by David King
The prosecutor spoke for another two hours, blasting Petiot as “a murderer, a thief, a con man, and an impostor,” that is, anything but a Resistant. To accomplish what he claimed, Petiot would have required personnel, matériel, and constant vigilance. “It’s absurd,” he concluded. Dr. Petiot was simply a criminal dominated by the twin desires of greed and cruelty. He was the “modern Bluebeard,” that is, “a modern gangster” who “killed to rob.” Dupin would not be able to finish his speech that evening. Leser adjourned the court at seven o’clock. The prosecutor’s call for the death penalty would have to wait until the next day.
35.
THE VERDICT
PETIOT IS NOT A MURDERER.
—René Floriot
AS the sixteenth and final day of the trial opened at one o’clock on Thursday, April 4, socialites, actors, athletes, dignitaries, and many other spectators once again squeezed together in the crowded courtroom, as Pierre Scize of Le Figaro said, like “herrings in a cask.” It was estimated to be the largest attendance at that time in the history of the Cour d’assises de la Seine.
Petiot, wearing the same gray suit and purple bow tie that he had on the first day of the trial, appeared confident as he scanned the gallery for Georgette, Gérard, and Maurice, all of them there as always. Dupin resumed his summary of the prosecution’s case. Before he could launch into the bulk of his argument, however, there was a disruption in the audience. A woman or perhaps two women had fainted. People scrambled to help, and when the guards intervened, they also met resistance from spectators who refused to abandon hard-won seats. Président Leser seemed confused about what to do. The trial looked like it would end, as the correspondent for Libé-Soir put it, “in a scandalous buffoonery.” Leser suspended proceedings at one forty-five.
Twenty-five minutes later, Dupin returned to his summary, reminding the court of the series of letters and postcards purportedly sent by victims after their disappearance. In each case, the content was similar, sometimes using almost identical language and word choices infrequently employed by the victim. Each time, too, the alleged writer signed his or her full name, even to a husband, a wife, or a lover.
Dupin classified Petiot’s victims into three groups: Jews hoping to escape the Occupation; gangsters and their mistresses; and a final category of patients who in some way threatened to put his medical practice in jeopardy. The latter group was murdered to prevent them from testifying about his activities. The gangsters and their mistresses were killed for their wealth, and if any of them belonged to the Gestapo, Petiot did not know it at the time and only took advantage of the fact afterward. As for Petiot’s calling the first group Gestapo agents and collaborators, this was a travesty. He had robbed and murdered Jews fleeing for their lives.
Petiot’s claims that the human remains had been planted were preposterous. The bodies at rue Le Sueur had been worked on by a skilled surgeon. The patterns of dismemberment corresponded to the pieces that had washed up in the Seine between the spring of 1942 and January 1943. Petiot admitted sixty-three “executions,” or liquidations as he called them, and Dupin reminded the court that there had probably been many more. He read a list of the twenty-seven people whom the state accused Petiot of murdering.
“No, Petiot, we will not allow anyone to desecrate the word ‘Resistance’ any longer,” Dupin said. “No deception, Petiot. The hour of justice has sounded.”
As soon as Dupin had uttered the words, Petiot stood and said, “Signed, the Procureur of the Vichy Régime.” The defendant held up a drawing he had been sketching during the closing statement. It was a caricature of the prosecutor that elicited laughter from the audience.
“Petiot, the role of judge does not suit you,” Dupin said.
“Nor you!”
The prosecutor, known for his reluctance to utter the words “death penalty,” usually resorted to some circuitous way of calling for capital punishment. For several days now, journalists and commentators had enjoyed a parlor game of guessing the phrase Dupin would use. After a final reminder that psychiatric evaluations had confirmed the defendant’s sanity and a claim that the death penalty had never seemed an “absolute necessity” more than now, Dupin was ready: “Let Justice be done and let us see Petiot soon join his victims.” This was not a popular phrase among the families of the victims.
AT three o’clock that afternoon, Président Leser motioned for Floriot to begin the final plea of the defense. As customary before beginning his argument, Floriot had downed a single glass of champagne—later this day too, for the first time, he would drink a second one. Floriot approached the task ahead, as Pierre Scize put it, with “the pleasure of a hunting dog running a hare,” a good comparison for the avid huntsman. Like many of the civil attorneys on the previous days, Floriot began by promising to be brief and deal strictly in known facts. His “short” summation would fill 339 typewritten pages and be one of the highlights of the trial.
Floriot confronted the prosecution head-on regarding the murder charges. The press had grossly distorted the facts, presenting the defendant as a “monster, an assassin, a thief, and perhaps even a sadist.” The Occupation-controlled press systematically suppressed evidence of Petiot’s work for France, embellishing instead his reputation as a terrorist and torturer. Never once was Petiot’s arrest by the Gestapo mentioned. His client’s image had been ruined.
The biases and mistakes in the media, moreover, were compounded by the inadequacies of the police investigation. Originally, Floriot said, the French police had wanted to accuse Petiot of one hundred murders, but with time, the number of victims had been steadily dropping as investigators discovered that he simply could not have killed them. In some cases, the real murderer was found; in other cases, the victim was discovered to be alive or to have been deported during the war. Sometimes, too, the victim had disappeared while Petiot was locked up at Fresnes. In the end, Floriot continued, the police were left with twenty-seven charges.
To secure conviction, detectives had searched for any piece of evidence that could be used against Floriot’s client, while also ignoring the positive testimonies found along the way. Citing the statement of Inspector Poirier, Floriot noted that the French police had interviewed two thousand of Petiot’s clients and found that they had said overwhelmingly positive things about Petiot. The prosecution’s statement had not reflected this reality.
Floriot retold Petiot’s background from his perspective. A volunteer infantryman in World War I and a veteran wounded in battle and honorably discharged with 50 and eventually 100 percent disability, Petiot had proceeded to study medicine at the University of Paris. He had written a dissertation that earned high marks and then established his own medical practice in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. Repeatedly his patients had testified about the quality of Petiot’s work as a physician and his achievements as mayor. Then, after surviving the personal attacks from enemies who plotted his downfall, Petiot had moved to Paris and rebuilt his medical practice. All the while, he had remained a devoted husband and father. Like the police and prosecution statement Floriot just criticized, Floriot’s was a blatantly one-sided portrait full of contradictions and omissions.
The same emphasis on service beyond the call of duty persuaded Petiot to throw his lot behind the Resistance—and what really, Floriot asked, was the Resistance? Was it necessary or sufficient to join an official organization? Shouldn’t one also consider the importance of deeply held convictions?
Like it or not, Floriot argued, Petiot was a Resistant. Witnesses had confirmed his strong anti-German stance, and indeed there was not a single instance in the dossier that could show anything remotely pro-German. The advocate dwelled on how Petiot had provided false certificates for Frenchmen to avoid the German labor camps, or furnished prescriptions for drugs to make them sick on the day of the physical examination. Petiot had expanded his Resistance activities by working with Fly-Tox; Resistance fighters who knew him well, such as Lieutenant Richard Héritier, had no doubt about his Resist
ance past. Nor had the Gestapo, Floriot argued, reminding the jury of his client’s almost eight months of torture and imprisonment.
Now, despite this service to his country, Petiot was on trial for twenty-seven murders. He admitted nineteen of them, claiming that each one was a Gestapo agent, an informer, or someone attempting to infiltrate the Fly-Tox organization and therefore subject to be “executed in the name of the Resistance and the name of France.” This was not a crime, Floriot reminded the court, citing the wartime proclamation issued by General de Gaulle in Algiers: “There is no crime or misdemeanor when the crime or misdemeanor has been committed in the interest of France.”
As for the other eight charges, Denise Hotin, Jean-Marc Van Bever, Marthe Khaït, Joachim Guschinow, Paul Braunberger, and Kurt, Greta, and René Kneller, Petiot denied them. Other than Guschinow and the Knellers, whom he had helped flee Occupied Paris, Petiot had no idea about the whereabouts of any of the other men and women. If the prosecution could provide sufficient evidence to pin a single one of these eight missing persons on his client, Floriot said, Petiot should be condemned. But the prosecution had not done so.
Floriot was meticulous, zooming in on each alleged victim and raising many doubts about the prosecution’s evidence. In the case of René Kneller, for instance, it was true that a pair of child’s pajamas had been found at 21 rue Le Sueur, the body of a young boy had washed up in the Seine, and, at the time of Petiot’s arrest, a ration card formerly belonging to the seven-year-old René had been found in Petiot’s possession with the surname changed to read Valeri.
Yet the prosecution had not managed to disprove Petiot’s defense that he sent the family abroad. Perhaps the pajamas had simply been left behind as dirty laundry and the ration card handed over as a gift or in lieu of the fees the Knellers owed Petiot. As for the body of the boy in the Seine, that could have been one of many young children who tragically disappeared in those days. There was no evidence proving it was René, and nothing at all connecting the remains to Floriot’s client. Petiot should not face the death penalty, the advocate argued, with so many questions remaining unanswered, and certainly not with such a glaring lack of evidence.
Turning to the disappearance of Dr. Paul Braunberger, Floriot proceeded to undermine the prosecution’s main link to Petiot: the hat and shirt found on his property that Marguerite Braunberger claimed had belonged to her husband. Madame Braunberger, Floriot noted, was nearly blind. She had only identified the objects after reading a description of them in a catalogue and then looking specifically for them.
The evidence, moreover, had been treated sloppily. The suitcases in which the items were found had been packed by the police in the absence of Dr. Petiot. This was understandable given that Petiot was in flight at the time. But after his arrest, the suitcases were opened and closed a number of times without his or his attorney’s presence. The fact that the seal was still intact was irrelevant. What was the guarantee of the integrity of the contents, Floriot asked, when the items had been “opened fifteen times in my absence and closed fifteen times in my absence?”
The hat and the shirt were not even found in the same location. The police claimed that they had been packed together, but that was incorrect. The shirt came from a suitcase in Neuhausen’s attic, while the hat was found in a suitcase at rue Le Sueur that also included a pipe, a camera, an ink blotter, a medical flashlight for examining the throats of patients, and a small appointment book. If the hat and shirt belonged to Braunberger, then where were his jacket, waistcoat, trousers, and any other articles of clothing?
As for the shirt’s supposed “P.B.” initials, Floriot pointed out another problem. He asked the jury to look more closely at the shirt. Was it really P.B.? Could it perhaps be “B.P.”? It also looked like “P.F.” and “F.R.” and some other combinations. Even Professor Sannié of the Identité Judiciaire, who had looked over the shirt closely with his microscope, could not say for certain that the initials had been “P.B.” Floriot explained:
When [Sannié can read the initials], he states it. Look at seal number thirty-five. On two other shirts, you see that someone has tried to remove the embroidered letters. A little further, he writes, “The initials which are found on the belt level of the left side have been removed. It is likely that they were A.E.” As a result, when he is certain, he writes, “The letters are …” and when he is less certain, he writes, “It is likely that …” But as you cannot see any letters on the Braunberger shirt [seal number 44], he says nothing at all. You can see that some letters have been removed; I do not dispute that, but you cannot assert that they are P.B. They might be P.B., but they could also be a number of other combinations.
As for the hat, Floriot called that “really something incredible.” Madame Braunberger had first told the police in an interview that her husband owned a hat from the designer Gélot. But when the police found a hat that matched her description, it carried the label of a different designer, “Berteil, rue du 4-Septembre.” Braunberger still insisted that the hat belonged to her husband because he had it repaired there in 1942 since, as she said, Gélot had then been closed.
Floriot challenged the statement. First of all, Gélot hats carry their identification in the crown, and so the mark should have remained there, even if the leather sweatband had been changed. Second, as Maison Gélot only designed custom-made hats, Floriot had obtained the form that the hatter used in designing the hat for “Doctor Braunberger, 207 Faubourg Saint-Denis, March 18, 1937.”
With this information, Floriot invited the jury to compare the Gélot form and the hat that the prosecution claimed had belonged to Braunberger. It was, Floriot said, “a disaster.” The hat in question was “too wide and much too short” for Braunberger’s head. To be exact, it was off by two and a half centimeters. “For a man who wore nothing but custom-designed hats,” Floriot noted, “a two-and-a-half-centimeter gap is really quite a lot.” It would either sit on “the top of your head” or fall “to your ears.”
Floriot then reminded the jury that Gélot had said Braunberger’s hat was patterned but the one exhibited in the courtroom was solid. When he called Gélot himself to confirm this fact, he discovered something remarkable. Gélot had actually given a sample of the fabric to the prosecution. “A sample?” Floriot asked. The prosecution had never informed the defense that it had received such a thing.
“Gentlemen of the jury,” Floriot said, taking out the replacement fabric provided by Gélot, “you may compare this sample with this hat.” The exhibit was a solid, flat felt, but the sample was a patterned, rougher, felt chiné. “They resemble each other like night and day.”
Not long after this demonstration, “hats off for the hat trick,” as correspondent Géo London put it, Floriot approached the conclusion: Could Petiot, the doctor who treated a child suffering from leukemia for several days and nights, without being paid a sou, really be capable of killing little René Kneller? Could this Resistance fighter, who had been arrested, tortured by the Gestapo, with his teeth filed down three millimeters and his skull crushed until he bled from the nose, mouth, and ears, really be able to kill Jews fleeing from the Nazis? The patriot and hero Lieutenant Héritier told the court under oath that, regardless of its decision, he would always be proud of being a companion of Dr. Petiot.
“I commend Petiot to your hands,” Floriot said, wrapping up a six-and-a-half-hour summary, the longest in his career. The jury, he was certain, would acquit his client.
Floriot received a standing ovation. The Associated Press Paris correspondent called it “the greatest defense summation in French criminal history.” Indeed, at that moment, it seemed that all the bones in the basement, the bodies half-devoured in the pit of quicklime, and the countless remains pulled out of the Seine were forgotten in a stream of eloquence and applause.
As French law gave the last word to the defendant, Leser asked Petiot if he wanted to add anything. “I cannot … nothing,” he said, emotional again from his lawyer’s closing statem
ent. “You are French. You know that I killed members of the Gestapo. You also know what you have to do.”
THE jury was handed a list of 135 yes-or-no questions, five for each of the twenty-seven alleged victims: “Is the above mentioned, Marcel André Henri Petiot, guilty of having willfully put to death, in Paris or in any other part of France, [insert name]?” Follow-up questions asked if the defendant was guilty of the above “with malice aforethought”? Was this also “accompanied by ambush and confinement”? or “by fraudulent appropriation of property”? Finally, did the defendant commit this voluntary homicide with the “aim of preparing, facilitating or affecting the fraudulent appropriation specified above?” A vote would be taken on each question for each victim. Two-thirds majority vote would suffice for the verdict.
As Leser, the two magistrates, and the members of the jury retired to the chambre des délibérations with the enormous dossier, they would enjoy a catered meal of sauerkraut and wine from a nearby bistro. Few spectators, meanwhile, dared to leave the courtroom, described by the writer Colette, covering the trial for France-Soir, as “suffocating and reeling.” A large crowd waiting outside still hoped for a seat, in case someone made the mistake of visiting the cafeteria without having a friend reserve their place. Some members of the audience pulled sandwiches, dry sausages, and fruit from brown lunch bags; others smoked. In the back, binoculars were brandished.
A guard escorted Petiot into a side room. Three of the “Floriot’s boys” took turns keeping him company. They would discuss everything from oriental carpets to the art of discovering bargains at auctions.
About 11:50 p.m., after two hours and fifteen minutes of deliberation, or roughly one minute per question, which was barely enough time to read the question aloud and vote, let alone debate the issue, the court clerk announced that the jury had reached its verdict. Petiot had already returned to the courtroom, where after signing copies of his book he had fallen asleep. He was awakened.
