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

by David King

  In December 1941, when the United States entered the war, Petiot claimed to have offered the design of his secret weapon to the American consulate (and this was also when he first adopted the pseudonym Dr. Eugène). By this time, Fly-Tox was supposedly managing a clandestine organization that helped Frenchmen escape Occupied Paris. False papers were obtained from a man close to Lucien Romier, Vichy minister of state, and another person known as “Desaix,” or more probably “De C,” who served the embassy of the Argentine Republic. A police commissaire based in the 7th arrondissement of Lyon further helped Petiot’s clients cross the border. The identification documents allowed Frenchmen to cross into Spain, then Portugal, and from there, reach safety in Argentina.

  All this work as a Resistant, Petiot said, led to his arrest, imprisonment, and torture by the Gestapo. Then, after his release, Petiot realized that he was under close surveillance by the Gestapo, and still shaken by his prison ordeal, he retreated to Auxerre to recuperate. He returned to rue Le Sueur for the first time in early February 1944. It was then that he discovered that his building had been filled with bodies.

  AFTER this unofficial interrogation, Captain Simonin handed Petiot over to the Police Judiciaire. The following day, Simonin would himself be brought before an official purge tribunal that examined cases of suspected collaboration. It was a five-minute hearing. Receiving a guilty verdict, Simonin was ousted from his position in intelligence. He disappeared. Years later, when he reemerged, he was convinced that his punishment had emanated from a certain faction that sought revenge for his arrest of Marcel Petiot.

  Petiot, in the meantime, was met at the Police Judiciaire by Lucien Pinault, Commissaire Massu’s successor, and Ferdinand Gollety, the juge d’instruction, the examining magistrate, who, in French law, conducts pretrial questioning, summons the witnesses, and compiles the dossier. Then, if he finds sufficient reason, the juge d’instruction forwards the evidence to the public prosecutor to draw up the indictment. Gollety, a short man from Boulogne-sur-Mer, on the northern coast, was regarded as a rational, no-nonsense magistrate with a scrupulous regard for detail. He was also a thirty-two-year-old official in his first posting.

  The defendant was, at this point, required only to declare his identity, not make a statement. Petiot made one anyway:

  My conscience does not reproach me in the least. I am proud of what I did as a patriot. If I have not obeyed all civil laws, I have obeyed the laws of war. Otherwise, the occupation imposed certain precautions on me. Among my comrades in combat, fifty knew my true identity. It required only one of fifty to denounce me, and one did.

  Petiot also retained as his legal counsel a rising star in the world of criminal defense, the forty-one-year-old Sorbonne-trained Maître René Edmond Floriot. “A demon for detail,” Floriot had already defended Petiot in the two narcotics cases of 1942. Petiot had first seen Floriot’s talents firsthand in 1937, when the attorney successfully defended one of his patients, Magda Fontages, for attempted murder of the French ambassador to Italy, Count Charles de Chambrun. Fontages was also known for seducing many powerful men, including Benito Mussolini, who at the height of passion liked to rip off her black silk scarf and pretend to strangle her.

  Pretrial questioning would be an elaborate process that would ultimately last fourteen months. It would not begin for another thirty-six hours, however, as it was already late in the evening of the 31st and November 1 was a public holiday. Petiot was taken to cell 7 of Sector 7 of Prison de la Santé, a large gray building constructed in 1867 in the 14th arrondissement. Petiot would join many suspected collaborators, Gestapo agents, black market profiteers, and other people who were accused of benefiting from the German Occupation. Petiot’s sector was reserved for prisoners on death row.

  “I have been a member of the Resistance since the Germans first arrived in Paris,” Petiot said in his first official interrogation on November 2, 1944. He would repeat many of the claims he had made to Captain Simonin, but also add a few details. He had issued false certificates of disability to help Frenchmen avoid deportation to Germany and other requisitions or demands from Occupation authorities. He told of using his secret weapon twice, fatally wounding a German motorcyclist on rue Saint-Honoré and another soldier on rue La Fayette. He said that the Americans had declined to adopt his invention, and that was a mistake. “A five-ton truck,” Petiot said, “could have carried enough of the gadgets to liquidate the million Germans trampling France under their jackboots.”

  Petiot refused to provide more detail about this supposedly deadly weapon. There was still too much uncertainty, he argued, and the Germans might return at any time and use it against his country. However unlikely this may have sounded, this belief was actually common in some circles, particularly in rural southern France. Many people feared that former collaborators were hiding in the countryside and planning to sabotage the Liberation with hopes of installing another German-friendly authoritarian regime. When a handful of former collaborators were uncovered in December 1944 after in fact secretly returning to France, probably as part of the Nazi Ardennes offensive, the unlikely rumor would gain more credence.

  Then, in his blunt fashion, Petiot gave another reason for his reticence to describe his invention: His interrogators were “too uncultivated in scientific matters to be able to understand.”

  When Gollety mentioned that Petiot would be well advised to reconsider, given that he was likely facing twenty-four counts of murder, Petiot countered unexpectedly that the juge d’instruction was ill-informed. He had killed sixty-three people. But these, he emphasized, were not the bodies at his house. The people he killed had been buried in the forest.

  Upon his release from prison, Petiot explained to Gollety, he had been eager to avenge himself. He tried to contact his colleagues in Fly-Tox, but the organization had been vanquished, and its members who had not been imprisoned or executed had fled. It was difficult to reconnect with any of his remaining comrades because everyone used code names and they had all been changed. At the same time, Petiot had hesitated in finding his colleagues because he knew that the Gestapo often released prisoners in order to track their activities. He was certain that he was being watched and followed, and he did not want to put his fellow Resistants in harm’s way.

  Petiot also related how, since being tortured by the Gestapo, he had suffered terrible headaches and increased bouts of anxiety. He felt sick upon his release from prison and needed to relax. In the end, he decided to visit his brother in Auxerre. He only returned to his apartment in Paris on or around February 8, 1944. What he found had immensely disturbed him.

  Not only had the Germans stolen much of his medical equipment, including an ultraviolet machine, an infrared machine, and many other items that he had hoped to use in his clinic after the war, but Petiot found the house itself “in a great disorder, furniture knocked over or broken, cupboards disemboweled.” The old manure pit, which he had sealed long before to keep out the rats, had been uncovered and filled with various missing items from his property, including tools, smaller instruments, a portable electrical heater, and two large cushions from the waiting room. Also in the pit were a number of corpses.

  “The bodies were fresh,” Petiot said, suggesting that they were put into the pit while he was in jail. The skin was still red and the heads were heavy, indicating that the brain had not yet disappeared, and this, Petiot explained, happened “very quickly during putrefaction.” The stench in the courtyard, the pile of bodies, and the bones in the basement—“I was absolutely bewildered and panic-stricken,” Petiot said.

  He first believed that the bodies had been concealed there by members of Fly-Tox who must have panicked. Later, after contacting a few members in secret, he said, he changed his opinion. It was the Germans who had dumped the bodies on his property. Petiot never explained how he would have connected with his fellow Resistants when, as he had just said, the surviving members had all changed names and he had not tried to find them for fear of exposing them to
the Gestapo.

  As for the bodies, Petiot said that he could not just load them into the truck and haul them away, as he claimed to have done to dispose of traitors earlier. The vehicle, at that moment, needed repairs, and although he was a decent mechanic who could have fixed the job himself, he was reluctant to attract undue attention. This was why he had ordered four hundred kilos of quicklime from Auxerre.

  But once he obtained the material, he found the method slow and only partially helpful in disposing of the bodies. Fearing a Gestapo raid at any moment, two of his colleagues suggested that they burn the bodies. The colleagues, of course, were not identified.

  To speed the process, the men hacked the cadavers into bits and fed the boiler, which was, Petiot said, the first time it had been used since he bought the building. He did not know anything about the bodies lacking hair, eyebrows, and facial masks. He suspected that it was either a lie or an effect of the lime. The hair might also have fallen out when they tried to move the corpses.

  BEING a patriot and a Resistance fighter, however, was not Petiot’s only possible defense. In the hands of his attorney, René Floriot, there was another strategy that prosecutors would have to consider.

  At the end of the First World War, Petiot was known to have been incarcerated in a number of mental institutions. He had been discharged from the army with 100 percent mental incapacity, though this had later been reduced to 50 percent. He had received disability payments from the state, and continued to do so during the time he was elected mayor, built his medical practice, and even during the period when he stood accused of turning his property on rue Le Sueur into a slaughterhouse.

  What’s more, Petiot’s stays in asylums had not stopped immediately after the First World War. As late as 1936, he had again been interned. The circumstances would be relevant should Petiot or his lawyer plead insanity, which, according to Article 64 of the Penal Code, could make him not legally responsible for his actions.

  On April 4, 1936, Petiot, then a thirty-nine-year-old doctor with a thriving Parisian medical practice, had been browsing among a display of books outside the Joseph Gibert Bookshop at 26 Boulevard Saint-Michel. About twelve thirty p.m., as he turned and walked away, a store employee, René Cotteret, caught up with him and pointed to a book under the doctor’s arm. It was an old, worn copy of a treatise on electricity and mechanics, Etienne Pacoret’s Aide-mémoire formulaire de l’électricité, de la mecanique et de l’électro-mécanique.

  Petiot, appearing surprised, claimed that he had not realized he had taken the book. He showed his identification papers, as requested, and offered to pay the full price of twenty-five francs. The man refused. He took the doctor by the arm and proceeded to escort him to the police station. Petiot lost his temper. According to the police report, he seized the employee by the throat, began to strangle him, and threatened to “bash his face in.” Moments later, as Cotteret fell to the ground, Petiot ran away in the direction of the Odéon métro station.

  Later that day, when an officer telephoned his apartment, a man answered and said that Petiot was not at home and had been out of town for several weeks. When two policemen knocked on his door, however, Petiot calmly opened it and received the summons for questioning at the St. Michel police station on April 6. On that date, Petiot arrived one hour late. His eyes were red, his face was puffed, and it appeared that he had been crying. He looked confused. When the officer began to ask about the shoplifting incident, Petiot handed him a letter that he said would explain everything.

  According to this document, Petiot had been exhausted and consumed by his latest inventions, including work on a pump to massage the intestines and cure chronic constipation, as well as a perpetual-motion machine that he claimed to have nearly perfected. He had been so absorbed in his inventions that he had not realized that he still held the book when he walked away from the shop. He had never planned to buy the book, let alone steal it. He already knew its contents.

  Petiot disputed the assault charge. As for his refusal to follow Cotteret to the police station, he reminded them that he had committed no crime and claimed that his family was waiting for him and he was already late when he stopped at the bookstore. He had cooperated with the detective, he emphasized, even giving his name: “If I hadn’t given it, you never would have found me.”

  Surprised by the physician’s behavior, both at the bookstore and at the station, the police commissaire ordered a psychiatric examination. During the session, held at St. Antoine Hospital, the performing psychiatrist, Dr. Michel Ceillier, thought Petiot seemed nervous, depressed, and highly unstable. He struggled to answer basic questions and could not state the title of his medical thesis. He “wept convulsively” and, in answering questions, spoke incoherently, except when he discussed his inventions, which Ceillier believed were pure imagination.

  Petiot appeared to suffer from “mental debility,” including “psychic disturbance, fits of depression, and delirium of invention.” He showed a “deep distate for everything, especially life.” He was, in short, given his profession as physician, “dangerous to himself and others”—the criteria used for placing someone in a mental institution (Law of 1838). So, on the basis of this report, dated July 22, 1936, Petiot was not held responsible for shoplifting and assault. The psychiatrist recommended that Petiot be interned in a mental hospital, forcibly if necessary.

  Typically, in these circumstances, a patient would be institutionalized in a state asylum, but Petiot was granted a private hospital, as his wife had requested on his behalf: the Maison de Santé d’Ivry, just outside Paris. The head psychiatrist, Dr. Achille Delmas, supervised the cure himself. Delmas had a reputation for being very lenient and client-friendly—he would also care for surrealist poet Antonin Artaud and James Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, who came to the institution for schizophrenia during Petiot’s stay. The physician arrived on August 1, 1936.

  As Petiot’s dossier, number 363 831, revealed, Dr. Delmas diagnosed the new patient as “cyclothymic,” that is, suffering from a mild manic-depressive psychosis. He noted that Petiot alternated between depression and hyperactive excitation. In depression, he experienced anxiety, insomnia, and taedium vitae, with an overwhelming need “to justify his past acts,” and in excitement, a tendency to overwork, “attempting a variety of simultaneous tasks, inventive spirit, intellectual exaltation, and excessive scientific preoccupations.”

  Not long after he entered the sanatorium, thereby removing the criminal charge, Petiot started petitioning for his release. Eighteen days after his admission, Dr. Joseph Rogues de Fursac described Petiot as “calm, lucid, and non-delirious.” Whatever mental troubles had ailed him were no longer present. On August 25, 1936, Delmas supported this diagnosis, pronouncing Petiot cured. The patient was, he wrote, in “a state of mental equilibrium that would permit one to conceive of lifting his internment and facilitating his imminent discharge.” No immediate action was taken. Marcel and Georgette Petiot began writing letters to officials asking for support for his release.

  “I am absolutely sane in mind,” Dr. Petiot wrote on August 19, 1936, to the procureur de la république “I have a very honorable professional past and I enjoy the esteem of everyone.”

  In the end, the court chose a panel of three distinguished psychiatrists to examine the case and issue a recommendation: Dr. Georges Paul Génil Perrin, the author of The Prevention and Cure of Nervous and Mental Disorders, who was joined by Drs. Paul-Marie Maxime Laignel-Lavastine and Henri Claude, author of Medico-Legal Psychiatry. Petiot did not like the choice at all. The first doctor, he said, was crazy; the second was just “a couch man” who, he implied, took liberties with his female patients, and the third had been plucked out of obscurity. The committee finished its examination of Petiot and submitted its findings on December 19, 1936.

  While appearing “amoral and unbalanced,” Petiot was found to be “free from delirium, hallucinations, mental confusion, intellectual disability, and pathological excitation or depression.” He, in
short, “presented no psychopathic trouble susceptible to justify a prolongation of his internment” and should be released from custody, which was done on February 20, 1937.

  Inside the report was a warning that “in the event of a future criminal indictment,” Petiot’s stay in a mental institution “should not weigh excessively in the deliberations.” This internment, in other words, did not mean that he was insane, and Petiot should be held responsible for his actions.

  But would this testimony be strong enough in case of an insanity plea now? As of November 1944, Petiot had convinced some psychiatrists that it was necessary to confine him in an asylum; others had concluded that he had cynically exploited French law to mimic symptoms of a troubled mind. The debate was far from over.

  24.

  BEATING CHANCE?

  BESIDES, I NEVER HEARD OF A DOCTOR-SURGEON-MAYOR-MURDERER IN FACT OR FICTION, MUCH LESS ONE WHO WAS ALSO A SPY, OR INTELLIGENCE INFORMER, WRITER, CARTOONIST, ANTIQUE EXPERT, MATHEMATICIAN, OR WHO CALMLY CLAIMED POSSIBLY A HUNDRED AND FIFTY VICTIMS … HE HAD LOST COUNT.

  —Dr. Albert Paul

  IN Cell 7 of Sector 7 of the Prison de la Santé, Petiot was confined in a space, nine feet by twelve feet, with little more than a bed, a couple of blankets, a water faucet, a chair, and a small table chained to the floor. He read, dabbled in poetry, and doodled, handing over some of his sketches to one of the armed guards who were posted outside his cell twenty-four hours a day. He also sewed, knitted, embroidered, and smoked heavily, earning the nickname “Cigarette Butt.”