by David King
“Pure invention. Your delirious imagination will play bad tricks on you. Madame Khaït often expressed the desire to escape to the unoccupied zone.”
“She had so little intention to leave that she did not even bring her ration cards, and left her laundry on the stove.”
Khaït’s husband, Floriot objected, had confirmed that she had long expressed the desire to leave for the unoccupied zone, and there was no documentation about the washing on the stove. As the two dueled, with the prosecuting advocate-general jumping in to support Véron, Petiot was relegated to the background. “What about me?” he asked. “Am I just a walk-on in this show?”
“What, are you bored?” Véron asked. Petiot reportedly yelled and kicked the box in response.
Leser adjourned the court at a quarter to six that evening. Some newspapers reported that Petiot had stumbled, falling into contradictions, showing ignorance about the Resistance, and generally losing credibility with his highly selective memory. By other tallies, he was winning over the inept prosecution, who appeared to be outmatched. Dupin’s limited exposure to the enormous dossier was showing.
At the end of the day, David Perlman of the New York Herald Tribune managed to interview two of the jurors—a shocking feat only surpassed when he succeeded in questioning Président Leser himself. In an article entitled “Paris Bluebeard called ‘Demon’ by Two Jurors,” Leser was quoted as calling Petiot “a demon, an unbelievable demon. He is a terrifying monster. He is an appalling murderer.” Another juror called him intelligent, mad, and guilty, adding that “the guillotine is too swift for such a monster.”
Jurors—and even the président of the tribunal—speaking about the defendant like this in the middle of a trial to the international press? Floriot now had grounds for a mistrial.
28.
TWO TO ONE
IF HE REALLY IS CRAZY, HE’S THE MOST REMARKABLE MENTAL CASE I EVER MET.
—Ferdinand Gollety on Dr. Petiot
AFTER the two jurors cited in the international edition of the New York Herald Tribune were replaced, Président Leser opened on Wednesday, March 20, 1946, by declaring that, in contrast to previous days, he would not allow matters to get out of hand. The trial was already behind schedule. From now on, he would keep it on course and preserve an atmosphere of “calm and dignity.”
One problem with the president’s new strategy was that rushing through the proceedings sometimes caused a sloppy treatment of the material that left many questions unanswered, or even unasked. This was not in the interest of the prosecution, let alone justice, and the defense would have many opportunities to exploit the newfangled urgency.
No surprise, the rapid progress through the twenty-seven murder cases prohibited the audience—and worse, the jury—from fully appreciating the tragedy of each disappearance. The trial was ironically, as several journalists noted, making it harder to sympathize with the plight of the victims. Indeed the last five years of world war had desensitized many people who had lived through the Holocaust, the ferocious firebombing raids, and an array of horrors that left between fifty and sixty million people dead. One of the trial’s low points was when Dupin protested that “human life is sacred” and the audience laughed.
After a short questioning about the disappearance of Van Bever, which prompted Petiot to launch into digressions on the young man’s drug abuse and sex life, Dupin turned to the Guschinow case. Petiot admitted accepting the Polish furrier as a client in his escape organization, but denied that he had murdered him. He testified to helping him flee Paris, referring him to Robert Martinetti, “the expert in clandestine passages across the Spanish border.”
Petiot told the court how he met Martinetti, claiming to treat him for “an affliction I don’t care to name,” a tactic that the physician often used to discourage further questions about his relationship with alleged associates or victims.
“Where is Guschinow now?”
“In South America.”
“Explain to us why no one has found him.”
“You are forgetting that Argentina is a German colony. A Polish man is not going to draw attention to himself there.”
Floriot asked if the prosecution had searched for Guschinow, because he did not see any evidence in the dossier of investigators being sent to South America.
Dupin replied that the juge d’instruction had investigated.
The dossier, Floriot objected, only contained evidence that Madame Guschinow had written to two people in Argentina asking if they knew her husband’s whereabouts; of course they did not, the defense counsel added, “any more than you have seen ninety-nine percent of the people in Paris.”
Petiot interrupted with his assertion that he had received three letters or cards from Guschinow in Buenos Aires, written on the stationery of the Alvear Palace Hotel. The defendant rambled on about the light blue color of the paper and how people in South America open letters from the side, not the top.
When Leser asked if he had been paid for arranging Guschinow’s departure, Petiot answered no, before correcting himself and explaining that he had asked the furrier for ermine for his wife. Guschinow had instead given him five sable coats, which he later learned were rare and worth 100,000 francs. The expensive furs found on Petiot’s property were, in other words, gifts in appreciation of his services. Petiot seemed to be holding back a sob as he related the value of the alleged present.
The civil attorney representing Guschinow’s widow, Maître Jacques Archevêque, asked about the false passport and papers. They were impeccable, Petiot said, “as if requested by Hitler himself.”
“Why did you advise Guschinow to remove all his initials from his laundry?”
“It’s elementary … that is, provided that you served in the Resistance.”
“I know the Resistance better than you do,” Dupin interrupted.
“Perhaps, but not from the same end [of the gun].”
As Petiot scored again with the audience, Archêveque tried to put the physician back on the defensive by demanding that he identify the members of his group.
“Again?” Petiot asked, launching into a lengthy monologue about how the prosecution and civil attorneys were making a mockery of French justice and causing the French people to look like buffoons. This was typical of the proceedings on the day Leser said he would take control of the trial.
THE cases of the nine gangsters and prostitutes were in a different category because Petiot did not deny killing them. In fact, he admitted to “executing” them and used this fact to support his overall defense, namely that he worked for the French Resistance and only liquidated traitors and collaborators who served the Gestapo.
“Jo the Boxer wanted to leave for Argentina with a woman and a friend,” Petiot explained. “He handed Fourrier twenty-five thousand francs per person. The first to travel was François the Corsican, and he wanted to leave with a woman. The scene took place behind the Madeleine.” Ten members of Fly-Tox, he said, “played the German police trick,” referring to their tactic of impersonating the Gestapo. François the Corsican then supposedly confessed to working for Lafont and the French Gestapo on rue Lauriston. “Hence, the execution.”
Leser asked Petiot for details.
“My, you have sadistic tastes!” Petiot said, in a faux-scandalized, if delighted, tone that amused the audience. Claiming not to have been present, Petiot said that he only knew that the gangster’s head had been smashed with a bludgeon made from a rubber pipe filled with lead, sand, and the spokes of a bicycle.
According to Petiot, Jo the Boxer made an “awful scene.” He had tried to excuse his behavior by claiming to be a poor man who had gone astray, and then allegedly offered Fly-Tox 400,000 francs to spare his life. He also vowed to betray Lafont. Jo and the two women who accompanied him, Annette and the unidentified woman, were shoved into the truck. Along the way, one of the women took out a revolver and “gave us some heat.” All three were buried at Vincennes.
Adrien the Basque, on the
other hand, had resisted arrest. “We had to stick a gun in his kidneys to force him into the truck.” Later, at rue Le Sueur, the gangster pulled a dagger and stabbed one of his men near the liver. Adrien was executed. “It was true butchery.” Petiot asked the président to show the court the photograph of the notorious tough guy he was proud to have killed.
Dupin acknowledged that the gangsters had worked for the Gestapo, but asked why Petiot had to kill the women. His answer provoked gasps of horror: “What would you want us to do with them?”
Realizing how his answer had been understood, Petiot elaborated: “They were mistresses of Gestapo agents. They would have denounced us.”
“What gave you the right to judge and execute people?”
“If there had been a procureur de la République at the time, we would gladly have let him take the job. It was not a very pleasant one.”
Floriot intervened on his client’s behalf. Three of the men worked for the Gestapo, he reminded, and the fourth, Zé, operated a brothel for German officers. “Why, then, would they want to leave France?”
“It is very simple,” Dupin said. “They were sought by the police.”
“Do you really believe that a member of the Gestapo would be afraid of the French police?”
“I respect human life in any case, Maître.”
“Do you respect the life of a member of the Gestapo?”
This was a delicate subject. In the awkward silence, Leser asked Petiot how much money he had made by killing these gangsters and prostitutes. Petiot said that his group did not work for material gain and did not receive a sou. This was another contradiction, which, in the rush, was not rigorously pursued.
Adrien the Basque had sewn 1 million francs into the shoulder pads of his suit, Dupin said, and his fellow gangsters carried another 3 or 4 million, not to mention the fees they paid for the alleged journey to Argentina.
Président Leser agreed to open the suitcase to see if Adrien’s jackets had in fact been ripped or altered in any way. As the clerk of the court, Wilmès, tried to remove the suitcase, the towering stack of evidence started to sway. Leser called for an immediate recess. Wilmès later admitted that he had feared that the suitcases might fall on him.
Petiot suggested that the guards remain in the room to prevent any theft. Turning to Floriot, he joked that if the court did in fact find a million francs, would he receive ten percent?
WHEN the court reconvened, the clerk opened seal number 54, a yellow suitcase with black leather corners that contained the clothes and personal belongings of Adrien the Basque. A musty odor escaped the old suitcase, as the usher rummaged through its contents looking for the gangster’s suit. When he found the jacket in question, Petiot snatched it and displayed it for the court, triumphantly pointing out that the garment was intact. Petiot grabbed another one. “Same thing,” he said, “not unsealed, very sure of that.”
Once again, instead of trying to poke holes in the defense, Dupin retreated, this time moving on to what should have been more solid ground. “The Wolffs were Jews who fled the German repression. They were one hundred percent Resistants.”
“They were Germans,” Petiot said. “They came from Berlin.”
“That’s false,” the Wolff family lawyer, Maître Jacques Bernays, interjected. “The Wolffs left Holland on June 12, 1942, and I have obtained a number of witnesses that prove that they lived in fear of reprisals from the Gestapo.”
Floriot countered with a police report written by Inspector Battut that documented the Wolffs’ arrival in France with a passport issued in Berlin identifying them as “refugees.” Jews who feared for their lives because of state-sanctioned terror, Floriot added, rarely applied to that government for a passport. In Paris, they “hid in a hotel requisitioned by the Germans.”
“They hid themselves the way I did when I was newly married,” Petiot said. “I pulled the sheets over my head and said to my wife, ‘Try to find me.’ ”
In the ensuing laughter, Dupin neglected to call out Floriot for omitting one important fact: The Wolffs’ passport was not issued in 1942, as it appeared in the discussion, but nine years before.
Petiot admitted to killing the Wolffs, as well as the Jewish couple that followed them, Gilbert and Marie-Anne Basch. They were a similar case, Petiot said, and therefore received the same fate.
“What about the Schonkers, the parents of [Marie-Anne] Basch?”
Petiot mocked the prosecutor. “I don’t know anything about them, but if it makes you happy, you can put them on my account. They came from the same bunch, and if I had met them I would have killed them.”
All of these Jewish families, Petiot added, had been sent to him by Eryane Kahan, whom the defense would present as a German agent trying to infiltrate Petiot’s Resistance organization.
“Why didn’t you kill Eryane Kahan, then, if you knew she was collaborating with the Germans?”
Petiot wanted her to send him more traitors. “If Kahan had sent me a hundred, like the Wolffs and the Baschs, I would have killed all one hundred. Then, Kahan would have been the hundred-and-first.”
The press, now keeping score of the trial like a soccer match, generally handed the victory to Petiot. The prosecution was failing even to establish that Jews fleeing Nazi persecution were not Gestapo agents. Petiot had had a good day indeed. After three days, he was winning by most accounts two to one.
At the end of the session, when two elegant women left the courtroom, one turned to the other and said that she had “never been more amused.” Overhearing the comment, a thin man in a shabby suit shouted at the women and attacked. He was, it was later learned, an Auschwitz survivor who had lost almost his entire family in Nazi death camps.
29.
INSIDE MURDER HOUSE
I AM ONE OF THOSE VICIOUS PEOPLE WHOM WORK AMUSES.
—Marcel Petiot
ON Thursday, March 21, 1946, the first official day of spring, the trial continued with the wrap-up of the président’s interrogatoire and ended with the calling of the first witnesses. There were as usual many heated debates and lengthy digressions, including Petiot’s story of a Nazi attempt to capture a Resistant, who had parachuted into the farmlands outside Lyon, by mobilizing a force of “four hundred prostitutes.” Leser repeatedly interrupted, insisting that Petiot stay on subject.
Very little new information emerged this day. Petiot at one point said that he had handed over Yvan Dreyfus to his so-called chief, Robert Martinetti, near the Place de la Concorde and watched the two men walk away in the direction of the Naval Ministry. This statement contradicted his previous account, namely that he left Dreyfus with his comrades at rue Le Sueur, but the prosecution again failed to force him to explain the discrepancy.
Petiot was instead allowed to tell the court how he had stood up to his Gestapo interrogators in prison. When they questioned him about Dreyfus, for instance, Petiot boasted of his answer: “If he’s a Jew, what difference does it make to you that he disappeared? If he’s an informer, you’ll soon find another. I was risking my neck, Monsieur le Président, but I was having a lot of fun.”
When Leser asked about Petiot’s brother’s concern for the fate of Yvan Dreyfus, Petiot admitted that Maurice had been a client and friend of the Dreyfus family, and he had tried to convince Yvan’s father to intervene on his behalf. This was not followed to any significant conclusion, and the jury never heard Nézondet’s allegation that Maurice claimed to have seen Dreyfus’s body in June 1943 on top of the pile of cadavers at his brother’s basement.
Before the jury had time to appreciate the tragedy of this disappearance, Floriot declared for the court that a Gestapo file from 1943 confirmed that Dreyfus had served as “an informer of the Gestapo.” As a result, Floriot said, “there is no need to feel sorry over the fate of Yvan Dreyfus.”
Président Leser, the advocate-general Dupin, and the Dreyfus family attorney, Maître Véron, all objected to this statement. Véron questioned the accuracy of the file, reminding the
court of Dreyfus’s patriotic record: how he had returned to France in 1939 to fight the Germans, only to be arrested when he tried to escape to England and join de Gaulle.
“Dreyfus was a traitor four times over: a traitor to his race, a traitor to his religion, a traitor to his country, and a traitor …,” Petiot began, before Leser, Véron, and Dupin all again protested loudly. The correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald described the scene in the courtroom: “Petiot ranted, roared, stamped his feet and waved his fists to the accompaniment of quarrels among counsel as fights broke out in the public gallery.”
As tensions remained high, Leser turned to the Kneller case, the last discovery before the investigation officially closed in the fall of 1945. Would Petiot really claim that Kneller, a veteran of the French Foreign Legion, was a collaborator? Was his seven-year-old son, René, also a collaborator?
Kurt Kneller was his patient, Petiot said, adopting his usual tactic of pointing out that “professional secrecy” precluded him from revealing the nature of his ailment. This argument was wearing thin, and as for his professional secrecy, that had not stopped him in other instances.
Petiot then boasted of how much he had allegedly helped the Kneller family. He had secured them false identities, one Alsatian, the other Belgian, and advised them to carry two bottles of cognac to give the guides who would escort them across the border. He had even loaned the family money to buy railway tickets to Orléans for the first part of the journey. Given these services, and the fact that the Knellers still owed him 2,000 francs for previous medical treatment, Petiot had asked the family to leave their furniture with him as collateral.
Asked about the lack of communication from the Kneller family describing their safe arrival and establishment of a new home, Petiot said that they were ungrateful. This answer, however, did not address the question of why the Knellers had not contacted other family members.
