Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris (23 page)

They also found two suitcases—a brown one full of pieces of paper, including a calling card for “Dr. Marcel Petiot, Faculty of Medicine,” and a black one that contained a gray hat designed by the Parisian hatter Berteil and bore the initials P.B. Detectives also found a jacket soiled with lime, and a copy of the journal
Le Crapouillot
of May 1938, with an article entitled “Crime and the Instinctive Perversions.” The police did not know what to make of this collection, particularly as it was not clear which items had belonged to Dr. Petiot and which had belonged to the bodies in his basement.

By late March, detectives had found Marcel and Georgette Petiot’s former maid, Geneviève Cuny, who was living about two hundred miles southwest of Paris. Cuny was at the cloister of Notre Dame de Charité in Angers, where she was in the process of becoming a nun.

As Cuny told Chief Inspector Battut, she had worked for Dr. Petiot
for almost two years—and these two years, tantalizingly, corresponded to the height of the suspected reign of terror. She had started in October 1941, the same month that Petiot began making his renovations to the newly purchased 21 rue Le Sueur. She left in August 1943, a few months after the disappearance of his last known victim, Yvan Dreyfus.

Cuny’s job consisted of receiving patients and cleaning the rooms, all of them except the kitchen, which Georgette did. “
During my time with Dr. Petiot,” Cuny said, “I have never noticed anything unusual.” She did say that, on occasion, Petiot brought home a variety of gentlemen’s clothes, and he and Georgette had gone through them on the kitchen table.

“
Yes,” she said, “Dr. Petiot often presented his wife with lavish gifts.” She remembered “jewels, rings, precious stones, a pearl necklace.” Asked if she knew anything about an escape agency, Cuny said that she did not. If Petiot operated one, she added, it was not to her knowledge.

A
NOTHER person in the Petiot family drawing attention in the press was sixteen-year-old Gérard. While he enjoyed good grades and popularity in school, some people thought that the media scrutiny would no doubt take its toll. One friend predicted Gérard would eventually change his name; another feared that he might commit suicide. His uncle Maurice, it was believed, was trying to arrange for him to attend a different school, a Jesuit academy in Joigny, where he would be shielded from questions from his classmates.

On March 30, 1944, Inspectors Cloiseau and Hernis interviewed the teenager in Auxerre. As usual, the detectives began by establishing his background.
After living his first five years at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, Gérard had moved with his family to Paris in 1933. Initially, he lived six months with his grandfather, Georgette Petiot’s father, in Seignelay. He soon returned to Paris, where he enrolled at the Lycée Condorcet, where Jean-Paul Sartre lectured.

In 1939, as war loomed, the Petiots sent Gérard to the countryside.
Over the next few months, he would move often, living first again with his grandfather, then with a great-uncle, and eventually with Maurice. As the feared bombardments and aerial gas attacks failed to materialize, Gérard had returned to Paris in April 1940. Two months later, however, the Germans were approaching the capital. Dr. Petiot obtained a car and drove Gérard back to his grandfather. Georgette had remained in Paris.

Gérard would have one more stint in Paris, living at rue Caumartin and studying at the Lycée Condorcet. This stay ended three years later, when the Gestapo arrested his father. Georgette sent him to live in safer Auxerre, with Maurice and Monique. The last time he saw his father, Gérard said, was at Mardi Gras, when he visited his parents at rue Caumartin for almost a week.

Had he ever been to rue Le Sueur?

Yes, Gérard said. “
I went there three different times with my father at about two-week intervals.” Although he did not remember the exact date, he believed that it was not long after the purchase. The house was then empty, except for some kitchen utensils that Dr. Petiot told him had belonged to the actress Cécile Sorel.

As for March 11, 1944, Gérard had been at school until about half past twelve, when he ate lunch with Maurice at rue du Pont. At five thirty that evening, he went to a Spanish lesson and then returned home for dinner with Monique and the two children. At nine fifteen or so, he remembered, Neuhausen arrived at the house, as he often did. Gérard also remembered a telephone call that night.

He and Maurice had been playing a game of chess. When the phone rang, Maurice left the room to answer it. Gérard then went to the kitchen with Monique. Several minutes later, when Maurice returned, “he did not say who had called or what it concerned, at least in my presence.” Maurice and Gérard then returned to their game of chess.

B
ACK at the Quai des Orfèvres, Massu was examining the contents of the suitcases for clues to identify possible victims. He was looking first at the labels on the clothing, such as where they were made,
bought, or perhaps laundered, or any other distinguishing feature, such as age, condition, and nature of the material, including any stain, mark, or initial that had not quite been removed.

As the commissaire was learning, the search was exasperating to say the least. On one hand, the accumulation of evidence—the butchered bodies in the basement, the human remains in the lime pit, and the personal items in the suitcases—suggested that Dr. Petiot’s enterprise was far larger than previously imagined. But who were these victims, and how could he identify them among the many thousands who had disappeared—
thirty-three thousand Jews alone in the eleven-week period following July 17, 1942?

“
You would phone a friend one day,” Jean-Paul Sartre recalled, “and the telephone would ring and ring in the empty apartment; you would ring the doorbell and he would not come to the door; if the concierge broke in, you would find two chairs drawn up together in the hallway with German cigarette ends between the legs.” Jews, Communists, members of the Resistance—anyone denounced as an enemy of the Third Reich—was at risk of a sudden arrest and deportation.

As the story of Dr. Petiot broke, desperate people with missing family members or friends increasingly contacted the police to ask if their loved ones might have been another one of his victims. Sometimes the distressed person, hoping to learn a relative’s fate, however horrific, acknowledged that they did not know of any connection with the murder suspect. Other times they could establish reason to believe that there had been a relationship, but the police struggled to prove that Petiot was in fact responsible for their loved one’s disappearance.
The case of Denise Bartholomeus Hotin vividly illustrates the uncertainties that bedeviled investigators.

After reading about the murders in the newspapers, Charles Bartholomeus informed the police about his daughter Denise, or “Nelly,” who had been missing since June 1942. At the time of her disappearance, she was a twenty-seven-year-old former employee and model for Lancel, the luxury leather goods and accessories store on the place de l’Opéra. In
June 1941, she had married Jean Hotin and moved onto his family’s farm near the village of La Neuville-Garnier in the Seine-et-Oise, where Jean’s father served as mayor.
The former husband, Bartholomeus suggested, should be helpful for the investigation.

Denise and Jean had not known each other for a long time before their marriage. They had met only the previous December, when Jean, on a trip to Paris, saw her selling handbags and was struck by her beauty. Denise had followed him to the village but soon became unhappy, struggling to adjust to life on the farm, quarreling often with her in-laws. She began to miss her family, friends, and old social life in the city.

Not long after their wedding, Denise discovered that she was a few months pregnant. Jean’s father, fifty-seven-year-old Henri Hotin, fearing for their reputation, apparently pressed for the couple to have an abortion. Later that year Denise traveled to Paris to see a midwife in the Saint-Lazare district, named Madame Mallard, to be treated for “pneumonia,” but many in the town believed that she secretly carried funds from the mayor to pay for an operation.

Mayor Hotin would deny knowing she was pregnant, let alone ordering an abortion or paying for it. He said Denise’s trip was a mystery. Jean’s mother, Pauline, also denied knowing anything about any medical procedure and only said that if Denise went to Paris, it was “
on her own initiative.” But Jean, as one police report put it, freely admitted what his parents tried hard to deny.

One year to the date after their wedding, as the town was still gossiping over the unhappy couple, Denise went back to Paris to obtain a certification declaring that she had not had an abortion.
Wearing a yellow orange dress and matching bodice, she left on June 5, 1942. It was supposed to be a short trip, with Denise returning the same evening. She didn’t take any luggage.

Two days later,
an enigmatic letter from Paris arrived at the Hotin farm saying that Denise could not return home and never had a “
miscarriage” because, she emphasized, in a text replete with underlined and fully capitalized words, she was “
never pregnant
.” She had done
“NOTHING wrong” and promised to return home soon. By the end of June, another letter arrived from Paris, this one for Denise’s husband. It was shorter:

Asked about his response,
Jean said that he had first been surprised, but then assumed that his wife had decided to remain in Paris a little longer with her family. He was not sure if she had been to see Dr. Petiot, he said, but he knew for certain that she had consulted him in July 1941. Hotin’s attempts to find her had been in vain.

Denise’s family was worried and suspicious, certain that she would never leave her husband like that. They asked the Hotins for information, only to be told that she was not on their farm and they did not know her whereabouts, but everything was fine. Denise’s family remained unconvinced.

Curiously, her husband, Jean, was already not only in a new relationship, but also engaged to be remarried. He had filed for divorce from Denise on the grounds that she had deserted him. His father was pleased with the new match. Indeed, having observed the prominent family over the last year, many residents in the community were convinced that the Hotins were glad to be done with Denise. Some people saw her disappearance as all too convenient, and whispered that Jean might have murdered her. Why, after all, did he not report her missing to the police?

Hotin’s search for his wife, moreover, was not inspired. In January 1943, six months after her disappearance, he had finally gone to Paris, spoken with the midwife, and learned that she had referred Denise to Dr. Petiot. Had Hotin seen him? detectives asked, in his questioning on March 25, 1944. No, Hotin had to answer: “
It was half past four when I arrived. I went upstairs and saw on the plate: ‘The doctor receives from five o’clock to seven o’clock.’ I did not dare to ring the bell.” He
couldn’t wait, he added, because his train back to La Neuville-Granier was soon departing. That was the end of his search for his wife.

Now, if Jean Hotin’s claims were true, then Denise would have visited Petiot in the first week of June, a difficult time, when he was already under investigation for two separate cases of selling narcotics, not to mention the two mysterious disappearances of witnesses, Van Bever and Khaït. Would he really have risked another disappearance, when any one of them, if proved, could end his career and send him to prison? This is not impossible; Petiot liked to toy with danger, as Massu would soon learn. He certainly did not lack confidence in his ability to escape punishment either, with or without protection.

Of course, it is possible that Madame Mallard did send Denise to Petiot; even if Parisian midwives rarely made such referrals in the early 1940s, they would do so when an operation went wrong or threatened to endanger the life of the patient. Perhaps the doctor had seen her and attempted an operation, only to have it result in a complication, or a dangerous infection from the unhygienic conditions that often surrounded black-market abortions. To avoid exposure to what was then a capital offense, Petiot had perhaps tried to cover the trail of his botched operation. There is, however, no evidence supporting this hypothesis.

The police kept reaching dead ends in this investigation. Jean Hotin’s claims that he visited Mallard—and the story of her referring Denise to Petiot—could not be verified because, by April 1944, Mallard was dead. She died that same month of natural causes. Mallard’s daughter, Gilberte Mouron, could not confirm the incident either, admitting only that she believed that she had heard Petiot’s name mentioned before. As for the office hours Jean Hotin cited, they did not match the ones Petiot kept at the time. No evidence tracing the disappearance of Denise to Dr. Petiot was ever found, and in fact, the police could not prove that she had visited the doctor, or that she was even dead. Still, the name Denise Hotin was added to the list of the doctor’s murder victims.