A reward of one hundred thousand francs had been offered for information leading to their capture. Moreover, the bandits would need a steady supply of money as they moved from place to place. Several illegalists appeared to have joined them out of solidarity, including René Valet and André Soudy.18
On Christmas night, Victor and Rirette heard a quiet knock on their door. It was Callemin and Garnier, exhausted, their clothes battered and their shoes covered with dirt. They had been afraid to find lodging with anarchist comrades for fear of compromising them with their presence. “It’s nice in here,” commented Garnier. Victor told him to be quiet, as the two little girls were sleeping. Rirette asked them in. Victor broke the silence with, “So! Here you are back from Dieppe!” Callemin offered a faint smile, and he and Garnier nodded. Callemin spoke while looking at his old friend Victor disapprovingly. They had thought that Bonnot’s idea—to figure out the itinerary of a bank courier carrying lots of money and rob him—would be a relatively easy and lucrative project. Then afterward, they had no idea where to hide, relating simply that, “We went around in Paris.” Garnier added that he had been the one who had shot Caby. Garnier, a man of few words, was “the killer of the team.” (Rirette remembered: “Callemin thought for him. And Callemin thought very badly.”)
Raymond Callemin added that the worst of it was “the crowd… of imbeciles, of ferocious guys.” They had been forced to fire at them as they drove away. Victor inevitably asked them why they had done what they had done. “What’s the use of making little speeches?” Callemin replied aggressively. “We didn’t get anywhere just discussing in public meetings. They are so beautiful, theories!”
Rirette waited for Victor to provide the coup de grâce and ask, “And now, have you somewhat progressed?” He wisely resisted, offering cigarettes instead. Garnier mumbled, “We have to start up again.” Callemin asked for some tea and Garnier a coffee—their insistence in Romainville on the evil of such drinks seemed far in the past. Victor could not resist saying, “You are drinking tea and coffee. I fear that you will make even further concessions!” Victor speculated that Callemin had come to see him “to recapture the memories of his adolescence when, sentimental and melancholic, he went around with me in the streets of Brussels.”
When nearby church bells struck twelve times, the two left, very quietly. Victor and Rirette had not told them that the police had rented a room in the adjacent building to keep the anarchist newspaper offices under surveillance.19
A break in the search for the perpetrators of the audacious holdup and getaway came, now almost predictably, through the mass press. Monsieur Chaperon, who worked as an employee in the town hall of Bobigny and was a “correspondant” of the best-selling Le Petit Parisien, told the paper—but not the police—that he had seen the Delaunay-Belleville automobile in his suburb in a recently opened garage, that of Jean-Georges Dettweiller.
Dettweiller, born in Paris in 1875, had begun his working life as a locksmith on rue de Flandres, until he left for a two-year term of military service beginning in 1894, after which he returned to his job until 1905. He had earned seven to eight francs a day and had the reputation of being a very good employee. Dettweiller moved to Bobigny near the route de Bondy, close to the communal limit with Drancy. Dettweiller still occasionally worked in a factory on rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis. The garage amounted to a hangar still under construction. The property was surrounded by a red brick wall and a wooden barrier. The family occupied only one part of the house with two floors, the rest lodging two other couples20
Dettweiller’s father had been a quarante-huitard (an [eighteen] forty-eighter), a democratic-socialist deported from France following Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état of December 2, 1851. The younger Dettweiller, who had briefly been a wine merchant in Paris, had attended some anarchist individualist causeries populaires.
The police acted quickly. Fearing that an article with this information that had appeared in the Le Petit Parisien would tip off the bandits, they raced to the garage that same day. They found Dettweiller, his spouse, their three boys (aged ten, eight, and five), and a four-year-old girl, the child of Jeanne Bélardi, who sold odds and ends in various markets. Sometimes the Dettweillers also provided lodging to Jeanne Bélardi’s lover, “Raoul Leblanc.”
Dettweiller readily admitted that he had stored the automobile for several days. He explained that “Leblanc” had brought it to the garage with several men Dettweiller did not know. When a search uncovered the burglary tools, Dettweiller and his wife were taken to a central police station. Dettweiller was already known to the police because of his anarchist leanings. Now the police were even more convinced of anarchist involvement in the holdup on rue Ordener.21
The police continued to stake out the garage. When Jeanne Bélardi, the mother of the little girl who was staying with the Dettweillers, arrived, the police took her in for questioning. The Lyon-born woman’s husband, Brutus Bélardi, was in prison in Melun for counterfeiting. Jeanne sold fake jewelry in markets—“You know how difficult life is for a woman alone… battling as best I can in the struggle for life,” with a child four years of age. Under questioning, it became clear that Jeanne Bélardi’s lover Leblanc was really Édouard Carouy. She had met him a month earlier at an anarchist causerie. At first, their relations were simply cordial, and then they became more than that. But Carouy had left her. Jeanne was determined to see him again. Indeed, she and Carouy had stayed together in the Dettweiller’s lodging for several days, before she moved on to a very cheap hotel, and then stayed briefly in the headquarters of L’Anarchie on rue Fessart. Her daughter had remained with the Dettweilers at the garage.22 Dettweiller claimed that when four men had brought the fancy car to his garage on December 14 at about two in the morning, he had been asleep. The man who spoke said his name was Charles Delorme, who returned on the night of December 20. Dettweiller’s accounting book had noted “the fourteenth, received from M. Charles Delorme one car in the garage, with the crank handle to be repaired,” along with an address in Melun. Police found some belongings of the “Leblanc” couple, and a police indictment from 1909 for Jeanne Bélardi’s husband and a letter of the latter from prison in Melun from September 1911.
When the four men returned for the automobile on December 21, Dettweiller continued, he asked for fifteen francs pay for the work he had done. They gave him twenty-five francs. Leblanc was not staying there that night, and he returned only on Christmas Eve. Dettweiller insisted that Leblanc had never told him that his friends were going to bring a car in for repair. He claimed that he never made a connection with the events on rue Ordener.23
Interrogated by the police, Madame Dettweiller related that her husband had told her “they came to bring the automobile of which Monsieur Leblanc had spoken” for some repairs. One day “he seemed to be repairing the crank handle.” Eight days later, someone knocked on the door; when Dettweiller asked who was there, he heard a voice say, “We are here to get the automobile.” Madame Dettweiller saw a light go on and heard the motor, thinking it was odd as it was the middle of the night, but the men had said they were going to a theater to pick someone up. She looked out and saw Dettweiller and three other men. The men drove the car away. They left behind five empty containers of fuel, which were then hidden under a wooden table.
Threatened with jail and having her children put into a facility for the poor, Dettweiller’s wife now admitted that Leblanc—now clearly Carouy—knew the men who had brought the car to her husband’s garage. Dettweiller continued to deny this and remained in jail. A neighbor told the police that her children had climbed into the car to play and that Madame Dettweiller became particularly angry, chasing them away and covering the automobile with a canvas tarp. The neighbor told police she thought this was suspicious, as if someone was trying to hide the car.24
Meanwhile, Jeanne Bélardi claimed that she did not know anything about Carouy’s role in bringing the automobile, refused to provide any information about he
r lover, and was placed in temporary incarceration. She asked Rirette Maîtrejean to find a place for her daughter to live while she was in custody. However, the police soon released Bélardi, believing that watching her would bring leads.25
Louis Jouin, the deputy director of security, was now even more convinced that Carouy had been one of the men in the automobile on rue Ordener. Moreover, from police photos witnesses formally identified Carouy as having been involved in the Société Générale heist. His description was sent to police offices throughout the Paris region: “Very strong, muscular man. Height, 1 meter 66. Face high in color. Dangerous individual, his capture will be difficult, always carries a revolver.” Carouy’s photo was diffused in the mass press on January 1. Now knowing that he had frequented the team of L’Anarchie in Romainville, police closely monitored comings and goings at the newspaper’s office. One difficulty confronting Lépine was that anarchists were obsessed with not providing any information that would compromise a comrade. With the increasing police presence and arrests, some anarchists began to head for the provinces to avoid interrogation.26
In the meantime, in Bobigny, Jean-Baptiste Chaperon, who had told the police about the car in Dettweiller’s garage, received a letter written in red ink: “My good fellow. Don’t think for a minute that you have escaped us. There is nothing you can do. We will find you no matter where.… You will get it (tu sautera).” It was signed “The avenger of the automobile.” Four crosses had been drawn at the bottom of the page.27
Very early on the morning of January 3, 1912, in Thiais, five miles southeast of Paris, a ninety-one-year-old rentier named François Moreau was brutally stabbed to death—thirteen knife wounds—in his house on the rue de l’Église. His seventy-one-year-old maid, the widow Arfeux, was also dead, killed with crushing blows from a hammer and suffocated. A neighbor had become alarmed in the morning when the house remained tightly closed and unlighted. She had gone to find the maid’s son who lived nearby. When no one responded to his knocking on the door, Louis Arfeux had gone to find the commissaire de police in the adjacent town of Choisy-le-Roi. Upon entering the house, the policeman had come across a horrible scene amid overturned chairs and open, rifled dresser drawers. The police surmised that one of the murderers had climbed the wall of the property and opened the door into the courtyard. The men then forced the lock of the front door of the house into the vestibule. On the second floor, they found the battered body of Moreau, his chest bloodied and his head showing the damage of repeated blows to what remained of its right side. In the next room lay the body of Madame Arfeux, “her head buried under pillows,” her hands and feet tied. Securities and twenty thousand francs in gold pieces had been taken.
A witness related to the police that on the afternoon of January 2 two men in Choisy-le-Roi had asked if she knew Monsieur Moreau and if she could tell them the way to Thiais. The rumor in the village was that Moreau had a considerable sum of francs in his house. She heard one of the men say as they walked away, “Too bad it’s broad daylight because we could take care of her and have what she is carrying.” Seeing police photos, she identified Édouard Carouy and Marius Metge, who was known to the police as a suspect in burglaries in Romainville.
Alphonse Bertillon was assigned to the case. The controversial police criminologist became an expert in using physical factors such as hair color, presence or absence of a beard, shape of the nose, scars, and birthmarks to identify criminals. During the anarchist attacks in Paris in the early 1890s, Bertillon’s physical descriptions of the bomber Ravachol had become widely known. Bertillon later came up with the idea of taking photos of suspects, one taken from the front showing the face and the other from the side. Above all, Bertillon became a specialist in the use of fingerprints (a process that had been used in Bengal in 1858 to establish identity, although fingerprints were used as identifiers in China as early as the fifth century). Yet the police criminologist remained marked—and for some even suspect—because of failures in the case of Alfred Dreyfus, when Bertillon had misidentified the Jewish captain as responsible for the infamous bordereau (detailed memorandum).28 Bertillon’s influence was such that his system came to be called “le bertillonnage” or “the Bertillon System.”
Footprints on the scene indicated to Bertillon that at least two men had been involved in the terrible crime. In Thiais, after taking the print of a left thumb from a chest of drawers, Bertillon became absolutely convinced that Édouard Carouy was indeed one of the perpetrators. A left palm print seemed to indicate that Metge had also been there. Moreover, several local people recognized Carouy from photos as having been snooping around Thiais before the murder. Two days later, police identified Carouy and Metge as suspects in the atrocious killings.29
Chapter 10
THE BONNOT GANG AT BAY
For the moment, the police had no reason to suspect that the bank heist and shooting on rue Ordener were related to the violent, atrocious murders in Thiais. A first break in the bank robbery had come almost immediately. On December 23, police reported suspicious comings and goings at the residence of Louis Rimbault in Pavillons-sous-Bois. Rimbault, thirty-two years of age, had served on the municipal council in Livry-sur-Seine in the Seine-et-Marne for several years. After his hardware store failed, he moved with his Belgian wife and two children to Pavillons-sous-Bois, closer to Paris. He became a suspect in several burglaries and for dealing in stolen goods. On January 8, police searched Rimbault’s residence and uncovered some stamps—believed to have been stolen from the post office in Romainville on the night of October 17—along with some anarchist propaganda and a number of revolvers, which Rimbault later claimed he had been asked to repair. Moreover, he had lodged three anarchists, including those with the first names of Raoul and Raymond. He told the police that the men had “even hit his wife in front of her husband when she seemed to take interest in what they were up to or seemed unhappy that they were staying with them.” The police believed that Rimbault may have supplied anarchist burglars with weapons. Rimbault’s father-in-law had bailed him out financially on several occasions but now stood ready to denounce him. Rimbault’s residence had become a rendezvous for criminals. Perhaps he had been present at the attack on rue Ordener?1
Police searched Metge’s room in Garches on January 10, and four days later they arrested him. Barbe Le Clerch disappeared the day of her boyfriend’s arrest. Metge had lodged Carouy, and now was himself a suspect in the Thiais murders, although he denied any involvement. A search of the room turned up items taken in burglaries in Pavillons-sous-Bois, including a birth certificate and a military record booklet and stamps that had been stolen from the post office in Romainville the previous October. Fingerprints taken there corresponded to those of Metge, whom the resident in Pavillons-sous-Bois had suspected from the beginning. On January 20, the police arrested Louis Rimbault in the same place.2
In the meantime, several witnesses agreed that the man who shot Caby had been left-handed and was wearing a long raincoat and a melon-shaped hat that came down over his ears. Another participant was described as short with a dark complexion—“southern- looking,” as people from northern France liked to say—with a trim mustache, and another man was described as a larger man, rather ruddy, and also sporting a mustache, this one more visible than that of his companion.3
On January 13, Raymond Poincaré, a conservative nationalist politician, became president of the Council of Ministers and formed a government, serving as minister of the interior. He made clear that reinforcing internal security against what he called an anarchist crime wave stood at the top of his list. Octave Hamard retired that month as head of Security. His successor would be Xavier Guichard, a professional policeman, who was the son of a Parisian doctor. When Guichard’s career in the police began in 1892, he was a simple inspector whose passion was prehistory. In his métier, the hard-working and disciplined Guichard remained convinced that the wildly popular novels of Arthur Conan Doyle were “amusing” but “had nothing to do with the r
eality” of policing. His job was to put an end to the bandits who were terrorizing Paris.4
In the meantime, Jouin and his colleagues began to consider illegalists as possible suspects in the crimes of rue Ordener and the massacre in Thiais, and they began to explore the possibility that the two events were linked.
A Belgian trail opened up. The past September, Belgian authorities had charted the comings and goings of French and Belgian anarchists who had fled the draft in one or the other of the countries.5 They were suspected of committing burglaries in Belgium and of then finding refuge in Paris. The Belgians were Raymond Callemin, Édouard Carouy, Jean de Boe, and Victor Kibaltchiche. All four were by then known to have lived in Romainville, when L’Anarchie was being published there. Soon the police believed that in the world of anarchist nicknames, “Gros Édouard” and “Raoul” might well be Édouard Carouy and Octave Garnier. On December 24, the former was seen in Bobigny, and police attention began to focus on that poor northern suburb. Garnier’s photo and description appeared in Parisian newspapers.
Before his departure as head of Security, Octave Hamard had gathered photos and information on about twenty people thought to be Carouy’s friends. Among them were two that corresponded to some of the descriptions of the men in the fancy automobile who had held up the courier of Société Générale on rue Ordener: Jules Bonnot, wanted for apparently having killed the Italian named Platano on a road in the Seine-et-Marne, and Octave Garnier, wanted for burglary in Charleroi in March 1911. Moreover, information provided by informers inside or on the margins of anarchist groups also identified Bonnot and Garnier as possible suspects. Police spies reported that a certain “Raymond” had been involved. One challenge for the police would be to find the location of these men, as they moved from place to place, sometimes à la cloche du bois. Jouin at first believed that Garnier and this certain Raymond were the same man, as nicknames were common.6
Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits Page 13
