Landru's Secret
Page 35
p.246 “Landru probably used a gun”: Riboulet, Le Matin, 5 June 1933.
p.248 “purpose of his visit”: ‘Déclaration de Landru, Charles, dit Frémyet, Charles, 14 April 1919, Paris Police Archives, Carton JA 28, Dossier Cuchet, reproduced in Landru: 6h 10 Temps Clair, Les Pièces du Dossier (Paris, 2013).
p.248 “‘gardening work’ (‘jardinage’)”: ‘Cuchet: Instruction’, report by Brigadier Riboulet, 13 Aug 1919, Paris Police Archives, Carton JA 28, Dossier Cuchet.
p.248 “and had had to flee”: ‘Audition de Gabriel Grimm’, 17 May 1919, Paris Police Archives, Carton JA 30, Dossier Général.
p.250 “because she was a prostitute”: Outside the court Moro was a champion of women’s rights, addressing a suffragettes’ rally one evening during the trial. Le Rappel, 19 Nov 1921.
Afterword: From the Quai de la Pinède to the Jardin des Plantes
p.251 “come into harbour”: Le Journal, 29 Oct 1927.
p.251 “led by Moro in the National Assembly”: The campaign was led in the press by the investigative journalist Albert Londres.
p.251 “to write this book”: Eugène Dieudonné letter to Moro, 21 July 1930, reproduced in Lanzalavi, (2011), p.48.
p.252 “could offer was ‘hypotheses’”: Le Journal, 24 Nov 1921.
p.252 “‘le grand Moro’”: See Robert Badinter’s memoir of Moro in Lanzalavi, (2011) pp.9–12.
Note on Sources
The surviving original documents on the Landru case are held today by the Archives de la Préfecture de Police in north-east Paris and the Archives départmentales des Yvelines near Versailles.
There are two major gaps in the combined collections. The court transcript (procès-verbal) of Landru’s trial was either lost or stolen at some point before the Second World War. I have relied instead on the extensive newspaper coverage of the trial to reconstruct the key exchanges, many of which were published verbatim. Most of the dialogue in this book was reproduced in very similar form in various newspapers.
The second gap is more intriguing. Landru’s infamous carnet and a significant body of other material disappeared from the Paris police archives before the liberation of France in 1944, when the absence of these documents was first noticed. It was assumed that the material had been removed during the German occupation, probably by the Nazis, and perhaps transported to Berlin. However, there are strong circumstantial grounds for believing that the carnet and other correspondence were taken about a decade earlier.
In 1933 Brigadier Louis Riboulet, one of the main detectives in the case, published a ghostwritten memoir, La Véritable Affaire Landru, which was also serialised by Le Matin newspaper. Riboulet used extensive extracts from the carnet and also quoted at length from the same correspondence that was later discovered to be missing from the case files. The coincidence is striking, since none of this material ever surfaced before or after in print.
The need to rely on Riboulet’s memoir as the only available source for the carnet presents an obvious dilemma. Riboulet was biased in favour of the prosecution and keen to portray himself in a favourable light. I have nonetheless assumed that Riboulet’s extracts from the carnet were accurate, because leading figures at the trial who had also seen the notebook were still alive in 1933 and in a position to correct any distortions: notably, Godefroy, Moro, Navières and Gilbert.
Like Riboulet’s book, my case is not objective. I have made selective use of the carnet (as reproduced by Riboulet) and the surviving case material in the police and judicial archives. Based on these documents, I have drawn my own conclusions about the credibility and importance of various witnesses.
A number of key prosecution witnesses struck me as unreliable or even liars: in particular, Jeanne Cuchet’s sister Philomène and brother-in-law Georges Friedman, the three detectives Riboulet, Dautel and Belin, and the three psychiatrists who pronounced Landru mentally fit to stand trial. Conversely, I thought the testimony of several witnesses who did not appear at the trial merited close attention. They included Mme Hardy, Jeanne Cuchet’s inquisitive neighbour in La Chaussée, and Jeanne’s friend and probable lover Pierre Capdevieille.
I treated one other witness in a manner that may seem too harsh. Fernande Segret wanted a starring role in the case and that is how she appears in most books on l’affaire Landru – centre stage, in the full glare of the limelight. Yet Fernande was a self-styled “survivor”, unlike Landru’s victims. This book is about their tragedy, not Fernande’s, which reached its dénouement many years after the events described in these pages.
Select Bibliography
Primary Sources
Archives de la Préfecture de Police, Pantin, Paris
Affaire Landru: Cartons JA 28 – JA 33.
Archives départementales des Yvelines, Montigny-le-Bretonneux
Affaire Landru: Cartons 1373W2, 2U767, 2U768, 2U769, 2U770, 2U771, 2U772.
Personal Collection of Dominique de Moro Giafferri, Paris
Auguste Navières du Treuil, “L’affaire Landru”, private memoir, undated.
Sam Cohen, Louis Riboulet, La Véritable Affaire Landru (Paris, 1933, serialised in Le Matin)
Extracts from Landru’s notebook (carnet).
Miscellaneous correspondence to and from Landru.
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris
Newspaper Collection, available online at:
http://gallica.bnf.fr/html/und/presse-et-revues/presse-et-revues
Main newspapers consulted:
L’Action Française
Comœdia
L’Echo d’Alger
L’Echo d’Oran
L’Echo de Paris
L’Excelsior
Le Figaro
Le Gaulois
L’Homme Libre
L’Humanité
L’Intransigeant
Le Journal
Le Journal des Débats Politiques et Littéraires
La Justice
La Lanterne
Le Matin
L’Oeuvre
L’Ouest-Éclair
Paris-Soir
Le Petit Journal
Le Petit Parisien
Le Populaire
La Presse
Le Radical
Le Rappel
Le Siècle
Le Temps
Secondary Sources
Books in English
Bardens, Dennis, The Ladykiller: The Crimes of Landru, the French Bluebeard, P. Davies, London, 1972.
Le Queux, William, Landru: His Secret Love Affairs, Stanley Paul & Co., London, 1922.
Mackenzie, F.A. (editor), Landru, Geoffrey Bles, London, 1928.
Wakefield, Herbert Russell, Landru, The French Bluebeard, Duckworth, London, 1936.
Books in French
Belin, J., Commissaire Belin. Trente Ans de Sûreté Nationale, Bibliothèque France-Soir, Paris, 1950.
Béraud, Henri, Bourcier, Emmanuel & Salmon, André, L’Affaire Landru, Albin Michel, Paris, 1924.
Bernède, Arthur, Landru, Jules Tallandier, Paris, 1931.
Biagi-Chai, Francesca, Le cas Landru à la lumière de la psychoanalyse, Imago, Paris, 2007.
Darmon, Pierre, Landru, Plon, Paris, 1994.
González, Christian, Monsieur Landru, Scènes de Crimes, Paris, 2007.
Jaeger, Gérard, Landru: bourreau des coeurs, L’Archipel, Paris, 2005.
Lanzalavi, Dominique, Vincent de Moro Giafferri: Défendre l’homme, toujours, Ajaccio, Albiana, 2011.
Masson, René, Landru, le Barbe-Bleue de Gambais, N’Avouez Jamais, Paris, 1974.
Michal, Bernard, Les Monstres, Bibliomnibus, Paris, 2014.
Sagnier, Christine, L’Affaire Landru, Editions de Vecchi, Paris, 1999.
Yung, Eric, Landru: 6h 10 Temps Clair, Editions Télémaque, Paris, 2013.
Acknowledgements
In Paris, Dominique de Moro Giafferri kindly shared his memories of his grandfather, Vincent de Moro Giafferri, and made available his private collection of material on the Landru case. I am
extremely grateful to him. I would also like to acknowledge my debt to Dominique Lanzalavi’s fine biography of Moro, based on the same collection, which contains much previously unpublished information on Landru’s defence barrister.
My friend Laurence Soustras helped me with many tricky translations of French words and phrases, including some obscure early twentieth-century argot. All errors in French are of course my own. I thank her as well for being so interested in the story and giving me a French perspective on l’affaire Landru.
I am grateful to the staff of the Archives de la Préfecture de la Police in Paris and the Archives Départmentales des Yvelines, which together hold all the surviving case files on Landru, as well as most of the photographs reproduced in this book. The rest of my research would have been impossible without online access to the Bibliothèque Nationale’s magnificent newspaper collection. Lastly in France, I thank the many family historians whose research on their ancestors, posted online, gave me crucial biographical information about Landru and his victims.
In Britain, I am grateful to my copy editor Linne Matthews, who saved me from numerous errors and inconsistencies and helped me tell a fiendishly complicated story as clearly as I could. At my publisher Pen & Sword, many thanks to Laura Hirst, who supervised the production, to Emily Robinson, who organised the publicity, and to my commissioning editor Jonathan Wright.
Various friends were enormously helpful at different stages of research, writing and editing. Mark Redhead put me straight about how to start the story and was always ready with encouragement and advice. Sarah Helm read an early draft of the first two chapters and made me realise I had to write them again. Nick Hindley cast his expert psychiatrist’s eye on the murky issue of whether Landru was clinically insane. Amelia Blacker and Paul Unwin helped me narrow an original longlist of more than fifty images down to the pictures you see in this book.As ever, I owe huge thanks to my agent Jane Turnbull for all her support and tireless editorial advice as I inflicted her with more drafts and redrafts of the manuscript than I care to admit.
Finally, I cannot thank enough my partner Tess and our daughter Hannah, who have been endlessly supportive and patient while I laboured over l’affaire Landru.
A night at the Opéra-Comique, 1918: Landru and his mistress Fernande Segret pose for a souvenir snap before heading to their favourite Paris theatre. (Roger-Viollet Collection, Paris)
THE DISAPPEARANCES (1915–1919)
Jeanne Cuchet, pretty, deaf, and secretive. She declined to reveal why she returned to her fiancé after discovering he was an imposter. (Archives de la Préfecture de police de Paris)
Jeanne’s beloved only son André, who disappeared with her in early 1915. “I could not keep the boy under surveillance,” Landru recalled. (Archives de la Préfecture de police de Paris)
‘Brazil’, Landru’s codename for the Argentinian Thérèse Laborde-Line. She was last seen picking cherries in his back garden at Vernouillet in the summer of 1915. (Archives de la Préfecture de police de Paris)
Marie-Angélique Guillin, Landru’s third known fiancée, thought she was marrying France’s Consul-General to Australia. She never got further than Vernouillet. (Archives de la Préfecture de police de Paris)
Anna Collomb, thrifty and intelligent, but a poor judge of men. She trusted Landru enough to let him buy her a one-way ticket to his country home at Gambais. (Archives de la Préfecture de police de Paris)
Flirty Andrée Babelay, just 19 when Landru spotted her one evening on the Paris metro. “He is my father but I call him ‘Lulu’,” Andrée told villagers in Gambais. (Archives de la Préfecture de police de Paris)
Célestine Buisson, homely and naïve, who disappeared at Gambais in August 1917. “If I take a husband it is to cherish him,” she told her monsieur. (Archives de la Préfecture de police de Paris)
Louise Jaume, estranged from her husband, sought God’s forgiveness for answering a lonely hearts advert. She made Landru pray with her in the village church at Gambais. (Archives de la Préfecture de police de Paris)
Marie-Thérèse Marchadier, a prostitute who supposedly had a “mania for marriage” and Landru’s last known fiancée. She vanished in January 1919. (Archives de la Préfecture de police de Paris)
Annette Pascal found her fiancé almost as terrifying as the German bombardment of Paris. “Be very worried,” Annette wrote to her sister on the day she disappeared at Gambais. (Archives départementales des Yvelines)
THE INVESTIGATION AND TRIAL (1919–21)
17 April 1919: Five days after his arrest, Landru poses for a photo in the town jail at Mantes. He found his cell agreeable and resented his transfer to the Santé prison in Paris. (Archives départementales des Yvelines)
The Lodge at Vernouillet, 35 kilometres north-west of Paris, which Landru rented in Jeanne Cuchet’s name in December 1914. The pavilion (left) connected with the main villa (centre), while the neighbours lived in the white house (right). (Archives départementales des Yvelines)
From the rear, The Lodge’s peculiar construction was more apparent. The villa (left) and the pavilion (centre) were overlooked by Landru’s incurious neighbour Mme Picque. (Archives départementales des Yvelines)
15 April 1919: The investigating magistrate Gabriel Bonin (fifth from left) inspects forensic samples taken from the rear garden of The Lodge. Bonin mistakenly thought it would only take a few days to solve the case. (Roger-Viollet Collection)
11 May 1919: L’Étang des Bruyères, near Gambais. The detectives Dautel (left, half-obscured) and Belin listen to Mme Mauguin describe what she saw floating on the water. Her evidence did not fit the prosecution case. (Roger-Viollet Collection)
The Villa Tric, 55 kilometres south-west of Paris, which Landru rented as ‘Raoul Dupont’ from 1915 to 1919. The village of Gambais (left) is just visible in the distance. (Archives départementales des Yvelines)
The rear of the Villa Tric and its outhouses from a distance, showing the property’s isolation. The village church (left) is 250 metres away, while Gambais (right, out of picture) is more than a kilometre in the opposite direction. (Archives départementales des Yvelines)
The Villa Tric’s kitchen, with Landru’s notorious little oven in the far corner. “It is a ridiculous utensil, scarcely bigger than a bedside table,” one journalist commented. (Archives départementales des Yvelines)
The Villa Tric’s rear enclosure, showing the unearthed grave (left) of Marie-Thérèse Marchadier’s three strangled dogs, close to where Landru buried Annette Pascal’s cat. (Archives départementales des Yvelines)
The open hangar (left) where Landru stored dead leaves, next to two locked sheds where Célestine Buisson’s sister peered through the keyhole at a bundle of indistinct shapes. (Archives départementales des Yvelines)
27 May 1919: Paris, Palais de Justice. Landru, handcuffed to his prison escort, is led away after his first formal interrogation. “It’s for you to prove the deeds of which I’m accused,” he sneered at Bonin. (Roger-Viollet Collection)
Paris, 18 December 1919: Landru’s wife Marie-Catherine, proven forger and liar, looks stern in a police mugshot on the day of her arrest. “My only crime is to have loved him too much,” she insisted. (Archives de la Préfecture de police de Paris)
Landru’s son Maurice, a convicted swindler, also denied complicity in his father’s crimes. Prison was “no hassle”, Maurice told a reporter nonchalantly. (Archives de la Préfecture de police de Paris)
“Your proofs, messieurs, where are your proofs?” Caustic and volatile, Landru was the despair of his defence counsel during the trial. (Archives de la Préfecture de police de Paris)
Mistinguett (‘×’), the queen of French musical theatre, was obsessed by Landru and pretended to be reporting on the trial for an English newspaper. Other celebrities who came to watch included Maurice Chevalier and the film star Sacha Guitry. (Archives de la Préfecture de police de Paris)
Jeanne Cuchet’s friend Louise Bazire glares back at Landru while the jury li
stens to the judge. Inconveniently for the prosecution, Mme Bazire insisted Jeanne was poor. (Gallica, Bibliothèque Nationale)
Célestine Buisson’s sister Marie Lacoste, the best detective in the case, glares at Landru. Without her, Landru might never have been arrested. (Alamy)
…and then came Annette Pascal’s niece Marie-Jeanne, dressed to kill and intent on humiliating Landru. “The monsieur was so gentle in bed with my aunt,” she taunted him. (Alamy)
Juliette Auger, plain and shy, who shredded Landru on the witness stand. (Gallica, Bibliothèque Nationale)
Maurice Gilbert (left), the presiding judge, clever and vain, and Robert Godefroy (right), the slow-witted prosecuting attorney. (Archives de la Préfecture de police de Paris and Gallica, Bibliothèque Nationale)
Vincent de Moro Giafferri, Landru’s brilliant defence attorney, waits impatiently to launch his electrifying closing address. (Gallica, Bibliothèque Nationale)
30 November 1921, evening: The jurors smile at the camera as they wait to stuff their verdicts in the urn. “They are mostly petits bourgeois, with just one timid, moustachioed worker among them.” (Archives de la Préfecture de police de Paris)
30 November 1921, evening: Landru waits in a holding cell beneath the court while the jury decides his fate. “On the heads of my family I swear that I have killed no one.” (Archives de la Préfecture de police de Paris)