by David King
There was no shortage of witnesses ready to testify about Petiot’s clientele, which seemed overwhelmingly female, with many of them addicted to morphine, heroin, or cocaine. As one patient later put it, Dr. Petiot was known to “nearly all the drug addicts of Montmartre.” And if these women could not pay his rates, Petiot was not averse to cutting a deal or trading services. The physician credited these women with teaching him invaluable lessons, not least in how to impose his will on other people. “It is through them that you learn to dominate,” Petiot said, calling prostitutes “the harems which make the great conquerors.”
One unidentified prostitute and client later told a reporter of her experiences with Petiot. “We were all a little afraid of him. He always asked for tricks that we did not like or sometimes that we did not know. Then, he would explain it to us with a funny laugh.” He was often rough and liked to bite or “pinch nipples with all his might.” Some prostitutes, like Marguerite la Poupée or Annette “Chouchou,” frequented his clinic for ointments. Petiot had a reputation for treating venereal diseases, particularly gonorrhea and syphilis, the latter being an especially difficult and lengthy procedure. There was, in short, no lack of opportunities for Petiot to gain insight and influence into the Parisian underworld.
Was this how the physician had met Paulette Grippay? The brothel where she worked was located just one street away, on rue Godot de Mauroy. Had Petiot sold her drugs, treated her for disease, or was there some other still-unknown link? The police would soon have their answer, and it would not be at all what Massu expected.
“ALL human preoccupations, all the difficulties, and all the worries of life—in order to end up there,” René Piédelièvre, a forensic expert working on the Petiot case, later reflected after his forty-five years of experience at the autopsy table. By “there,” he meant a lifeless body lying “among the debris which is going to crumble and disappear progressively into a microbial rot in the earth among the devouring insects and their larva, the workers of death.”
Piédelièvre had never forgotten his first trip to rue Le Sueur. Walking across the courtyard, he had stumbled upon what he thought was a pebble. He reached down to examine it and found instead a “fragmented vertebra where one could still see through the ligament.” He had “trampled in the dust of bones” and then, once the debris arrived at the Institut médico-légal, examined the “portions of scalps with the hair completely impregnated by a foul magma.” But, as with Commissaire Massu, the most troubling discovery for Piédelièvre was the drainage pit in the back building, where he saw the many twisted bodies, “cooped together like herring and partially burned by the lime which whitens them like sparrows.”
Some of the bodies were nearly intact, others were dismembered, and an early examination proved to him that the suspect was a skilled dissector. Like his colleagues on the case, Dr. Paul and Dr. Dérobert, Piédelièvre was not yet prepared to state that the murderer was an anatomist, or a forensic specialist, but he was clearly a doctor. “The dislocations were well done,” Piédelièvre said, noting how the suspect had carefully removed the pulpes digitales to prevent fingerprint identification and then removed the face mask in a single cut. Piédelièvre marveled at the “extreme skill” of the murderer.
As forensic scientists, Piédelièvre’s team would serve as an important “auxiliary to justice.” The goal was to render a carefully weighed opinion that, given the hard evidence, they would not soon “be obliged to contradict.” The task in the Petiot case was excruciatingly complicated, as they tried to reconstruct the bodies among the scalped craniums, the broken thighbones, and what Piédelièvre called a “foul muddle” of lime-caked flesh and debris. And when they could not reconstruct, they would resort to calculating the number of victims by weighing the bone fragments.
They were asked to determine the number and gender of the victims. This was difficult enough, but possible by concentrating on certain bones, such as the pelvis, the thighbone, and the femur, all of which were wider and more spread out in the female. Far more difficult, however, was trying to determine the time and cause of death. Most of the remains were not only savagely mutilated, but also in an advanced state of decomposition.
To complicate matters further, the forensic team had found no evidence of a bullet, knife, bludgeon, or other violent wound. A few of the victims had broken arms or legs, but the angle of fracture suggested that this had probably happened after death, and clearly after the skin and muscles had been removed from the bone. The implication was that the breaks had occurred when an arm or leg had been crammed into the small space of the basement stove.
Nor were there bloodstains, smears, drops, splashes, or even a trace of poison. In most cases, the internal organs had been cut out. Disemboweling the victim had certainly diminished the stench; it would also multiply the difficulties of finding the cause of death. In the few instances when they found internal organs, it was feared that the fire, the lime, and the advanced putrefaction would prevent the organs from yielding any significant conclusions.
The unanswered questions were certainly accumulating. Massu needed to learn everything he could about the suspect and who, if anyone, might be helping him. “The smallest testimony can have its importance,” Massu said, sending detectives across the city looking for anyone who might have known the doctor.
MAURICE Petiot, meanwhile, was brought in for a second interrogation.
“Would you please indicate how you spent your time during the days of March 11 through March 13?”
On the eleventh, Maurice answered, he had stayed the entire day in Auxerre. He had made some repairs in the neighborhood, and then, in the evening, he received his friend Albert Neuhausen, who arrived on the 9:30 train from Paris. As he had “no means of returning home to Courson,” Maurice had invited him to stay the night at one of his properties.
On Sunday the twelfth, Maurice worked on the central heating of his property on rue Sous-Murs. In the evening, he and his wife, Monique, went to an auction house and purchased a rug. On the thirteenth, he remained at home on rue du Pont until three in the afternoon, when he biked to Seignelay to visit a farm that Georgette Petiot had inherited from her father after his death in October 1943. “I did not find anyone there,” Maurice said, adding that it was only that day that he heard the news of the police investigation.
“Contrary to what you claim,” Massu said, “you have sent certain products or material to the property at rue Le Sueur. Would you like to explain?”
“If I have sent any materials, it is for you to prove it.”
“You have sent some, including lime.”
“It is for you to prove.”
Massu was well on his way to doing just that. The truck driver who came by the Hôtel Alicot looking for Maurice about a delivery, Jean Eustache, had already contacted the police with a major revelation. Eustache, age twenty-two, informed detectives that he had made deliveries for Maurice Petiot on four or five occasions. Mostly it was electronics or furniture, but the last time, in mid-February 1944, Eustache and a fellow worker named Robert Massonière had picked up Maurice Petiot in truck number 290-ZU-4 and driven him to a quarry outside Aisy-sur-Armançon, where they had collected four hundred kilograms of quicklime.
“He told me it was for whitewashing the property,” Eustache said. Upon arrival in Paris about ten o’clock on the morning of February 19, 1944, the three men had unloaded the sacks just inside the carriage entrance to a private mansion somewhere in the city. Eustache was not sure exactly where. Maurice did not pay him anything for the transport, he said, and he assumed that the price had been negotiated with his employer.
Massu did not specifically question Maurice yet about the lime, as he did not have the deposition in front of him. Instead, the commissaire pressed on, preparing the ground for the future confrontation.
“Have you seen any lime on the property at rue Le Sueur?”
“No,” Maurice answered. “I have never seen any there.”
Massu
asked about his whereabouts on February 19. Once again, Maurice claimed to have spent the day at home. Did he know a man named Jean Eustache? Yes, Maurice said, but not very well, and he could not say for sure the last time he had seen him. How about on the nineteenth?
Maurice hesitated, removed his scarf, and then calmly said that he would now tell the truth. He had come to Paris about that time, probably the nineteenth, in a small truck driven by Eustache. Maurice then claimed that he had been dropped off at the Place de la Concorde, while Eustache and a coworker at the delivery firm proceeded to make deliveries. The three of them were to meet the following day about two o’clock at the intersection of rue Le Sueur and the Avenue Grande Armée. Maurice was then supposed to direct them to a warehouse, where they would haul away “the electrical material that I had bought.”
But Eustache did not arrive at the designated time, Maurice said, and so he went to dine with his brother at rue Caumartin and then afterward to a vaudeville show at the A.B.C. on the Grands Boulevards. Later, at the Hôtel Alicot, Maurice said, he learned that Eustache had not shown up at the rendezvous because his truck had been involved in an accident.
Massu interrupted to ask if Maurice had been to 21 rue Le Sueur at any point during this trip to Paris.
“I did go to rue Le Sueur,” Maurice now admitted, but he had not entered the house. He said that he had to return a set of keys to his brother—a statement that Massu thought had been uttered accidentally. It certainly did not help his claims about not knowing much about the building.
“I should tell you,” Maurice added, “that in the truck were about thirty bags of coal which were supposed to be returned to Auxerre.” After the accident, Maurice said that he had offered to allow Eustache to store this cargo at his brother’s town house at rue Le Sueur while they waited on repairs or the arrival of a new vehicle. He had not mentioned this incident earlier, he said, because he could not have imagined that it could have had any significance for the investigation.
As for his brother’s whereabouts, Maurice said that he did not know. He had not received any news and could only guess, envisioning three possibilities: he was hiding out with the Resistance, he had taken flight abroad, or he had committed suicide.
Massu asked an officer to lead Maurice into a holding cell. How long would he be held? he asked.
“As long as I am permitted by law.” Massu needed to follow up on details, which “however unimportant for you, are essential for the investigation.” Maurice Petiot, protesting his innocence, was led away.
At this time, almost midnight, Massu returned home. Bernard, he knew, would still be awake, studying in his room and waiting to hear the latest news about the case. Massu felt that they were approaching a major breakthrough. That night, he and Bernard discussed serial killers. Petiot had not killed over a long period of time like Henri Landru, the commissaire said. Instead Petiot had attempted too much too soon, and as a result, his killing spree had lasted only a short while. Massu, clearly, had a lot to learn about this case.
10.
“GOODBYE ARROGANCE”
AFTER HAVING HAD THE LEISURE TO STUDY THE DEPTH OF HIS THOUGHT, I AM CONVINCED THAT HIS GREATEST PLEASURE WAS TO PLAY WITH OTHER PEOPLE’S MINDS.
—René Nézondet on Marcel Petiot
PROFILING—the practice of drawing up a psychological portrait of a criminal based on behavioral clues and evidence—was not used in this murder investigation or in any other during the Occupation. Although already occasionally employed, most famously in Walter Langer’s profile of Adolf Hitler for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1943, profiling’s heyday would come much later. The FBI’s elite Behavioral Science Unit, which opened in 1972 in Quantico, Virginia, would have many first-rate identifications—a success popularized in Thomas Harris’s harrowing 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs and the subsequent film starring Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Hannibal Lecter.
A veteran of this unit, Special Agent John Douglas, widely regarded as the basis for the fictional detective Jack Crawford in the Harris novel, described what he referred to as the “homicidal triad” of behaviors that suggest future violent crime—namely, cruelty to small animals, bedwetting at a late age, and arson. Two of these applied to Marcel Petiot. And the third was not far off. Police already knew of the fire at the dairy following the murder of its owner, Petiot’s patient and possible mistress, Henriette Debauve. They would also soon learn that, not long after the disappearance of another lover, Louisette Delaveau, a mysterious fire had destroyed the home of her former employer.
The French police continued the difficult task of trying to understand this man. Detectives searched banks and insurance companies to find his account and look for any suspicious transactions. They solicited information from government agencies overseeing hospitalizations, accidents, prisons, and passports, the latter under his name as well as several others, such as his wife’s maiden name, Lablais. Detectives continued to speak with neighbors, while also staking out the auction houses Petiot liked to frequent, the train stations he might use to flee Paris, and the various properties he owned around the city. The only visitor they noted was a forty-eight-year-old woman named Marie Julienne Le Roux. She had come to clean Petiot’s office.
When questioned, Le Roux told inspectors that she worked at rue Caumartin weekday mornings from ten to twelve and then again in the afternoons from two thirty to five thirty, with an additional short shift on Saturday mornings. During this time, she would receive patients, which, she confirmed, included more women than men. She also cleaned the apartment and office—everything, that is, except for the linen, which Georgette Petiot preferred to wash herself. Le Roux had not seen Dr. Petiot since her shift Friday night.
On Saturday, March 11, 1944, when she worked the morning as usual, Petiot had not arrived. “I have never noticed anything suspicious either in his office or his X-ray rooms,” Le Roux said. Her testimony, though, was of limited value because she had worked in Petiot’s office for only three weeks.
There was another woman, however, who might have more valuable information for the investigation; this was Geneviève Cuny, who had worked in Dr. Petiot’s office and household for a couple of years. She was no longer at rue Caumartin and, apparently, not in Paris either. Massu sent detectives to find this woman.
BY March 16, 1944, when Massu called in Maurice Petiot for another interrogation, Inspector Battut and several detectives from the Brigade Criminelle had searched his property on rue du Pont. They had gone through the ground floor with its electronics boutique, the dining room, and the kitchen, followed by the cellar and the three bedrooms on the top floor. As the police report of the search summed it up, they found “nothing suspicious.”
The detectives had also searched Maurice’s property on rue Sous-Murs. At first, they found mainly tools, firewood, and more antique furniture. Then, in one of the bedrooms, an inspector discovered a curious locked cupboard. After locating the key in a drawer, he opened it and found a number of papers belonging to Dr. Petiot: a diploma, an insurance policy, acts of sale for a couple properties, two address books, and the identity card of the late French actor Harry Bauer. A closet in the room also contained an astrakhan coat, two furs, and several other articles of women’s clothing in a small size.
When asked about these discoveries, Maurice said that he had no idea that they were there. He imagined that they had been left a few months before, when Marcel and Georgette had come to Auxerre and stayed several nights in the room. As for Bauer’s identity card, Maurice suggested that it must have been a gift to his brother. Maurice was also still denying any knowledge of lime at rue Le Sueur. This time, however, Massu read aloud the signed testimony of the truck driver Jean Eustache.
Looking him straight in the eye and calmly changing his story again, Maurice admitted that Eustache was correct. According to the account he now told, Maurice had delivered four hundred kilograms of lime to the town house. His brother Marcel had requested the material to “kill the bugs
in the attic of rue Le Sueur and to whitewash the façade.” “Goodbye arrogance,” Massu said afterward. Maurice Petiot was another witness “caught in the trap of his own lies.”
As Maurice explained to the commissaire, he had failed to answer honestly because he feared that the information would give a false impression. He was also trying to protect the truck driver, who had been sworn to secrecy about the lime. Maurice acknowledged that he had made a mistake in covering up his involvement in the delivery, but he was no murderer and knew nothing about bodies in his brother’s town house.
“My brother did not keep me informed of his business,” Maurice said. What he did know was that Dr. Petiot had wanted the building on rue Le Sueur to establish “a clinic for cancer and tumor research.” Georgette Petiot, he added, had certainly visited the property, because his brother would not have bought it without showing it to her.
Asked about his own visits to rue Le Sueur, Maurice said that he had never seen anything unusual. Nor had he been surprised by the disorder and bric-a-brac that prevailed, as his brother was an avid collector who enjoyed purchasing items at auction houses. He had, he now admitted, entered the triangular room, which he described as “a sort of cabinet noir.” While he claimed not to recall any hooks on the walls, he had seen the false door, which had intrigued him, and he had tried to open it with an iron bar. He had concluded that it was merely decorative.
It was during this interview that Maurice admitted that he had learned of the discovery of the crime scene not on Monday, March 13, as he had claimed, but actually on March 11. He had received a late-night anonymous telephone call. Adamantly and repeatedly, he swore that it was not his brother who made the call.
