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

by David King

  MARCEL Petiot had purchased the property on rue Le Sueur from the Princess Marie Colloredo-Mansfeld in May of 1941 for 495,000 francs. He paid 373,000 down, covering the remainder with annual payments of 17,500. The building was put in the name of his son, who became the ninth owner since its construction in 1834. On August 11, 1941, Petiot took possession of the town house, and within six weeks, he began making renovations.

  The construction company, Laborderie et Minaud, had made a number of improvements to the property. In addition to pouring a concrete foundation in the garage, the masons had built a high outer wall in gypsum around the courtyard and constructed an inner wall in one of the buildings, which created the triangular room. They then surrounded this new space with a wall consisting of twenty-two centimeters (8.6 inches) of solid brick. A viewer was installed, a double door was inserted, and eight iron hooks were added. In the kitchen, they had also installed a concrete sink and, he claimed, plugged some holes in the basement that gave access to the sewer. The renovation work was completed in October 1941—two months before the disappearance of the first known victim, Joachim Guschinow.

  Jean Minaud, one of the owners of the firm, said that he had never visited the site or inspected the work. It was a small project compared to his company’s usual ventures. He had delegated everything to two brothers, Louis and Gaston Dethève. When Massu asked to speak with them, Minaud told him that Louis had died two years before in an air raid. Gaston, however, was available, and on March 23, 1944, he accompanied the commissaire to rue Le Sueur, where he would point out the work in detail. He also removed the Lumvisor lens from the wall for examination.

  As Dethève explained, Petiot had told them that he planned to open a clinic and mental institution after the war. The newly constructed triangular room would house an “electric transformer.” Petiot wanted the walls reinforced to drown out the sounds, so as not to disturb the neighbors and also to protect against the dangers of radiation. “With electrotherapy,” he had allegedly told the Dethève brothers, “you cannot be too careful.” Petiot had also explained the insertion of the viewing lens into the wall as a device to monitor the progress of his machine. The courtyard addition, which was built on top of a wall already several stories high, would protect his patients from the prying eyes of his neighbors, not to mention shield them from the peach pits that he claimed children liked to throw into his yard. As for the hooks in the triangular room, Dr. Petiot had not explained their purpose.

  WITH news of the “murder factory” on rue Le Sueur splashed on the front pages of all the major Parisian papers, a number of people approached police headquarters with stories about the suspect. One of the more useful tips came from Roland Albert Porchon, a thirty-two-year-old former deliverer of wine who had made a small fortune during the years of the Occupation. He owned, among other things, a trucking company near la porte de Sainte-Cloud and a restaurant on rue du Faubourg Poissonière, which had been “Aryanized.” A large man with short dark hair and a thick neck that the French then described as Germanic, Porchon had many friends on the police force and in the criminal underworld.

  Like Gouedo, Porchon claimed knowledge of the clandestine escape agency. In March 1943, Porchon had suggested it to a friend, René Marie, and his wife, Marcelle. After the usual round of background checks and interviews, the couple had been accepted by the organization. The cost was to be 45,000 francs, the fee clearly varying depending on many factors, not least being the desperation of the potential client to leave and his or her ability to pay. Porchon, who operated a secondhand furniture business on the side, had offered to buy the couple’s furniture for a lump sum of 220,000 francs. The couple, in the end, had not left with the agency.

  But there was more to Porchon’s testimony. After the news on rue Le Sueur first broke, Porchon had panicked. Realizing that he had sent over a couple to the doctor and fearing that police might find their names, as well as his own, at rue Le Sueur, Porchon had tried to cover up the incident. He confessed to Massu that he had gone to the Maries, and told them, in no uncertain terms, to avoid speaking with the police. And if the police came to them, they should deny everything. Porchon, busy with his own concerns, did not need any additional hassles from the authorities.

  In the course of the conversation, Porchon also mentioned a name that Massu and his inspectors kept encountering: René Nézondet. He was, they already knew, a friend of Marcel Petiot, and he had also been arrested when the Gestapo arrived at the physician’s home. They were in prison together until Nézondet’s release in June 1943. After twenty years of friendship dating back to their bachelor days in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, Nézondet had served, in Porchon’s words, as Petiot’s “right arm.”

  Nézondet had approached Porchon once with a proposal from Dr. Petiot to sell a large stock of alcohol. Porchon, tempted, picked up the phone and called a friend in a purchasing agency that sold goods in bulk to the German Occupation authorities. He was not interested. Nézondet came with many other proposals, which Porchon said he had not taken seriously.

  On one such occasion in 1943, Nézondet had come to him with an idea of launching a new, German-sanctioned radio station that would operate in Paris. While they discussed the proposition, Nézondet related some gossip about Dr. Marcel Petiot, calling him “the King of the Gangsters.” Then, Nézondet added mysteriously, “I would never have believed he could ever commit murder!”

  According to Porchon, when he challenged this statement, Nézondet told him that he had entered a basement somewhere in town—he did not say where—and seen “sixteen corpses stretched out.” Porchon was still skeptical, he said, but Nézondet replied that he had seen the corpses himself. “They were completely black,” he added. “They must have died by injection or some poison.”

  Nézondet then allegedly told Porchon why he thought Petiot had killed his victims: “I suppose he asked them for money to pass them into the Free Zone and instead of helping them escape, he killed them.” Nézondet swore Porchon to silence, assuring him that he would report the murders to the police himself as soon as the war ended.

  As if that were not disturbing enough, Massu now learned that this was apparently not the first time Porchon had reported Petiot’s suspected murders to the police. On August 2, 1943, Porchon had contacted a friend, Commissaire Lucien Doulet, then a forty-two-year-old director of the police économique at the quai de Gesvres, which investigated financial crime, and told him about a rumor circulating in the underworld about “a Parisian doctor who, under the pretext of passing young people out of the country, asked them for sums of money between 50,000 and 75,000 francs, and then did away with them after payment.” This doctor, Porchon added, disposed of the remains “by burying them in the courtyard of his building.”

  Doulet had told him to report the news to the Police Judiciaire, which Porchon did. “He didn’t seem to take the matter seriously,” Porchon said. The police officer in question, Massu learned, was an inspector on his own Brigade Criminelle: René Bouygues. When the commissaire interviewed him on August 19, Assistant Inspector Principal Bouygues admitted knowing Porchon for five years and praised him as a valued police informer. But he denied ever hearing anything about Petiot or any murders. He later changed his mind, saying that he had “forgotten about it.”

  That Inspector Bouygues would attempt to make this excuse for not pursuing the allegation illustrates the sheer disregard for human life during the German Occupation—a time when many people simply disappeared without explanation. Porchon’s testimony also underlined the extent to which the police department, even when tipped off about possible murder, neglected to investigate. Was this an example of incompetence, an overwhelmed police force, or yet another sign that perhaps someone was protecting Marcel Petiot?

  It was at this time that Massu learned that the rumors of a stranger arriving at and departing from the crime scene at rue Le Sueur on the night of March 11 were true. Patrolmen Teyssier and Fillion, the policemen who spoke with the man, had always de
nied it, persisting in their stance even after fireman Corporal Boudringhin gave his testimony on March 16, describing the visitor in detail.

  Teyssier admitted that there had been many curious people outside the town house, but he said none had been allowed to enter. He flat-out denied the claims of the fire chief. “At no point,” Teyssier said, “have I seen Dr. Petiot on the premises.” Fillion supported Teyssier, but the evidence was mounting. Robert Bouquin, one of the first arrivals to rue Le Sueur, also saw the stranger, as did Maurice Choquat, who had arrived that night about 7:45.

  On March 18, 1944, Patrolmen Teyssier and Fillion reversed themselves. A man claiming to be “the brother of the owner,” Fillion confessed, had approached him and entered the building with his permission. He explained this lapse of judgment by the fact that he had been shocked and overwhelmed by the “staggering spectacle and the unbreathable air from the smell of rotting cadavers burning in the stove.” Teyssier also now acknowledged seeing the stranger. After his return from calling headquarters for reinforcement, Teyssier noticed this unknown man standing under the vault of the carriage entrance with Fire Chief Boudringhin and Fillion, the latter looking uncomfortable. The man had remained three or four minutes, Fillion said, and then left, profiting from the general chaos. “At that moment,” Fillion added, “I was far from thinking that this man was the killer.”

  For this negligence of duty, as well as their repeated lies, Patrolmen Teyssier and Fillion were removed from their positions and ordered to appear before the Germans at the Pépinière Armory. Both men fled, fearing severe reprisals. Teyssier, a thirty-nine-year-old member of a Resistance group inside the police—l’Honneur de la police—escaped by jumping out of a window at the armory.

  14.

  DESTINATION ARGENTINA

  IF THE AMOUNT OF DOUGH EDITH DONATED FOR ALL THESE GOOD CAUSES IS ANY INDICATION, SMUGGLING PEOPLE ACROSS THE BORDER WAS A GREAT WAY TO MAKE A LIVING.

  —Simone Berteaut, on her sister Edith Piaf

  ON the evening of March 19, 1944, Pablo Picasso’s play Le Désir attrapé par la queue (Desire Caught by the Tail) was performed in private at his friends Michel and Zette Leiris’s fifth-floor apartment on the Quai des Grands-Augustins. It was a dark surrealist farce that featured a star-studded cast: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Picasso’s former lover Dora Maar. Albert Camus narrated, describing the largely imaginary sets—that is, except for a large black box that served alternatively as a bed, a bathtub, and a coffin.

  Picasso had written the play three years earlier, beginning, as he recorded in a notebook, on the evening of January 14, 1941, and, in the tradition of surrealist automatic writing, finishing it three days later. Reminiscent of 1920s avant-garde theater, the play revolved around deprivation and indulgence, or more specifically hunger and sex. Michel Leiris, who had selected the cast, played the lead role of Big Foot. Sartre was The Round End; Raymond Queneau, The Onion; and Jacques-Laurent Bost, Silence. Simone de Beauvoir played The Cousin, while publisher Jean Aubier was The Curtains.

  When Gertrude Stein had read the script, she suggested that Picasso stick to painting. But the photographer Gyula Halász, better known as Brassaï, after his native Transylvanian village of Brassó, thought otherwise. He praised Picasso’s virtuosity, comparing the composition style to a “verbal trance [that] gave free rein to dreams, obsessions, unavowed desires, comical connections between ideas and words, everyday banalities, the absurd.” This play, he added, displayed the painter’s “humor and inexhaustible spirit of invention … in their pure state.”

  The audience, filled with painters, writers, playwrights, surrealists, and even Argentine millionaires, seemed to agree. They applauded loudly and congratulated Picasso on his success. Afterward, the cast and audience retired for a celebration, fueled by wine and desserts, including a chocolate cake brought by the Argentines.

  As the play ended at about eleven, just before that night’s curfew, Leiris had invited the cast and several friends to stay the night. They sang, listened to jazz records, and admired Sartre playing the piano. Camus and the host acted out various scenes, enhanced in part with wine served warm with cinnamon. The party ended at five in the morning. Simone de Beauvoir was overjoyed: “A year before we would never have dreamed of gathering together like this and having a noisy, frivolous party that went on for hours.”

  This was the first of the fiestas, as Michel Leiris dubbed them, that would take place in the spring of 1944. Beauvoir described another one not long afterward, at surrealist Georges Bataille’s house in the Cour de Rohan:

  We constituted a sort of carnival with its mountebanks, its confidence men, its clowns, and its parades. Dora Marr used to mime a bullfighting act; Sartre conducted an orchestra from the bottom of a cupboard; Limbour carved up a ham as though he were a cannibal: Queneau and Bataille fought a duel with bottles instead of swords; Camus and Lemarchend played military marches on saucepan lids, while those who knew how to sing, sang. So did those who didn’t. We had pantomimes, comedies, diatribes, parodies, monologues, and confessions: the flow of improvisations never dried up, and they were always greeted with enthusiastic applause. We put on records and danced; some of us … very well; others less expertly.

  Beauvoir, looking back, remembered being “filled with the joy of living. I regained my old conviction that life can and ought to be a real pleasure.”

  ON March 19, Commissaire Massu began questioning the hairdresser Raoul Fourrier and the makeup artist Edmond Pintard individually about their involvement in the alleged escape organization.

  Raoul Fourrier, a short man with white hair in a black beret, was brought into the commissaire’s office on the third floor first. Slumped into an armchair, Fourrier appeared nervous, cautious, and highly distrustful. He spoke in a low voice, as his eyelids fluttered and his fingers clutched the armrest. When the subject of Petiot was broached, Massu noted that the sweat beaded on Fourrier’s forehead and then disappeared into the wrinkles of his thick neck.

  After an early silence, Fourrier told Massu that he had been a patient at Petiot’s clinic on rue Caumartin for seven years, and it was there that the doctor first alluded to the escape organization. The time, he believed, was May 1941, because they had been discussing the case of some unfortunate young cyclists who had been punished for crossing the line of demarcation. Petiot had then let it be understood that he knew how to pass Frenchmen into the unoccupied zone and then into South America. It was a dangerous operation that could be infiltrated at any time by the Gestapo. He kept a packed suitcase ready in case he should ever have to leave in a hurry.

  Perhaps Fourrier, with his contacts at the hair salon, knew some people who would want to take advantage of this escape opportunity. Fourrier was surprised by this question, he said, claiming that he had always tried to avoid any action that would bring him into conflict with the authorities. But, as Fourrier put it, “the doctor is a charming man, seductive even.” He convinced the hairstylist that he was an active member of the Resistance helping fellow patriots escape “the vengeance of the Germans.”

  At the same time, Petiot promised Fourrier a “nice commission.” Defensively, Fourrier told the commissaire that he had hesitated at the thought of his own personal gain. He was after all a patriotic Frenchman. Massu, unconvinced, returned to the subject of the organization. Fourrier freely admitted that he had agreed to help Petiot find recruits, and he sought out the assistance of his old friend, Edmond Pintard, who had many more contacts throughout the Parisian demimonde.

  Fourrier told Massu of the client Charles Beretta, a safe choice since this man was already known from the Gestapo file. Since being released by the Germans in January 1944, Fourrier said that Petiot had twice tried to recruit him. When he refused, Petiot became angry and blamed Fourrier for causing their arrests by recommending Beretta.

  After a short break in the interrogation, Massu asked about other people Fourrier had referred to Dr. Petiot. One of the first clients, he said, was known
in the underworld as “Jo the Boxer,” “Iron Arm Jo,” “Jo la Ric,” or “Jo Jo.” A handsome, dark-haired thirty-something man with a broken nose and prominent scars under his chin, “Monsieur Jo,” as Fourrier called him, often dressed in a flashy style, with baggy, high-waisted, and tight-cuffed pegged trousers, and a long, loose coat with wide lapels and padded shoulders. He had been recruited by Pintard at a small bar on rue de l’Echiquier, in the heart of a notorious prostitution district along rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis.

  Fourrier later picked him out from a series of police photographs. His real name was Joseph Réocreux, and he was, as Massu put it, “no choirboy.” Jo the Boxer had a long criminal record that ranged from robbery to procurement, with several terms in prison, from Lyon to Saint-Julien-en-Genevois in the Haute-Savoie on the Swiss border. He had four or five warrants out for his arrest, but there was a more pressing reason why he wanted to leave France.

  Jo the Boxer had fallen out with the leader of one of the most violent and notorious criminal gangs in Occupied Paris: Henri Lafont (real name Henri Chamberlin). Alias “Henri Normand,” “Monsieur Henri,” or “The Boss,” the forty-two-year-old Lafont ran the group known informally as La Carlingue or the French Gestapo. The official name was Active Group Hesse, after a German SS officer under Helmut Knochen who’d looked after its foundation. Lafont’s men would not only engage in the usual racketeering and run bars, restaurants, and nightclubs; they would also kidnap, rob, ransom, and torture “enemies of the Third Reich”—and indeed they would often be rewarded by German authorities for their attacks. Lafont would ride through Paris in his white Bentley, always the latest model and usually with a mistress at his side. He seemed to prefer aristocrats and dancers.

  In his palatial office on the second floor of 93 rue Lauriston, which was filled with the dahlias and rare orchids that he obsessively collected, Lafont ruled over a brutal and increasingly profitable criminal empire. He had an extensive network of agents and informers who kept him updated about affairs. Lafont insisted on order and discipline, demanding that his men remain régulier with him, that is, showing at all times, as one former member of the gang put it, “discretion, efficiency, team spirit, and a strict regard for instructions.” Jo the Boxer had broken this rule. He was donning a Gestapo uniform and, on his own initiative, committing a string of burglaries, thereby defrauding both the Third Reich and his own organization. Punishments in the cellar of Lafont’s gray stone building were more feared in the underworld than the tortures of the Gestapo.