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

by David King

  There were other peculiarities. Madame Kneller signed each communication “Marguerite,” though friends knew she had retained the Germanic spelling of her name Margareth and always preferred the shortened form of “Greta.” The handwriting was more angular and strained than usual. Still, the letters seemed to have silenced any concern that something was amiss. They also likely served another purpose. As in the Braunberger case, the postcards would serve as recruiting tools for future clients.

  When Christiane Roart was interviewed at the police station, she picked out Petiot immediately from a series of mug shots. She thought that the handwriting in the postcard matched the sample of a prescription signed by Dr. Petiot that the police provided. Moreover, when she looked through the suitcases, which she had packed for the family, she believed that the men’s shirts monogrammed with the faint initials “K.K.” (which someone had attempted to remove) had belonged to Kurt Kneller.

  Other items in Petiot’s suitcases would be traced to this family, including a woman’s black coat, a woman’s bathrobe, and a number of kitchen and other towels monogrammed with their initials. Roart also recognized a pair of striped pink silk pajamas, though she could not say for certain that they had belonged to young René. The pants bottoms of a second pair of pajamas, however, seemed to be his, because, she remembered, it had been made from one of his father’s shirts. The boy’s name, age, and birth date matched one of the ration cards that Petiot carried at the time of his arrest.

  The Knellers were never seen again in Paris or Argentina. On August 8, 1942, three weeks after their disappearance, workers on a barge on the Seine near Asnières reported discovering a bag wedged in some bushes. Inside were the mutilated remains of a young boy, approximately eight or nine years old, and the head, femurs, pelvis, and arms with the shoulder blades and clavicles of a woman between the age of forty and forty-five. Three days later, a man’s head was found in the river. The remains have never been identified, but the Knellers were added to the list of victims.

  ON October 30, 1945, almost one year to the date after his arrest, Petiot suddenly refused to answer any questions. There had been ample time, he concluded, for the juge d’instruction to conduct his investigation and ask any question that he deemed relevant. Petiot was drawing the line. He would henceforth save his answers for the trial.

  Gollety tried to prod him, but he would not relent. Sometimes the dossier reads like a farce, as seen, for example, in the interrogation on November 3, 1945.

  “On what date did you buy the property on rue Le Sueur?” Gollety asked.

  “I have decided that I will no longer answer any questions, except in public.”

  “For what purpose?” Gollety asked, returning to the question of his purchase of the house.

  “Write ‘ditto’ and things will move along more quickly.”

  Gollety would arrive with a long list of questions, including a forty-eight-page compilation on December 28, 1945, and Petiot would simply refuse to answer any of them.

  The following month, in accordance with French criminal law, Gollety sent the Chamber of Accusations a bulging dossier that weighed approximately fifty kilos. There was enough evidence, it was concluded, to warrant sending the Petiot case to trial.

  As for the alleged accomplices, including Georgette Petiot, Maurice Petiot, René Nézondet, Albert and Simone Neuhausen, Raoul Fourrier, Edmond Pintard, Roland Porchon, and Eryane Kahan, it was now officially decided that all charges would be dropped. There was simply not enough evidence to prosecute them. “Yet it is certain that, if justice can do nothing against them,” the future prosecution assistant Maître Michel Elissalde said, “the name that they bear and the sad reputation which affects them personally may already serve as a constant source of shame, at least if Petiot’s amoral insensitivity has not triumphed over them.”

  The state was going to concentrate on Marcel Petiot. The number of victims was set at twenty-seven, and the file was turned over to the procureur général to draw up the formal acte d’accusation.

  26.

  THE PETIOT CIRCUS

  THOSE OF YOU WHO WISH TO AMUSE YOURSELVES SHOULD GET OUT OF HERE AND GO TO THE THEATER.

  —Marcel Leser

  ON the crisp spring morning of March 18, 1946, some four hundred spectators and one hundred journalists packed the Cour d’assises of the Palais de Justice on the Île de la Cité. Everyone was eager to see the man accused of killing twenty-seven people, chopping them into pieces, flushing their inner organs into the sewer, and then disposing of the other remains in his lime pit or burning them in his basement stove. All the while, he amassed a fortune. This was expected to be, the Washington Post reported, “the most sensational criminal trial in modern French history.”

  As at the opening of a new play, actors, film stars, and ladies of high society, wearing turbans or fashionable small feathered hats, flocked to the courtroom, jostling for any empty seat or a place to stand. Many other Parisians, brandishing binoculars or opera glasses, came in anticipation of the thrilling denouement of the macabre affair. The air reeked of perfume. Outside, street vendors hawked souvenirs in an atmosphere increasingly resembling a carnival.

  The evidence for the prosecution, lining the entire back wall of the courtroom, weighed more than one ton. All the parcels, trunks, suitcases, and baggage, it was noted, gave the courtroom the appearance of a train station. There were also glass containers of other items found at rue Le Sueur, ranging from an umbrella to the wheel of a bicycle.

  At the center of the long high table would sit the president of the tribunal, fifty-seven-year-old Marcel Leser, in a long scarlet robe trimmed with ermine. He would preside over the trial and, in accordance with French criminal law, conduct the interrogatoire, or preliminary questioning, himself. At his side were two magistrates who would be asked to take part in the deliberations of the jury and even vote on the verdict. This practice was supposed to ensure legal expertise in the debate, though it also meant that the state could exert considerable influence on the outcome. A jury in 1946 had only seven members, and two-thirds majority sufficed to reach a verdict. All jurors were, by law, male.

  To the immediate right of the magistrates sat the chief prosecuting attorney, Avocat Général Pierre Dupin, a thin, balding man with gray hair. He had only been appointed to the case six weeks before, when a number of higher-ranking prosecutors declined and his predecessor abruptly resigned. His assistant, thirty-year-old deputy Maître Michel Elissalde, had spent his honeymoon cramming for the trial, covering the floors of his apartment wall to wall with the documents and regaling his new wife with arguments about the case.

  At a right angle to the prosecution was the defense, led by the celebrated forty-four-year-old Maître René Floriot in black robe and white cravat. Floriot wore his trademark round tortoiseshell glasses. His hair was short, cut to the top of his ears, slicked back over his forehead, and parted to the left. Four young attorneys assisted him: Eugène Ayache, Paul Cousin, Pierre Jacquet, and Charles Libman. Each one, apportioned a fourth of the dossier, had devoted the last eighteen months to preparing the case. As their hairstyles were similar to their superior’s, they were soon dubbed the “Floriot boys.”

  There were also nine civil attorneys participating in the proceedings—in French law, families of victims may hire lawyers to represent them during the criminal trial and, like the prosecutor, cross-examine witnesses and the defendant. The Khaït, Braunberger, Guschinow, Kneller, Wolff, Basch, and Dreyfus families had all hired representation, as had the families of Paulette Grippay and Gisèle Rossmy. The most prominent of the civil parties was Maître Pierre Véron, a highly decorated Resistance fighter who represented the Khaït and Dreyfus families. Paulette Dreyfus had hired another attorney as well: her brother-in-law, Maître Pierre-Léon Rein.

  At 1:50 p.m., a small door in the back reserved for the defendant opened and in walked Dr. Petiot, wearing a gray overcoat atop his blue-gray suit with lavender pinstripes and a purple bow tie. He was not
restrained in handcuffs, as he had asked that they be removed just moments before. Security was tight. Two Gardes Mobiles, each wielding a tommy gun, accompanied the defendant into the prisoner’s box, which was located at a raised level right behind his defense attorney. Other helmeted guards stood at attention around and outside the room.

  Petiot smiled to the jury and audience. One journalist thought he looked like an actor, an artist, or a pianist; another quipped that he looked like the “devil’s poet.” Petiot’s black “piercing eyes” gave even the hardened forensic expert Professor René Piédelièvre the chills.

  Aware that he was the center of attention, Petiot took off his overcoat, folded it gently, and placed it on top of the dossier beside him. Then, evidently not finding his effort satisfactory, he unfolded his coat and proceeded to refold it a second time more meticulously. He straightened the knot of his bow tie. The crowd watched his every move. The show was just beginning.

  Cameras popped and flashed a dazzling light. The defendant first raised his hands to shield his face, before relenting and turning his favorite profile to the photographers. “Gentlemen, please,” Petiot eventually said, when he had had enough. He scanned the crowded room looking for his wife, son, and brother, all of whom, of course, were in attendance, as were three widows and the few surviving family members of his alleged victims.

  The clerk of the court read out the acte d’accusation, or indictment, charging Marcel Petiot with twenty-seven counts of “willful homicide … committed with premeditation and malice aforethought, for the purpose of preparing, facilitating or affecting the fraudulent appropriation of clothing, personal items, identity papers, and a portion of the fortune of the above-mentioned victim.” The statement ran to more than twenty closely typed pages.

  Of the victims, there were fifteen Jews; nine gangsters, prostitutes, and other people wanted by the police, the Gestapo, or both; and three people who had no known connection with the escape agency: Jean-Marc Van Bever, Marthe Khaït, and Denise Hotin. One victim was unidentified, described as a young woman who’d disappeared in late 1942 or early 1943. This was the second woman who had accompanied Jo the Boxer in an attempted departure from Occupied Paris.

  During the indictment, rather dull, monotonous, and hardly audible for most people in the packed room, many of the attendees watched the defendant closely. Although stooped over or propped up on an elbow leaning onto the ledge of the prisoner’s box, Petiot had a formal bearing that still somehow looked dignified. He had the high forehead of an intellectual, with prominent cheekbones and thin lips “like the edge or blade of a knife.” His hair was thinning, and, for many, like Kenneth Campbell of the New York Times, he looked younger than expected. Perhaps the most commonly noted feature was his hands. They were those not of a doctor or a surgeon, but rather, it was said, of a strangler or a butcher. The press was clearly not going to change its tune in painting a portrait of a killer, regardless of the fact that he had not yet been convicted and faced a trial with his life at stake.

  Petiot, acting like the star in his own film, listened to the indictment, already looking bored. He brushed his hair back from his forehead with one hand and then the other. The dark circles under his eyes reminded the writer Jean Galtier-Boissière of the makeup applied to sleepwalker Cesare in the German expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The defendant gazed out into the distance, sometimes fixing his “famous hypnotic stare,” as one journalist recalled, on a specific member of the audience. At other times, he looked down, concentrating on his doodling in the margins of his own copy of the indictment. The drawings, it was later discovered, were caricatures of the prosecutors, and not poorly done either.

  During the roll call of the witnesses enlisted to testify in the trial, which included about ninety people, Floriot raised his first question: “What about Colonel Dewavrin?” This was a key official in the Resistance, the chief of the DGER, the military intelligence and counterintelligence organ of the Free French. Petiot had identified him in his pretrial interviews as someone who could vouch for his activities in the Resistance. Leser answered that the witness was “on a mission.”

  “I am anxious to know the duration of this mission,” Floriot said.

  “That’s my thought as well,” Dupin, the prosecutor, said.

  At a quarter after three, after the hour-and-a-half acte d’accusation seemed to drag on interminably, Président Marcel Leser opened with the interrogatoire, a detailed examination of the charges that included a brief biography of the accused. In French law, a defendant’s past record plays a more important role for the prosecution than in Anglo-Saxon countries. In addition, the president of the court questions the defendant and may, if he chooses, comment on the answers as well. The accused may challenge witnesses or the prosecuting attorney, even in the middle of a testimony, and indeed failure to allow such a question may be grounds for a mistrial. Any of the lawyers—prosecution, defense, or civil attorney—may intervene at any time as well. To an outsider, a French trial might seem somewhat disordered; the Petiot case would look like pure chaos.

  Indeed, in recounting the introductory overview of Petiot’s life, Leser had only gotten to the defendant’s work as a student at the University of Paris, which he called “mediocre,” when Petiot interrupted: “I did however get ‘very good’ on my thesis. I should be modest about these things.”

  “You enjoyed a lot of popularity as a doctor. You were quite seductive.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Leser answered spontaneously, prompting laughter. Leser then reminded the court of other crimes that Petiot had been accused of committing as a young man. He mentioned a woman who leased Petiot his first house in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne and claimed that he had stolen furniture, including an antique stove, which he had tried to replace with a replica.

  “She told everyone that she was having sexual intercourse with me,” Petiot said. “I declined this honor. She lied.”

  Leser asked about Petiot’s former maid and suspected lover, Louisette Delaveau, who had disappeared in 1926.

  “My first murder,” Petiot said sarcastically. “I assume of course that you have a witness.”

  Pierre Scize of Le Figaro noted that Petiot had good fortune in drawing Leser for his trial. The president would be accused of being too lenient with the defendant. Jean Galtier-Boissière thought that Leser seemed like a plump, jovial St. Antony on the bench. In Leser’s defense, it was early in his career and he had no experience with witnesses as brazen as Petiot, or trials as high profile as this one. Leser simply pressed ahead in his biographical introduction, noting the suspected thefts of oil, gasoline, and tires and, one example that the press would particularly seize on, a supposed Christmas Eve theft of a cross from a cemetery.

  “That was a story spread by all the bigots and hypocrites in the country.” The cross, Petiot said, “disappeared two hundred years ago. There must be a statute of limitations, isn’t there, Monsieur le Président?”

  “But you were convicted for tapping electricity?”

  “Yes, I was convicted,” Petiot said, “but that does not prove that I was guilty.” The audience roared in approval.

  “Next you are going to tell me the whole dossier is false.”

  “No, I would not say that. Only eight-tenths of it is false.”

  The prosecutor, Dupin, apparently uneasy about how the interrogatoire had opened, intervened. At this point, Petiot lost his temper in a startling outburst of anger. “Stop!” he shouted, glaring at the prosecutor and clenching his hand into a fist. “Would you please be so kind as to allow me to finish?”

  Leser reprimanded him. “I forbid you to speak in that tone.”

  “All right,” Petiot said, described as waving off the president with the back of his hand. “But I don’t care to be treated like a criminal. And I ask the gentlemen of the jury, who will be the referees of this battle, to note all the lies in the dossier.”

  After recounting the scandals of P
etiot’s career as mayor in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, with frequent interruptions, Leser discussed his Parisian medical practice. He noted the leaflet Petiot handed out announcing his arrival, which boasted his ability to cure everything from appendicitis to pain in childbirth. Leser, unimpressed, called it “the prospectus of a quack!”

  “Thank you for the advertising,” Petiot said, “but I would ask you to keep your opinions to yourself.”

  Floriot objected. “The first requirement of a court is to be impartial. I request that you withdraw the epithet ‘quack.’ ”

  “I never said that,” Leser replied, before agreeing to retract the statement. He next questioned Petiot about his substantial wealth, particularly the contrast between his “astronomical salary” and the paltry sums he declared on his tax returns.

  “Oh, astronomical,” Petiot said, again with sarcasm, adding that his 300 to 500 thousand francs a year hardly qualified as astronomical. When Leser pointed out that Petiot had only claimed 25,000 francs in income, the defendant said he was observing a long-standing medical tradition: “When a surgeon earns eight or ten million a year, he declares a hundred thousand francs. That proves that I am a Frenchman. I didn’t want to seem like some kind of sucker.”

  At this point, some members of the audience laughed, and others applauded. The audience was indeed having a taste of Petiot’s wit, a hint of the verbal sparring to come, and a preview of the many difficulties the président would face in a trial already on the verge of slipping out of control.