The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot

by Thomas Maeder

  Stefanaggi did not need to prove that Petiot had killed Piereschi, since he admitted it, but the lawyer leaned heavily on the sterling merits of an unsavory victim to prove that said victim had not been a collaborator.

  Charles Henry was to present the case of Paulette Grippay, but in the heat of his passion he never mentioned her name, nor her case, once during his hour-long plea.

  HENRY I am here today to shed light. No one has understood the Petiot trial—neither the court nor the prosecution. Petiot is even more guilty than you think.

  He retold the whole story despite Leser’s efforts to stop him, and emphasized the role of what he called “the Nazified bestiary haunting the outskirts of the Gestapo.”

  HENRY [Petiot] worked for an anti-French organism operating on the fringe of the Gestapo to defend the interests opposed to this latter entity. Seen in this light, of course, the whole trial becomes perfectly clear.

  Elissalde buried his face in a handkerchief, the audience broke into hysterics, and Leser turned bright red trying not to laugh.

  PETIOT [shouting] I would like to point out that it was not I who hired this man.

  Henry took Floriot to task for apparently enjoying the trial.

  LESER Oh, leave Maître Floriot alone.

  HENRY [in conclusion] I have tried, amid general incomprehension, to explain that which no one, up until now, has explained. I hope that the gentlemen of the jury will condemn Petiot with full understanding. This is much better than to condemn without understanding.

  He sat down.

  LESER What about your client?

  HENRY I have finished. I won’t labor the issue.

  André Dunant could scarcely hope to draw serious attention after Henry’s speech; he briefly stated that Gisèle Rossmy could be reproached with no justifiable cause for her murder.

  The following day the summaries continued. The newspapers complained that most of the lawyers began with “I shall be brief,” “I do not want to repeat what you have already heard,” or “I do not wish to waste the court’s time,” and then charged right off repeating and wasting for hours on end. Bernays spoke for the Wolffs; Petiot stayed awake for an hour, finally dropping his head on his arms when the lawyer said, “You know my reputation for brevity.” Gachkel spoke for the Basches and their relatives, and Léon-Lévy for the Knellers. Almost everyone joined Petiot and Floriot in an afternoon nap. Véron woke them up.

  With lucidity, force, and considerable oratorical skill, Véron went back, point by point, picking apart the defense, showing all the improbabilities, hesitations, and contradictions. He briefly summarized the Dreyfus affair, and proved once again that Petiot knew nothing of the Resistance.

  VÉRON I don’t know whether or not some of Petiot’s victims worked for the Gestapo, but if they did, he never knew it, and their ashes will join those of the dead from Auschwitz and Dachau.

  There is a legend that you all know well: the story of the ship-wreckers. Cruel men placed lanterns on the cliffs to lure ashore ships in distress. The sailors, confident, never suspecting that such evil deceit could exist, sailed onto the reefs and died, and those who had pretended to lead them to safety filled their coffers with the spoils of their foul deeds. Petiot is just that: the false savior, the false refuge. He lured the desperate, the frightened, the hunted, and he killed them by turning their instincts for self-preservation against them.

  The Resistance has a duty to defend its dead, who gave their lives that France and freedom might live. If three hundred fifty thousand of our men and women made the supreme sacrifice, it was not so that a depraved criminal like Petiot could conceal his shame beneath the flag of the Resistance. Your verdict must make it clear that his imposture is not sanctioned by you. You must condemn him to death.

  PETIOT Punk.

  VÉRON Say what you like. I’ll go to your execution.

  It was Pierre Dupin’s task to summarize the prosecution’s case and formally call for the death sentence. Since he still scarcely knew the facts, he was forced to rely on style.

  DUPIN Never in a hundred years, gentlemen of the jury, has such a monster appeared before a court. Petiot has outdone Landru: twenty-seven crimes instead of eleven. You see before you the Bluebeard of our century, a modern Gilles de Rais. It was with horror that I undertook this case. Petiot indiscriminately murdered men, women, and children simply to rob them of their few earthly goods.

  Petiot yawned and began to draw caricatures of Dupin.

  DUPIN Petiot’s perversity is equaled only by his skill as an actor in a self-created role. The man you see before you is the star performer in a fictional drama of the Resistance. It is a play that has grown within his imagination, and which contains not a single shred of real life. It will take me five minutes to show that everything he has said is a web of lies.

  Petiot glanced at the clock and returned to his artwork.

  Dupin spoke for two hours. At 7:00 P.M. Leser asked him to continue the next day and adjourned the court.

  April 4, the sixteenth and last day of the trial, drew by far the largest crowd. Extra chairs were placed around Leser for guests, political figures, and visiting magistrates. The spectators, armed with field binoculars and opera glasses to watch Petiot’s face when he was condemned, burst through the police barriers and stood packed in the aisles and at the back of the courtroom. Several people fainted in the oppressive heat, but there was no room to extricate them, nor even for them to fall down. At one point during Dupin’s summary when the audience proved particularly unruly, Leser asked the guards to remove the disturbing element, but no one would move and the guards felt unequal to the task. During recesses, people crowded around Petiot, who gave autographs and signed copies of Le Hasard vaincu with such blasé satisfaction that it seemed he regarded the trial as a reception organized for his own particular pleasure.

  Dupin spoke for another hour and a half, and finally he reached his conclusion.

  DUPIN No, we will not let Petiot soil the sacred memory of the French Resistance. The imposture is over, Petiot, the hour of judgment rings.

  PETIOT Signed, the Procureur of the Vichy régime.

  DUPIN The role of judge does not suit you.

  PETIOT Nor you.

  Journalists had speculated over the words Dupin would employ in requesting the death penalty. He was notoriously squeamish about using the phrase “sentenced to death,” and generally found some strange and elliptical substitute.

  DUPIN I have often hesitated before demanding the death penalty. Today I have no scruples about it. May Petiot soon go to join his victims.

  The journalists did not think the phrase well chosen.

  PETIOT Thank God that’s over.

  René Floriot stood up at 3:00 P.M. He had drunk his one glass of champagne. For the first time in his career, he would drink a second glass halfway through his plea—a plea that lasted six-and-a-half hours. The courtroom was silent, and no one posed a single question as Floriot thundered on.

  FLORIOT After such a long trial, so many days of interrogations and testimonies, my adversaries have just spent fifteen hours by the clock trying to convince you of Petiot’s guilt. Fifteen hours! The case cannot be very clear or simple.

  Rest assured; I will not plead for fifteen hours—I will spare you that suffering. I will be as brief as possible, but I, I will not spin you a tale. I will not take liberties with facts and dates. I will plead my dossier, and nothing but my dossier; nothing I am about to say is not confirmed by an element of this dossier, and should you doubt me, I can tell you where to find it. When I have finished, I am confident that nothing will remain, amidst an affair which sad events and the malice of men have complicated seemingly beyond all reason, which might permit you to return the guilty verdict Monsieur l’Avocat Général demanded just a moment ago.

  Everything in this case has been falsified. I accuse no one except the horrifying times we have so recently lived through, and which have left their mark on the preparation of this case. Petiot cam
e before you to be fairly judged, but he was preceded by a monstrous reputation; the reputation of a low assassin who killed for plunder, a sadist who enjoyed the spectacle of death. Under the Occupation, the press mentioned that Petiot had been previously arrested, but they could not, of course, say that the charge had been fighting for his country. He had been arrested, period. Imaginations ran wild. The papers went on about bodies burning in a stove. When the Germans were defeated and we discovered the horror of the crematoria, a simple mental association sufficed to turn Petiot into a collaborator, a torturer, a Gestapist. But the case is not so simple, and we have allowed ourselves to fall into one confusion after another.

  Petiot, Floriot said, would never have been accused at all if not for the bodies at the rue Le Sueur. Having found them, the police went back, trying to find identities to match with these unidentified corpses. To show how flimsy their evidence was, Floriot stated there had been a hundred original, tentative victims, but most had been dropped because (1) the real murderer was found, (2) it was learned that the “victim” had been deported, (3) the victims were killed while Petiot was at Fresnes. By a process of elimination, then, anyone the police could not prove Petiot had not killed, they assumed had been killed by Petiot. On the other hand, Floriot continued, almost two years after the Liberation, there remained sixty thousand unsolved missing-persons cases in Paris alone—excluding Jews—and these represented only cases where family or friends remained and were willing to file a report. (No one knew where Floriot found this figure, but in using it he presumably hoped his listeners would see that out of sixty thousand cases, a determined police force could, by pure coincidence, find circumstantial connections between twenty-seven of them and Petiot, or anyone else. It was an ill-advised line of reasoning: one could easily turn it upside down and wonder how many more of these unsolved sixty thousand cases could have been Petiot’s work.)

  FLORIOT Again, one imagines—and I owe this invention to the great talent of my learned colleague, Maître Véron—that one can make the following, very simplistic, rational construction: “Petiot has killed a certain number of people. He admits it. Either he killed them out of patriotism, in which case he is a Resistant, or else he killed them through cupidity, in which case he is a low criminal and a murderer.” There is no other possibility, there is no other hypothesis, there is no third choice. “Thus,” Maître Véron says to himself, “if I prove that Petiot is not a Resistant, I will automatically have proven that he is a murderer, and the jury will condemn him.” He believes that he accomplished this by asking a few questions. Yesterday Monsieur l’Avocat Général, during two hours of summation, spent one hour and forty minutes—I timed it by my watch—calling Petiot a quack doctor, a false Resistant, and showing you his own horror at the rue Le Sueur. He, like Maître Véron, and like all the rest of my colleagues here, based his case on emotion and not on fact. But the facts can speak for themselves, and you shall hear them.

  And Floriot returned to the beginning.

  FLORIOT They have searched in Petiot’s past for everything that can be used against him. But it truly seems that they only looked for the bad and ignored the good. One example: Inspector Poirier told us that the Police Judiciaire had interviewed two thousand of Petiot’s clients. All two thousand had good things to say about him. There was not a single unfavorable report.

  At Villeneuve-sur-Yonne the police questioned his political adversaries and the two doctors whose clienteles he had taken away. They did not speak with the vast majority of the population, which was very much in his favor. The simple fact that, despite it all, a number of people courageously presented themselves here in court only proves the investigation’s bias.

  Floriot recited Petiot’s career, then, in an “unbiased” way. Infantryman in the First World War, seriously wounded, honorably discharged with 100 percent disability; studied medicine, received good grades, established his practice in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. Devoted to his patients and the people, Petiot was elected to public office and reelected several times with crushing majorities. His enthusiasm, energy, and dislike of red tape provoked jealousy, and petty political enmities had cost him his position. He moved to Paris, and again there was the litany of devoted patients: Petiot riding his bicycle ten miles to treat a child for free; Petiot saving an infant’s life; Petiot who almost went broke because he cared so little about money he forgot to bill his patients. Floriot neatly explained away the narcotics charges and the arrangement of the rue Le Sueur. The war came, and the same noble sentiments pushed Petiot into the Resistance. Perhaps his name did not appear on some official list, but that was not a necessary license for fighting to defend France. The evidence proved he hated the Germans. There was irrefutable evidence that he had furnished false medical certificates to help Frenchmen avoid forced labor, that he had obtained false identity papers for English parachutists, that he had saved a woman on the verge of being arrested by the Germans, that he had warned Jews about to be raided, that he had offered to hide people in flight from the Gestapo. There was the testimony of Lhéritier, Courtot and Barré. The contradictory statements about Cumulo, Brossolette, and Fly-Tox were misunderstandings, easily explained.… Floriot’s choice of facts and rhetoric were overwhelming and sowed doubts in the minds of his audience. He came to the victims.

  FLORIOT Petiot is accused of twenty-seven murders. He admits nineteen of them and denies eight. He admits having killed the people sent by Eryane Kahan, the pimps and prostitutes, and Yvan Dreyfus.* If the prosecution can prove that he killed even one of the eight people he denies, then he should be condemned. For the others, the prosecution does not have to prove anything. It is up to Petiot to prove that he killed members of the Gestapo or Gestapo informers. If he fails to prove this for even one case, again, he should be condemned. Let us begin with the cases that he denies: Hotin, Van Bever, Khaït, the Knellers, Guschinov, and Braunberger.

  Floriot quoted Jean Hotin’s testimony: “I was married on June 5, 1941. On June 26 my wife had her period. At the beginning of July she told me she was pregnant.” What nonsense! He showed a photograph of the plaque outside Petiot’s office, which did not give the hours Hotin claimed, and he pointed out that Denise’s identity card was found at Jean’s house eighteen months after her disappearance, although no one would have dreamed of going anywhere during the Occupation without identification papers.

  Floriot similarly disposed of the charges involving Van Bever, Guschinov, and the Knellers. In the dossier he found a number of statements from people who thought they had seen Madame Khaït, but no serious search had been made. Why not? Article 687 stated that Robert Martinetti existed and had been imprisoned. Where was he then?* The prosecution had not really proved many of the disappearances or disproved Petiot’s statements at all.

  Floriot’s presentation was thorough and logical, and if it contained occasional contradictions, the jury did not notice at the time. Typical of his methods was his lengthy attack on the Braunberger charge, the main evidence for which consisted of a hat and a shirt.

  FLORIOT For me there remains the task of proving that these two objects could not possibly have belonged to Dr. Braunberger. I don’t think it will be difficult.

  First of all, a small detail you will find significant. You remember, when I interrogated Commissaire Massu, I asked him, “Tell me how you opened the suitcases.” There is something you should know: forty-six [sic] of these suitcases were packed by the police at Courson, one at the rue Le Sueur, and one at the rue Caumartin, and they were all packed in the absence of Dr. Petiot. I’m not blaming anyone—Petiot was in flight at the time. But when they opened these suitcases again, particularly since they had been closed in the presence of witnesses who were themselves under indictment at the time [that is, the Neuhausens and Georgette Petiot], Petiot should have been asked to be present.

  I can still see the notaries pleasantly saying, every time they opened a suitcase, “The defense can ascertain that the seals are intact.” Of course they were intac
t. It had been opened fifteen times in my absence and closed again fifteen times in my absence. The seals may have been intact, but since they had been affixed there in the absence of both my client and myself, that did not guarantee much of anything.

  Still, let us take the suitcases as they are. Note this fact—one which, I believe, no one has pointed out previously: the shirt was found in a suitcase packed at Courson, and, as you know, the suitcases at Courson had come from the rue Le Sueur. The hat marked P.B. was not found in a suitcase from Courson, but in a suitcase packed at the rue Le Sueur. This is what the police report says, at any rate, but unfortunately it is not true. In fact, the bag with the hat was packed at the rue Caumartin. It is a strange suitcase; whoever packed it threw in anything that came to hand, including a hat marked P.B. Judge for yourselves—one almost has the impression that a special suitcase was made up just for this hat. Other than the hat, it contains a pipe (Dr. Petiot’s pipe), a blotter (his blotter, which was sitting on his desk), a camera (his camera), a flashlight (the sort doctors use to examine a patient’s throat), and a notebook (it is his agenda, containing his medical appointments).

  This is all rather curious. Thus one must say that Dr. Braunberger was killed at the rue Le Sueur; his shirt was in a suitcase from the rue Le Sueur that was sent to Courson. His shirt alone. None of his other clothing was found; no jacket, no vest, no trousers, nothing. All of them had markings which Madame Braunberger would have recognized just as easily. His shirt was found at the rue Le Sueur and his hat at the rue Caumartin!…

  Now, we are told that this shirt bears the initials P.B., but that they have been removed. Ah! gentlemen of the jury, I beg you to examine this shirt carefully during your deliberations. It could have been B.P., it could have been P.F., it could have been F.R.—it could have been just about anything you like, but no one can assert that it was P.B., because you can see nothing at all!

  We looked at this shirt together, Monsieur le Président and I. I will not ask for your testimony, Monsieur le Président, because I know you would not give it. Still, this is a material fact: you can look at this shirt, and you cannot make out the letters that have been removed from it.