Landru's Secret

by Landru's Secret- The Deadly Seductions of France's Lonely Hearts Serial Killer (retail) (epub)

  Landru did not stay long, racing off to meet Mme Heurtot near the Gare Saint-Lazare (10.30 am); Mlle Le Couturier just south of the Gare de l’Est (11.30 am); Mme Leclerc off the Place de la Concorde (2.30 pm); Mme Dupuis by the Hôtel de Ville (3.30 pm); Mme or Mlle Vailly at an unrecorded location (5.30 pm); and finally, Mme or Mlle Labrouve at another unknown address (8.00 pm).

  Spoilt for choice, Landru was preying on a city denuded of young men. In these early months of the war, the hospital trains pulling into Paris’s great terminals and the crippled soldiers begging at street corners were a portent of what became known as France’s “hollow years”. More than a quarter of all French males born between 1891 and 1895 would die during the war, most of them killed at the front. In their wake, swarms of older men, some of them marriage swindlers, closed in on vulnerable single women.

  Landru moved fast, jotting down his impressions of his latest female target in the files he kept on women at a garage he had just rented in the north-west suburb of Clichy. A 36-year-old widow was “vulgar with a grating voice”. A 39-year-old woman had “intolerable sinuses”. A 43-year-old widow was more promising, Landru thought. Her husband had just been killed in the trenches, she had no children, and she confessed that she could not bear the thought of being all alone. “Has money”, Landru scribbled; he would see her again.

  ***

  “Brazil”, Landru wrote in his carnet on 27 May. She was in fact Argentinian, a 46-year-old widow called Thérèse Laborde-Line who lived on her own on a rundown street in south-east Paris. Landru climbed all the way up the stairs to Thérèse’s garret apartment, pausing for breath at the top. “6th floor”, he scrawled, making a mental note not to repeat the experience too often.

  Thérèse had once been a striking young woman, captured in a studio portrait with her long black hair tied up in complicated tresses, a white feather boa draped glamorously around her shoulders. Gradually Thérèse’s veneer of self-confidence had been chipped away, exposing her brittle, needy character. Born in Buenos Aires, Thérèse’s family had emigrated to France when she was still a small child, settling in the foothills of the Pyrenees. She had married a local innkeeper, but they had soon separated and he had died in 1902, leaving her to raise their only son Vincent, the one real love of her life.

  When Vincent, still unmarried, got a job in Paris as a postal clerk, Thérèse decided to follow him. Vincent soon found that sharing a tiny apartment with his difficult mother got on his nerves, especially as she refused to find employment while expecting him to pay the rent. Vincent married in early 1914 and straightaway Thérèse began bossing her daughter-in-law, who soon loathed her. That summer, Vincent was transferred by the post office to the eastern city of Nancy, taking his wife with him and leaving Thérèse in his apartment. From Nancy, Vincent wrote his mother a careful letter, pointing out that if she wanted to stay she would have to get a job, because he could not afford the rent.

  “Bien cher petit”, Thérèse replied: “I must tell you that I am making and continue to make every possible effort not to abuse you; I will not hide from you that since the day you left, I have neglected nothing to find a position.”

  In the spring of 1915 Vincent finally lost patience with Thérèse, who was still unemployed. He gave her three months’ notice to move out, a shock that finally roused her to action. She placed a notice in Le Journal, advertising herself as a lady’s companion, and began checking the lonely hearts adverts. By one or the other route, she came to Landru’s attention.

  Once again, Landru was “Georges Frémyet”, an industrialist from the occupied north with a country villa near Paris. Thérèse soon paid a visit to Vernouillet, returning with a bag of cherries she had picked for her concierge in her fiancé’s garden; for she and “Frémyet” were now engaged to be married. She did not know that another woman, codenamed “Crozatier” by Landru, had just got engaged to him as well.

  ***

  Marie-Angélique Guillin, 52, was a short, plump woman who lived on Rue Crozatier, near the Gare du Lyon. Originally from a village in Normandy, she had married a peasant who had died young, leaving her no money and two little children. Sometime in the 1890s, Marie-Angélique had found a job as a housekeeper for an affluent civil engineer in the town of Melun, 50 kilometres south-east of Paris. She had placed her young daughter in a state orphanage and left the older boy to fend for himself; and then, it appears, she had probably become the engineer’s mistress. When he died in 1913, he had left her 22,000 francs (about 68,000 euros), a substantial sum that she had used to set herself up in a nice apartment in Paris.

  As far as Marie-Angélique was concerned, she had no family ties that needed to bother her. In 1912 her widowed railwayman son had been killed in an accident at the Gare du Lyon, leaving a baby boy whom he had entrusted in his will to a friend rather than Marie-Angélique. “He feared that the boy would be mistreated [by Marie-Angélique], as he had been from an early age,” the friend later explained. Meanwhile, Marie-Angélique’s married daughter now lived in a village north-east of Paris, having never forgiven her mother for abandoning her as a child.

  In sum, Marie-Angélique was neither attractive nor likeable. Landru, alias “Georges Petit”, an entrepreneur from Lille, sized up this uneducated woman in her absurd chestnut wig and decided to test her credulity with an utterly ludicrous tale. He confided that he was not merely a highly successful businessman but a former undercover agent working against the Germans behind enemy lines. In gratitude for his clandestine work, the foreign ministry had just appointed him as France’s next Consul-General to Australia. His ship was due to depart in a matter of weeks.

  There was only one minor hitch, Landru explained to Marie-Angélique. He was a single man and it was clear that as Consul-General he would need a wife with taste and elegance to accompany him to the many banquets and receptions he would be required to attend. Hence his little lonely hearts advert in Le Journal. Would Mme Guillin perhaps consider joining him in Australia?

  At the end of June, Marie-Angélique wrote urgently to the mayor of her home village to obtain her birth and marriage certificates, which she would need in order to marry again. She also commissioned a wedding dress from her favourite couturière in Melun.

  Briefly, Landru switched back to Thérèse, the Argentinian-born widow, intent on not having to climb her wretched staircase too many more times. On 28 June he brought Thérèse down to The Lodge, where she wrote a letter to a former boyfriend in southern France, announcing that she was going to marry an unnamed “monsieur”. Thérèse did not put an address at the top of the letter, which was never sent. No one ever saw her again.

  A fortnight later, Marie-Angélique made her first visit to Vernouillet, where Landru set her another test. He told her there was one locked bedroom that she must never enter. Curiosity got the better of Marie-Angélique, and thinking her fiancé was out of the house, she peered through the keyhole. She was startled to see women’s clothes and shoes scattered everywhere. At this moment, Landru appeared silently by her side.

  “You little rascal!” he exclaimed, apparently on the verge of hitting her in his fury. And then, just as swiftly, he calmed down, explaining wistfully that the clothes and shoes had belonged to his dear, late mother, whose memory was sacred to him.

  In late July, Marie-Angélique’s conscience made her visit her estranged daughter outside Paris to reveal her marriage plans and imminent departure for Australia. At last she was ready to go. On Saturday, 31 July, a warm, hazy day, Marie-Angélique departed early from Rue Crozatier with Landru, carrying only hand luggage and leaving all her furniture and other possessions behind. He had arranged to come back alone in a day or two to clear the apartment.

  During the weekend, Marie-Angélique wrote a letter from The Lodge to her daughter and son-in-law, saying she had arrived at her fiancé’s house, without giving an address. Landru added a postscript, expressing his eagerness to make the couple’s acquaintance and assuring them that Marie-Angélique was “enjo
ying herself in the country”.

  Then she vanished, like Jeanne, André and Thérèse before her.

  ***

  During the summer of 1915, Thérèse’s son Vincent wrote twice to his mother from Nancy to ask for her new address and to check whether she had received a postal order to pay for her move. When Thérèse failed to reply he gave up trying to contact her, deciding his mother was angry with him for forcing her out of his apartment.

  Marie-Angélique’s daughter and son-in-law were also puzzled that they never heard anything more from her, following her brief letter from Vernouillet. In the end, they decided that her ship had probably been torpedoed by the Germans, somewhere between France and Australia.

  Chapter 4

  The Villa Tric

  All that summer, a 55-year-old woman with a little dog was often seen at the Bagneux cemetery in southern Paris, tending a newly dug grave. In recent years, Berthe Héon had endured a succession of tragedies that would have destroyed a less courageous woman. Berthe’s two children by her late husband had died; then her long-term partner had died; then their daughter Marcelle’s fiancé had been killed at the start of the war; and finally, in the spring of 1915, Berthe’s beloved Marcelle had died in childbirth. As Berthe laid flowers on Marcelle’s tomb, all she had left were her memories of Marcelle and her dog Nénette, who kept her company wherever she went.

  Born in Le Havre, Berthe had no money of her own, scraping a living as a bartender and cleaning woman. She could not afford a tombstone for Marcelle, but hoped one day to be able to pay a mason to give her daughter a decent last resting place. As she and Nénette made their way back to Marcelle’s old apartment in central Paris, Berthe could only see one thing clearly: she had to pick herself up, find a man who would look after her, and start her life again.

  When she inspected herself in the mirror, Berthe thought she looked quite presentable for a woman in her mid-fifties. She had dyed blonde hair, a nice buxom figure and despite her grief, was naturally sociable, always ready to have a good gossip. Putting Marcelle temporarily out of her mind, she began to check the lonely hearts columns.

  She soon spotted one in Le Journal that looked just the job. It read:

  Monsieur, 47, having completed his military service, 4,000 francs plus savings, about to establish himself in a pretty, healthy colony, desires to meet with view to marriage, lady of similar age and equally modest situation, if single, who consents to accompany him, very serious proposal, agency and intermediary not involved.

  Landru could scarcely disguise his fury when he got his first look at Berthe, as she opened the door of Marcelle’s apartment one late June or July day. She had obviously lied about her age, claiming to be only 39 in her reply to his advert. He needed to teach her a lesson.

  He was “Georges Petit”, an entrepreneur from Tunis. Soon, he and Berthe were discussing his various North African business ventures and his yearning for a companion to share his colonial home. A marriage proposal was made, eagerly accepted: Berthe knew she had made the right decision, even though she would no longer be able to take care of Marcelle’s grave.

  Berthe had a friend called Mme Dalouin, a housekeeper in the same apartment block, who was taken aback by the speed of Berthe’s engagement, so soon after Marcelle’s death. “I am all on my own and my goodness, I will never find another opportunity like this one,” Berthe explained to Mme Dalouin. Berthe pointed out that her monsieur had an excellent situation in Tunisia and had come to Paris to liquidate the estate of his sister, who had recently died. “She must have been a posh tart,” Berthe thought, for on a visit to the sister’s former house in Vernouillet she had seen stacks of lacy underwear.

  Mme Dalouin met Berthe’s fiancé soon afterwards and did not like what she saw. Landru, alias Petit, was playing man-about-the-house, helping Berthe’s concierge bang some picture nails into a wall in the hallway. Berthe agreed that she and Mme Dalouin would go off to a nearby café where Landru joined them a few minutes later. Something about his manner made Mme Dalouin suspicious. In her view, it just seemed too unlikely that a man of his means and background should want to marry an almost illiterate, working-class woman like Berthe.

  Without telling Berthe, Mme Dalouin went to a public library and looked up “Georges Petit” in a commercial directory for Tunisia. To her relief, a “Georges Petit” really did live at the address that Mme Dalouin had wheedled out of him at the café. She still thought Berthe’s fiancé was a bit fishy but decided it was none of her business if Berthe wanted to take a chance with him.

  By the start of October, Berthe was all set to marry. She had obtained her birth and marriage certificates from Le Havre, while her fiancé had kindly agreed to pay the last quarter’s rent on Marcelle’s apartment. Landru had also paid off the rent on Berthe’s old apartment in the small town of Ermont, 22 kilometres north-west of Paris, where he had enquired with her former landlady about Berthe’s “morality”.

  Next, Landru sold at auction all Berthe and Marcelle’s shabby furniture from their two apartments, realising barely 1,000 francs. Berthe meekly agreed that he should manage this money on her behalf, while she entrusted her dog Nénette to a friend in Ermont, promising to send money for pet food before she sailed for Tunis.

  At this point, an obstacle to their wedding plans arose. Landru probably explained to Berthe that he had mislaid one of his identity documents and was waiting for a replacement. The real reason for the delay was that he had nowhere to take her.

  In early August he had ended his lease on The Lodge at Vernouillet and moved out, storing Jeanne Cuchet’s furniture, clothes and other belongings at a garage in the western Paris suburb of Neuilly. Landru’s neighbours in Vernouillet had become too curious about his activities; one of them had even complained to the local policeman about the smoke that wafted up the street whenever he lit a fire. He needed to find another country house with rather more privacy before he could finish his business with Berthe.

  At the start of October, in cold, misty weather, Berthe left Marcelle’s apartment for the last time, bound for a cheap travellers’ hotel opposite the Gare Saint-Lazare. She stayed there for about a week, and was then transferred by Landru to some cheap rooms he had rented in western Paris. Here, Berthe survived on pocket money he parcelled out from the proceeds of her furniture sale, all noted in his carnet as “loans”. One such “loan” of 40 francs allowed Berthe to buy a new pair of shoes.

  ***

  That autumn Célestine Buisson, the homely, trusting housekeeper, and Anna Collomb, the insurance company typist, separately thought Landru was already in Tunisia on an extended business trip. It was too bad, Célestine remarked stoically. She would just have to hope her fiancé returned from his travels by the New Year, when he had vaguely promised they could wed. Anna was less tolerant of Landru’s long absence. Her watchful concierge at Rue Rodier recalled Anna receiving at least one other gentleman caller during the autumn of 1915 who was certainly not Mme Collomb’s bearded, bowler-hatted monsieur.

  Meanwhile, Landru was house-hunting. He required more money for the kind of country retreat he had in mind, one that was well away from neighbours, preferably with a big garden and outdoor sheds for storage. Fortunately, the recently vanished Marie-Angélique Guillin still had almost 12,000 francs in bank savings, the residue of her inheritance from her former employer in Melun; and Landru had plenty of experience at fooling dozy bank clerks.

  During November, as Berthe waited patiently to start her new married life in Tunisia, Landru went back and forth at the two banks where Marie-Angélique had kept her investments. He posed as her brother-in-law “Georges Petit” (here he flashed a fake identity paper), having been asked by her to withdraw her savings (here he waved a forged letter of authority). As Landru knew, the fraud worked because men routinely looked after their womenfolks’ assets and a male bank official was unlikely to check his credentials, provided he acted with confidence. The obliging manager at one of the banks even insisted on delivering the
cheque for “Georges Petit” once Marie-Angélique’s funds had been cleared.

  Flush with cash, Landru set off in search of his ideal house or “hermitage”, as he liked to think of it. North or east of Paris was out of the question, because the villages directly behind the trenches were infested with busybodies, keen to report any stranger who looked like an enemy agent to the authorities. “The war would go better if there weren’t so many spies,” observed a character in a short story currently being serialised by Le Petit Parisien. “It seems that General Joffre [the French commander-inchief] only has to order an advance at 9.00 in the morning and the Germans know all about it by 10.00.”

  Landru decided to look in the countryside south and west of Paris, near enough to reach in an hour or two but well away from the war. Trawling through the property adverts, he found a house that sounded promising.

  At the start of December, he caught a train to the village of Garancières, 50 kilometres west of Paris, bringing his bicycle with him. From Garancières he cycled a further nine kilometres south-west, a conspicuous figure in his city clothes and black woollen cycling cap as he rode through gently rolling farmland. Approaching the village of Gambais, he saw that the road skirted dense woodland to the east, the outer fringe of a vast, ancient hunting forest. He cycled on, past a row of stables leading up to the gates of a sixteenthcentury chateau, where he swung sharp right into the centre of the village.

  In most respects, Gambais was no different from many other French villages after more than a year of war. It had a mairie, set a little back from the main street, and the usual small shops; it also had a noticeable dearth of able-bodied men. Officially, Gambais had just over 1,000 inhabitants, but the actual population was far lower, since almost all local men in their twenties and thirties had gone off to fight. Even the police had been mobilised, leaving Gambais under the fitful watch of a 70-year-old parttime constable. On the mayor’s orders, this elderly officer was primed to keep an eye out for non-existent German spies rather than the thieves who came down from Paris for easy pickings. The nearest regular gendarme was stationed in the market town of Houdan, seven kilometres away.