by Landru's Secret- The Deadly Seductions of France's Lonely Hearts Serial Killer (retail) (epub)
Landru regularly told Célestine that he could not spend the night with her because of one of his mysterious “work trips”. She had no idea that he was seeing other women. On 27 April, for example, he visited Annette and her niece Marie-Jeanne at Villa Stendhal, splashing out on a bottle of fortified Malaga wine and biscuits for the two of them. He came again the following day and then his visits to Annette abruptly ceased as a fresh distraction came into view.
Towards the end of April, Landru was riding a tram when he spotted a slightly built young woman with a frizz of curly blonde hair. Fernande Segret, 24, lived near the Gare du Nord with her widowed mother, an usher at a vaudeville theatre. Fernande worked by day as an assistant in a fur shop, but described herself as an “artiste lyrique”, a cabaret performer of songs and sketches. In truth, Fernande’s dreams of stardom were almost as far-fetched as Nivelle’s fast-disintegrating plan to smash the Boches with a knockout blow.
Landru made his approach and next day he and Fernande went boating in the Bois de Boulogne. According to Fernande, she and “Lucien Guillet” discussed literature and other subjects of mutual interest as they paddled around an ornamental pond. In between spouting snatches of romantic poetry, Landru measured up this dippy shopgirl. He decided she would make a more agreeable, less needy mistress than the much older Annette, whose inquisitive niece was starting to get on his nerves.
***
“Mon cher ami,” Annette wrote to Landru on 16 May. “The hours, the days seem like interminable months passing by, alone with my thoughts and suffering at your continual absence. Do you believe I have no worries, ah yes, life is very tough for me sometimes and, you see, at the end of this month, I have a bill to pay for 200 francs, and that gives me a lot of trouble.”
Preoccupied with Fernande, Landru dashed off a soothing note.
“How happy I am to know that, despite your absence, I am always in your thoughts,” Annette replied by return of post. “Please believe that it is the same on my side and what happiness there will be for me when you come to look for this lovely little kiss that I so look forward to giving you.”
Landru had no time for Annette’s promised treat. All through the summer of 1917, he was busy entertaining Fernande, Célestine and at least one other guest at the house outside Gambais, which he had privately rechristened “The Hermitage”.
***
Louise Jaume, the devout shop assistant, came down to Gambais for the day, reporting back to her concierge’s daughter that while her fiancé’s country villa was nice enough, his behaviour had been “a little bizarre”. Instead of attending to her, Louise complained, he had spent much of the time sweeping up dead leaves in the back garden to add to the pile in his shed.
Louise was not entirely friendless as Landru drew her into his orbit. At the dress shop where she worked, a short walk from her apartment, three women kept an attentive eye on their highly strung assistant. Louise’s employer, Mme Lhérault, a middle-aged widow, ran the shop with her two grown-up daughters. Louise was keen to get the Lhéraults’ approval for her new fiancé and one day she invited the daughters to join her at her next rendezvous, near the Gare du Nord.
It was a fleeting encounter, but Mme Lhérault’s daughters saw enough of Landru to be a little unsure whether this smarmy gentleman was the right husband for Louise. She had no such doubts, while insisting to “Lucien” that she could not sleep with him till her divorce came through and they were married.
“Enfin, I hope that better times will come for both of us.” Louise wrote to him that summer. “I want to have the strength of character to wait patiently for the happiness I desire.”
***
In July, as Célestine fussed about her wedding dress, her married sister Catherine suffered a miscarriage and fell gravely ill. Célestine and her younger sister Marie swept into action, taking care of Catherine’s young children, whose mobilised father was away at the front. Landru, alias Frémyet, was also kindness itself, bringing fruit and flowers most days to Catherine’s hospital bedside, where he could see for himself that she was dying.
Catherine’s husband wrote in despair to Célestine from the trenches, explaining that he could not get compassionate leave and fretting that he might not be able to afford his wife’s funeral costs. Tactfully, Landru suggested that as a man who understood stocks and bonds he could perhaps check the current market value of Catherine’s investments. Célestine could not thank him enough, whisking him off to Catherine’s apartment. Marie came too, for she had reached a point with Célestine’s questionable fiancé where she wanted to keep an eye on his every move. Landru did not let Marie get anywhere close to him. He insisted that she and Célestine made themselves comfortable in one room while he inspected Catherine’s investment titles in the other. After some time, he reappeared with the news that Catherine’s portfolio was in “less critical” shape than he had feared. Bien, he said briskly, it was time for all of them to get back to the hospital.
When Célestine returned to the apartment to put away the title deeds, she was surprised to discover that one of them seemed to be missing. Perhaps Catherine had cashed it in, Célestine wondered. By now, Catherine was too ill to give a clear answer about anything, so Célestine did not mention the matter. Marie was much more alarmed, increasingly sure that Célestine’s fiancé was some kind of crook. What Marie lacked was any firm proof to show her foolish sister.
Catherine died in late July, releasing Landru from his hospital duties. One sunny Saturday, he and his new love Fernande, the aspiring artiste lyrique, went for a bike ride in the Bois de Boulogne. He hired a changing hut and after Fernande had put on a loose-fitting cycling costume, they rode off to find a nice secluded spot in the trees. Fernande unbuttoned her costume and in her own words, “became his mistress”.
The following weekend they sampled the forest of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, further west of Paris. Afterwards, Landru found time to send identical postcards to Louise and Célestine, each with a cursory greeting. Célestine, accustomed to her fiancé’s “work trips”, was delighted he had even bothered to write. Louise was most unhappy. “I was waiting impatiently for a word from you,” she wrote back tetchily. “A little letter would have given me pleasure, much more than two words on a card.”
In the middle of August, Célestine’s sister Marie was due her annual week’s leave from her housemaid’s job. To her surprise, Célestine’s fiancé invited Marie to join them at his country retreat in Gambais. Marie accepted; it would be a chance to have a good, hard look at this monsieur and decide if he really was a swindler.
***
His setup at Gambais disturbed Marie, beginning with the fact that the house was hardly furnished. She and Célestine had to share a cot bed in one room, beneath a cheap print of the wolf in sheep’s clothing from Aesop’s fable, while Landru, alias Frémyet, slept across the corridor. Looking around the villa, Marie doubted that he had much money, despite his air of being a man of means. This impression was reinforced when he spent several days wallpapering two of the downstairs rooms, both dripping with damp, in order (so he said) to sublet the property.
In between decorating, Landru made two trips to Paris, leaving Marie and Célestine alone at the villa. Marie nosed around, eventually coming to a locked shed at the bottom of the garden. Squinting through the keyhole, she could just make out what looked like bundles or packages, but in the gloom it was impossible to tell what they were. She returned to the house without investigating a pile of dead leaves in the adjoining hangar, an unusual sight in August.
Landru came back from his second trip to Paris with a “gift” of about 50 francs for Célestine, promising to give her more on their wedding day. The money was part of the latest sum that Landru had withdrawn with Célestine’s permission from her bank account in order to manage it better. Hoping to soften up Marie, he gave her a ring from his horde of stolen women’s jewellery.
Marie was not so easily led. As soon as she could have a private word with Célestine, Marie d
emanded to know how much money Célestine had handed over to her fiancé from her original nest egg of about 10,000 francs. Reluctantly, Célestine said that her monsieur had taken about 3,000 francs. Marie was incensed, telling Célestine she was an idiot to trust her money to this man. Célestine was just as furious, refusing to hear any further unkind remarks from her meddling younger sister about “Monsieur Frémyet”.
At the end of the week Landru and his guests took the train to Paris, with Marie and Célestine barely on speaking terms. On their arrival, Landru left for another vague appointment, while the sisters went off to lay flowers on Catherine’s grave. Then Célestine and Marie parted company, glad to see the back of each other.
Next morning, Célestine and Landru caught a train to Houdan, the main station for Gambais, with Célestine travelling on a one-way ticket. On 24 August, Landru made a round trip to Paris to sell some bonds belonging to Célestine for 1,880 francs.
Something now disrupted the smooth progress of his thefts from Célestine. So far, Landru had retained almost all the proceeds from his steady liquidation of Célestine’s portfolio, only permitting her a little pocket money. Perhaps Célestine had finally heeded Marie’s warning, because when Landru returned to the villa, she made him give her 1,000 francs. Furthermore, Célestine demanded that Landru repay her a small debt of 30 francs. Both transactions were carefully recorded by Landru in his carnet.
Landru’s repeated visits to Célestine’s bank in Paris now ceased. Over the next week, he visited the village shops each day to buy enough food and drink for two people: two pork chops, two steaks, and so on. Finally, on 1 September, he reached for his carnet and noted the time, 10.15 am. Shortly after, he set off alone for Paris, as gunfire echoed across the fields and woods around Gambais. It was “le moment de la chasse”, the start of the annual hunting season, when the local farmers blasted away at any wild bird or animal they could eat.
Chapter 7
Sacré Coeur
On Sunday, 30 September 1917, Landru and Louise caught the early train to Houdan in time to celebrate morning mass in the village church across the fields from the villa. Landru popped ten centimes in the collection box and then they walked up the road to the house. Sometime that afternoon Louise felt obliged to tell Landru that she was not prepared to go to bed with him, and would he please take her back to the station. She did not, however, break off their engagement.
***
A few days later a letter arrived at the mairie in Gambais from the typist Anna Collomb’s younger sister Ryno.
It was now nine months since Anna’s disappearance, immediately after her traumatic Christmas lunch with the family at their apartment on Boulevard Voltaire. During this period, Ryno had lost all patience with a series of men who had failed to establish what had happened to Anna. Ryno feared the worst, based on her enquiries so far.
In January, a basket of flowers left outside her parents’ apartment had instantly made Ryno suspicious. The flowers had purportedly been sent by Anna from southern France with her calling card slipped inside. It looked to Ryno like a crude attempt by Anna’s fiancé to deceive the family about her whereabouts, following her failure to come back from her last visit to Gambais.
Ryno’s elderly father, prodded by her, had enlisted one of Anna’s gentlemen friends, known to the family, to make enquiries about her disappearance. This man – who had been shocked by Anna’s dishevelled appearance when he had last seen her – had checked with Anna’s former concierge and passed on the family’s concerns to the police. His duty done, he had given up looking for Anna, as had Ryno’s father. The police had not even registered Anna as a missing person.
Enraged by all this male incompetence, Ryno had launched her own one-woman investigation. She had gone first to the Paris office of the exiled municipal government of occupied Lille. Using all her charm, Ryno had persuaded an official to check whether the Lille authorities had any record of a man called “Georges Frémyet”, Landru’s alias. The official had drawn a blank. He had also confirmed that no one called “Cuchet” had ever claimed a refugee’s allowance, as Landru had pretended to Anna.
Ryno next wrote to the mayor of Gambais, asking if a man called Cuchet or Frémyet lived in the village with a woman matching Anna’s description. She identified Landru’s villa precisely, using the postcard that Anna had sent her from Gambais two years earlier with an ‘X’ above the house. The mayor had failed to reply, so on 1 October Ryno wrote again; still, no one replied.
On 24 October, Ryno wrote a third letter, concealing her fury beneath icily formal prose:
“Monsieur”, she began, “Permit me to confirm that I sent you an earlier letter on the subject of a disappearance and am surprised not to have received any response.”
At last the mayor of Gambais, a 58-year-old local businessman called Alexandre Tirlet, instructed the village schoolmaster François Bournérias to reply. Bournérias explained that unfortunately the mairie had no record of anyone called Frémyet or Cuchet renting a house in the village.
Ryno wrote back on 4 November on behalf of the whole family:
“It is one more surprise for us all to learn that there is no house rented at Gambais under one of the two names that I indicated,” she observed incredulously. Once again, Ryno gave full particulars about the man and the location of the house. She added:
“My sister adored my mother, and for me she was like a second maman, and precisely because of the affection and entente between us, it is inconceivable that she does not wish to see us voluntarily anymore or to write to us.”
On Tirlet’s orders, Bournérias did not reply.
Bournérias had told Ryno an extremely compressed version of the truth, for he and Tirlet knew perfectly well which man and house she had identified. Like many other people in Gambais, they had noticed this bowler-hatted monsieur around the neighbourhood with a series of women, ever since he had first rented the Villa Tric two years ago. The mayor and the schoolmaster had also seen him driving his camionnette through the village and assumed that since he said he was an automobile trader, he had a wartime licence to drive the vehicle.
However, the man called himself Dupont, not Frémyet or Cuchet. As far as the mayor was concerned, that was enough to invalidate Ryno’s enquiry. A man’s private life, after all, was his own business – a point that the monsieur in question would later make repeatedly.
The mayor and the schoolteacher had managed to throw Ryno off the scent. Reluctantly, she now started to suspect that Anna and her imposter fiancé must have eloped after all, who knew where.
***
That autumn, while Ryno got nowhere with the mairie, Landru was struggling to allay the suspicions of Célestine’s younger sister Marie about Célestine’s disappearance. He tried to fool Marie with his postcard trick, sending several from Gambais to the house in Paris where Marie worked as a maid. Each card carried a one-line greeting from “Célestine”, but Marie saw instantly that the handwriting was forged.
Crucially for Landru, Marie did not yet believe that he had killed Célestine. Marie still imagined he was a run-of-the-mill marriage swindler and that Célestine, having ignored Marie’s advice, deserved to suffer the consequences.
What stirred Marie into action was a letter she received in October 1917 from Célestine’s war-wounded son Gaston, now blind and living with an uncle near Biarritz. Gaston needed money to pay for a hospital operation and had written to his mother in Paris for help, but she had not replied. Could Aunt Marie please try to track her down?
Marie wrote to Célestine at her sister’s old apartment near the Porte de Clignancourt, where Landru collected her letter on one of his regular visits to pick up Célestine’s correspondence. Realising the danger, he turned up unannounced at Marie’s employer’s house in central Paris and when she answered the front door, abruptly handed her 250 francs for Gaston’s operation. Landru explained to the sceptical Marie that “Mme Buisson” was “very distracted” because they were about to depart on a
trip to the provinces; this was why she had failed to reply to Gaston or deliver the money herself.
By now, Marie’s friend and fellow maid Laure Bonheure had joined her on the doorstep, curious to get a look at this suspicious caller. After Landru doffed his bowler hat and hurried off down the street, Laure agreed with Marie that he was obviously up to no good.
Landru was still worried about Marie. A fortnight later, he showed up again at the house, ostensibly to enquire on Célestine’s behalf about Gaston. With Laure looking on, Marie asked why Célestine could not write to Gaston herself and indeed, why she had failed to reply to any of Marie’s letters. Landru remarked flippantly that Mme Buisson had become “very lazy” about correspondence since hiring her own secretary.
Landru could see from Marie’s reaction that his answer was not good enough. Somehow he had to deal once and for all with this wretched maid. In late October he came up with a plan. He wrote to Marie with the news that he and Célestine would be spending a few days in Paris at the apartment near Porte de Clignancourt. Would Mlle Lacoste care to join them for dinner? Marie was unaware that the apartment had been empty since Célestine’s last journey to Gambais in August, other than for one overnight stay by Fernande. She did not therefore sense a trap. For several days Marie pondered the invitation and then decided to say no. Enfin, Marie reasoned, it was up to Célestine to make peace directly, rather than use “Frémyet” as her messenger.
A few days later, Landru appeared yet again at the house where Marie worked. Could Mlle Lacoste, after all, be persuaded to join him and Mme Buisson for dinner that evening? No, she could not, Marie replied, as her friend Laure glared at Landru. He returned next morning; surely she would come to dinner tonight?
“I asked him why he was not with my sister,” Marie recalled. “He assured me she was working and could not come.”
Marie had had enough. She told Landru to wait while she collected her coat and then ordered him to take a walk with her round the block. As soon as she was away from the house, Marie handed him the 250 francs that Landru had given her for Gaston’s operation. It was up to Célestine to help Gaston, Marie said. Then she sent Landru on his way, with the parting shot that Célestine knew exactly where to find her if she wanted to get in touch.
