The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot

by Thomas Maeder

  Massu summoned Guschinov’s wife Renée, who told the rest of the story. On January 2, 1942, she and her husband had dined together; then he gathered his bags and consulted a map of Paris to find the street where he would meet Petiot. Madame Guschinov went with her husband as far as the rue Pergolèse, where he told her that he must continue the journey alone. They kissed and said good-bye, and Madame Guschinov had not seen him since. Massu also consulted a map, and saw that the rue Pergolèse intersects the rue Le Sueur.

  Two months after her husband left, Renée Guschinov had gone to ask Petiot for news of him. The doctor had shown her a brief note in Guschinov’s handwriting, undated, saying that he had traveled via Dakar and had safely reached Buenos Aires. Subsequent letters, one allegedly on the letterhead of the Alvear Palace Hotel in Buenos Aires, said that his new business there was doing well and that she should leave France and come at once. And why hadn’t she gone? Massu asked. The reasons she gave the commissaire were obscure and contradictory (Petiot would later say she had found a lover she preferred to her husband). Joachim’s letters stopped, and she wondered but did nothing. She was a Jew, and Jews did not like to make themselves conspicuous—which was perhaps one reason why she had not reported Joachim’s disappearance to the police even now, after the Petiot affair had broken; she had been unwillingly dragged into it by Gouedo’s report. Massu did not know what to make of her, but her husband’s case seemed clear.

  On March 17 Massu sent his men to pick up René Nézondet, whose name repeatedly came up in the Petiot investigation. Not only had he been arrested by the Germans along with Petiot the previous year, but back in 1942, when Petiot was questioned about the Van Bever and Khaït disappearances, the doctor claimed that Madame Khaït had told him of her wish to leave Paris and that he had given her Nézondet’s address in Lyon, in the free zone. Inspector Gignoux had searched for Nézondet in Lyon, but he had recently been fired from his job at the newspaper Le Figaro for black-market activities and had then moved to Paris. When Gignoux found him there in 1943, Nézondet said that he and a girlfriend had successfully crossed the demarcation line on the Comte de Barbantane’s property and that he might conceivably have mentioned this to Petiot at some point. But no, he had certainly never met Madame Khaït or Van Bever, nor could he understand why Petiot should have given anyone his name or thought he could be of help. When Massu’s men now went to Nézondet’s apartment at 15 rue Pauly in the fourteenth arrondissement, they found a viewer in his front door identical to the one in the wall of the triangular room at 21 rue Le Sueur.

  René-Gustave Nézondet was an amiable, loose-fleshed man just over six foot three. His left eyelid drooped when at rest, and when he spoke he unconsciously compensated by raising that eyebrow—a habit that gave him a startlingly credulous expression. A forty-eight-year-old native of the Yonne, he had known Petiot for more than twenty years. When they first met, Nézondet had been the town clerk at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, but an injury to his right hand forced him to give up this position and he began raising trout and watercress and organizing Sunday-night dances at nearby Fontaine Rouge. After his marriage, his in-laws had insisted he see less of his friend Petiot, who was becoming actively involved in leftist politics in the village. Agreeable by nature, Nézondet bowed to their wishes, and apart from the occasions when Petiot and his wife put in an appearance at the Sunday-evening fêtes, he scarcely saw his former comrade until 1936, the year in which Nézondet’s marriage broke up and he moved to Paris for the first time. Arriving in the capital, he had learned from another old friend from the Yonne, Roland Porchon, that Petiot, too, was living in Paris. Nézondet saw the doctor a few times, and their friendship rapidly resumed. Petiot found Nézondet jobs at a newspaper and as receptionist for a pharmaceutical company. Later, when police questioned Petiot’s concierge about his acquaintances, the only person she could remember seeing at the doctor’s rue Caumartin apartment was Nézondet. Despite their close association, Nézondet pleaded complete ignorance of Petiot’s alleged murders, escape routes, or anything else outside the placid life of a dedicated local doctor. As for the viewers, they had both happened to buy one the same day at a flea market.

  Roland Albert Porchon, Nézondet’s friend, had already voluntarily gone to the police a day or two after the discovery at the rue Le Sueur. An overweight, middle-aged man whose very face inspired suspicion, Porchon was currently running a trucking firm and second-hand-furniture shop—the latest in a long series of semilegitimate ventures. His path had occasionally crossed that of the police, and in exchange for favors or oversights, or simply out of generosity toward close acquaintances, he sometimes supplied information to the police, particularly to Inspector René Bouygues of the Criminal Brigade, a friend for several years. On March 13 or 14 he had telephoned both Bouygues and Commissaire de Police Lucien Doulet saying he had important information to give them about Petiot. But his main reason for calling, police soon learned, was to cover up his own participation in an abortive attempt to send a couple to Petiot’s ostensible escape network. Nothing was simple: the investigators grew accustomed to the fact that each new character who surfaced brought along a host of others—none of whom agreed with anyone else. Porchon brought the Maries.

  In March 1943, a man named René Marie and his wife Marcelle heard, through an obscure chain of friends, that Porchon knew someone who could help them escape from France. According to Porchon, he had sent them to Petiot via Nézondet. According to the Marie couple, however, Nézondet had not been involved—Porchon had sent them directly to Petiot, who told them the escape price was F45,000 per person and that they should sell all their furniture. Porchon offered them F220,000 for their possessions. The Maries were worried and uncertain what to do, and when a friend reported unsavory rumors about Petiot’s professional life, they resolved not to go. Immediately after learning of the rue Le Sueur discovery, Porchon came to the Maries, they reported, and instructed them not to go to the police; he suggested several rationalizations they could give if their names were found at Petiot’s apartment and if the police should come to make inquiries. Porchon had enough problems already without risking implication in a murder case, and he hoped to keep out of it at all costs. He also went to Inspector Bouygues and asked him to cover up his involvement; the police officer initially agreed, believing, he later admitted, that here was a question of an honest escape organization that patriotism demanded he protect. He knew nothing of the Petiot affair at that time. But when he confidentially told an associate at headquarters of Porchon’s visit, Bouygues learned what was now involved and immediately went to Massu.

  When taken before juge d’instruction Berry on March 17, Porchon claimed that he had known of Petiot’s crimes all along. In late June 1942, he confessed, Nézondet had told him everything and had proclaimed that “Petiot is the king of criminals. I never would have thought him capable of such a thing.” Porchon had asked him what he was talking about, and Nézondet told him of “sixteen corpses stretched out” at the rue Le Sueur that he had seen with his own eyes. “They were completely blackened; they were certainly killed by poison or injection.” Why had they been killed, Porchon asked? “I suppose he asked them for money to pass them into the free zone and instead of helping them escape, he killed them.” Nézondet had asked Porchon to remain silent about the murders and had assured him that he would go to the police himself as soon as the war was over.

  Judge Berry was stunned. This was the first time anyone had admitted to knowing anything and, if it was true, the case against Petiot was suddenly blessed with firm support. But as questioning continued, Porchon showed himself to be a more and more unreliable witness. He had told Inspector Bouygues, for example, that he had once seen Petiot dressed in work clothes toiling away at foul deeds in a cellar. Called before the juge d’instruction again, he retracted this story, saying that he had recently undergone a minor foot operation, and that when he spoke to Bouygues he had been hallucinating as a result of the anesthetic.

  Nonethe
less, Porchon had certainly known something long before the police did. Commissaire Doulet, another of Porchon’s many friends on the force, now remembered that the year before, on August 2, 1943, during the period that Petiot was in the Gestapo prison at Fresnes, Porchon had come to his office about some minor police matter and had told the commissaire he was about to go to the Police Judiciaire to discuss a very important case. “According to him,” Doulet said, “it concerned a Parisian doctor who, under the pretext of passing young people out of the country, asked them for sums of money between F50,000 and F75,000 and then did away with them after payment. This doctor supposedly got rid of the bodies by burying them in the courtyard of his building.” Porchon, according to Doulet, claimed to have heard about the murders from the Gestapo, “who did not want to interfere since it was a purely French matter.”

  Doulet encouraged Porchon to report immediately and without fail to the Police Judiciaire. When Doulet later asked if he had done so, Porchon assured him: “Yes, I saw a police officer whom I know well. He didn’t seem to take the matter very seriously, but in the next few days I intend to give him additional information which should interest him.” The officer in question, of course, was Bouygues, who now recalled that, yes, sometime in the summer of 1943 Porchon had briefly mentioned something about someone who sent people “to the other side,” but had also said that this unnamed person was then arrested and imprisoned by the Germans. Porchon had never furnished additional details, nor had he mentioned Petiot’s name until after the rue Le Sueur discovery, and Bouygues had completely forgotten the event until he was reminded of it. Judge Berry was dumbfounded. Witnesses rarely agree completely, but this case was truly incredible. Now, on top of everything else, he was faced with police officers who were told about mass murders and not only didn’t investigate the reports, but soon forgot all about them.

  Hoping someone would crack, Berry had Porchon and Nézondet confront each other in his chambers. Nézondet said Porchon’s story was laughable, and to prove his point he laughed. He had never heard anything so ridiculous in his life! A day or two later, however, the police interrogated Madame Marie Turpault, a friend of Nézondet’s mistress Aimée Lesage, whom the couple had once sent to Petiot for rheumatism treatments. In December 1943, Madame Turpault said, she had been at Nézondet’s apartment and had asked about Petiot. “He’s a real bastard,” Nézondet had told her. “He’s in prison right now, and he should stay there.” Nézondet further said, according to Madame Turpault, that he had met Petiot’s brother Maurice, who had found bodies in a pit at the doctor’s house and a book with a list of sixty names. Maurice had asked Nézondet to help him dispose of the evidence and hush up the matter; Nézondet claimed he had refused to do this and had threatened to go to the police at the end of the war.

  Nézondet was now confronted with Madame Turpault, and he said that she, too, was inventing fabulous stories, even though much of her tale closely resembled Porchon’s testimony. Madame Turpault stubbornly stuck to her earlier statement, and added that Maurice Petiot had asked Nézondet to help him build a wall to conceal the cadavers. On March 22, Nézondet, unable to hold out any longer, announced that Porchon and Turpault were telling the truth and that he would now tell the whole story. His version, which Judge Berry’s clerk copied down and added to the rest, was as follows.

  In November or December 1943, while Petiot was still in prison at Fresnes, Nézondet met Maurice at the Hôtel Alicot, the same hotel where Georgette later stopped while in flight to Auxerre. Maurice was pale and trembling. He told Nézondet: “I have just come from my brother’s house. There’s enough there to have us all shot.”

  “Enough what?” Nézondet asked. “An arms cache? A secret transmitter?”

  “I wish that’s all it was,” Maurice replied. “The journeys to South America begin and end at the rue Le Sueur. There are bodies piled in a pit, with their hair and eyebrows shaved off. I found a book where he [Marcel] wrote down the names of his victims; there must have been fifty or sixty of them.” Maurice described to Nézondet the method of killing. A syringe filled with poison was somehow arranged so that it could be operated from a distance, though Nézondet did not recall the formula of the poison Maurice allegedly described, and his own descriptions of the syringe, which in some of his varying statements he claimed Maurice said had been mounted in the false doorbell in the triangular room, were incomprehensible. No mounting of any kind was found in the doorbell. Nézondet added that Maurice had also mentioned finding large quantities of clothing at the rue Le Sueur, both civilian apparel of all kinds and German army uniforms. Maurice had packed everything into crates and taken the stuff away in a five-ton truck.

  A few weeks after Maurice recounted this horror story, Nézondet continued, Georgette Petiot and her son Gérard came to Nézondet’s apartment for dinner. Sometime during the evening she mentioned that the accusations the Germans leveled against her husband were really not very serious, and she expected his release shortly. Nézondet drew her away from Gérard. Without mentioning Maurice’s name, he informed her of the bodies at the rue Le Sueur. She fainted three times and threatened to commit suicide. Nézondet, with a peculiar notion of assuagement and tact, advised her to get a divorce and find a lover. When Georgette pulled herself together she went to Maurice, who was in Paris on business, and recounted Nézondet’s incredible story. Nézondet was summoned by them the next day to explain himself. Maurice now feigned ignorance of the whole matter, according to Nézondet, and so he remained silent. He assumed Maurice’s attitude must mean he wished to protect his sister-in-law from knowledge that might endanger her sanity. When Judge Berry questioned Aimée Lesage, who had been present at the dinner, she supported everything her lover had said about the evening’s events. She suspected Madame Petiot had contrived her fainting spells and was really neither so surprised nor horrified as she seemed.

  Georgette Petiot told Judge Berry that this 1943 incident really had happened, but that when Nézondet refused to repeat his extraordinary claims in front of Maurice she had concluded that he was lying. When he had suggested she take a lover she thought he was offering himself for the role, and she surmised that his slanders against her husband were only a weird means of attaining this end by forcing her into a divorce.

  Nézondet also now told Judge Berry that he had gone to the police about Petiot. Inspector Gignoux had questioned him about Madame Khaït in July 1943. At that time Nézondet had simply said that Petiot was in prison, without mentioning anything about Maurice’s alleged confidences. When the Germans released Petiot in January 1944, Nézondet said he had been extremely worried and uncertain. He knew that Petiot had killed, but since Maurice had told him about German army uniforms at the rue Le Sueur, and since the Germans had released Petiot, he wildly theorized that his friend was killing German deserters with the approval of the Gestapo. But he wasn’t sure. Nézondet had gone to the Police Judiciaire and told Inspector Gignoux that Petiot was now free, vaguely hoping that the police would keep an eye on him. According to Nézondet, Gignoux told him: “The Petiot affair is over; besides, we can’t follow him.” And another inspector in the room muttered to himself, “I wouldn’t be surprised if there were thirty or forty victims in this case.” All of this led Nézondet to believe the police were completely aware of what was going on. Gignoux and the other inspector denied having said any such thing and said that though Nézondet had come to tell them of Petiot’s release, they had not understood the point of his visit. Curiously, immediately after telling the Police Judiciaire about Petiot, Nézondet, by his own admission, told Petiot that he had spoken to the authorities—perhaps thinking that the doctor would not dare harm him with the police in the picture. Since, as he told inspectors, he feared for his life, he and Aimée Lesage had insisted on meeting Petiot and his brother in a public café.

  The investigators found Nézondet impossible to figure out. Maurice Petiot naturally denied the whole extraordinary tale, and the entire Petiot family called Nézondet a b
uffoon and a lunatic. “He was very upset when the Germans arrested him,” Maurice explained gently, “and his mind has never completely recovered from the shock. Nézondet always used to keep me well entertained because he told a lot of amusing stories. This time I don’t think he’s very funny.” Maurice’s wife Monique recounted to police and reporters that when Nézondet lived in Lyon, he had reportedly discovered the location of a buried treasure by dowsing with a pendulum. He had bought the field under which the treasure lay, only to have his pendulum change its mind and indicate that the treasure was in an adjacent field. Rather than purchase that field, he began digging a tunnel underneath. Nézondet did not deny this story; he dryly commented: “So? That doesn’t prove that I’m a buffoon.”

  For a week, the investigation remained at an impasse. Though the police could never prove that Maurice had truly told him of the bodies at the rue Le Sueur, Nézondet was charged with non-denunciation of a crime—an offense instituted by the Germans in October 1941 to discourage the French from concealing Resistance activity. Technically the law concerned only those who were witnesses to a crime or who learned of projected crimes, and Nézondet’s lawyer argued that his client fell into neither of these categories. Nonetheless, Nézondet was to spend fourteen months in the Santé prison. The court was using any possible pretext to keep everyone connected with Petiot in custody until the maze of complicity could be untangled. Besides, Commissaire Massu assured Aimée Lesage, her lover was really much safer imprisoned by the French than at the mercy of the Germans.

  * After Batut’s visit, Maurice had gone to Joigny hoping to arrange for his nephew Gérard to be transferred to a school there—so that the youth would be more isolated from the trauma of the investigation. For whatever reason, this plan came to nothing and Gérard remained in Auxerre.