Landru's Secret
Page 29
Why, then, their sudden move to Vernouillet at the start of December 1914; so rapid, that “everything was rushed through”, according to Jeanne? Mme Oudry, the Vernouillet estate agent, may have provided another clue. Mme Oudry recalled that Landru told her he could not sign the rental contract for The Lodge after his first inspection of the property, because his “wife” needed to see the place for herself.
Landru’s remark appears unusual, given his repeatedly expressed opinion about the subordinate position of women and their duty to obey men. I have no firm proof, but I suspect it was Jeanne, not Landru, who initiated the abrupt move to Vernouillet, because of some unwelcome development in Paris: perhaps a visit by her meddling sister Philomène to her apartment near the Gare de l’Est.
In this plot, Jeanne panicked at the end of November, ordering Landru to find a discreet base near Paris where she and André could leave France unnoticed – or she would hand him over to the police. Having approved Landru’s choice of The Lodge, Jeanne then went to ground. She made no effort to get to know her neighbours in Vernouillet. Over the Christmas holidays, she wrote careful letters to her sister-in-law Mme Germain and to Mme Morin, discouraging them from paying a visit because of the “poor weather”.
Jeanne behaved as if she had turned her back on her former life.
***
Landru’s lack of urgency in the weeks following the move to Vernouillet reinforces the impression that he had no plan to kill Jeanne and André. His dawdling may also have revived Jeanne’s doubts over whether he could be trusted; a dangerous position for Landru, since she only needed to walk up the hill to the police station at the top of Rue de Mantes in order to get him arrested.
Sometime in the first half of December Landru went off for several days to retrieve his car from the farm in Normandy where he had billeted his family. Nothing of any note happened at The Lodge for the next month. And then something did happen.
In the middle of January, André’s prospects suddenly changed when the government brought forward the mobilisation of his contingent – the socalled “class” of 1917 – to the summer of 1915. André now knew that his possessive, fretful mother would soon be powerless to prevent him leaving home to fight the Germans. He would shortly be “savouring the pleasures of garrison life”, André told Max without irony in his last letter to his friend, dated 20 January 1915.
From Jeanne’s perspective, any project to emigrate with André would collapse when André left for barracks. André’s impending departure was also bound to alarm Landru because the boy, like his mother, knew Landru’s true identity. At his trial, Landru made the curious remark that he could not keep André under “surveillance” after he “left” Vernouillet, purportedly for England. In the same indiscreet aside, Landru also let slip his low opinion of André’s final letter to Max.
André feelings about Landru and his mother’s liaison with a convicted crook can be deduced from what is known about his character. Monsieur Folvary, Jeanne’s employer at the dress shop, recalled that André disapproved of his mother’s plan to marry again. André’s “ardent” patriotism and boyish sense of honour shone through his correspondence with Max, while his silence about Landru was also eloquent. It was as if André could not bear to write about a man he despised and probably feared.
The situation at The Lodge was already unstable because once André turned 18 in June 1915 he would be entitled to volunteer for military service, provided he had parental consent. However, André’s last letter to Max implied that Jeanne would withhold her permission. Her refusal to yield to André’s wishes almost certainly explains his excitement about the advancement of his compulsory mobilisation; for Jeanne would not be able to stop him joining Max in the trenches.
By 20 January, when André wrote his last letter to Max, it is possible to imagine several crises erupting in this toxic, combustible household. Perhaps Jeanne told Landru that he had to get her and André abroad in a matter of weeks, if not days, before André received his call-up papers. Perhaps Landru stalled, and Jeanne at last saw through his deceit, telling him she was going to the police. Or perhaps Jeanne told André the full details of her project to get him overseas, before he was killed by the Boches; and André, fired up with esprit de combat, told his mother and Landru that he was having no part in their illegal scheme.
In all these scenarios, Landru had been cornered by Jeanne and André, who could send him to New Caledonia for the rest of his life. To avoid that fate, Landru had only two options. He could disappear, which would be difficult, although not impossible, as the next four years would prove; or he could kill this dangerous mother and son.
***
How did Landru pull off the only double murder on the charge sheet? The detective Riboulet, who did not attend the police search of The Lodge, thought Landru probably used a gun. This theory falls apart as soon as one looks at the house, hemmed in on either side by neighbours who would certainly have heard the shots.
It seems most likely that Landru strangled Jeanne and André, taking advantage of The Lodge’s peculiar two-sided construction to catch each of them in turn by surprise. He could have waited till one of them left the house and then hidden the first body out of view in the garage or the uninhabited pavilion-style annexe, before Jeanne or André returned.
It is an opinion, nothing more, but I decided that killing Jeanne and André gave Landru an appetite for murder and specifically murdering women. Nothing else satisfactorily explains the frenzy of activity that followed, as he bought the carnet, opened his filing system and raced around Paris trawling for female targets. I also felt that the act of murdering the Cuchets finally tipped Landru across the frontiers of madness.
Before Jeanne and André’s deaths, Landru’s actions seem recognisably rational, based on the immoral goals he had set himself. He pursued Jeanne because he found her attractive; he fled his home in Malakoff to avoid arrest; he removed his wife to Le Havre to prevent her testifying at his trial.
Conversely, Landru’s behaviour after he killed Jeanne and André appears increasingly wayward. He did not act in his own best interest, pursuing the “logic” of a remorseless, lethal marriage swindler, as described in the réquisitoire. Instead, his choice of victims was illogical. He killed the Argentinian-born Thérèse Laborde-Line, who had almost no money, before the relatively affluent retired governess Marie-Angélique Guillin. He then murdered the penniless Berthe Héon while pretending to the relatively welloff Anna Collomb and Célestine Buisson that he was on a lengthy business trip abroad.
I think it is conceivable that Landru got rid of Thérèse because he resented the long climb upstairs to her dingy sixth-floor apartment. During the investigation and at his trial, he was still grumbling about this irksome chore. I also believe that with the same vicious caprice, Landru singled out Berthe for punishment because she had lied to him about her true age.
All of this lay ahead as Landru contemplated the dead bodies of Jeanne and André. He had two corpses on his hands, in a house overlooked by its neighbours. At this critical juncture, he could have done with some help. Did he receive it?
***
On 14 April 1919, two days after Landru’s arrest, his younger son Charles told the detective Dautel an intriguing story. Charles said that one day in late 1914 or early 1915, his father summoned him to Vernouillet. According to Charles, he spent the whole day with Landru at The Lodge, but only went into the garage and the kitchen in the pavilion-style annexe. Incredibly, Dautel did not ask Charles to explain the purpose of his visit.
Several months later, Charles provided one more detail about this visit to the detective Riboulet. Charles said that his father had required him at The Lodge for some unspecified “gardening work” (“jardinage”). In another extraordinary lapse, Riboulet did not ask Charles to describe the nature and precise location of this “gardening”.
Bonin eventually gave up trying to gauge the degree of complicity of Landru’s family in his crimes and the task is still just
as difficult. At times, as in this episode involving Charles, members of the family are so close to a murder scene that it seems they must have known Landru was a killer. Only Suzanne, Landru’s younger daughter, kept her father at a distance, by moving out of the family’s apartment in Clichy to live with her fiancé; and it was this young man, an automobile mechanic called Gabriel Grimm, who shed the most light on Landru’s overbearing relationship with his wife and children, in a long witness statement that Grimm gave to the police.
In April 1914, soon after his engagement to Suzanne, Grimm visited the family at their apartment in the southern Paris suburbs. “I found them all in tears,” Grimm recalled. “They told me that Landru had done some bad business at his garage in Malakoff and had had to flee.”
Grimm did not say whether Marie-Catherine and her children were rueing the fact that Landru had committed a crime, or the prospect that he might get caught. Either way, Grimm made clear in his statement that Landru, a fugitive from justice, remained in close, regular contact with his family throughout the war.
Grimm was mobilised in August 1914 and did not see Suzanne again until the autumn of 1915, when he was assigned to work in a factory engaged in war production in the northern Paris suburbs. Conveniently for Grimm, the factory was near the family’s apartment in Clichy.
Soon, Grimm asked Landru for permission to marry Suzanne. Landru refused, explaining that he could not do so while he was living under a false identity. Without telling Landru, Grimm and Suzanne decided to rent an apartment of their own in Clichy, so they could live as man and wife. Landru pursued them, insisting that he would “make them comfortable” by providing all the furniture for their new home. Grimm and Suzanne knew better than to refuse this offer from her possessive, interfering father.
On his and Suzanne’s frequent visits to the family’s apartment, Grimm remembered how Marie-Catherine could not bring herself to escape from Landru by sueing for divorce: “One day she would appear to have made up her mind, the next she was undecided. It was enough for Landru to make an appearance for only a few minutes for her to excuse his way of life.”
Overall, Grimm left an impression of a criminalised household that was complicit in Landru’s thefts and frauds, while maintaining a state of wilful ignorance about the rest of his activities. And in the end, that is how I came to see Marie-Catherine and her children.
Charles’s “gardening work” at The Lodge illustrates graphically the fine line that the family never dared cross. On a first reading, Charles looks like an accomplice to murder. It seems probable that Landru summoned Charles directly after Jeanne and André’s deaths in late January or February 1915 and possible that the gardening work concerned the disposal of some or all of their remains. Yet it does not follow that Charles saw Jeanne and André’s corpses or realised what he was doing.
Charles volunteered his disclosure about the visit, suggesting he was unaware that he might be incriminating himself. He was also quite specific about which parts of this lopsided property he had visited: the garage, where he may have helped Landru reassemble the recently dismantled camionnette; the kitchen in the side annexe, possibly for lunch; and the garden. All this time, Jeanne and André’s bodies could have been stored by Landru in the upstairs bedrooms of the main villa, well out of Charles’s view, because the garage offered a passageway between the street and the rear garden.
Did Charles, still only 14, ask his father about the purpose of the “jardinage”? He may have done and Landru may have lied in response. However, I think Charles was telling the truth when he said he kept his mouth shut. As he explained to Dautel, he was so afraid of his father’s temper that he never dared ask about Landru’s “way of life”.
***
A century later, we can see how it was not just Landru’s family who stepped back from the horror, allowing him the freedom to operate almost at will. So did the mayor and the village schoolmaster in Gambais, who refused to take seriously the exact, detailed enquiries of two sisters of the missing women. The police turned a blind eye, both before and after Landru’s arrest, when they pretended in public that they had traced all his female contacts. Ultimately, the authorities cared more about sending Landru to the guillotine than gauging the full extent of his crimes.
Boundless misogyny ran through Landru’s dark psyche; it was the thread that tied together all the murders he committed after killing Jeanne and André. Yet Landru appeared “normal” because he operated in a society that took women’s inferiority for granted and in the middle of a terrible war, valued men’s lives more highly.
Misogyny distorted the prosecution case, reducing the ten women on the charge sheet to chauvinist stereotypes. They were foolish, vulnerable, feeble, loose – never individuals whose personalities deserved any deeper enquiry. The defence case also reeked of chauvinism. Moro seized any chance to portray Landru’s victims as promiscuous, as if this undermined the charge that his client was a murderer. In one especially distasteful crossexamination, Moro humiliated Marie-Thérèse Marchadier’s friend Yvonne Le Gallo, simply because she was a prostitute.
The press complained about the “invasion” of the courtroom by women spectators, even as journalists at the trial revelled in images of startling sexual violence. One reporter, a well-known drama critic, fantasised about an actress who attended the hearing being burnt, naked, on stage. Newspaper cartoonists drew pictures of female hearts being roasted on a spit or dolls being stuffed into ovens.
This was the world in which Landru thrived and it is not so very distant; for while the past is a foreign country, it has borders with the present.
Afterword
From the Quai de la Pinède to the Jardin des Plantes
Six years after Landru’s trial, a middle-aged woman stood in tears on the Quai de la Pinède in Marseille, watching a ship come into harbour. Louise Dieudonné did not recognise her former husband Eugène when he walked down the gangway, but she hugged him all the same and would not let him go. All Louise wanted was to marry her anarchist house decorator again and settle down like a proper couple, with none of this free love nonsense.
Dieudonné had returned to France after 13 years’ penal servitude in the swamps of Guyane for a crime he did not commit, only spared the guillotine because of a successful appeal for clemency by Moro. He had escaped twice – once in 1921, when he was soon recaptured, and again in 1926, when he fled from Guyane to Brazil. Now he was back in Louise’s arms, having been assured of a full pardon after a campaign led by Moro in the National Assembly.
Louise got her wish and once the pardon was granted she and Eugène remarried at a ceremony in the mairie of Paris’s 11th arrondissement. There was one surprising guest – a juror at the trial in 1913 who had contacted Dieudonné after his return to apologise for wrongfully finding him guilty. In an astonishing gesture of forgiveness, Dieudonné invited the juror to be an official witness at the wedding.
Dieudonné resumed his old trade, opening a small decorating business on Boulevard Saint-Germain, and in 1930 was persuaded to write a book about his terrible years of forced labour. As a token of gratitude, Dieudonné sent a complimentary copy to the lawyer who had saved his life.
“Mon cher Maître,” Dieudonné wrote to Moro, “you will perhaps feel a little joy in thinking that your efforts have not been in vain. Since, without you, I would not have been able to write this book.”
Dieudonné, a man he liked, and Landru, a man he despised, defined why Moro fought all his life for the abolition of the death penalty. By coincidence, on the same day in November 1921 that the newspapers reported Dieudonné’s failed escape attempt, Godefroy admitted at Landru’s trial that the prosecution had no idea how Landru had killed his victims. All Godefroy could offer was “hypotheses”. For Moro, the death penalty was not justifiable even if a defendant was deemed guilty beyond all reasonable human doubt. A higher standard of certainty had to be reached, too high for a jury of fallible mortals, because the sentence could not be reversed.
Moro did not win this argument in his lifetime, but he won it from beyond the grave. Twenty-four years after Moro’s death in 1956, the justice minister who had delivered his funeral oration became President of France. In one of his first acts of office, François Mitterrand abolished the death penalty on the advice of his justice minister, Robert Badinter, who as a young barrister had known and admired “le grand Moro”.
Moro’s legacy was complete.
***
I am also opposed to the death penalty, in any circumstances. For that reason, I like to think that I would have sided with the three jurors at Landru’s trial who took Moro’s advice and voted to acquit on the murder charges, safe in the knowledge that Landru would have joined Dieudonné in the tropical hell of Guyane. Yet if I am honest, I cannot be certain that I would have had the strength of principle to vote with the minority, rather than send Landru to the guillotine in a spirit of raw, visceral vengeance; for at his trial, Landru’s fate was settled by the heart, not the head.
I think the moment when Moro lost the case came early in the trial and had nothing to do with the evidence. It arrived when a woman wept helplessly for a younger sister who, in life, she had found exasperating.
Philomène Friedman was not a trustworthy witness, as Moro wished to demonstrate when he asked her to describe her dream about the ghost of Jeanne visiting her in the night. Philomène’s dream was a fantasy, yet unfortunately for Moro, what the jurors saw was a sister lost in grief, alone on the witness stand, beyond any consolation. No normal human heart could fail to be moved.