by Landru's Secret- The Deadly Seductions of France's Lonely Hearts Serial Killer (retail) (epub)
Monteilhet and Mme Bizeau were not the only witnesses from Gambais who undermined this narrative. Two elderly women, Mme David and her friend Mme Auchet, were ridiculed at Landru’s trial when they testified about passing the Villa Tric one autumn day in 1917 and seeing foul smoke pouring out of his chimney. They were just a couple of “village gossips”, one reporter wrote. Yet if Mme David and Mme Auchet were broadly right about the date then the official body count of seven victims at the villa was questionable.
With the confidence of country women who followed the seasons, Mme David and Mme Auchet stuck to their recollection that they had seen the smoke in late October or early November 1917. This was at least two months after the disappearance of Célestine Buisson and almost a month before Louise Jaume vanished.
Landru said that when Mme David and Mme Auchet passed the Villa Tric he must have been burning dirty old rags soaked in automobile oil along with other refuse. “Clearly, it didn’t smell of roses,” he sneered at the women.
Assuming that Landru was lying, it is arguable he was burning the remains of Célestine Buisson, having stored all or part of the corpse for at least two months. But it appears more likely that Landru was burning another victim’s remains.
***
If Mme David and Mme Auchet were reliable witnesses, another plot begins to take shape.
A convicted swindler, on the run from the law, invites an unknown number of women to the villa he rents outside Gambais between December 1915 and April 1919. He finds these women via lonely hearts adverts, matrimonial agencies or by trawling Paris’s trams, buses and metro lines. Sometimes the man jots down his companions’ names or codenames in his carnet, along with a note of his journeys with them between Paris and Gambais. At other times he forgets to keep records, for his schedule is increasingly hectic and his memory is not what it used to be.
In Gambais, the man and his guests are sometimes noticed by local people – in particular, the coachman who operates a cab service between Houdan and Gambais, and the local shopkeepers. Sometimes, however, they are not seen by the villagers, especially when the man and his latest woman get off the train at Garancières or Tacoignières and walk across country to the house.
The man is not always clear in his own head about why he has invited a woman to the villa. Sometimes he wants to get rid of her because he finds her irritating or deserving of punishment. Almost anything can set him off: a woman lying about her age, going on about God, or having nosy relatives. On other occasions he wants her money and if she balks, he kills her. The only thing he always wants is sex, regardless of whether she is young or middle-aged, pretty or plain. In the spring and summer, he especially enjoys taking his guests to the forest on the other side of Gambais.
When it is time for the women to die he strangles them, “the gentlest of deaths” in his opinion, and also the quietest. Sometimes he notes the hour that he kills them in his carnet; at other times he cannot be bothered, especially when he has also failed to log their name or codename. Once he has stripped his victim of jewellery and cash, he drags or carries the body to a locked shed at the end of the garden.
Then he returns to Paris, for up to a week; not so long that the body begins to decompose, but long enough to wonder if it will be discovered by the local cobbler or his son, who are paid by his landlord to keep an eye on the house when it is empty. He enjoys taking this risk, which adds to his sense of power. The cobbler and his son are lazy and not inclined to visit the villa regularly. The man may also have bribed them not to come to the house, for the landlord lives far away and will be none the wiser.
When the man returns to the villa, he waits till nightfall and brings the body back to the house. He cuts off the hands, feet and head, the body parts most commonly used to identify corpses. He is careful to wash away the blood as quickly as he can and he may also take the opportunity to cut up a dead animal – for instance, a chicken bought at the butcher in Gambais – to disguise the source of any tiny stains he leaves behind.
Next, he burns the identifying body parts in his oven, along with the women’s clothes. The risk he takes is the noxious smoke billowing out of the chimney that any passer-by will smell. At intervals, various locals see and smell the smoke while he is at work in the kitchen. However, only one witness, the butcher in Gambais, notices smoke at approximately the same time that one of the man’s known guests vanishes.
When the man has finished his grisly task, he cleans the oven, scraping out any remaining bone debris or non-combustible items like hair pins and buttons. He conceals these charred fragments beneath a pile of leaves in his hangar, mixing them up with burnt animal bones. His oven is small and time is short, so he dismembers the rest of the body and packages up the sections, which he stores temporarily in the locked shed.
Over the coming nights, the man gradually takes the packages away in his camionnette. This is another risky moment, because any civilian driving a car around the countryside after dark in wartime is bound to attract suspicion and the village constable is on the alert for German spies. But the man has a clever cover story. He says he is an automobile trader, and gradually the villagers become accustomed to seeing him driving around the neighbourhood at odd hours.
He disposes of the packages in secluded spots he knows well – notably the ponds in the forest and the surrounding boggy terrain, where it is easy to dig deep holes. The possibilities for concealment are endless, although on one occasion he is nearly detected by a woman walking past one of his burial sites. The police subsequently investigate these ponds, but they lack the resources, the energy and the skill to undertake a comprehensive, systematic search.
The man has an unwitting ally in his efforts to erase the evidence of his crimes. For centuries, wild boars have roamed the forest, rooting through the thick undergrowth for any food they can unearth. The makeshift graves make easy pickings for these ravenous omnivores, which consume everything they find, including the bones.
One day in early 1919, the man tries to tally up his murders by writing a list, but his records are patchy and his memory is “rebellious”, as he puts it. He cannot be sure that the list is complete, for as he also notes, his previous life flows past him as if it had been lived by someone else. Fifteen years earlier, a psychiatrist warned the man’s wife that her husband stood on the “frontiers of madness”. By the time he is caught, he has long since crossed the border.
***
I do not know if all the elements of this alternative plot are true. Landru may never have bribed the cobbler to stay away; Pierre Vallet and his son Marcel may simply have been incurious, never bothering to snoop around the property. The boars in the forest may never have gone near Landru’s makeshift graves, which may never have existed; the only circumstantial evidence was the hole that Mme Bizeau thought she saw Landru digging.
Yet not all the elements need to be true for the overall story to hold together. One can remove the greedy pigs, the indolent cobbler and much else besides without the rest of the narrative falling apart. By contrast, Bonin’s tightly circumscribed, single-motive plot depends on every element standing up to scrutiny. It relies, for example, on Landru murdering the destitute 19-year-old Andrée Babelay for her non-existent money, an absurdity that the jury refused to believe.
Every pattern that Bonin tried to impose on the case broke down because of the exceptions. Landru’s ten known female victims were not all comfortably off, as the prosecution continued to argue at his trial. Three of the women had almost no money at all, while only three had sufficient savings to be attractive targets for a marriage swindler: Marie-Angélique Guillin, Anna Collomb and Célestine Buisson.
To paper over these inconsistencies, the authorities deployed the easy slur that the women were all “besotted” with Landru. Yet I felt only three of the missing women qualified for this description.
Thérèse Laborde-Line, Landru’s Argentinian-born fiancée, struck me as achingly lonely when she fell into his clutches in the summer of 1915. She
was alone in an apartment she could not afford, estranged from her postal clerk son, and without friends in Paris. Marie-Angélique Guillin, Landru’s next known victim, was swept up by the fantasy that she was going to be a diplomat’s wife in Australia. Célestine Buisson was in thrall to the idea of making a home with a respectable husband.
None of the other seven women on the charge sheet seemed “besotted” with Landru or even especially fond of him. In their different ways, they were using him for a purpose. For example, Berthe Héon saw Landru as a means to escape the intolerable grief of losing her daughter and stillborn grandchild. Anna Collomb wanted a husband who would adopt and legitimise her little daughter. Even Louise Jaume, the devout, estranged wife of a husband who had run off to Italy, appears to have seen marriage to Landru as a path to regaining God’s esteem. Louise kept up her guard till almost the end, refusing to sleep with Landru and finding him somewhat suspicious, as he obsessively swept the leaves at Gambais.
It was these sinister glimpses of the Villa Tric – the pile of leaves, the print of the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the four animals buried in the kitchen enclosure – that formed the backdrop to the case that Bonin constructed. Yet the Villa Tric did not hold the key to why the horror began; in that sense, Landru’s sketch of his oven was a false signpost. The key lay elsewhere.
Chapter 25
The Road to Vernouillet
It takes a quarter of an hour to reach The Lodge on foot from the station that serves Vernouillet, passing through quiet suburban streets on the outer fringe of Paris’s commuter belt. The Rue de Mantes has been renamed since Landru’s time and the house has a different street number, but it is still recognisably the same property: an odd, double-fronted residence near the bottom of a steep lane, with a smaller annexe tacked onto the main villa.
The more one looks at The Lodge, the more striking its lack of privacy becomes. Landru’s neighbours had a clear sight of the back garden, as did anyone walking across the fields behind the house. It seems an improbable place for Landru to have chosen to kill Jeanne and André Cuchet, quite unlike the isolated Villa Tric at Gambais.
As I worked through the immense file on Jeanne at the Paris police archives, I came to believe that Landru had no plan to murder her and André when the three of them arrived at The Lodge at the start of December 1914. Something happened in December or January to make Landru decide in his desperation that Jeanne and André had to die.
***
“We are in the presence of facts which are reproduced identically.” Such was Bonin’s accusation against Landru during one of their many interrogation sessions. Yet in almost every detail, the case of Jeanne and André Cuchet differed from the nine subsequent murders on the charge sheet.
Jeanne and André represented the only double murder in the series; two victims at the same property, one straight after the other. André was the only male victim and crucially, he and his mother were the only victims who knew Landru’s true identity and were aware of his criminal past. Nonetheless, they came to live with him at The Lodge.
There was another version of Jeanne’s strange, sad tale that Bonin either never considered or jettisoned because it was impossible to reconcile with his hypothesis of identical murders. This story told of a humble Parisian seamstress who hated her job and dreamed of a new life abroad with her one true love: not Landru, but her only son André.
Until the outbreak of war in August 1914, Jeanne’s relationship with Landru fitted the pattern of a hard-up woman in search of a husband who would provide for her and André, or at least act as her vieux monsieur (sugar daddy). Jeanne was poor, a fact proved by her financial records, the will of her husband and the testimony of two well-placed witnesses: her friend Louise Bazire and her probable lover, the shirt-maker Pierre Capdevieille. In 1914, Landru had plenty of cash as a result of his latest swindle and his seizure of his father’s legacy. All Jeanne had to trade in return was her sex appeal, which she used to get Landru into bed.
Bonin expended an enormous amount of time trying to make Jeanne fit the template for all the murders that followed. Yet she kept breaking the mould. There was no hard evidence that Landru was after her pitiful savings and plenty of circumstantial evidence that Jeanne was quite unlike her portrayal in the réquisitoire définitif as a dim, emotionally vulnerable woman.
Jeanne’s sister Philomène and brother-in-law Georges Friedman did their best to suggest to the police that Jeanne was naïve about men. On the contrary, she seems to have been quite calculating in her dealings with potential suitors after the death of her husband, who had left her destitute. Before meeting Landru in early 1914, Jeanne rejected at least two potential suitors, a wine merchant and a commercial traveller, while the only man she appears to have trusted was Capdevieille, who may have been married.
Why, then, did Jeanne “fall” for Landru? Mme Hardy, the nosy neighbour who lived above the couple in La Chaussée, saw a woman who was quite cool, even distant in her exchanges with Landru. Viewed through Mme Hardy’s eyes, it appears plausible that Jeanne could have become engaged to Landru to advance a specific project.
Five witnesses recalled Jeanne speaking about her desire to start a new life with André in Britain or America: her friend Louise Bazire, her concierge Mme Pelletier, her former employer Albert Folvary, her brotherin-law Louis Germain and Germain’s wife. All five dismissed Jeanne’s plan as a fantasy, on the grounds that she spoke no English. Yet it was not so far-fetched.
It is easy to see why a single working-class mother, scrimping a living as a seamstress, might have wanted to emigrate; in belle époque Paris, there were plenty of other women in a similar situation to Jeanne who felt the same way. It is also understandable why Jeanne’s ambition suddenly became an urgent goal when war broke out in August 1914: for her prime concern as France mobilised was the safety of the one victim on the charge sheet whom the authorities scarcely bothered to investigate.
***
André Cuchet merited just one slim police report in his mother’s bulging case file, where he was cast as a mere victim of circumstance, killed because of Jeanne’s obsession with Landru. “The son followed the mother to his death,” the réquisitoire declared, “and an eleventh corpse was added to the mournful list.”
André’s status as a footnote overlooked the testimony of Mme Morin, the mother of André’s best friend Max. Mme Morin remembered how Jeanne was “heartbroken” when she heard a false rumour in the autumn of 1914 that André, still 17, might soon be able to volunteer for the army, without her permission.
Jeanne’s behaviour in the war’s opening months bore all the signs of a mother who was terrified that her callow son, gripped by military fervour, would soon be killed by the Boches. At the start of August 1914, Jeanne rushed back to Paris from La Chaussée, unwilling to leave André on his own. In October, she pulled André out of pre-army training, telling him it was pointless. In November, she forced André to give up his newly found factory job to come and live in cosseted seclusion with her and Landru in Vernouillet.
Jeanne’s fears for André were entirely rational because the war was rapidly descending that autumn into carnage. On 11 October, as André began his pre-army training, Le Journal published a “bitter, vehement, superb” letter from two sisters who had already lost four brothers at the front; a fifth had been severely wounded. Now they addressed their sixth brother, also mobilised, on behalf of their grieving mother:
“Maman weeps, she says you must be strong and wishes you can avenge their deaths… God has given you life, He has the right to take it back, this is maman who says so.”
Some French families took what the nationalist press called the cowards’ option. They emigrated, with distant North America a particularly appealing prospect. During the war, more than 50,000 people left France each year for the United States, many of them speaking little or no English. Jeanne’s challenge in following their example was her lack of money and connections. She needed someone who could make possible her and And
ré’s escape.
Did Landru encourage Jeanne to think he was that person? A passing remark by Landru to Mme Oudry, the estate agent in Vernouillet who looked after The Lodge, suggests that he might have done. Landru told Mme Oudry that Jeanne worked for a Paris fashion house, a position that required her to make business trips to America.
Why might Landru have encouraged Jeanne’s dream of emigrating? I think the reason was straightforward. He enjoyed having sex with her and wanted to keep the relationship going by stringing her along. Landru was besotted with Jeanne, not the other way round.
Until Jeanne prised open his locked chest on 16 August 1914, Landru could use the excuse of his “lost” papers to delay their promised marriage and subsequent emigration, en famille. The balance of their relationship changed completely when Jeanne discovered Landru’s identity and, critically, the fact that he was a criminal on the run. Based on the evidence in the case archives, I believe she decided to blackmail him. In return for allowing him to sleep with her again, Landru had to get her and André out of the country, with or without him. Otherwise she would have him arrested by the police.
Jeanne does not appear to have reached this decision lightly. Following her discovery of Landru’s papers, she confided her misgivings about him to three people: her friend Mme Bazire, Max’s mother Mme Morin, and her former assistant seamstress who visited her at the end of August.
Jeanne probably decided to resume her relationship with Landru and blackmail him for two reasons. One was André’s incorrigible naïvety about the war, expressed in his letters to Max Morin; the other was the mounting slaughter at the front.
Landru might well have looked like a plausible escape agent to Jeanne. Even his criminality could have appeared an advantage, because here was a swindler loaded with cash, with a car and false identity papers, adept at getting past military checkpoints. In addition, Landru knew his way around the Atlantic port of Le Havre. The point is not that Landru could have engineered Jeanne and André’s flight from France. It is that he might have convinced her that he had the means to do so.