Landru's Secret
Page 27
Charles Paul, the chief forensic pathologist at the trial, continued to cut up corpses with phenomenal industry. By the time of his own death in 1960, Paul had performed almost 160,000 autopsies, while frequently appearing as a trenchant expert witness in murder cases. Yet on the subject of Landru, Paul remained uncharacteristically tentative. “Does something mysterious surround the disappearance of the ten fiancées?” Paul mused to a reporter shortly after Landru’s execution. “With the necessary passing of time, we will judge more calmly this astonishing and shocking case.”
Robert Godefroy, the chief prosecuting attorney, maintained till his death in 1935 that his eight “proofs” of Landru’s guilt had removed any doubt in the case. Maurice Gilbert, the presiding judge, was also convinced of Landru’s guilt, while retaining a dim view of Godefroy’s performance at the trial. Before his death in 1937, Gilbert reportedly confided to friends that he thought Moro might have saved Landru from the guillotine if just one of the missing women had turned up alive.
After Landru’s execution, Moro resumed his stellar career at the Paris Bar. He continued to campaign against the death penalty and in the 1930s became one of France’s most outspoken opponents of the Nazi regime.When France fell in 1940, Moro only just evaded arrest by the SS, joining his wife in the unoccupied zone. They eventually escaped to Corsica, where Moro laid low until the island was liberated in 1943, seething at the injustices he could no longer reach.
He returned to the Paris Bar after the Liberation, nicknamed “the old lion” as he prowled and pounced in the courtroom. Yet still Landru’s spectre hung over Moro. In his final years, Moro would smile when inquisitive grandchildren asked him if he believed Landru had killed the missing women. He could not say what he thought, Moro patiently explained, because of his duty of confidentiality to Landru, even beyond the grave.
Moro died suddenly in November 1956 at the age of 78, felled by a heart attack after running to catch a train that was leaving the station. At his funeral in Paris, the speech of honour was given by the minister of justice, an artful, ambitious politician who at this stage in his serpentine career was a supporter of the death penalty. Moro would not have appreciated the irony.
Auguste Navières du Treuil, now 75, was among those who attended Moro’s funeral. Before he died in 1967, Navières set down his recollections of Landru in a three-page private memoir. It is a frustrating document, all the more so because Navières was a wonderfully vivid writer. Navières brought to life his first encounter with Landru at the Santé prison, the turmoil of the trial’s final day and Landru’s last minutes in his cell as he prepared to go to the guillotine. What Navières did not reveal was whether he believed that Landru was guilty.
Navières also refrained from mentioning a piece of evidence in his possession that might have been significant. Sometime between the end of the trial and his execution, Landru had entrusted Navières with a sketch. In 1968, a year after Navières died, his daughter displayed this drawing on French television.
Landru’s little picture showed the rear wall of the Villa Tric’s kitchen, with his oven in the centre. Beside the cuisinière Landru had written: “One can burn anything one wants in there.” This was the remark attributed to him by Mme Falque, the wealthy widow who had visited Gambais in October 1918 and then broken off her engagement.
On the reverse side of the page, Landru had written his rejoinder to Mme Falque’s insinuation that he had burnt human remains in the oven. “This demonstrates the stupidity of the witnesses,” Landru had observed. “Nothing happened in front of the wall, but in the house.”
There was no telling whether Landru had planted a cryptic clue or an ambiguous tease. Yet at a minimum his message seemed a signpost, directing his accusers back to the Villa Tric for the key to his fabled secret.
Chapter 24
The Road to Gambais
From the station at Garancières, the road to Gambais has changed little in the century since Landru cycled off to inspect the Villa Tric for the first time. It winds through rolling farmland and then straightens into an avenue that heads south-west for the last four kilometres towards the village.
On the edge of Gambais, a left-hand turn heads into dense woods, the outer fringe of an ancient hunting forest that stretches more than 20 kilometres south-east to the former royal chateau of Rambouillet.
One clear, moonlit night in the late spring or early summer of 1916, a 39-year-old army doctor took this side road, called the Route de Gambaiseuil, as he cycled to his barracks. Jean Monteilhet had just witnessed a strange scene, which he later recalled in the crisp, precise language of a medical man who knew the importance of facts.
Monteilhet had been visiting his aunt, the Mother Superior at the local convent, and had missed the last train from Houdan to his barracks in Versailles, some 40 kilometres away. Cursing his luck, he had ridden back towards Gambais en route to Versailles along the road that went directly past the Villa Tric.
Approaching the house, Monteilhet had noticed a grey camionnette parked outside the front gates and thick, nauseous smoke churning out of the chimney. He had stopped by the gates to have a closer look and seen the glow of a fire in one of the windows at the rear. Monteilhet had wondered what dreadful meal was being cooked and then continued on his journey.
About half an hour later, Monteilhet was peddling along the Route de Gambaiseuil, deep in the forest, when his bike got a puncture. Swearing again, he stopped by a pond at the foot of a long hill, pushed his bike down a small embankment, and took his puncture repair kit out of his army satchel.
Monteilhet had just finished mending the puncture when he heard the sound of an approaching car, chugging through the woods from the direction of Gambais.
“I was surprised to see the same automobile I had seen in front of Monsieur Tric’s villa,” Monteilhet remembered. “This vehicle stopped about 50 metres before the pond and a man got out, rather short, wearing a cap and a kind of chestnut or khaki hunting jacket. He had quite a long beard. As he got out of the car, he was carrying a package on his shoulders. He headed towards a causeway which extended almost to the middle of the pond. When he reached the end of the causeway, I could no longer make out the package, but I heard a ‘plosh’ noise coming from something which had been dropped in the water. At that moment, I had the impression that he was a poacher who was throwing his cast-net in the pond.”
Having dropped his package, the man hurried back to the camionnette, still without seeing Monteilhet, who remained half-hidden down the embankment. The man started the engine, turned the car around, and drove off back towards the village.
Monteilhet had thought nothing more about this rather sinister incident until Landru’s arrest in April 1919, when the doctor instantly recognised the “poacher” as the same man. At first glance Monteilhet seemed to have come closer than anyone to witnessing Landru in the act of burning and dumping the remains of one of the seven so-called “disparues” [missing women] known to have disappeared at the Villa Tric. Monteilhet’s testimony prompted Bonin to order the detectives Dautel and Belin to search the pond in the woods, along with a much smaller pond nearby.
On 10 May 1919, in balmy, late spring weather, Dautel and Belin began their investigation, assisted by workers from the local chateau and six officers from the river police. As the temperature rose through the morning, a gathering crowd of villagers bought beer and other cold refreshments from a mobile drinks cart set up by the side of the road.
The spectators saw an operation that bore no resemblance to a modern forensic search. In their superficial fashion, Dautel and Belin settled for a “semi-drainage” of the pond, which was clogged with reeds and thick mud. All day, the river police meandered on a barge around the half-drained pond, casting dragnets to catch any debris, while the detectives directed operations from the bank.
One elderly woman, Mme Mauguin, was certain she had seen a package wrapped in waxed linen floating on the water in the summer of 1918, while picking wild herbs for a
pharmacist in Houdan. She had thought it was “a drowned person”, although oddly, she had not gone to the police. The searchers found nothing at the spot she indicated or anywhere else in the muddy shallows. At sunset Dautel abandoned the search as futile and returned with Belin to Paris.
Given Monteilhet’s vivid testimony, the police should have unblocked the sluice gates and drained the pond completely. Instead, the investigating magistrate Bonin lost interest in the pond as a possible crime scene, because in one crucial detail, Monteilhet’s deposition did not fit the prosecution case.
Initially, Monteilhet said he saw the “poacher” in the late spring or early summer of 1915, about six months before Landru rented the Villa Tric. Realising his error, Monteilhet had then checked with his aunt. She confirmed that Monteilhet had seen her in late May or early June 1916, possibly by referring to the convent’s visiting book.
Yet this still did not overcome the main problem with Monteilhet’s testimony as far as the authorities were concerned. Monteilhet’s sighting of Landru at L’Étang des Bruyères (Heather Pond), as it was known, fell approximately halfway between the first known disappearance at Gambais (Berthe Héon, December 1915) and the second (Anna Collomb, December 1916). Monteilhet’s story was worthless, so long as the investigation stuck rigidly to the assumption that Landru had killed precisely seven women at Gambais, and no more.
***
Standing by the pond today, it is easy to visualise the incident that Monteilhet surely witnessed. Here, a murky expanse of water, about 70 metres wide and 150 metres long, crowded by reeds and ferns and overhung by vast, deciduous trees; there, a small path, leading towards a rotten wooden stump jutting out from the far bank, the last vestige of the causeway that Landru hurried along, lugging his heavy package.
Looking at the pond, it is also possible to sense an altogether darker case, one that Monteilhet saw, smelt and heard that moonlit evening. In this narrative, Landru killed more women than the ten fiancées on the charge sheet (three at Vernouillet and seven at Gambais). It all depended on whether the police had grasped the full extent of Landru’s operation.
At Landru’s trial, the prosecution implied that the carnet was a comprehensive record of his movements during the period between his first meeting with Jeanne Cuchet in early 1914 and his arrest five years later. Godefroy based this assumption on the réquisitoire définitif, which claimed that from 1914 to 1919 “he [Landru] was in contact with 283 women, all of whom have been found or their fate is known, apart from the ten whose names appear in the carnet.” The statement was untrue. In a report sent to Bonin, the police acknowledged that of the 283 women Landru was known to have contacted, “the identity of 72 individuals had not been established”.
This was only the start of the slippages in the official record of Landru’s activities. The police deduced the figure of 283 women from the notes in Landru’s carnet and the files in his garage, which contained records of his contacts via matrimonial agencies. However, Landru only acquired the carnet and started his filing system in the spring of 1915, after Jeanne Cuchet’s disappearance. He did not keep detailed notes in the carnet until the summer of 1916, an important fact that emerged in 1933 when Riboulet published his memoir of the case.
At Vernouillet, where Landru rented The Lodge from December 1914 to August 1915, the police only knew about the disappearance of Jeanne and André Cuchet, Thérèse Laborde-Line and Marie-Angélique Guillin. Berthe Héon, the fifth victim on the charge sheet, must have visited Vernouillet, because she joked to a friend in the summer of 1915 about the saucy underwear she had seen at her fiancé’s country house. Beyond these five names, the police could not be sure that no other women had visited The Lodge, because the recollections of Landru’s neighbours were so hazy.
At Gambais, the investigation confronted a different problem. The police interviewed a number of witnesses in addition to Monteilhet who had very precise memories of Landru behaving suspiciously. Yet like Monteilhet, their testimony jarred with the official narrative of seven disappearances at the Villa Tric: Berthe Héon (December 1915), Anna Collomb (December 1916), Andrée Babelay (April 1917), Célestine Buisson (September 1917), Louise Jaume (November 1917), Annette Pascal (April 1918) and Marie-Thérèse Marchadier (January 1919).
***
In May 1916, around the time that Monteilhet saw Landru, Marie Bizeau was wandering in the woods near the same pond. Mme Bizeau, 46, was the wife of a gamekeeper at the nearby chateau which owned this stretch of the forest. Through the trees, she spotted a bald, bearded man, only visible from the head and shoulders upwards and apparently digging a large hole. The man looked up and Mme Bizeau hurried on her way, not inclined to get too close to this dubious stranger whom she later identified as Landru.
Almost two years later, Mme Bizeau saw Landru again while her husband and other estate workers from the chateau were restocking the pond with fish. Landru was on the causeway, laughing and gesticulating at the men as they stood chest deep in the cold water.
“What numbskulls,” he exclaimed, pointing in particular at Monsieur Bizeau.
Mme Bizeau grabbed Landru by the sleeve and suggested that he might like to get in the water and give the men a hand. Landru shook her off and strolled back along the causeway, flicking the water with a makeshift cane as he wandered into the forest.
About two hours later, Mme Bizeau was handing her husband some dry clothes when she saw Landru emerging from the trees with a “rather fat” woman in a fur coat who looked about 30 and two small girls, aged about eight and ten. The woman complained to “Monsieur Dupont” about the cold and told him firmly that it was time to go home.
Mme Bizeau was interviewed by the detective Dautel in May 1919, a few days after the futile “semi-drainage” of the pond. She gave a lengthy deposition and Dautel tried in vain to trace the plump, fur-coated lady and her two girls. Mme Bizeau never heard from the police again and she was not summoned to testify at Landru’s trial.
Inadvertently, Mme Bizeau had knocked a hole in the police’s reconstruction of Landru’s movements during the week before Annette Pascal’s disappearance at the start of April 1918. Mme Bizeau saw Landru with the fur-coated woman on 29 March 1918, two days after Landru first brought Annette to the Villa Tric. Annette returned to Paris by train on the evening of 27 March, as confirmed by her concierge. The police assumed that Landru had accompanied Annette back to Paris and then returned with her to the Villa Tric on 4 April, the day before she vanished.
Mme Bizeau contradicted this account. Based on her testimony, Landru must either have remained at the villa on 27 March, after Annette left for Paris, or returned with Annette to Paris and then come back to Gambais on 28 March or the morning of 29 March in time for his walk in the woods with the fur-coated woman. Landru must then have returned to Paris in time to accompany Annette back to Gambais on 4 April, the day before she disappeared.
Yet the carnet contained no record of any journeys by Landru between 27 March, when Annette returned to Paris, and 4 April, when she came back to the Villa Tric with him. Landru’s notes in the carnet did not therefore amount to a complete log of his movements during the last week of Annette’s life.
Mme Bizeau saw Landru by the pond for the last time in June 1918, about two months after Annette’s disappearance. He was standing bareheaded on the opposite bank, while a blonde woman who looked in her late thirties lay asleep at his feet. The woman had a little pet dog, which began barking when it saw Mme Bizeau. Landru’s companion on this occasion could not have been his mistress Fernande Segret, who was staying with relatives in Burgundy at the time. Mme Bizeau had stumbled across another woman the police never traced.
***
On foot, it takes about an hour from the pond to reach the Villa Tric, walking back along the Route de Gambaiseuil towards Gambais. At the village’s war memorial, the road swings sharp right past the mairie and strikes northwest in the direction of Houdan, seven kilometres away. For a while the road is flanked by modern detach
ed houses and then it gives way to open farmland, with the village church and graveyard visible in the distance. Approaching the church it is easy to miss the Villa Tric, half-hidden on the left-hand side of the road behind a thick, evergreen hedge.
No one lived here when I visited the villa in 2017, shortly before the house was put up for sale. On the rusting iron front gate, a tattered “chien méchant” notice warned away intruders; on the roof, a television aerial twisted in the breeze. Despite the boarded-up windows, the house still looked much as it did in Landru’s time: nondescript and desolate.
A thin, straggly hedge along the side of the property facing Gambais offered more glimpses of the rear garden. Landru’s open-air hangar had gone, as had a couple of other outhouses; otherwise the scene was the same as a century ago. An enclosure with a wash house and outdoor pantry or storage shed opened onto a much larger, unmown lawn, shielded on the side facing the church by a large garage where Landru had kept his camionnette.
Bonin saw the Villa Tric as the heart of the mystery he was trying to solve. The house seemed an obvious setting for a multiple murder plot, complete with clues to guide his investigation: the charred bone debris and scraps of women’s apparel beneath the leaves, the rusty, tinpot oven, the suspicious smoke.
In Bonin’s plot, a man brings seven women to the villa between December 1915 and April 1919, solely to steal their assets and murder them. Only five other women visit the house during this period and survive to tell their story: the man’s wife, his younger daughter, his mistress, her mother, a wealthy widow, and the sister of one of his victims. All the murders are premeditated and follow a barbaric logic. One killing leads to the next murder as soon as the man’s funds begin to run low.