the business of the father of my children who, besides, did not live with me.”
Gradually Landru’s family slipped into the shadows. In 1927, the “Rémys” (their new name by deed poll) returned briefly to public view when they declined to renew their five-year concession on Landru’s grave in Versailles, pleading poverty. His remains were dug up and discreetly reburied in an unmarked plot on the other side of the cemetery. Six years later, the press descended again on the family’s apartment in Clichy, when a skeleton was unearthed by builders working on a site only two doors along the street. Marie-Catherine had no comment on whether this might be another of Landru’s victims. Forensic experts soon concluded that the skelet
on belonged to a man who had died at least 25 years earlier, long before the family moved to Clichy.
At some point in the 1930s, Marie-Catherine and her eldest son Maurice changed their surnames for a second time in a bid to shake off journalists and blackmailers. They vanished from sight, although somewhere in France’s official records the traces of their later lives must exist.
Like his elder brother Maurice, Charles Landru worked between the wars as an automobile mechanic and a taxi driver in Paris. Charles married in 1938 and seems to have lived in and around the city until his death in 1980. Marie, Landru’s eldest daughter, married a bank clerk and after a long widowhood, died in 1985 at the age of 94. Suzanne, the younger daughter, lived for many years in French West Africa with her second husband, a colonial soldier. She died in 1986, the last person with any intimate knowledge of Landru.
***
By then, all the leading figures in the investigation and trial of Landru were long since dead and largely forgotten. Gabriel Bonin, the juge d’instruction, suffered a fatal embolism only two months after Landru’s execution. Bonin was only 43. In 1924, Amédée Dautel, the first detective to interview Landru, was killed by a heart attack at his home in Toulouse, where he had been transferred four years earlier. Dautel’s death left the field clear for his former deputy, Jules Belin, to inflate his own role in the case. Over the decades, Belin gave several dramatic and inconsistent accounts of how he finally apprehended Landru, none of them true.
Louis Riboulet, the third main detective in the case, retired from the Paris police in 1926 at the age of 50 and became a private eye. Riboulet was sufficiently adept at self-publicity for one newspaper to hail him in 1931 as the officer whose “implacable logic” had cracked open l’affaire Landru. Two years later, Riboulet published La Véritable Affaire Landru, a ghostwritten rehash of the prosecution case. Riboulet’s book, serialised in Le Matin, relied heavily on extensive reproduction of Landru’s notes in his carnet and a substantial volume of other material from the police and judicial archives that has never been seen since.