Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris

by David King

  Petiot certainly knew the victim. The two had been introduced several years before by “Old Man Frascot”—the same man who had introduced Petiot to his previous lover, Louisette Delaveau. Frascot, moreover, had joined the doctor and Henriette for dinner a few times, and they had appeared to hit it off. She became his patient, and, as police investigators later believed, almost certainly his lover.

  There were many curiosities about this case. The fire occurred on a Tuesday evening, when Debauve’s husband went out to the bistro. This was also the second Tuesday of the month, the day before the dairy paid the farmers for milk. The safe had been forced open, but no money had been found there, because Debauve had hidden it earlier that day under the kitchen cabinet.

  Interestingly, too, the police had uncovered a clear set of fingerprints on an iron engraving tool that had been removed from the shed and probably had been used to pry open the safe in the bedroom. Fingerprints were taken of the dairy’s twenty-one employees, but there was no match. When Petiot was asked for fingerprints, he refused. Robert Seguin, his successor as mayor in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, later described the uproar when Petiot finally complied. He lost his temper and ripped out a page from the town’s official register (registre officiel des déliberations). “Furiously, he pressed his fingers into the ink himself and affixed his fingerprints onto the legally inviolable register. Then he threw it on the table saying, ‘Do what you want. You’ll see that it will not get you anywhere.’ ” He stormed out of the room, slamming the door.

  When Commissaire Massu requested the file on the Debauve murder from the investigators of the Brigade Mobile of Dijon, it was not found, and detectives began to grow suspicious. Speculations rose about the missing documents, and many people believed that the mayor had used his power to destroy them. Years later, the dossier was actually located—filed not under D for Debauve, but M for murder. Curiously, too, it was slim, containing no record of any interviews or even a reference to Petiot’s arrival on the scene.

  Of course, a crime of this nature had attracted a great deal of attention from police, press, and townsmen. One freelance reporter for the local paper, Le Petit Régional, was particularly well informed. His reporting was soon filling in details that perplexed even the main investigators. Among other scoops, he retrieved the hammer used in the murder, from a stream close to the farmhouse, dropped there likely so that the rust would remove any trace of fingerprints. The journalist never signed his name to any of the articles. His identity was only revealed in 1945. It was Marcel Petiot.

  Frascot, in the meantime, had been claiming that he knew something about the case that no one else did, insinuating that he had seen Petiot at the dairy before the fire and implying that the hunt for the murderer should begin in the mayor’s office.

  What exactly Frascot knew about that night may never be revealed because, a few weeks after Debauve’s death, he agreed to meet with Petiot for a drink at the bar of the Hôtel du Dauphin. During the course of the conversation, Frascot told his doctor that he was suffering from a painful bout of rheumatism. Petiot informed him of a pioneering new drug from Paris that would likely relieve the symptoms, if not also cure him. As a favor to his old friend, Petiot offered to administer the injection for free. They walked to Petiot’s office down the street. Three hours later, one of the most promising witnesses in the murder investigation was dead.

  The official cause of Frascot’s death was an aneurysm, or “by accident … from a heart shock, or some unknown side effect resulting from a hypodermic injection.” This is of course possible, but the person who conducted the postmortem and signed the death certification was Villeneuve-sur-Yonne’s medical coroner. And that position—Massu learned with disbelief—was held by Dr. Marcel Petiot.

  AFTER finishing a funeral at Passy cemetery, the gravediggers returned to their sieves at the Petiot town house, retrieving the bones and rotten limbs from the pit, placing them in wooden boxes that resembled coffins, and then transporting them to the Institut médico-légal on the place de Mazas in the 12th arrondissement.

  The Institut médico-légal (IML) boasted one of the most celebrated forensic laboratories in the world. After moving to this location in 1914, from its previous site just behind Notre Dame, the IML had expanded from its original role as a morgue to being an advanced institution that pioneered the use of science in criminal investigation. One of the groundbreaking investigators was Alphonse Bertillon, an early proponent of what he called “anthropometric” techniques: that is, learning how specific measurements uniquely identify individuals.

  As nineteenth-century French law differentiated between first-time and repeat offenders, allowing for more lenient penalties for the former, criminals regularly adopted false aliases to pose as first-timers. Bertillon’s method consisted of measuring every criminal upon arrest on eleven points: height, width of outstretched arms, length and breadth of head, as well as length of the foot, the middle finger, the little finger, the arm from elbow to middle finger, and so on—the left side being preferred in the measurements because it was the least likely to change if the suspect engaged in hard physical labor. Together, these precise measurements would uniquely identify a person. Two people, Bertillon reasoned, may share one, two, or perhaps three of the same measurements, but not all eleven. The odds, he calculated, were 268,435,456 to 1. And then, to address this possibility, he added three additional descriptive points of reference: the color of the suspect’s eyes, hair, and skin.

  In February 1883, after years of cataloguing and refining his classification system, Bertillon successfully identified a repeat offender, an achievement that has been heralded as the first use in history of scientific detection to identify a criminal. Over the next few years, Bertillon would repeatedly demonstrate the value of this method, identifying no fewer than 241 offenders in 1884, 425 in 1885, and by the end of the decade, some 3,500. By the mid-1890s, the French police had five million measurements on file.

  Bertillon would pioneer a number of other changes as well, from standardizing the photograph of the criminal upon arrest into a front and side “mug shot,” to bringing a camera to document the scene of the crime. He would eventually support the use of fingerprints, though he had first resisted this tool as a challenge to his own identification system. Bertillon’s esteem had risen quickly. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would make Sherlock Holmes show “enthusiastic admiration of the French savant,” and then, in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Dr. Mortimer credits Holmes and Bertillon as being the two best detectives in Europe.

  The current head of the IML was Paris’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Albert Paul, a renowned sixty-five-year-old forensic scientist who came from a family of doctors and lawyers. After studying under Paul Brouardel, a leading expert on forensic pathology and forensic entomology, Paul had become professor of forensic medicine at the Sorbonne in 1918 and worked on many high-profile cases, most famously the Henri Landru case in 1920–1921. Landru had eluded authorities for years as he killed wealthy women, robbed them, and then burned their bodies.

  Dr. Paul had cracked the case when, replicating Landru’s technique of disposing of his victims, he burned human body parts in a kitchen stove. “A right foot,” Paul learned, “disappears in fifty minutes, a half skull with brains taken out in thirty-six minutes, the whole skull in one hour ten minutes. A human head with the brain, hair, tongue, etc. disappears in about one hour forty minutes.” The most difficult to dispose of were the trunk and thorax, possibly explaining why the murderer at rue Le Sueur chopped the bodies up before feeding them to the fire.

  A legend in his field, Dr. Paul was also no small sensation in Parisian society, where he was known for a wealth of tales, often spiced up with his macabre sense of humor. Commissaire Massu had a great respect for Dr. Paul, whom he called “the doctor of a 100,000 autopsies.” Massu and Paul had met thirty-two years before, in the spring of 1912, when both were starting their careers, Massu at the brigade and Paul at the old coroner’s office on quai de l’Archevê
ché, before he moved to the Institut after the First World War. Massu had learned among other things that the coroner was a touchy eccentric who hated long questions and could not stand “chatterboxes.” Massu always kept this in mind in his dealings with the temperamental expert.

  On the rue Le Sueur case Paul would be assisted by a talented forensic team that included Professors Léon Dérobert and René Piédelièvre of the Museum of Natural History. Both Dérobert and Piédelièvre were specialists in the area of reconstructing fossil remains—an expertise that would prove invaluable in the Petiot investigation. Paul already suspected that work on this case would be more difficult than even Landru.

  The coroner’s office was being asked to identify human beings from a horrid mass of decomposed and mutilated remains retrieved from the lime pit, the stove, and the basement of rue Le Sueur. They would have to match arms, legs, torsos, and thighs—much as they might do for a dinosaur skeleton at the museum. They were asked to determine, among other things, the number of victims, identifying them by age and gender as well as cause and time of death. Their report would be crucial evidence to authorities struggling for fundamental facts.

  Hard at work, Paul sorted through a heap of “thigh bones, craniums, shinbones, ribs, fingers, knee caps, and teeth” at his large marble table. There were two nearly complete skeletons and two half torsos. In most cases, however, they were dealing with bones, such as the ten collarbones, nine sterna, six shoulder blades, and one complete pelvis that had been found, or, more often, fragments too small or deformed to be identified. There were many of those pieces or, as Dr. Paul put it, “three garbage cans full.” There were also several human scalps. The collection of hair alone weighed eleven pounds.

  “It’s not an autopsy,” Paul said. “It’s a puzzle.” A puzzle, or rather, as investigators would soon learn, a set of different puzzles with many missing pieces.

  6.

  THE WOMAN WITH THE YELLOW SUITCASE

  I AM A SPECIALIST IN DESTINY AND ITS MYSTERIES, BELIEVE ME. SEIZE YOUR CHANCE. IT’S HERE.

  —Jean Cocteau, “Address to Young Writers,”

  La Gerbe, December 5, 1940

  ASTONE’S throw from Marcel Petiot’s apartment on rue Caumartin, Jean-Paul Sartre was teaching philosophy at the Lycée Condorcet. Outside of class, which was held three and a half days a week during term, Sartre enjoyed spending time in a number of cafés around town. One of his favorites, in the spring of 1944, was Saint-Germain-des-Prés’s then little-known Café de Flore, where he liked to arrive early in the morning and head for his table in the back on the second floor. There, the short, balding, and bespectacled thirty-nine-year-old sat in a red chair, puffing on his pipe and scribbling away with his fountain pen, racing to capture his thoughts in small, tidy letters. Given the wartime shortage of tobacco, Sartre would stop from time to time to retrieve cigarette butts from the floor to stuff into his pipe.

  At the other end of the room, at a mahogany marble-topped table, preferably near the stove, sat his friend and lover Simone de Beauvoir. The two deliberately staked out territory at opposite ends of the café to concentrate on their work. About lunchtime, they would break for a meal, most often in Beauvoir’s corner flat on the third floor of the La Louisiane on the rue de Seine. Conversation, no surprise, flowed. “I realized,” Beauvoir once said, “that even though we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short.”

  Sartre was entering into a very productive period that would ultimately send him to the heights of intellectual stardom. In the summer of 1943, he had published his monumental Being and Nothingness, a 722-page philosophical treatise about freedom and responsibility that would become a sensation in the immediate postwar period. At first, however, it was largely ignored. There had only been one review thus far, in René-Marill Albérès’s Etudes et Essais universitaires. Sartre’s friend Jean Paulhan joked that the bulky work would be useful for weighing fruits and vegetables.

  That summer, Sartre had also just completed his first major play, The Flies, which was staged at the Sarah Bernhardt Theater, then renamed Theatre de la Cité by the Nazis, to remove the Jewish reference. In this play, which reinterprets the myth of the House of Atreus, young Orestes returns home to Argos amid a plague and the tyrannical rule of Aegisthus, his father’s murderer and now his mother’s lover. Orestes obtains his revenge, murdering the hated usurper and freeing the city from the curse—an appropriate subject for the Occupation that was also subtle enough in its ancient Greek setting to pass the censors.

  On the opening night, which, because of electricity cuts, was actually held during the afternoon of June 2, 1943, Sartre was standing in the theater lobby, when a handsome, elegantly dressed young man with gray-green eyes walked up and introduced himself. It was Albert Camus, the twenty-nine-year-old novelist who had the previous year published his first novel, The Stranger. Camus had left his native Algeria in March 1940 to seek a cure for pulmonary tuberculosis at the mountain retreat at Le Panelier near Chambon in Vichy. In November 1942, he had become virtually stranded when the Allies invaded North Africa and the Germans seized the unoccupied zone.

  Sartre had reviewed The Stranger in a mostly positive six-thousand-word essay; he was in fact one of the first people to do so, that is, except for the reviews by Camus’s friends or by journals owned by his publisher, Gallimard. The two thinkers, Sartre and Camus, shared many interests, from literature and social justice, to explorations of freedom and absurdity. But the ice really broke, as Simone de Beauvoir put it, when they discussed the theater. Sartre was writing a new play, the future No Exit, and wanted Camus to act in and direct it. Sartre insisted.

  As rehearsals began over Christmas 1943, Camus joined Sartre’s circle at Café de Flore, and their friendship grew quickly enough to evoke Beauvoir’s jealousy. Later, she acknowledged that she worried about how Sartre, “the strongest heterosexual I knew,” could fall so completely for the charming stranger. “We were like two dogs circling a bone,” she said of her rival. What Beauvoir did not mention, however, was that she had also been attracted to Camus and once tried to seduce him, only to be rebuffed. “Imagine what she might say on the pillow afterwards,” Camus told his friend and fellow writer Arthur Koestler.

  Another place Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir could be seen that spring was at the restaurant the Catalan, on rue des Grands-Augustins, sometimes seated at the table of their new friend, Pablo Picasso. Despite many invitations to come abroad, the Spanish artist had remained in Paris during the Nazi Occupation, painting in his two-story studio on rue Saint-Augustin, on the Left Bank. The sixty-two-year-old Picasso, with long white hair falling onto his shoulders, was surrounded by his work and his women, including his latest lover, twenty-two-year-old painter Françoise Gilot.

  In the eyes of Nazi authorities, Picasso was a highly suspect artist. He had supported Spanish republicans in the Civil War, raised money for their cause, and published caricatures of the military dictator in his Dream and Lie of Franco. He had commemorated the German firebombing raid of the Basque city of Guernica on the afternoon of April 26, 1937, on a three-hundred-square-foot canvas that had dramatically raised awareness of the tragedy. Hitler, of course, had placed the painter on a list of modern degenerates, and the Nazis banned all his exhibits in Paris.

  The French police had actually collected a sizable file on the Spanish painter, a dossier that was only discovered in 2003, when 140 cardboard boxes were returned to Paris from Moscow. The Russians had seized the archive in 1945 from the Germans, who in turn had taken it after the Liberation. As historians then learned, Picasso had applied for French citizenship in April 1940, but the state had rejected the application on grounds that he was suspected of being an anarchist or communist, or harboring sympathies leaning in that direction. “He has no right to be naturalized,” an official wrote on the form, and “should even be considered suspect from a national viewpoint.”

  Picasso had not told even his closest friends about this request
. He had, however, let them know about his fears: namely, that his authorization to remain in the country was about to expire and he had sworn never to return to Spain as long as Franco was in power. Fortunately for Picasso, a sympathetic police official intervened. “Very illegally,” Maurice Toesca wrote in his diary in September 1943, “I have prolonged his stay for three years.”

  The Germans who visited Picasso’s studio during the Occupation were not the SS men who were rumored to be slashing his paintings, but instead a number of officials who admired his work. One frequent visitor was Lieutenant Gerhard Heller of the Referat Schriftum (Literature Section) of the Propaganda-Staffel. After his introduction in June 1942, Heller, a censor, would take a break from the stacks of manuscripts overflowing on the shelves, tables, chairs, and floors at his office at 52 Champs-Élysées to climb the spiral staircase, heart beating with excitement at another chance to observe the most infamous example of modern degenerate art at work.

  As usual, Picasso was experimenting with color, texture, and form. In addition to woodcuts and pen-and-ink drawings, he worked on cardboard, matchboxes, cigarette boxes, even food, like a piece of bread—a reflection of his creative zeal as well as the shortage of canvases under the Occupation. Many of the objects of his paintings—sausages, legs of lamb, grand buffet tables, and the empty cooking pot—reflect the preoccupations and hardships of the period, as did the death’s-heads and grotesque monsters reminiscent of his early cubist days. Even his choice of colors, more black, gray, and beige, seemed to parallel the drab palette of the Occupation.