by David King
Massu then asked Nézondet about the claims of the trucking company owner and secondhand furniture dealer Roland Porchon—namely, that he had seen sixteen bodies at rue Le Sueur. Nézondet dismissed this allegation with a laugh. It was outrageous, he said. He had not seen any bodies personally; Porchon must have been mistaken. He had merely reported what someone else had told him. Who was that? Nézondet stalled and hedged, before finally admitting that the source of the information was Maurice Petiot. On March 22, after many evasions and denials, he said that he would now tell the truth.
In late 1943, either November or December, Nézondet began, he met Maurice Petiot at the Hôtel Alicot to negotiate the purchase of radio equipment. Petiot arrived an hour late and nervous unlike any time Nézondet could remember. He looked as “white as a sheet,” Nézondet said.
“I have just come from my brother’s house,” Maurice allegedly told him. “There’s enough there to have us all shot.”
“Enough what? Hidden weapons? A secret radio transmitter?”
“I wish that’s all it was. The journeys [to South America] begin and end at the rue Le Sueur.”
At this time, with Petiot still held in prison by the Germans, Maurice had also discovered “a pit full of bodies and quicklime—all of them were naked, with hair and eyebrows shaved off.” A book was found nearby, containing the names and addresses of all the victims, along with the dates and other notes about the executions. He found a syringe, a hypodermic needle, poison, and many bodies. “There must have been fifty to sixty victims.” Maurice also allegedly found a great deal of clothing, including suits, dresses, and German military uniforms.
Nézondet had been astonished, he told Massu, claiming that it was not possible, that “it’s a nightmare!” But Maurice’s demeanor seemed to confirm the horrors. Nézondet noted how his hands quivered as he related his discovery.
What’s more, according to Nézondet, Maurice Petiot proceeded to describe the means of execution as some sort of distance-operated syringe. The victim, locked in the triangular room, would eventually press a button in the wall, which activated the lethal device. A miniature needle hidden inside the button pricked the finger with poison. That way, Petiot had not technically killed his victims; they had done it to themselves.
“Why did you not inform the police?” Massu asked. “It’s your duty.” The Law of 25 October 1941 had established the legal obligation to denounce a crime or the intent to commit a crime. The failure to comply carried a penalty of three months to five years in prison.
“I know that well,” Nézondet said. “But Marcel Petiot was my best friend. I also thought of his wife and his son.”
Commissaire Massu asked how much Georgette Petiot knew of her husband’s activities. After a slight hesitation, Nézondet said that she knew everything because, as he feared for her safety, he had told her “the horrible truth” himself. In early January 1944, a few weeks after his meeting with Maurice Petiot, he had invited Georgette and Gérard Petiot to dinner at his apartment at 15 rue Pauly. They had discussed her husband, who she was sure would soon be released by the Germans, as indeed he was. Nézondet waited until the two of them were away from the teenager. As Nézondet put it, she “fainted, or almost fainted three times and threatened to commit suicide.”
Georgette Petiot would later confirm that the events that evening were substantially true as Nézondet described them. She added, however, that she had not believed a word of his story. He seemed to be lying. In addition, Nézondet had suggested that she should divorce her murderous husband and the two of them have an affair, and this, she told Massu, further convinced her that he had made up everything to seduce her. (Nézondet countered unconvincingly that he only said she needed to have an affair, though not necessarily with him.)
Maurice had been furious at him, Nézondet said, for telling Georgette about the dead bodies. The last he heard, Maurice was trying to figure out what to do about them, and also find a truck to haul away the many suitcases he’d found at his brother’s property.
Since that initial conversation at the Hôtel Alicot, Nézondet said that he had lived in mortal fear of his former friend. Not long after the physician’s release from the Germans, which Nézondet said had astonished him, Marcel Petiot invited him to rue Le Sueur. He politely declined, but when the physician, with his charm, refused to take no for an answer, Nézondet had relented. It was his lover, Aimée Lesage, who put a stop to the meeting, insisting that he never go to rue Le Sueur alone. She was certain, she believed, that she had saved his life.
THE French police continued to question neighbors of the reclusive physician. Augusta Debarre, a thirty-nine-year-old woman who lived on the third floor of 22 rue Le Sueur, had some information for the detectives. About nine or nine thirty one night the previous summer, Debarre had seen an old truck, probably a Ford, parked outside Dr. Petiot’s building across the street, and a couple of men had loaded a number of suitcases into it.
Other neighbors had witnessed the same event. Andrée Marçais, the thirty-four-year-old woman in No. 22 whose husband had made the first call to the police about the smoke, remembered that the vehicle was gray, and there were two or three men piling luggage into the truck. Yvonne Staeffen on the fifth floor believed that one of the men was the stranger who came regularly on the bicycle. “With my daughter,” Staeffen said, “we have amused ourselves by counting the suitcases.” They reached forty-seven, but they had not started from the beginning.
It was the eyewitness account of Angèle Lalanne of 26 rue Le Sueur that brought the police one crucial step closer to finding the truck. She reported seeing a sign on the old vehicle: TRANSPORTS AVENUE DAUMESNIL. Massu now had something tangible to pursue.
An investigation into the transport companies and garages on the two-mile-long avenue, however, did not immediately turn up any valuable information. At one point, the detectives stopped by the Hôtel Alicot and struck up a conversation with a group of truckers. One of them, Emile Henri Pintrand, remembered that the man in the police photograph, Maurice Petiot, had approached him the previous summer about a delivery. Pintrand had declined because he was already busy that day. His friend, Leopold Sturlèse, had accepted.
But when Sturlèse arrived at the rendezvous at the Hôtel Alicot as planned, he learned that Maurice had hired someone else and the delivery had already been made. After a wild-goose chase to find this person, the inspectors discovered that the driver of the truck had been Maurice Lion of the Manjeard Company.
Lion verified that he and Maurice had loaded a number of suitcases onto his gray Renault truck and driven them to Gare de Lyon. A quick visit to the baggage office at that station revealed that, on May 26, 1943, train number 2001 had carried three separate shipments of a total of forty-five suitcases, weighing 683 kilograms, to the nearby town of Courson-les-Carrières:
Group No. 18 11 suitcases 160 kilograms
Group No. 235 18 suitcases 280 kilograms
Group No. 436 16 suitcases 243 kilograms
All of these suitcases were signed for by Albert Neuhausen, the man both Monique and Maurice Petiot had claimed slept in their property in Auxerre. Neuhausen immediately became a key figure in the ongoing investigation.
On March 30, 1944, when the police came to search his electronics shop in Courson-les-Carrières, he was not there. His wife, Simone-Andrée, however, admitted knowing about the suitcases. Maurice had brought them to the house the previous summer, claiming that they belonged to his brother, who had been arrested by the Germans. The arrest had happened just five days before. Had Maurice moved the suitcases to avoid seizure by the Gestapo?
Madame Neuhausen promptly escorted Massu, Inspector Battut, and a couple other detectives up to the attic, which was filled with suitcases stacked neatly in rows. Some were made of leather, a few still in dustcovers or carrying labels such as grand hotel amsterdam; others were plain, even plywood, like many made during the Occupation. Several of the suitcases still carried baggage tickets from Gare de Ly
on.
There were, in fact, forty-nine pieces of luggage in Neuhausen’s attic. Thirty-seven of these were from the shipment from Gare de Lyon; the other twelve were not previously known. There were a few trunks, which were so heavy that they could not be carried down the steps and had to be lowered by rope through the dormer window. The suitcases were placed on the police truck for delivery to the station. Half of the village, Massu said, seemed to be standing outside watching.
As rain poured down, police cars brought what Massu called “the most tragic cargo” to the headquarters at 36 quai des Orfèvres.
Reporters, sensing a scoop, descended on the building. As cameras popped, Massu, umbrella in hand, helped unload the suitcases. Rain splashed on the evidence, threatening to rub off the ink of the luggage tags. Five inspectors carried the trunks up to the third floor, which, as Massu put it, soon looked like a hotel lobby, while his office resembled a luggage room in a train station.
The contents of the suitcases would prove remarkable. Inside, in no apparent order, were a total of 79 dresses, 26 skirts, 42 blouses, 48 scarves, 52 nightgowns, 46 pairs of panties, 14 dressing gowns, 13 negligées, 77 pairs of gloves, 35 belts, 25 handbags, 26 hats (women’s), 10 pairs of boots, 6 jackets, 5 fur coats, 3 mink stoles, and 311 handkerchiefs. There were also 115 men’s shirts, 104 cuffs, 82 pairs of socks, 66 pairs of shoes, 29 men’s suits, 14 overcoats, 4 pairs of slippers, and 3 pairs of swimming trunks, in addition to an assortment of towels, tablecloths, sheets, pillowcases, pajamas, nightshirts, raincoats, eyeglasses, handbags, hairnets, hatpins, nail files, cigarette cases, and bus tickets. In short, there were 1,760 items in the inventory.
Analysis of the contents of these suitcases, Massu hoped, would provide clues to catch the killer and evidence to prosecute him afterward. It might also, with a great deal of time and perseverance, help identify the many victims and perhaps even answer the most difficult question of all: namely, the motives for the grisly murders.
17.
FRUSTRATION
IF SHE HAD COMMITTED SUICIDE, IT IS VERY LIKELY THAT [HER] BODY WOULD HAVE BEEN FOUND.
—Commissaire Massu
ALBERT Neuhausen was found on March 31, 1944, at the Hôtel Alicot. When detectives questioned him, Neuhausen reaffirmed that he was only holding the suitcases for his friend Maurice Petiot, who had done many favors for his family, including giving them a loan to buy their house. Neuhausen said that he had never looked through the suitcases, claiming no curiosity whatsoever about their origins or contents. A detective asked if this had changed after he read the newspaper accounts of the events at rue Le Sueur.
“I do not read the newspapers,” Neuhausen said. “I have never heard anyone speaking about it.” He claimed only to have learned of the discovery of the crime while staying at the Hôtel Alicot on a business trip.
The search of Neuhausen’s property had, however, uncovered a number of items that had clearly been removed from the suitcases. In the bedroom of their sixteen-year-old son, Christian, was a man’s wardrobe, including a suit and an overcoat. In Albert and Simone’s bedroom were a number of other personal items that police believed had been unpacked from the suitcases.
Confronted with the evidence, Neuhausen no longer denied opening and taking a few things from the trunks. Around March 27, he said, he and his wife had gone to the attic and looked through “three or four” suitcases that were not locked. He had also used one of the suitcases for a trip to Paris, reasoning, “Now that Dr. Petiot is in flight, I can just as well take something. He will never come to reclaim it.”
Neuhausen had other information for the police. About two or three months after the arrival of the suitcases, Maurice Petiot had come to the house. Neuhausen escorted him to the attic and returned to work. He did not know if Maurice had opened or rummaged through the suitcases, or if he carried anything away. Another time, Maurice had brought Georgette Petiot to his attic. Again, he claimed that he did not know if they opened or removed anything, as he had left them alone and he had not seen them leave. His wife, Simone, on the other hand, did. She told the police that they had taken two suitcases.
In light of the discovered luggage in Neuhausen’s attic, the Brigade Criminelle made another search at 21 rue Le Sueur. The haul, this time, was smaller: a white shell necklace, a pearl necklace in earthenware, a toothbrush in a white-and-red case with the words extra hard on it, and a framed portrait of socialist leader and former prime minister Léon Blum. Among other things, there were also a thermos, a pipe, a tube of Vaseline, a Gillette razor, soap from Marseille, a Vienna newspaper dated October 26, 1942, and a shoehorn inscribed with the name hôtel europa, dresden.
They also found two suitcases—a brown one full of pieces of paper, including a calling card for “Dr. Marcel Petiot, Faculty of Medicine,” and a black one that contained a gray hat designed by the Parisian hatter Berteil and bore the initials P.B. Detectives also found a jacket soiled with lime, and a copy of the journal Le Crapouillot of May 1938, with an article entitled “Crime and the Instinctive Perversions.” The police did not know what to make of this collection, particularly as it was not clear which items had belonged to Dr. Petiot and which had belonged to the bodies in his basement.
By late March, detectives had found Marcel and Georgette Petiot’s former maid, Geneviève Cuny, who was living about two hundred miles southwest of Paris. Cuny was at the cloister of Notre Dame de Charité in Angers, where she was in the process of becoming a nun.
As Cuny told Chief Inspector Battut, she had worked for Dr. Petiot for almost two years—and these two years, tantalizingly, corresponded to the height of the suspected reign of terror. She had started in October 1941, the same month that Petiot began making his renovations to the newly purchased 21 rue Le Sueur. She left in August 1943, a few months after the disappearance of his last known victim, Yvan Dreyfus.
Cuny’s job consisted of receiving patients and cleaning the rooms, all of them except the kitchen, which Georgette did. “During my time with Dr. Petiot,” Cuny said, “I have never noticed anything unusual.” She did say that, on occasion, Petiot brought home a variety of gentlemen’s clothes, and he and Georgette had gone through them on the kitchen table.
“Yes,” she said, “Dr. Petiot often presented his wife with lavish gifts.” She remembered “jewels, rings, precious stones, a pearl necklace.” Asked if she knew anything about an escape agency, Cuny said that she did not. If Petiot operated one, she added, it was not to her knowledge.
ANOTHER person in the Petiot family drawing attention in the press was sixteen-year-old Gérard. While he enjoyed good grades and popularity in school, some people thought that the media scrutiny would no doubt take its toll. One friend predicted Gérard would eventually change his name; another feared that he might commit suicide. His uncle Maurice, it was believed, was trying to arrange for him to attend a different school, a Jesuit academy in Joigny, where he would be shielded from questions from his classmates.
On March 30, 1944, Inspectors Cloiseau and Hernis interviewed the teenager in Auxerre. As usual, the detectives began by establishing his background. After living his first five years at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, Gérard had moved with his family to Paris in 1933. Initially, he lived six months with his grandfather, Georgette Petiot’s father, in Seignelay. He soon returned to Paris, where he enrolled at the Lycée Condorcet, where Jean-Paul Sartre lectured.
In 1939, as war loomed, the Petiots sent Gérard to the countryside. Over the next few months, he would move often, living first again with his grandfather, then with a great-uncle, and eventually with Maurice. As the feared bombardments and aerial gas attacks failed to materialize, Gérard had returned to Paris in April 1940. Two months later, however, the Germans were approaching the capital. Dr. Petiot obtained a car and drove Gérard back to his grandfather. Georgette had remained in Paris.
Gérard would have one more stint in Paris, living at rue Caumartin and studying at the Lycée Condorcet. This stay ended three years later, when the
Gestapo arrested his father. Georgette sent him to live in safer Auxerre, with Maurice and Monique. The last time he saw his father, Gérard said, was at Mardi Gras, when he visited his parents at rue Caumartin for almost a week.
Had he ever been to rue Le Sueur?
Yes, Gérard said. “I went there three different times with my father at about two-week intervals.” Although he did not remember the exact date, he believed that it was not long after the purchase. The house was then empty, except for some kitchen utensils that Dr. Petiot told him had belonged to the actress Cécile Sorel.
As for March 11, 1944, Gérard had been at school until about half past twelve, when he ate lunch with Maurice at rue du Pont. At five thirty that evening, he went to a Spanish lesson and then returned home for dinner with Monique and the two children. At nine fifteen or so, he remembered, Neuhausen arrived at the house, as he often did. Gérard also remembered a telephone call that night.
He and Maurice had been playing a game of chess. When the phone rang, Maurice left the room to answer it. Gérard then went to the kitchen with Monique. Several minutes later, when Maurice returned, “he did not say who had called or what it concerned, at least in my presence.” Maurice and Gérard then returned to their game of chess.
BACK at the Quai des Orfèvres, Massu was examining the contents of the suitcases for clues to identify possible victims. He was looking first at the labels on the clothing, such as where they were made, bought, or perhaps laundered, or any other distinguishing feature, such as age, condition, and nature of the material, including any stain, mark, or initial that had not quite been removed.
