It is hard to postulate a satisfactory explanation of the reason for his transformation from petit escroc to serial killer. I would suggest: 1. Opportunity: mass death was a daily fact of life... the calculation made by Landru was probably a question about who would miss a few more bodies, especially if they came from France’s ‘lower orders?’ He was cold and rational, and was proved sane by a court psychiatrist’s assessment – an important distinction that allowed the prosecution to petition for the death penalty. 2. Motive for murder – the court found that, under cover of the war, Landru had murdered and disposed of the missing women to avoid denunciation for fraud and theft, which carried a sentence of transportation to Devil’s Island. This was possibly a worse fate than the death penalty. He was, after all, in possession of the personal effects of the missing women. Aware of the perilous nature of the possession of such objects – furniture, objets d’art, personal effects, and bank account details – he passed himself off as a dealer in antiques and antiquities and rented retail units in at least four addresses in some of the seedier districts of the city to this end. 3. I’m afraid we shall have to resurrect the unfashionable concept of evil, if the decision to do these terrible things was made rationally. In fact, Landru used a similar idea in his defence: “The crimes of which I am accused could only be explained by the most marked insanity. They say I am sane. Therefore I am innocent!” (Bardens, p.183) Even though his primary motive appears to have been financial rather than to kill purely for pleasure, the reason for taking this step remains unclear. It is probably the case that pure opportunism triumphed over any fear of the consequences of his actions: Landru showed a businessman’s contempt for anything that got in the way of his pursuit of profit and a psychopath’s disregard for conventional morality.
He was held in connection with the disappearance of 10 women and 1 young man, although the actual number may well have been much higher: “...and Paris, the city that experienced all that horror, still shudders at the memory of it all,” although there is a tradition in Paris, as we shall presently see, of shuddering with mordant laughter at the same time.
Habeas Corpus – it is difficult to hold someone in custody, let alone sentence them to death for murder, if the last thing that one can do is produce a corpse. In fact, all that forensic scientists had to put before the court was a melancholy exhibition of sentimental fragments recovered from Landru’s collections of looted antiques and antiquities, stored at several locations: coats, combs, thimbles, scissors, chairs, items of well-worn underwear, an oil painting of Madonna and Child (the Child’s eyes put-out by bullet-holes), locks of hair, photographs, boot fasteners, press-studs, metal clips from corset suspenders, birth certificates, bills of sale, false hairpieces, dentures, pathetic pieces of tasteless jewellery – tiny reminders of lonely women now disappeared.
They even found scraps of poetry – though if these included selections from Benedict’s favourites, Verlaine and Baudelaire, the police never said. It may have been no more than seductive trash written by Landru. In Christoph Chabouté’s graphic novel, Landru reads a passage from Alfred de Musset to Fernande Segret (the only woman to get caught in Landru’s traps and survive to tell the tale): « Partout ou sans cesse altère de la soif d’un monde ignore, j’ai suivi l’ombre de mes songes » from ‘La Nuit de Décembre’: Wherever, thirsting to be shown /The wonders of a world unknown,/My fleeting dreams I sought to chase;/Wherever I beheld once more/What I had seen and known before, /The falseness of the human face...(Translation by George Santayana, 1905). Musset was one of France’s most celebrated authors of love poetry – it would not be too far-fetched to claim the scraps of paper contained his words, but, without access to the police files, we will never know for sure.
The most incriminating pieces of evidence turned out to be the records of the purchase of rail tickets from Paris to Gambais – a return ticket for Landru, but always a single for his companion. The court inferred that this meant that Landru’s companion would not, in fact, need a return ticket from Gambais: she would not be coming back.
At his trial, the case for the prosecution hung on the fragile, almost speculative connections between the contents of the ashes and fragments and the detailed accounts he kept in notebooks that were discovered by the police when they searched Landru’s numerous addresses in the Paris area. It was these trinkets, pieces of quotidian ephemera and scraps of cremated bones and teeth, that got him convicted and executed: the revenge of the objects which, although partially burned, were impossible to destroy completely, and people who, in spite of their solitude, were never completely forgotten. A red drop of blood is heavier than an enraged sea… if any traces of blood drops are present.
The problem for the authorities was to acquire enough evidence to make the apparently speculative link seem credible, by accounting for Landru’s accounts, in a painstaking process of connecting the fragmentary evidence to entries in the notebooks. Landru knew this. It was the motivation behind his crass, insolent and infamous defence: “You accuse me of crimes, prove them.” (Bardens, p.119) Leroux’s Benedict Masson sums it up when he claims: “…that he was not paid to do the judge’s job, and it was for the law to ascertain what had happened to the young ladies that had passed through Corbillères; that, in the matter that concerned the court, he had no interest whatsoever, he had not even the slightest interest in their fate; and that, even if they had found him burning a girl that had been cut into pieces (an accident to be regretted, mostly by her…), it did not in any way prove that he was guilty of her murder,” repeats Landru’s absurdist defence almost verbatim. Except that Landru would not even admit this much. Refusing to be drawn on the suggestion that he knew the whereabouts of the missing women, Landru told the judge: “It is true that I knew the ladies in question, but I am un homme galante and cannot allow you to ask me questions concerning them. If they have disappeared it is nothing to do with me. It is not for me to say what has become of them. It is for you to make the necessary search. I am innocent, I swear. When you can produce proof of what you claim, I will discuss it.” (Bardens, p.119)
Doubts about Landru’s guilt persist to this day, if only in the form of satirical commentaries on the case: what if he was, in fact, telling the truth? Yet, if he was innocent, what would account for the disappearance of 10 women and 1 young man? In several cases, when he condescended to comment at all, Landru claimed that he had helped them to emigrate to England or the USA and could not otherwise account for their whereabouts. This was not a completely far-fetched claim, in context of the First World War: it was not uncommon for wealthy Europeans to seek to escape to America to avoid the fighting, or conscription into the army. When cross-examined on this point, Landru’s notorious defence repeated itself:
“It is not for me to say. It is for the police to find out. They took six years to find an innocent man, yet they cannot find my vanished clients.” (Bardens, p.165)
In the end, it was a more macabre, but no less sad, exhibition of fragments that convinced the court of Landru’s guilt and saw him sentenced to death. The judge revealed that, after the stove had been swept clean and the cinders meticulously sifted, just over 4 kilos of ashes, calcinated bone fragments and teeth had been extracted, along with a quantity of animal matter (dead pet dogs that had once belonged to one of his victims?) Of these 4 kilos, 1,500 grammes were from human bodies, and 996 grammes from human skulls. Forensic scientists testified that the human fragments were from 3 skulls, 6 hands and 5 feet; the teeth came from mature humans between 26 and 50 years of age; the skull fragments bore marks from cutting instruments and, in fact, all limb bone and other long bone fragments bore similar evidence of dismemberment, presumably with a metal saw (a shard from such an instrument was found among the ashes). The ashes also contained fragments of personal items – metal fasteners for shoes and corsets, a hairpin, scraps of clothing.
Amid all the horrors served-up by these daily forensic discoveries, Landru immediately began to acquire the almost comical reput
ation that he still enjoys in France. The case was immediately seized upon by comedians and satirical songwriters in the cafés and cabarets. The almost complete failure of the police and prosecution to make any of the charges levelled at Landru stick became the subject of endless popular jokes and “...there was a rumour in circulation that still solemnly reported by some, that the whole affaire Landru was a put-up job, a farce engineered by the government to divert the attention of the population from the peace negotiations.” (Bardens, p.129) The French government had found itself on a collision-course with its wartime British and American allies over its demands for the payment of excessive financial war reparations by Germany, and the ceding of large tracts of German territory to France (the British and American governments both argued for a more lenient peace settlement). Some members of the public believed that Georges Clemenceau, the French President, had issued a secret directive to the press to maximise coverage of the Landru case, in order to play-down the government’s political problems, and that the entire scandal had been engineered to demonstrate that law and order ruled again following the administrative chaos of the war.
From the dock, Landru gave these unlikely rumours a strange hint of credibility – at one point, the judge observed that Landru appeared to be preoccupied with something. He replied:
“True, sir, I am. And who could help being so? My thoughts are engrossed by the electoral situation in this unhappy country.” (Bardens, p.129)
The Landru case has continued to inspire satirical comment. At least two films have been made about these events: Monsieur Verdoux (1947) – directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin; and Landru (1963) – released as Bluebeard in English – directed by Claude Chabrol; with Oulipo and Collège de ‘Pataphysique mainstay Raymond Queneau appearing in the role of Clemenceau, a screenplay by Françoise Sagan, and starring Charles Denner as Landru.
Both of these films were black comedies but, in spite of the proven talent on show, both of them failed spectacularly (in financial terms) and nearly cost their directors their careers.
More recently, if one can be permitted to suspend judgment on the awful crimes of Landru and to take his insolent defence at face value, there is a morbidly farcical humour to the case that has been explored by Frédéric Pages, under his nom de plume of Jean-Baptiste Botul. Botul, a hyper-fictional philosopher, is a regular contributor to a satirical magazine called Le Canard Enchâiné, who aims to encourage the spread of Botulism (in a purely philosophical sense, of course).
Botul-Pages’ habitual satirical targets include the likes of Bernard Henri Lévy, so-called nouvelle philosophie, and the capture of the language of ‘empowerment’ and individual liberty, from genuinely emancipatory political factions, by the ‘post-modernist,’ neo-liberal right wing. Pages-Botul’s Landru, précurseur du féminisme, reproduces a fictitious series of letters exchanged, between 1919 and 1920, between the philosopher and the soon-to-be-convicted killer. According to these letters, Landru has been wrongly accused of murdering women he has actually helped. On this deliberately scurrilous appraisal, probably a veiled attack on Lévy and his ilk, Botul argues that Landru should be celebrated as an important male proto-feminist: a ‘precursor of feminism,’ who has helped the missing women to sell their property, all-the-better to ‘empower’ them to sever their ties with France and escape to new lives in Argentina and the USA, where they now live in relative luxury. This reproduces some of what Landru claimed from the dock, no matter how silly this line of argument might seem.
From the offing, the comic comments on the case began with Landru’s demand that the jury suspend disbelief in his defence, suspend judgement, and suspend belief in the credibility of truth itself. “You must be careful of legends, you know, gentlemen of the jury. So much has been written and talked of in my unfortunate affair that a legend has grown up which must be carefully distinguished from the truth.” (Bardens, p.164) He tried their patience and that of the judge with a series of provocations that would have seen him silenced in just about any court outside France (where such obstructive protestations used to be tolerated). Legend has it (from Bardens, once again) that one journalist, driven to distraction by Landru’s buffoonery, quietly left the court and shot himself through the head.
Another journalist, a Monsieur Fauverge, in order to test the validity of some of the main charges, even went to the length of buying an identical model of stove to the one that Landru was accused of having used to cremate his victims at Gambais, and found that it would not adequately dispose of a kilo of meat. He wrote:
“It burnt the coal up all right, but not the meat! Maybe the court may decide that Landru dissolved heads, hands, feet and so on chopped off from his victims to prevent them being identified... They may... We’ll see!” (Bardens, p.143) By means of a rebuttal, it needs to be mentioned at this juncture that Jean Belin, the police inspector in charge of the case, had already performed the same experiment: but he had used the actual stove in the villa at Gambais. He had loaded it with high-quality anthracite and, within 15 minutes, the sheep’s head that he had placed in the stove had disappeared, almost without leaving a trace. All that remained of it was a small heap of ash and a couple of charred, highly-calcinated teeth.
The Landru Specials – for a while in 1921 it must have seemed as if there was only one event worth writing about in the newspapers. The demand for access to the trial by the press was so great that extra trains needed to be timetabled, between Paris and Versailles, nicknamed the ‘Landru Specials.’ Special tickets had to be issued to a horde of reporters, from all over the world, seeking access to the public galleries in the court, and 12 new telephone boxes were installed so that copy could be rushed to editors everywhere. Landru’s trial was an infamous social attraction for Parisian socialites and celebrities – Maurice Chevalier was noticed in attendance, as was Colette. This could not have gone unnoticed by Gaston Leroux.
Gaston Leroux is a writer who has been almost completely superseded by his own famous creations: Erik (the Phantom of the Opera); Joseph Rouletabille (the boy detective and model for Hergé’s more famous Tin-Tin); and Cheri-Bibi (a character who goes out in search of revenge for his imprisonment on Devil’s Island for a crime he did not commit). Adaptations of his novels and their characters have been extremely numerous: there have been more than 30 film adaptations (deservedly so: Leroux was one of the first authors systematically to write for the cinema), without even making a tentative count of comic books, television serials (La Poupée Sanglante was adapted into a 6 part serial that aired on Antenne 2 in 1976), and a singularly successful piece of musical theatre – yet he remains an almost forgotten writer, even in France, in spite of all the labours of the late Francis Lacassin, who edited the standard edition of Leroux’s collected works in the 1990s.
That being said, Leroux was one of the most famous serial-novelists of the early 20th Century.
Born in 1868 in Paris and educated in the prestigious college at Eu in Normandy, he trained initially as a lawyer – but he did not last long in that profession. He preferred to immerse himself in the public furore and popular-cultural tragicomedy that surrounded famous trials than to read depositions in front of their judges, and retrained as a journalist. He became the legal and theatre correspondent for Le Matin, a right-leaning, liberal-republican newspaper, first published in 1884, that was owned by a group of American financiers called Chamberlain & Co. In this capacity, he covered such famous cases as the trial and execution of the anarchist bomber Auguste Vaillant, and the prosecution of Émile Zola during the Dreyfus Affair. As a foreign correspondent for the same newspaper, he wrote several exciting reports from some of the major flashpoints of the abortive 1905 revolution in Russia. After the First World War, the paper’s political inclinations degenerated from a moderate, anti-monarchist position into a vehemently anti-parliamentarian strain of fascism but, by that time, Leroux was only publishing serialized novels in the paper. Leroux was long-gone (he died in 1927) when the editors of Le Matin adopte
d a collaborationist, pro-Nazi stance following the German invasion of France in 1940. Unsurprisingly, the paper ceased publication as of 1944.
As a journalist, his trademark was vigorous insistence on the facts of the story, to the detriment of analysis, with an insistence on empathy with victims: “To leave the paperwork to one side, to work from only one document: life! Everyday life!” In 1907, increasingly dissatisfied with his new profession, he retired from journalism and started to write fiction. His first novel was The Mystery of the Yellow Room. It was an immediate success, and a lot of what is left of Leroux’s posthumous fame still rests on it. The success of this novel allowed him to relocate to Nice, where he produced a formidable oeuvre before his death in 1927: somewhere in the region of 40 novels, as well as numerous short stories, articles, plays and film scripts.
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