by Landru's Secret- The Deadly Seductions of France's Lonely Hearts Serial Killer (retail) (epub)
She did not tell Le Journal about the worst episode of all. At 9.00 am on 23 April 1912, a passer-by stumbled across an old man hanging from a tree branch on the eastern edge of the Bois de Boulogne. He was Landru’s widowed father, Julien Landru, who had killed himself in despair at his son’s criminality; or so Marie-Catherine told the police. Landru missed the funeral, because he was in the middle of a three-year prison sentence for a failed marriage swindle in Lille.
In the autumn of 1912 Landru was released from jail and returned home. He soon got his hands on the substantial legacy of around 12,000 francs that his father had pointedly left to Marie-Catherine and her children, not him.
At this moment, as her narrative approached the outbreak of war, Marie-Catherine broke down. She knew nothing of Landru’s activities after 1914, she sobbed, absolutely nothing:
“The unhappy woman rose tragically to her feet, panting for breath, and cried out: ‘I am going to tell you something horrible. I have suffered too much. My children are in so much pain. It can’t go on, it can’t go on!’
“And the poor haggard creature collapsed on a chair, murmuring: ‘God, will he not have pity?’”
***
Over the next few months, the investigation would establish the following facts:
• July 1914: Marie-Catherine spent a week in Le Havre with Landru, thereby ensuring she could not appear as a witness at his trial in Paris for swindling.
• August 1914 – spring 1915: Landru billeted his family in a village in Normandy and then in the town of Ézy-sur-Eure, west of Paris. They lived for some of this period under a false name.
• Winter 1914–15: Landru summoned his youngest son Charles to Vernouillet to assist with unspecified “gardening work” at The Lodge.
• Spring 1915: The family moved to Paris and then Clichy. Marie-Catherine and all her children apart from Maurice lived for the rest of the war under the false name “Frémyet”.
• October 1915: Maurice Landru, mobilised under his real name, was sentenced by court martial to three years in jail for various swindles and thefts. The police found Maurice in possession of jewellery and valuables that had belonged to Jeanne Cuchet, the seamstress who had vanished with her son André.
• January 1917: Following his early release from jail, Maurice assisted Landru in concocting a cover story to explain the recent disappearance of the typist Anna Collomb. Maurice repaid a small debt Anna owed to a friend who ran a wine shop in Paris. He said he had met Anna by chance with a bearded man at a hotel south of Lyon.
• January 1917: On his father’s instructions, Charles Landru placed a basket of flowers with Anna Collomb’s carte de visite outside her family’s apartment on Boulevard Voltaire. The present was designed to fool Anna’s family into believing that she was in southern France.
• August 1917: Landru’s eldest daughter Marie bid anonymously on his behalf at a property auction in Gambais for a house located deep in the forest near the village. Marie left the auction when the bidding exceeded Landru’s maximum price.
• September 1917: Posing as the widowed housekeeper Célestine Buisson, Marie-Catherine visited Célestine’s bank in central Paris with Landru. She forged Célestine’s signature, allowing Landru to withdraw Célestine’s savings.
• November 1917: Posing as the dress shop assistant Louise Jaume, Marie-Catherine visited another bank in Paris with Landru. In the event, Landru was able to withdraw Louise’s money without Marie-Catherine needing to forge Louise’s signature.
• 1915–19: Posing as Landru’s “apprentice”, Charles Landru assisted his father in removing and storing the furniture and possessions of Jeanne Cuchet, Thérèse Laborde-Line, Marie-Angélique Guillin, Anna Collomb, Louise Jaume, Annette Pascal and Marie-Thérèse Marchadier.
***
Bonin only had some of this information when Marie-Cathérine gave her interview to Le Journal in May 1919. Rather than haul her in again, Bonin chose to let Landru’s wife stew for a while, as he focused on her husband. By the third week of May, Bonin was ready to interrogate Landru. Landru, on the other hand, was not yet ready to be interrogated.
He was off his food, Landru told the prison doctor at the Santé, and generally out of sorts: moody, tired, irritable, that kind of thing. The doctor thought Landru might be depressed. Bonin despatched Dr Paul, a forensic pathologist, to the Santé to offer a second opinion. Paul returned from the prison with the answer Bonin required: in Paul’s view, Landru was mentally fit to face his first formal interrogation by Bonin.
Landru rose early on Tuesday, 27 May, feeling buoyant. He had banished the blues and was looking forward to his appointment after lunch with “Maître Bonin”, he told his guard. The main point was to look smart for the occasion. He chose his best grey suit and black woollen bicycling cap, a large pink handkerchief, and a white cotton chemise in place of his coarse prison shirt. To Landru’s annoyance, his prison escort made him remove his shoelaces to stop him running away.
Landru crumpled as soon as he arrived at the Palais de Justice and saw the photographers gathered in the courtyard, ready to snap him. He covered his face with his handkerchief and shuffled into the building, pursued by a scrum of reporters, all the way up the stairs and along the corridor to Bonin’s door. Navières was waiting for him, but Moro was delayed. Worse for Landru, Bonin deliberately made Landru and Navières sit outside his office for several minutes while the press crowded around the “Bluebeard of Gambais”.
“Landru made himself small, as he submitted to an assault by camera lenses and magnesium smoke,” Le Journal reported. “Soon the magnesium fumes made it almost impossible to breathe in the corridor. Landru began to cough uncontrollably and his eyes filled with tears.”
At last, Bonin summoned Landru and Navières into his cabinet. Bonin began by slowly reading out the eleven suspected murder cases, in order:
At Vernouillet:
Jeanne and André Cuchet (January/February 1915)
Thérèse Laborde-Line (June 1915)
Marie-Angélique Guillin (July 1915)
At Gambais:
Berthe Héon (December 1915)
Anna Collomb (December 1916)
Andrée Babelay (April 1917)
Célestine Buisson (September 1917)
Louise Jaume (November 1917)
Annette Pascal (April 1918)
Marie-Thérèse Marchadier (January 1919).
“What do you have to say in reply?” Bonin asked Landru.
“But nothing, absolutely nothing, monsieur,” Landru answered serenely. “It’s for you to prove the deeds of which I’m accused. I am innocent of all the charges.”
Bonin tried to unsettle Landru by starting with Marie-Thérèse Marchadier, the last of his presumed victims. He asked Landru about his killing of her dogs, his clearance of her apartment, his reason for bringing her to Gambais. Each time, Landru replied “oui” or “non” or refused to answer at all.
Bonin turned to the charred bone debris beneath the pile of leaves in the hangar at the Villa Tric.
“I have not killed anyone,” Landru observed irrelevantly. “What do you want me to say?”
“You won’t give me a proper reply because you can’t.”
“I have nothing to say to that.”
Bonin was in a weaker position on the bone debris than he cared to reveal, because Dr Paul had yet to find any pelvic fragments, the only way to confirm whether the original skeletons had been female. Unhelpfully, Paul calculated that about two-thirds of the debris, measured by weight, was of animal origin.
At this moment, Moro swept into Bonin’s cabinet, apologising profusely to Bonin, Navières and Landru for his late arrival. Moro kept quiet while Bonin asked a couple more questions and then Landru’s star counsel made his first intervention in the case.
The defence had “grave reservations” about Dautel’s search of the Villa Tric on 13 April, before the property had been sealed, Moro declared. Furthermore, as a matter of urgency, the defence requir
ed casts of each individual bone fragment found in the hangar, with a view to allowing “certain experiments”. Bonin and Moro both knew that most of the fragments were far too small to be set in a mould. That was Moro’s point; in the defence’s considered view, the debris was worthless as forensic evidence.
Bonin ended his interrogation before Moro could disrupt it any further with more time-consuming requests. Moro, however, was not finished.
As Landru shuffled away down the corridor in his unlaced shoes, handcuffed to a prison guard, Moro suddenly raised his arm. “Pardon!” he barked at the press: Moro wished to share an important observation with them. He could not reveal what Landru had told Bonin and yet here was something remarkable, Moro said. Normally, a person displayed their emotions by blinking or fluttering their eyelids:
“Now, Landru’s eyelids did not move at all. He looked straight in front of him, his eyes wide open, or if he lowered his head, he did not lower his eyes. This immobility of the eyelids, this insensibilité, is significant.”
Moro would take no questions on the matter; client confidentiality prevented him. He and Navières proceeded down the corridor, leaving the journalists to ponder – as Moro intended – whether Landru was mentally fit for anything other than a lunatic asylum.
***
One reason Bonin did not begin his interrogation of Landru with Jeanne Cuchet, the first fiancée to disappear, was because her case was proving so problematic. It was clear that Jeanne’s brother-in-law Georges Friedman was either lying or ignorant when he claimed she had been “worth” about 100,000 francs. Even Friedman’s wife Philomène declined to corroborate this figure. Instead, Philomène said she knew little about her sister’s finances but supposed that Jeanne must have possessed “une aisance” (literally “an affluence”).
Jeanne’s other brother-in-law, Louis Germain, married to her late husband’s sister, ventured that Jeanne had been worth between 40,000 and 50,000 francs, once all her furniture and linen was included. However, Germain said he could not “certify” this information because Jeanne did not keep him informed about her affairs.
By contrast, two well-placed witnesses confirmed that Jeanne had been almost broke by the time she met Landru. When Jeanne’s husband Martin died in 1909, her friend and probable lover Pierre Capdevieille, a shirtmaker by trade, had found her the job making lingerie fine for a dress shop and had fixed André’s apprenticeship at the “Fashionable House” shirt factory. Capdevielle knew that Martin Cuchet had left Jeanne nothing because he was one of the administrators of Cuchet’s will. Three years later, Capdevieille had liquidated Jeanne’s last investment apart from a few municipal bonds so she could pay the rent on her apartment on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis. Jeanne’s finances had been “far from brilliant”, Capdevieille told the police laconically.
Jeanne’s friend Mme Louise Bazire was able to corroborate Capdevieille’s testimony because her husband had also been an administrator of Martin Cuchet’s will. Mme Bazire remembered how Jeanne had been so poor after Cuchet’s death that she had been forced to borrow 1,000 francs.
In addition, Jeanne’s former employer, the dress shop manager Monsieur Folvary, confirmed on less authority that Jeanne had “very few savings”.
Bonin’s theory that Landru had killed Jeanne once he had stolen her assets collided with another inconvenient fact. In the spring of 1914, when Landru left Paris with Jeanne for the village of La Chaussée, he was loaded with cash. In total, Landru had reaped 35,600 francs from his latest swindle, easily the most successful fraud of his career. On top of this loot, Landru still had most of the 12,000 francs that his father had wanted to leave to Marie-Catherine and her children. He was rich, while Jeanne was poor.
The difficulties got worse for Bonin, because as Landru’s first alleged victim, Jeanne was supposed to serve as the template for all the “identical” murders that followed. Yet in the most literal sense, Jeanne’s case did not add up.
***
All through the summer of 1919, Bonin hammered away at his maddeningly uncooperative suspect, who shuttled back and forth between his cell at the Santé and the Palais de Justice. Moro initially attended these grinding interrogations, “but little by little he realised that our client’s system of defence was invariable,” recalled Navières, who acted as Landru’s minder.
One day in late July, Bonin concealed Jeanne Cuchet’s sister Philomène and Philomène’s husband Georges Friedman in a neighbouring cubicle where they could hear his questioning of Landru. Bonin tried to lure Landru into telling a lie about the Friedmans, which they would then be able to refute, after bursting out of their hiding place like characters in a Feydeau farce.
“I have nothing to reply and I will not reply, because I do not want to reply,” Landru stated, retreating into his customary silence. The Friedmans stayed put in their hidey-hole.
At another session, Bonin tried to terrify Landru into admitting his guilt.
“Landru, if you carry on with such a system of defence you will be sentenced to death and guillotined,” Bonin warned. “Do you hear me – guillotined!”
“Monsieur le juge d’instruction, let us be serious,” Landru said calmly. “You say I will be sentenced to death, but you are also condemned to death, the clerk is condemned to death, the guard who keeps watch on me is condemned to death, Maître Navières is condemned to death, as well as poor old Landru, monsieur le juge.”
Landru’s 25-year-old son Maurice, suave and slim, with a wispy blond moustache, provided further torment for Bonin and the police. Maurice was at ease with the undeniable truth that he had sold some of Jeanne Cuchet’s jewellery in the autumn of 1915. He had had no idea of their origin when his father gave Jeanne’s valuables to him, Maurice said nonchalantly. Indeed, now that he thought about it, he had never heard of Mme Cuchet until his father’s arrest. On balance, Maurice had assumed the jewellery must be some kind of family heirloom, handed down to his father.
Maurice found it harder to explain why, in January 1917, he had paid off Anna Collomb’s small debt to her friend who ran a liquor store, after claiming that he had met Anna by chance in southern France. At first Maurice pretended he could not remember this transaction. His interrogator, Commissioner Tanguy, asked the question again with sufficient verbal or physical force that Maurice suddenly got his memory back.
“He [Landru] gave me a package and a 20 franc note, telling me to take the package to a nearby wine shop which he pointed out to me. He explained that there was a sum to pay for a woman whom I should say I had met in Valence.”
Why had Maurice lied for his father?
Maurice regretted that he could not recall anything more about the incident.
***
By the end of July, Bonin was desperate to get away with his wife and children for his annual summer vacation in Corrèze, the small rural department in southern France where he had been born. This year, Bonin had particular reason to spend time in Corrèze because he was a candidate in the parliamentary elections scheduled for the autumn. Landru would not let him go, blocking all Bonin’s efforts to get to the bottom of l’affaire Cuchet and move on to the other nine missing fiancées.
On 6 August, Bonin accused Landru of stealing Jeanne Cuchet’s identity documents.
“All of that is of no interest to me,” Landru said loftily. “I am innocent, it’s for you to produce the proof of my crimes.”
A week later, a hot, sticky day, Bonin summoned Landru’s wife for further questioning.
“The poor woman acknowledged – it had been her birthday! – that one day her husband had given her some jewellery,” Le Journal reported. “She has since learnt that the jewels belonged to Mme Cuchet. She was unaware of their provenance, she is sorry.”
Bonin dismissed Marie-Catherine and called for Landru, who did not know that his wife had just been interviewed.
“Bonjour, monsieur le juge, you can see I’m quite overwhelmed by this heat,” Landru said cheerily. “It feels like I’ve got a ring of
lead squeezing my head; really, I’m amazed you want to question me in this weather.”
Landru was not in the mood to discuss the Cuchets; he was sorry, but given the weather, he just did not feel like it. Bonin turned to Thérèse Laborde-Line, the next woman on Landru’s list.
“Why did you give her the codename ‘Brésil’?” “I have nothing to say.”
“How did you make her acquaintance?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was it through a lonely hearts advert?”
“It’s possible.”
Bonin picked up Landru’s carnet and flicked through the pages, noting half a dozen occasions in the spring and early summer of 1915 when Landru had visited “Brésil” at her sixth-floor apartment on Rue de Patay.
“She lived much too high up!” Landru exclaimed. “Can you believe what it was like to go up those stairs? Moi, I had a horror of it. Just put down that I went there four times and leave it there,” he instructed Bonin.
Another week passed. Still trapped with Landru in his stifling cabinet, Bonin could bear it no more.
“I’m sick of you!” Bonin yelled at Landru, his voice echoing down the empty corridors of the Palais de Justice. “You constantly interrupt me and when I ask questions you just say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or refuse to answer at all. You’re making a fool of me.”
“Try not to get so cross,” Landru advised Bonin.
***
From all directions, complaints landed on Bonin’s desk about the slow progress of his enquiry.
“Monsieur,” Annette Pascal’s elder sister Louise Fauchet wrote from Toulon, “very astonished to have received nothing about my deposition on the subject of l’affaire Landru, my sister Mme Pascal being one of the victims; would it be indiscreet on my part to ask you for some information about the case and what was the result of my deposition I believe myself to have the right to know for it was me who raised my sister and I was a mother to her.”
Louise’s daughter Marie-Jeanne realised better than her mother that Bonin urgently needed hard evidence of Landru’s murders. Unfortunately, Marie-Jeanne had never visited the Villa Tric, where Annette had disappeared. All Marie-Jeanne could offer, following a request from Bonin, was a detailed inventory of Annette’s possessions:
