The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot

by Thomas Maeder

  Aside from the mention of the doctor’s house in the first letter, there was little tangible link between Braunberger and Petiot, and even less imaginable motive. After the discovery of the suitcases at Courson-les-Carrières, newspapers published relatively complete inventories of the clothes found there and in Paris. Among the items were a size-40 men’s shirt, blue with white stripes, made by David, 32 avenue de l’Opéra, and a man’s hat with the initials P.B. made by A. Berteil on the rue du Quatre-Septembre. Madame Braunberger asked to see these items and positively identified them as articles her husband had worn on the day of his disappearance. They would play a significant role in the trial.

  On August 13, 1945, the French minister of justice received a letter from the American Joint Distribution Committee in New York; a Jewish refugee living in Bolivia had asked the committee to look into the whereabouts of members of his family in Paris—Kurt, Margeret, and René Kneller. The committee had written to the Knellers’ landlady at 4 avenue du Général-Balfourier, but she was no longer there. Police found another inhabitant of the building, Christiane Roart, who was also René Kneller’s godmother. She told them that the unfortunate family had departed with Dr. Petiot, ostensibly to flee the country. For some reason she had never reported this to the police, though she must have suspected her friends’ fate after she recognized a photo of their doctor in the newspapers.

  Kurt Kneller was a Jew born at Breslau in 1897 who emigrated from Germany to France on June 10, 1933. In France, he worked successively as codirector of the Cristal radio-and-home-appliance distribution firm and as technical consultant to a battery manufacturer. On December 6, 1934, he married Margeret (Greta) Lent, thirty-three, originally from Berlin, and their son René was born at Issy-les-Moulineaux on May 8 of the following year. Kneller requested French citizenship in 1937 and served honorably in the French Foreign Legion from September 1939 until the disarmament a year later. Police checked Kurt Kneller’s record thoroughly. His loyalty to France seemed impeccable and the closest he had ever come to illegal activities was once when he had overdrawn his bank account.

  Since June 1941 Jews had been circumscribed from most professional posts and forbidden access to theaters, restaurants, swimming pools, cafés, racetracks, public parks, and libraries, and they were not usually permitted to own a telephone. On July 8, 1942, they were forbidden entry to department stores and most other wholesale and retail shops except between 3:00 and 4:00 P.M.—hours when most businesses were closed. Mass raids had already begun, though the Germans, hoping to arouse French antagonism as little as possible, started with immigrants rather than native French Jews and began publicity campaigns presenting them as aliens who stole food and jobs from the French. These people were stripped of their citizenship and deported as parasites on the national economy.

  On Thursday, July 16, 1942, German officers came to the Knellers’ apartment. Greta was visiting Mademoiselle Roart upstairs, and upon glancing down the stairwell to see who was at her door, she realized the family was in danger. When her husband returned home they left seven-year-old René with Mademoiselle Roart and went to stay with Clara Noé, a friend who lived around the corner on the rue Erlanger. The next day Kurt told Christiane Roart that his doctor was going to help them escape the country. He asked her to prepare their suitcases, which someone would fetch later that day, and to keep René until Saturday, then bring him to Madame Noé’s apartment. That afternoon, a doctor whose name Mademoiselle Roart did not know but whom she later identified from mug shots as Dr. Petiot, came to her building with a handcart and an elderly man to help him. He played with René while they spoke for a few minutes, then left with two large and four small suitcases containing the most important of the Knellers’ possessions. He wanted to remove all of the furniture as well, but the landlady would not permit him to do this.

  At 6:00 P.M. on Saturday, July 18, Mademoiselle Roart took René to the rue Erlanger; the same evening the doctor came for Kurt Kneller, who was to be followed the next day by his wife and son. The doctor asked Clara Noé to walk some distance behind them as far as the Etoile to make sure they were not shadowed. She accompanied them only about halfway and, seeing nothing suspicious, hurried home. The next morning Madame Noé was out buying milk for René’s breakfast when the doctor returned for the mother and son; by the time she returned home they were gone. Clara Noé was pleased to have the Knellers out of Paris; she learned that the Gestapo visit to the Knellers’ apartment had been part of a massive two-day raid in which 12,884 Jews had been arrested and herded into the Vélodrome d’Hiver, where they spent three or four days cramped in the grandstands without food before being shuttled to the camp at Drancy and loaded into freight cars bound for the east. Of the total 150,000 native and foreign Jews deported from France during the war, only 3,000 adults and 5 or 6 children returned.

  In the weeks that followed the Knellers’ departure, Mademoiselle Roart, Madame Noé, and another friend of the Knellers’ received postcards from Greta. She said they had safely passed the line, though her husband was sick and had almost lost his mind. The grammar was strange and the words uncharacteristic. The cards were signed “Marguerite,” whereas Madame Kneller had never changed to the French form and still spelled her name “Margeret,” and the handwriting was fine and spindly—not at all like Greta Kneller’s, said Madame Noé, but very similar to newspaper photographs she later saw of Dr. Petiot’s prescriptions. Mademoiselle Roart said Kurt Kneller had shirts with his initials on them—similar to those found at the rue Le Sueur with the letters K.K. removed, and she positively identified a pair of child’s pajamas found in Petiot’s building as those worn by René on the last night he spent at her home.

  The Knellers vanished on July 18 and 19. Three weeks later, on August 8, 1942, in the Seine near Asnières, barge men discovered the head, legs, feet, vertically sectioned thorax, upper arm, and pelvis of a seven- or eight-year-old male child, along with the head, femurs, pelvis, and arms of a middle-aged woman. A man’s head was found some distance away three days later. All three victims had been dead for several weeks and their remains were putrified beyond all possibility of further identification.

  PART TWO

  7

  MARCEL PETIOT: THE DOSSIER

  Who was Dr. Marcel Petiot, the “Vampire of the rue Le Sueur,” “the new Bluebeard,” “the second Landru,” or, more simply, “the monster”? The French judicial system, unlike many others in the West, holds that the life history and previous record of an accused criminal provide an essential context within which to evaluate the case at hand. The presiding magistrate at a trial opens by presenting a brief biographical sketch of the accused, and the jury’s opinion of the evidence is weighted by this knowledge. Within days of the discovery in the rue Le Sueur, the court assigned detectives to piece together Marcel Petiot’s life story. They interviewed thousands of former patients and hundreds of old neighbors from the various towns where he had lived. Inspectors sifted through school, military, and professional records, court files and old newspaper accounts, and dutifully followed up all rumors and clues no matter how unlikely or bizarre. Rarely has a man been honored with such a professional team of biographers, and rarely has the picture of him that emerged been so grim.

  Marcel André Henri Félix Petiot was born at 3:00 A.M. on January 17, 1897, the son of Félix Iréné Mustiole Petiot, a post and telegraph employee, age thirty, and his wife Marthe Marie Constance Joséphine Bourdon, age twenty-two. They lived at 100 rue de Paris in Auxerre, an ancient town of about thirty thousand inhabitants located one hundred miles south of Paris in the rural Burgundian department of the Yonne.

  The Auxerrois have a wealth of extravagant stories about Petiot’s youth, some of them true, some doubtless invented as suitable for a future killer. People assured inspectors that he developed a cruel streak at an early age. One day when he was five, while he was sitting on the kitchen floor snipping his nursemaid’s tape measure into individual centimeters and storing the numbers in a matchb
ox, the neighbors’ gray kitten strayed in. He grew fond of the cat and threw fits and almost crushed it in his embrace if anyone tried to take it from him. But despite his affection, one day the nursemaid found Marcel standing beside a tub of boiling water she had prepared for her laundry; he was dipping the kitten’s hind paws in the water and beaming rapturously as it howled with pain. That night the maid let him take the cat to bed; she thought that Marcel was upset by his behavior and felt remorse. The next morning she found his hands and face covered with scratches, and the kitten was dead, suffocated in his bed. A favorite pastime of the same period was to steal young birds from their nests, poke their eyes out with a needle, and delightedly watch them hurl themselves against the bars of a cage.

  His schoolmasters agreed that Marcel was extraordinarily intelligent, but strange, solitary, incorrigible, and unable to show sustained interest in his work. At age five, he could read like a child of ten. His precocity showed in other ways, as when he was caught passing obscene pictures around the classroom or making indecent proposals to a male schoolmate. At eleven, he interrupted a history class on African civilization by firing a shot into the ceiling with a revolver stolen from his father, and he spent one recess period standing a classmate against a door and throwing knives into the frame around him, with astonishing accuracy. His parents once consulted a doctor about his eccentricity and such physiological or mental abnormalities as convulsions, somnambulism, and a tendency to wet his bed and trousers between ages ten and twelve, but the medical man could only tell them that time and hope might cure what he could not.*

  Petiot’s mother died in 1912, when he was fifteen and his brother Maurice was five. The father accepted a job at the post office in the village of Joigny, some fifteen miles away, and his two sons stayed with their aunt Henriette Bourdon in Auxerre. Before the end of the year Marcel was thrown out of school for disciplinary reasons. He went to stay with his father at Joigny, and was thrown out of school there, too. Returning to Auxerre, he was once again thrown out of school, this time for more than mere unruly behavior and “over-excitation.” Using a stick with glue on the end, Marcel, now seventeen, had stolen mail from a postbox—possibly to cash money orders, perhaps out of mere curiosity, conceivably, as was once suggested, to blackmail townsfolk who wrote of their indiscretions. He was eventually caught, and in February 1914 was charged with damaging public property and mail theft.

  French courts at that time, even as now, commonly recommended psychiatric examination of accused lawbreakers, particularly when there were any unusual circumstances, such as, in this case, the youth of the offender. On March 26, 1914, a court-appointed psychiatrist found Marcel to be “an abnormal youth suffering from personal and hereditary problems which limit to a large degree his responsibility for his acts”; another physician concurred on May 6, adding that the only cure for what ailed Marcel would be one mainly oriented toward his “adaptation to discipline and social life.” Following these diagnoses, and abetted, perhaps, by his father’s intervention with the postal authorities, charges against Marcel were dropped on August 14 because, according to the court judgment, “the accused appears to be mentally ill.” Félix Petiot was so upset by Marcel’s repeated delinquencies and unrepentant nature that he wanted nothing further to do with his son. Petiot was sent to Dijon to complete his schooling; he finished only the first part of his baccalauréat examination before unspecified problems forced him to return to Auxerre, where he was once again expelled from school. Finally he received his degree from a special school in Paris on July 10, 1915.

  Petiot was inducted into the Eighty-ninth Infantry Regiment in January 1916 and was sent to the front in November. He served with neither distinction nor dishonor until May 20, 1917, when, in bitter fighting in the Aisne, hand-grenade shrapnel ripped open his left foot. He was evacuated to a military clinic in the Orléans insane asylum for treatment of this injury and of a bronchial condition brought on by a poison-gas attack. His wound healed well, but he began to exhibit symptoms of mental disorder and was sent to a series of rest homes and clinics to convalesce. He returned briefly to his regiment, then was almost immediately sent back to a clinic. There he was involved in an obscure incident involving stolen blankets and was placed in the military prison at Orléans. Renewed indications of mental unbalance caused his transfer to the psychiatric unit at Fleury-les-Aubrais, in the same region, where a doctor diagnosed him as suffering from “mental disequilibrium, neurasthenia, mental depression, melancholia, obsessions and phobias,” and concluded that Marcel could not be held legally responsible for his acts.

  After a month of treatment and another month’s convalescent leave, Petiot was returned to the front in June 1918. He had a nervous breakdown, fired a revolver at his foot, and was transferred to a depot behind the lines. In July he went into convulsions at the Dijon train station; he spent the afternoon unconscious in the railroad infirmary and was granted another three-week leave. In September, he joined the Ninety-first Infantry Regiment at Charleville as a machine gunner, but was unable to accept discipline, complained of incessant headaches, and claimed to be in constant dread of another fit. In March 1919 he spent two weeks at the psychiatric division of the Rennes military hospital, where the medical director found him the victim of neurasthenia, amnesia, mental unbalance, sleepwalking, severe depression, paranoia, and suicidal tendencies. He recommended his discharge from the army.

  This recommendation was examined by the Commission de Réforme, which governs discharges and pensions. They approved, and on July 4, 1919, Petiot was released from the army with a 40 percent disability pension. The case was reviewed in September 1920 and his disability rating increased to 100 percent; the examining psychiatrist, concluding that Petiot was suffering from severe depression, suicidal tendencies, hyper-emotivity, and utter inability to perform any physical or intellectual work, recommended that the patient might be best off placed under continuous surveillance in a psychiatric hospital.

  Petiot was examined again in March 1922, and immediately afterward he wrote to the Commission de Réforme that he “purely and simply refused to accept any disability pension at all so as to avoid being subjected again to what I find a more than disagreeable bit of exhibitionism.” Nonetheless, he continued to receive a pension for years and underwent the disagreeable examination again in July 1923. Both of these last two reviews upheld the earlier conclusions, with the added notations that Petiot showed complete indifference about his future and had bite scars on his tongue from bimonthly epileptic seizures. Curiously, his pension was now reduced to 50 percent disability.

  When in 1920 the commission psychiatrist found Petiot incapable of any work and suggested his placement in a mental hospital, Petiot was indeed already at a mental hospital, in the town of Evreux, sixty miles west of Paris in the Eure. He was not there as a patient, however, but as a medical student serving his internship and preparing a thesis on an incurable, progressive nerve degeneration called Landry’s paralysis. (Some newspapers later misunderstood their informants and wrote that Petiot had written his thesis on the mass murderer Landru.) Truncated and accelerated medical programs designed for former soldiers enabled him to complete his schooling in eight months and his internship in two years; the police in 1944, unable to piece together a full set of records, suspected Petiot had accelerated his program even further through unscrupulous means. In any event, he received his degree from the Faculté de Médecine de Paris on December 15, 1921.

  Petiot was proud of his new position, though his friend Nézondet believed that he wanted it only for the power it conferred: the power of healing, the power over life and death, the prestige, the control over people who gave him their trust and confided their secrets. Félix Petiot was proud, too, and wrote to the son he had banished in disgrace years before. Marcel went to see him. He listened to his father’s apologies and praise, he dined with him, and when dinner was over and Félix prepared to sit down to a long talk, Marcel rudely announced that he was expected elsewhere and
walked out of the house.

  * It is interesting to note that an early psychiatric description of the psychopathic personality listed four childhood symptoms characteristic of that disorder: somnambulism, enuresis, cruelty to animals (particularly decapitation), and arson. Petiot was never accused of arson—at least not as a child—but otherwise his record was perfect.

  8

  DR. PETIOT AND MR. MAYOR

  Armed with his Paris medical degree, Petiot moved to the town of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, an old historical village on the banks of the Yonne River built in 1165 as a royal residence for King Louis VII. Villeneuve was only twenty-five miles from Petiot’s native Auxerre, and with a population of forty-two hundred served only by two aging physicians, it appeared the ideal spot for an ambitious young doctor of twenty-five to set up practice. He rented a small house on the rue Carnot with three rooms and a garden, and spent several weeks distributing tracts he had printed up that announced his arrival: “Dr. Petiot is young, and only a young doctor can keep up to date on the latest methods born of a progress which marches with giant strides. This is why intelligent patients have confidence in him. Dr. Petiot treats, but does not exploit his patients.” At first this boastful flier attracted only those patients already dissatisfied with the other two doctors, as well as hypochondriacs always eager for new treatments and a virgin ear, but Petiot quickly began to lure away even the more devoted patients. He was a gentleman to the ladies, paternal to the children, and a sympathetic listener to the men. While maintaining his exalted position, he nonetheless made the people of the village feel he was just one of them.