The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot

by Thomas Maeder

  The police did not spend the rest of the day searching train stations and circulating photographs of Dr. Petiot as one would expect. Instead they went to the Simon Real Estate Agency. They learned that Monsieur Simon was a Jew and had fled France when the Germans dissolved his business. A further search turned up a former employee of the agency and the notary who had handled the sale of the rue Le Sueur house. Petiot had purchased the building in his son Gérard’s name on August 11, 1941. He paid F495,000—F373,000 down, the balance payable in annual installments of F17,500.

  Investigators then located the construction firm that had built the triangular room, installed the iron rings, and erected the wall that sheltered the courtyard from the eyes of curious neighbors. Two masons and several workers had done the job in October 1941 at a cost of F14,458.52. They had seen Petiot frequently at the time, they told the police, and the doctor had said he intended to install a clinic in the house after the war. The wall was to prevent neighbors from bothering his patients and to keep children from throwing peach pits into the yard. He intended to set up an electrotherapy apparatus in the triangular room and monitor its functioning through a viewer in the wall. The workers had found Petiot quite an amiable fellow.

  The police found these details of mild interest but such information did little in helping to capture the criminal. Nor was it intended to at first—as headquarters soon came to realize. Superiors learned that the agents Teyssier and Fillion had let a prime suspect escape, and the two fled France for fear of reprisals (they did not return until after the Liberation). The Germans now told Commissaire Massu they were astonished that Petiot had not yet been caught. Massu replied that he was surprised by their astonishment, since the files showed that the Germans had once actually held Petiot in prison and had voluntarily released him. The impasse lasted only briefly, after which it became all too evident that Petiot’s crimes, far from being committed in the name of France, were gruesomely personal. By then, however, the authorities had lost valuable time, and Petiot had vanished completely.

  French newspapers during the Occupation were completely under German control and largely printed German propaganda as well as enlistment calls for the French Gestapo. Their circulation dropped more than 50 percent as they ceased to publish anything of interest except amended rationing regulations. Fewer than 18 percent of the major prewar Parisian dailies and periodicals survived, while the rest fled to the free zone or succumbed to Nazi censorship. Those that remained and the handful of new publications were forced to collaborate actively (and their staff members were among the most harshly treated when the Liberation and purge finally came).

  The Germans had no wish to censor the Petiot affair, and may even have welcomed it as harmless diversion for a subjugated Paris. On Monday, circulations shot up as every newspaper in France exaggerated the discovery at the rue Le Sueur in an orgy of sordid detail and carried banner headlines about the “new Landru.”* Estimates ranged as high as sixty victims, and most reporters assumed all of them were women. Petiot, in the speculating press, became a drug addict and abortionist, a sadist and a lunatic who had a dozen means—each more outlandish than the last—of murdering helpless, lovely ladies in his triangular chamber. More than one paper carried rumors that the lower part of the bodies in the pit had been more severely damaged than the upper, indicating that the victims had been forced to stand in the caustic lime and dissolve alive. Even for people oppressed by years of war, the bizarre cruelty of the crimes soon became the favorite topic of conversation and, later, of wry amusement. One cartoon depicted a woman at a physician’s office door saying, “I’ll only come in for my appointment, doctor, if you swear you don’t have a stove.” Another showed a group of psychics communicating with the beyond through table-tilting: “If we put our hands on the stove instead,” one of the mediums suggested, “maybe we could contact Dr. Petiot.”

  The police did not find it entertaining as they began seeking answers to a long list of questions. They methodically set out to discover: who and where was Petiot? who were the victims and how many were there? how and why had they been killed? how and by whom had the building been equipped for murder? where did the lime come from? and were there accomplices? Experts from the police forensic lab photographed and made scale drawings of 21 rue Le Sueur. They took fingerprints from every available surface—and perhaps intentionally mishandled that job; how otherwise explain the fact that no useful prints were found at either the rue Le Sueur or the rue Caumartin?

  In closets and corners of the basement, inspectors found a jumbled collection of objects, including:

  22

  used toothbrushes

  15

  women’s combs

  7

  pocket combs

  9

  fingernail files

  24

  tubes and boxes of

  pharmaceutical products

  3

  shaving brushes

  5

  gas masks

  5

  cigarette holders

  1

  pair of women’s trousers

  1

  three-piece suit

  7

  pairs of eyeglasses

  2

  umbrellas

  1

  cane

  They also found: a black satin evening gown, with golden swallows embroidered on the bosom, bearing the manufacturer’s label Sylvia Rosa, Marseille; a jaunty woman’s hat made by Suzanne Talbot in Paris; a man’s white shirt from which the initials K.K. had been maladroitly removed; and a photograph of an unidentified man, which the newspapers published at the request of the police.

  The large human remains had been taken to the morgue on Sunday. Policemen refused to touch the piles of quicklime, and four gravediggers from the Passy cemetery were hired to sift through them with a sieve and pack the human elements in plain wooden coffins. The examination was headed by the celebrated forensic expert Dr. Albert Paul, who had directed every major coroner’s inquest in the department of the Seine since the Landru case in 1920 (when he burned human heads in a kitchen stove to observe their rate of combustion) and whose macabre humor and love of morbid detail made him as popular at social affairs as in court. Dr. Paul, Dr. Léon Dérobert, Dr. René Piédelièvre, and two professors from the Museum of Natural History, specialists in skeletal assembly and the reconstruction of fossil remains, spent several months measuring and categorizing thirty-four specimens ranging in size from a single connected shoulder blade and breastbone to the eviscerated half-corpse found on the stairs. Their final, voluminous report, with 150 pages of photographs and reams of description, was sadly disappointing.

  Not even the number of victims could be accurately determined. There were:

  Unpaired bones

  Vertebrae 10 subjects

  Sterna 7 subjects

  Coccyxes 6 subjects

  Paired bones

  Collarbones 10 subjects

  Shoulder blades 8 subjects

  Pelves 5 subjects

  From these remains the experts concluded that there were at least ten victims—five men, five women. But taking into account the fifteen kilograms of badly charred bones, eleven kilograms of uncharred fragments, quantities of pieces too small to identify (“three garbage cans full,” Dr. Paul told the newspapers), and the fact that there were five kilograms of hair, including more than ten entire human scalps, Dr. Paul could only cautiously say that “the number ten is vastly inferior to the real one.”

  Identification of the victims was equally impossible based on the limited information provided by such mutilated and badly decomposed bodies. The youngest of the ten victims, the experts determined, was a twenty-five-year-old woman; the eldest, a fifty-year-old man. There were no old bone injuries that could be used for identification. The existing teeth were almost all in poor condition, though one had a porcelain cap. One woman had very small hands and feet, and the forearm of a five-foot-ten male victim was abnormally short. One man had a partic
ularly voluminous skull, as did one woman, whose head was also round and flattened at the back. Another woman had a protruding lower jaw, which would have given her a distinctly simian appearance in life.

  Radiological examinations showed no traces of bullet or knife wounds, nor any similar marks of violence on bones. Some of the long bones of the legs and arms had been broken after death, apparently either to conceal telltale deformities or to make them easier to fit into the stove for burning; the breaks were so crude that Dr. Paul gaily theorized the bones had been wedged between a door and its jamb and yanked. Photographs and full-scale drawings were made of each piece, the teguments were removed, and insect larvae were lifted and placed in numbered test tubes; then each piece was cleaned, measured, photographed, and drawn again.

  Someone with an intimate knowledge of anatomy had dissected the bodies in a professional manner, though Paul noted that whereas a doctor would sever an arm at the shoulder, in this case the rib cage had been cut at the center and the whole arm, shoulder blade, and collarbone removed as a single piece—precisely, he pointed out, as one might carve a chicken. The dismemberment technique was identical to that used on a dozen batches of human remains, including nine severed heads, that were fished out of the Seine in 1942 and 1943—a flood of cadavers that ended when the culprit narrowly escaped detection after throwing a human hand off a bridge just as a barge passed underneath. Identification of these bodies, too, had been impossible, due both to decomposition and the fact that someone had stripped away the fingerprints and expertly removed the faces and scalps in a single piece. At the time, Dr. Paul had been concerned by scalpel marks in the fleshy parts of four thighs that floated ashore at La Muette on October 29, 1942. He knew firsthand that, unlike a surgeon, a coroner switching to another instrument does not lay down his scalpel but instead uses the cadaver’s thigh as a convenient pincushion; Paul had feared that one of his own students might be moonlighting. The bodies found at the rue Le Sueur bore identical marks on the thighs, and though a definite link was never proved, at least one forensic expert was convinced that the same person was responsible for the Seine and rue Le Sueur murders. This assumption did raise disturbing questions, though. Disfigurement was understandable when the bodies were to be thrown into a public waterway, but at the rue Le Sueur, when they were to be burned, what was the need for such delicate care? Perhaps the killer found the dissection not only practical, but pleasurable?

  Professor Henri Griffon, director of the police toxicology laboratory, was given five jars of viscera and a kilogram of lime to examine for toxic substances. He noted that no blood was present in any specimen; the viscera were shapeless, impregnated with quicklime, in an advanced state of mummification, and exuded “a piquant and extremely disagreeable odor.” His vague estimate placed the time of death at least several months to a year before the discovery, but the effects of the lime were so uncertain that Griffon would not later repeat this opinion in court. Chemical analysis could rule out poisoning by toxic metals such as lead, bismuth, barium, zinc, mercury, antimony, and arsenic, but this left innumerable other poisons as well as strangulation, asphyxiation, and a host of other murder techniques whose marks would not show or could be concealed. Organic poisons that doctors normally use, such as ouabaine, scopolamine, chloroform, strychnine, and digitalis, were eventually found at Petiot’s rue Caumartin apartment, along with fifty times the amount of a doctor’s normal stock of morphine and heroin, but no such substances were found at the rue Le Sueur, and no trace of them would be expected in such badly decayed corpses.

  The remains were among the most horrible the forensic experts had ever seen, but despite their revulsion, they could not restrain a certain amount of professional admiration for someone who had covered his tracks so effectively. Years later, Dr. Piédelièvre included in his Memoirs of a Coroner a chapter on Petiot entitled “My Dear Confrère, Doctor Petiot.” All of their science did not help them find one scrap of information, though they had more than enough material to study. When Dr. Paul gave his conservative estimate of ten bodies at the rue Le Sueur, he also said the number could go as high as thirty. There were from nine to a dozen more in the Seine. No one could guess how many more were never found or, at a time when bodies were common and too often meant trouble with the Germans, were found and never reported. Petiot himself later referred to sixty-three deaths—and on a few topics he was always scrupulously accurate.

  * A selected list of characters begins on page 289.

  * A generation earlier, Henri Désiré Landru had been guillotined for seducing and murdering at least ten women and burning their remains in his stove.

  2

  THE FIRST IDENTIFIED VICTIMS

  The first two tentative identifications of victims were made with embarrassing ease: the police checked department files to see whether Petiot had a record, and the bodies began to assume names—Jean-Marc Van Bever and Marthe Khaït. These two murders, apparently among the first in the series, had been simple, practical affairs, different from the rest; and perhaps by showing Petiot just how easily murder could be done, they had started him in his new vocation. At the time when they occurred, no murder charges had been brought: the police simply noted it as strange that two people connected with Petiot conveniently disappeared just before they were due to testify in court on two separate narcotics charges against him. As Massu’s subordinates pieced the story together, the following tale emerged.

  Early in 1942, two years before the rue Le Sueur discovery, the Police Judiciaire vice squad impounded the books of all Parisian pharmacies in an attempt to track down people who were receiving inordinately large amounts of narcotics. This massive raid was typical of Maréchal Philippe Pétain’s paradoxically moralistic Vichy government, which substituted Family, Fatherland, Work for the republican French motto Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and elevated basic old-fashioned morality to the level of patriotic duty. Since drug abuse ruined the bodies and minds of Frenchmen, it was not only damaging to the individual, but almost a crime against the State.

  A raid on pharmacies was certain to catch most abusers. In occupied France drugs were exceptionally hard to find. Borders were effectively closed to smugglers, and pushers and other specialists in illegal traffic found more lucrative work in the black-market sale of daily goods. The only way an addict could support his habit was through compliant doctors or by misrepresenting himself to a number of honest doctors as a candidate for a drug cure. Either method left records in the dangerous-drugs registers of pharmacies, and it was on such evidence that the police arrested Jean-Marc Van Bever and his mistress on February 19, 1942.

  Van Bever was the son of Adolphe Van Bever, coeditor with Paul Léautaud of a well-known anthology of French poets, and the nephew of the painter La Quintinie, one of the founders of the Salon d’Automne. Jean-Marc Van Bever was well brought up and fairly well educated. He had received his baccalauréat degree, spoke fluent English and some Italian and Spanish, and had spent a year or so in law school, but after this promising start his life fell into ruins. He squandered a F500,000 inheritance on various publishing and printing ventures, all of which failed, and spent much of the decade before his arrest drawing unemployment or welfare benefits. He had found his first regular job at age forty-one, four months before his arrest, when he and his sole friend, an out-of-work Italian hatter named Ugo Papini, began delivering coal. This work brought F60–F120 a day, and by economizing Van Bever had been able to save some F2,000–F3,000, which he always carried on his person.

  Van Bever had made an abortive foray into marriage a decade earlier, and since then his only female companionship had been prostitutes. Jeannette Gaul, thirty-four, was one of these. At age thirty she had begun to use drugs, and with drugs as a lever one of her suppliers had persuaded her to quit her job as a chambermaid and become a licensed prostitute in a registered brothel. She drifted from one provincial brothel to another, and by late 1940 ended up in Paris, where she became a streetwalker, hanging about the seedier qu
artiers, picking up men—including Van Bever—and escorting them to the nearest cheap hotel. Van Bever was her paying client for three weeks in November 1941. When she fell ill, he visited her in the hospital. He persuaded her to move in with him at his hotel on the rue Piat two days before Christmas.

  When she moved in with Van Bever, Jeannette Gaul gave up prostitution, but not her drug habit, which she continued to support by procuring, under guise of cures, limited quantities of heroin from five different doctors—each of whom presumably believed he was gradually weaning her from the drug. Among them was Dr. Marcel Petiot, who in late January and February 1942 had written five prescriptions in Jeannette Gaul’s name and two in that of Van Bever. The latter was not an addict, and had even been trying to persuade his mistress to give up drugs. But she was more stubborn than he, and until he could convince her to change, Van Bever stood by meekly.