The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot

by Thomas Maeder

  3

  THE INVESTIGATION

  On Monday, March 13, 1944, the search for Dr. Marcel Petiot began in earnest. Chief Inspector Marius Batut and a subordinate requisitioned a car and some gasoline, which was rationed even for the police, and set out for Petiot’s native province, the Yonne, where they thought he and his wife might be hiding with former friends and associates. They remembered the sign on the door of 21 rue Le Sueur giving an address in Auxerre, where Petiot’s brother Maurice lived. Closer examination of the worn paper revealed that someone had originally written “56 rue du Pont,” and that this had been erased and changed, in a different hand, to “18 rue des Lombards.” The former was Maurice Petiot’s home; the latter was a building that had been purchased by their father, Félix Petiot, and passed on upon his death in August 1942 to Maurice.

  Number 18 rue des Lombards proved to be a curious house, built on a hill riddled with ancient Roman catacombs, and constructed, someone suggested, by an architect in the throes of delirium tremens, so tortuously was it built around its steeply sloping foundation. It was empty, except for piles of furniture and bric-a-brac reminiscent of the disordered collection found at the rue Le Sueur. In one neat room was a rumpled bed.

  Inspector Batut eventually found Maurice working in his radio store as though it were a perfectly ordinary day, disturbed only by the flood of newspaper reporters who had arrived even before the police. Maurice Petiot was thirty-seven, ten years younger than Marcel, and in some ways, it later appeared, a pale copy of his sibling. The two looked similar, but Maurice was taller and thinner, more timid, his face hollow and angular, and he lacked his brother’s dynamic presence and intelligence. In school he had distinguished himself only by an immoderate love of the bicycle, and his subsequent career as a bicycle salesman and radio repairman and dealer included one or two bankruptcies. In recent years, though, he had purchased quantities of furniture, art, and jewelry, reportedly sometimes at several times their value, as well as a number of buildings and properties, both in his own name and in that of his wife and two children. One could partly account for this sudden wealth by his fortuitous acquisition of large stocks of American radios and electronic parts before the Occupation, which he now sold at great profit, particularly to the Germans. But even so, it was hard to believe that this chronic failure, even helped along by luck, was covering his phenomenal expenses with business earnings alone.

  Maurice told Inspector Batut he had not seen or heard from his brother since late February and was utterly astonished and puzzled by what he had heard on the radio and read in the papers about the rue Le Sueur discovery. He was obviously upset. His eyes were red and feverish from lack of sleep, he had not shaved in days, and his hands and shoulders twitched nervously as he spoke in an almost imperceptible voice. Yes, he knew that his brother owned a building in the sixteenth arrondissement, but he had never been there and had learned the exact address only from the stories in that morning’s papers. As for the recent occupant of the bed at the rue des Lombards house, it had certainly not been his brother or sister-in-law in flight, but a friend from nearby Courson-les-Carrières—Albert Neuhausen, a radio distributor and repairman like himself, who often stopped in Auxerre when returning from Paris too late to make his connection home. Batut drove the ten miles to Courson. Neuhausen, he discovered, had slept at home the previous night. It was the first contradiction in a case that soon became a solid mass of them.

  Batut had to return to Paris, but at Massu’s request several local policemen went to stake out the Auxerre train station the next morning. They arrived when the train for Paris was less than a mile from the station, and a policeman recognized Dr. Petiot’s wife, Georgette, waiting on the platform. Both she and Maurice were arrested and held at the Auxerre police station, and Massu himself drove out to bring them back to Paris. Maurice’s wife Monique came to say good-bye, bringing Georgette and Marcel’s fifteen-year-old son Gérard, who had been staying in Auxerre for some weeks past. As Massu’s car drove off, Georgette cried that she had done nothing wrong, and told her son to behave himself, study hard, and obey his aunt until she returned.

  Madame Petiot was taken to Police Judiciaire headquarters on the quai des Orfèvres. At thirty-nine, she was a beautiful woman, but now the simple elegance of her black skirt, white blouse, and astrakhan coat was in stark contrast to the disheveled curls hanging around her exhausted and tear-stained face. She could barely hold up a hand to shield herself from the photographers, and two inspectors almost had to carry her through the door.

  Seated in Massu’s office, Georgette Petiot claimed total ignorance of the whole affair. “I did not know the house on the rue Le Sueur very well,” she told the commissaire.

  I only went there once, and I didn’t like it; it was too large. I don’t even remember the previous owner’s name. I know that he [Dr. Petiot] had some work done there, but I don’t know what kind. My husband has always been a very gentle person, but he never told me anything about his business affairs, something that I complained about frequently.

  Saturday morning [March 11, the day of the discovery] he saw patients at our [rue Caumartin] apartment. We ate lunch at noon. He went out at 3:00 P.M. and returned at 6:00. A patient—a foreigner, I believe—was waiting for him. We had dinner around 7:30. Suddenly, the telephone rang. I heard: “This is the police.” My husband took the receiver and said, “All right, I’m on my way.” He left quickly; I followed him to the stairs and asked where he was going. He did not want to tell me. I waited all night in an armchair. I didn’t know what to think, and wondered if he had been arrested [by the Germans]. On Sunday morning I decided to go to Auxerre to be with my son (who was at school there), and I thought that perhaps my husband had gone there himself. I went to the Gare de Lyon to catch the 7:00 or 8:00 train, but there were no trains that day. I returned to my neighborhood, but did not want to go back to the apartment. I went to church and attended several services, then spent most of the afternoon in the waiting room of the Gare Saint-Lazare.

  That evening I read in the newspapers about the horrible things they accused my husband of doing. I didn’t know where to go; I couldn’t return home, and did not want to go to my family in Paris. I spent the night sitting on the stairs of a building my husband owns at 52 rue de Reuilly. On Monday, I spent most of the day in a restaurant near the Gare de Lyon, on the rue de Bercy, I think. I took the 5:20 train and arrived in Auxerre at about 9:00 in the evening. When I got to the rue du Pont no one was home, but my brother-in-law arrived a few minutes later. He said that he was returning from Joigny,* and that he had been on the same train as I, though we had not seen one another. I can’t tell you anything more.

  Nor could she, for at that moment she fainted.

  An inspector Hernis, one of Batut’s aides, was asked to check Madame Petiot’s story. None of the twenty-one people living at 52 rue de Reuilly had seen her on the night of the twelfth, but this was not particularly surprising. The concierge knew her slightly, and though she had never met the doctor himself, she knew Maurice Petiot very well, since it was he who came to collect the rents every month. Henri-Casimir Alicot, owner of the Hôtel Alicot at 207 bis rue de Bercy, corroborated Madame Petiot’s story in every detail. She had arrived Monday morning around 9:00, dressed in black, carrying a yellow leather suitcase, looking miserable and haggard as though she had not slept. She asked for a room and napped a bit in the afternoon; she told Alicot that she had spent the previous night awake in a staircase. She asked whether he had read the newspapers. He had. She said she could not believe it possible that her husband, so good to her, could have done such monstrous things. Alicot persuaded her to eat a bit of soup, and she left around 4:15 to catch the train for Auxerre. She told him she wanted to see her son once more as she feared she would be arrested.

  Alicot also mentioned to Inspector Hernis that he knew Maurice very well, since the latter had stayed in his hotel from Wednesday to Saturday of almost every week since 1940 during business trips to Par
is. The last time had been around February 19–22, when Maurice arrived with a truck, plus a driver and workman who were delivering something for him somewhere in Paris.

  When Massu later questioned him, Maurice retracted his earlier statement that he knew nothing about the rue Le Sueur building his brother owned. Maurice had been to it several times to supervise some work and on occasion had paid the utility bills. Massu suspected the purpose of Maurice’s February trip was to deliver the quicklime used to decompose the bodies, and he told him so. “If that’s what you think,” Maurice replied, “you will just have to prove it!” Prove it they did. Later that afternoon, Jean Eustache, a trucker from Auxerre who had heard of the case, contacted Massu and told him that he and Robert Massonière had driven Maurice to a quarry thirty miles away at Aisy-sur-Armançon on February 19, 1944, and picked up four hundred kilograms of quicklime, which they delivered to a large private house in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris. Eustache could not recall the exact address, but his description of the coach door and entranceway matched those at 21 rue Le Sueur.

  Faced with this evidence, Maurice admitted the journey, but claimed the sacks had contained coal, not quicklime, and that the coal had not even belonged to him. What had happened, he told Massu, was that Eustache’s truck had broken down while transporting the coal and some furniture to Paris, and, since they were in the sixteenth arrondissement when the mishap occurred, Maurice had offered to let the haulers store the coal in the entrance to his brother’s building on the rue Le Sueur. Eustache admitted that, yes, his truck had, indeed, broken down, but only after delivering the lime—not coal—to its intended destination. Maurice then capitulated altogether, saying he had only lied to protect the young assistant in his radio shop, Robert Maxime, whom he had sworn to secrecy.

  Early in February, Maurice explained, his brother had written him from Paris asking for a quantity of lime to exterminate cockroaches and to whitewash the façade of his building. Maurice had delivered it. Then, on Saturday, March 11, toward 11:00 P.M., he had received a mysterious telephone call informing him that the police had discovered human remains at the rue Le Sueur. As the first newspaper accounts did not appear until Sunday, he had not known what to make of this peculiar anonymous communication. He mentioned it to his employee, Robert Maxime, the next day; Maxime, who knew about the lime since they had discussed places to get it, commented, “It’s true that lime will destroy cockroaches as well as bodies.” Terrified by this suggestion, Maurice could not bring himself to mention it to the police and risk being implicated in the affair. He asked Maxime, too, not to mention it. Maxime confirmed the incident. On the evening of Friday the seventeenth, six days after the discovery, Maurice Petiot was handed over to juge d’instruction Georges Berry, charged with conspiracy to commit murder, and sent to Paris’s Santé prison.

  Earlier that same day, Massu and several inspectors had accompanied Madame Petiot to the rue Caumartin apartment for a brief search. A thousand people mobbed the sidewalk outside, and photographers pressed in as the terrified woman tried to shield her face. As reporters followed them up the stairs shouting questions, she turned to scream: “You are assassins! You’re making fun of my misery! You know that I only went to the Yonne to see my son!”

  In addition to huge quantities of morphine and heroin, the search uncovered three sets of male and female human genitalia preserved in alcohol (anatomical specimens probably stolen from Petiot’s medical school, as it later turned out) and a diabolical wood sculpture done by the doctor himself of a beast—half-animal, half-devil—with an exceptionally large phallus. There were no signs of the quantities of jewelry Judge Olmi had noticed the previous year, and police would later learn that, before leaving the house, Petiot had packed up all the available money and jewelry. In a locked medical cabinet they found quantities of black-market coffee, sugar, and chocolate, which Georgette was permitted to take with her to prison.

  Georgette Petiot fainted again during the search and was taken to the police security ward at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital. Her health seemed so feeble that it was several days before she was officially informed that she was under arrest. For lack of any more concrete evidence, Judge Berry used her inability to verify the origin of a five-carat diamond ring her husband had given her to indict her for accepting stolen goods. It was a strange piece of judicial logic that no one but she cared to protest. She at first failed to understand the charge at all, and for several days the judge could not even persuade her to hire a lawyer. When she was fingerprinted by the Identité Judiciaire, it was found that her fingerprints spiraled in the opposite direction from all the other four million prints on file. It also appeared that a sixth finger had been amputated from both hands. Palmists assured the press that such oddities surely reflected a unique and sinister personality.

  Questioned again the day after his previous interview, Maurice insisted he knew nothing about his brother’s whereabouts. “Perhaps he committed suicide, or joined the Maquis, or left the country.” The police did not find his sarcasm amusing. But Maurice now admitted having gone to the rue Le Sueur three or four times: the previous July to put antimite powder on the furniture in the salon (true—powder was found there); in January, accompanied by an architect, to check for water leaks that were causing troublesome moisture in a house on the rue Duret that backed on 21 rue Le Sueur (there were still leaks at number 21); and in February to deliver the lime. In January he had investigated the entire building and found nothing unusual. Since that part of the rue Le Sueur building contiguous with the house on the rue Duret included the triangular room and the stable containing the pit, Maurice and the architect had toured these rooms together. The manure pit had been covered by two heavy marble slabs, he said, which he did not attempt to move. He had tried to open the double door in the triangular room but decided it was merely decorative; he felt certain there had been no iron rings in the wall at that time. Neither he nor the architect, whom police also questioned, reported noticing anything suspicious or smelling the pestilential odor that would have permeated the building had it contained dozens of rotting bodies. Why, Massu asked Maurice, had he felt obligated to do all these chores in a building belonging to his brother? Because, he replied, Marcel had been in prison at the time: “The Germans suspected my brother of treason.”

  On March 15 Massu had been contacted by the German commissaire Robert Jodkum,* who was willing to furnish details of Petiot’s earlier arrest by the Germans. Jodkum was the interpreter and secretary of, successively, S.S. Hauptsturmführer Theo Dannecker and S.S. Obersturmführer Heinz Röthke, who directed Gestapo subsector IV-B4 on the rue des Saussaies—the Jewish Affairs division responsible for scheduling raids and determining which Jews should be sent to camps or deported; as such, Jodkum attended or conducted interrogations, occasionally participated in arrests, and gathered information. In early 1943, a French informer had told him of an escape organization that obtained false passports and smuggled Jews and downed Allied pilots to Spain and South America. The headquarters of this network were in a barbershop at 25 rue des Mathurins, a street that intersects the rue Caumartin a few hundred feet from number 66. The barber, Raoul Fourrier, and his friend Edmond Pintard were active members of the organization, the informer said, but the leader was a mysterious and elusive figure known only as Dr. Eugène. The Gestapo had arrested Fourrier and Pintard on May 21, 1943. After threatening them and beating Dr. Eugène’s real name out of the barber, Gestapo officers had gone to the rue Caumartin apartment and arrested Dr. Petiot, along with René Nézondet, who happened by to deliver theater tickets for a musical comedy. Nézondet appeared totally innocent and was released two weeks later; Fourrier, Pintard, and Petiot were held in the Fresnes prison for eight months, until January 1944.

  Massu’s vision of the crimes abruptly took on a more horrifying dimension. He envisioned a new murder scenario: posing as the head of an escape organization, Petiot had lured desperate people into his home under some pretense and murdered them. Even the
Germans had been fooled. But Massu was particularly puzzled by one thing: if Petiot had been in a Gestapo prison until January and, as Maurice avowed, visiting his brother at Auxerre for two weeks afterward to recuperate, and if as late as January 1944 there had been no bodies at the rue Le Sueur, as both Maurice and the architect claimed, how had the badly decomposed bodies gotten there? Was it really possible they were hidden there all the time—that the architect simply had not seen them and Maurice had lied? Surely if they were hidden there they would have given off an unmistakable stench. These conspicuous questions, which would never be answered, added themselves to the growing mountain of bizarre, contradictory detail.

  Before he could investigate this new information, Massu’s new theory was confirmed. That afternoon he was visited by a man named Jean Gouedo who, together with a Polish Jew named Joachim Guschinov, owned a fur store at 69 rue Caumartin. In late 1941, Gouedo told Massu, Guschinov was frightened by the increasingly harsh German treatment of Jews and toyed with the idea of leaving France. His physician and neighbor, Dr. Petiot, had told him this would be possible: for F25,000 he could obtain a false Argentinian passport and safe passage to South America. Gouedo had helped Guschinov pack on the eve of his departure. According to Petiot’s instructions, all markings were removed from his clothes and $1,000 in U.S. currency was sewn into the shoulder pads of a suit. Guschinov also took a quantity of silver, gold, and diamonds worth F500,000–F700,000, another F500,000 in cash, and his five finest sable coats.