Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris (39 page)

At this point, it was time to enter the basement. Professor Sannié continued explaining, like a tour guide, what they had found, pointing out its location and describing its state. “
It is here at the bottom of these steps that I discovered pieces of cadavers,” he said. “Next to the two furnaces you see there was half a human body, split in the middle. In the larger furnace were human remains burning and sizzling with human juices and blood oozing out from the heat.”

Sannié also mentioned the bag, outside the landing, that contained “half a corpse.”

Petiot interrupted, asking the expert to confirm that it was a German army mail sack.

Sannié thought it was a cement bag.

“
This sack is under seal, isn’t it?” Floriot asked.

Sannié did not answer.

“
This is truly incredible.”

There were certainly risks in moving the courtroom to this location, and many irregularities emerged, any one of which could cause a mistrial. In addition to the growing list of missing or misplaced evidence, the door to Petiot’s town house had remained open; when someone tried to close it, Leser refused. It was a public trial, he said, not wanting to open a loophole for the defense. Yet, because he had insisted on the
openness, the crowds eventually managed to swarm past the roped barriers and the police officers. Robert Cusin of
L’Aurore
compared the rush of spectators to a rugby scrum.

Several members of the public roamed the building virtually at will. “
Do you want to see the boiler?” an elderly couple was overheard asking their granddaughter. A reporter was inspecting the stove closely enough with his flashlight to spot the hairs scorched into the grate. Another journalist witnessed members of the public urinating in a corner.

Souvenirs were snatched, like an ashtray from Petiot’s office, medical brochures, and review journals, some of them with the physician’s notes in the margins. Someone walked away with Petiot’s copy of Céline’s
Bagatelles pour un massacre;
another person with an early edition of Pascal. One man was seen rushing out of the building carrying a stack of Petiot’s criminal novels and treatises. More disturbingly, papers were flung out of office windows. Leser’s son was said to have uncovered a tibia. Prosecution lawyers were even photographed that day holding what one astonished reporter identified as “
human shin bones in their hands.” Some of the many alleged bones were likely chunks of quicklime left over from the retrieval of the remains from the pit.

Just after four o’clock that afternoon, as the expedition wound its way back to the front of the building, certain members of the audience started shouting, “
Death to the assassin!” As for the jurors, the trip to 21 rue Le Sueur had not delivered the wave of sympathy that Floriot and Petiot had hoped. The so-called future clinic of the doctor had not seemed innocent, but rather more grim and horrific than ever.

P
ROFESSOR Sannié took the stand again in the short late-afternoon session at the Palais de Justice. Maître Jacques Bernays, the civil attorney representing the Wolff family, asked him about Petiot’s statement that he had planned to put medical machinery in the triangular room. “
It is absurd and ridiculous,” Sannié answered. He could not squeeze an examination table into the small room, let alone bulky machinery.

Petiot protested that, while the room was small and he had used it to question traitors captured by his group, it had not served as a torture chamber. Nothing he said, however, addressed Sannié’s point that medical equipment for his so-called clinic simply would not fit into the room. Floriot came to his client’s assistance, reminding the court that there was no evidence whatsoever to support the hypothesis that the triangular room was a torture chamber or prison cell. There was not even a sign of a struggle or any attempt to escape its confines, as surely would be the case if the room had been used as the prosecution claimed.

“
Did you find any of Petiot’s fingerprints on any of the objects taken from rue Le Sueur?” Floriot asked.

“
No, we did not find any of his fingerprints.”

It was an astonishing revelation. Not only were Petiot’s fingerprints lacking, but Sannié further testified that the ones found on-site remained unidentified.

Georges Massu, then serving as commissaire of Grandes Carrières
in the 18th arrondissement, followed Sannié to the stand, his left hand and wrist still healing from his suicide attempt. After the tour of rue Le Sueur, his testimony proved anticlimactic. Floriot hounded him about the missing bag that had been found at rue Le Sueur with half a body inside. Massu thought it had been a potato sack. Floriot and Petiot both said it was actually a German mailbag, with the implication that it was the Germans who brought the bodies to rue Le Sueur.

When Floriot asked where the bag was now, Massu said that he thought it was with the Identité Judiciaire. The commissaire added little new substance to the trial, prompting several journalists to criticize him for testimony that seemed vague, imprecise, and even contradictory. “
Why do these civil servants, nine times out of ten, cut such pathetic figures?” asked Pierre Scize of
Le Figaro
. The least difficulty, he added, “sends them hiding behind each other.”

Massu would later defend himself against these charges.
Although he had not succeeded in arresting Petiot, he had identified the murderer, uncovered the evidence to bring him to trial, apprehended several accomplices, and identified a number of Petiot’s alleged victims. It was his team that had established the basic parameters of the case. Massu was proud of his work, he said, even if he never had the chance to interrogate Petiot, as he had long wanted.

On Saturday, March 23, the trial resumed at one o’clock in the afternoon, drawing probably the largest crowd yet. Newspaper accounts of the court’s relocation to rue Le Sueur had evoked more curiosity and attracted even more members of high society. Rainier, the heir to the Principality of Monaco, and Laure, the wife of the provisional president of France, Félix Gouin, were among those who came
à la Petiot
as if it were the theater. The duke of Windsor, it was said, had written Leser to ask permission to attend the trial.

Just before the
président
opened the proceedings, a man fainted and the ushers struggled in the packed room to remove him to safety. After the delay, Commissaire Massu’s assistant, Inspector Marius Battut, took the stand, carrying a stack of notes. He had handled many of the details of the investigation, including the discovery of the suitcases in
Courson-les-Carrières and the identification of many victims. The inspector was able to hold his ground.

When asked if the Wolffs and the Basches had served as Gestapo informers, Battut was adamant: “
I can assert the contrary under oath.”

After a heated exchange that ended with Floriot forcing Battut to admit that Dreyfus had been working for the Gestapo, Floriot asked the witness if the suitcases the police found were ever shown to the victims’ families.

“To my knowledge, no.”

“Why not?”

“Maître, you are forgetting that we were under the Occupation.” It was difficult to imagine Nazi authorities making an effort to help families of Jews, criminals, or other people who had tried to escape.

Floriot asked about Lafont’s visit to Massu and the identification of the silk shirts that had belonged to Petiot’s now acknowledged victim, Adrien Estébétéguy. “I am not well informed on that matter,” Battut said. He knew that Lafont was interested in the fate of some of his men who had posed as German police and committed a number of robberies. All of them went missing, he said, except for “a man named Lombard, who did not disappear.”

“Are you sure?” Petiot asked, the tone and timing of his question making some wonder if this man should be considered victim number 28 in the docket.

Despite the impression Petiot’s comments made, this man was not his victim. Charles Lombard, or “Paul the Beautiful,” had fled France, where he was wanted for charges of “intelligence with the enemy.”

“Your investigation was conducted very hastily, Inspector,” Floriot said.

“I did not have a dozen secretaries to prepare my work, maître,” Battut said, glancing over at the defense counsel, who was supported by the “Floriot boys” and a number of other assistants who had joined them that day. The audience appreciated the remark.

“
Yet you have a dozen inspectors who work under your orders,” Floriot said.

“Would you like to inform us,” Petiot interjected, “of
how many patriots you arrested and sent to the Germans to be shot?”

Inspector Battut glared at the defendant.

“Of course,” Petiot answered for the officer. “There were too many to count.”

“Who is the criminal here?” Véron asked.

In rapid succession, three other police inspectors were called to the stand that afternoon to testify that the investigation could find no confirmation of Petiot’s claims of being a Resistance fighter. A Resistant, Captain Henri Boris, also confirmed that the group Fly-Tox was “
completely unknown to Fighting France.” Petiot countered by arguing that his group was independent of the mainstream Resistance forces based in London.

After Jean Hotin’s unimpressive testimony, which added little to the trial except comic relief, Captain Urbain Gouraud, formerly of the Villeneuve-sur-Yonne police department, called Petiot “
an adventurer without scruple” and boasted of issuing him seven tickets. He also testified about his long-held suspicions that Petiot had killed his earlier lover, Louisette Delaveau.

Floriot then pointed out a problem with the witness’s testimony: “
Before he accused Petiot, do you know how many other people he knew were guilty? … Nine, gentlemen, nine. If they had not closed the case, he would have accused the entire town.”

At the end of the first week of the trial, the police investigation appeared botched, hastily conducted, and riddled with many errors and omissions. The prosecution, likewise, looked lost in the thirty-kilo dossier. Swiss journalist Edmond Dubois summed up the strange dichotomy: While “
the Parisian newspapers continue to treat Petiot as a monster and publish his sniggering photograph with the menacing eyes, the conversations that take place in the corridors [of the Palais de Justice] during the intermissions of the trial far from reflect that unanimity.”

A
FTER a welcome rest on Sunday, the trial resumed on day seven, Monday, March 25. First to take the stand was the widow Renée Guschinow, a small blond woman dressed in black mourning veils who looked young and thin—“
thin as an umbrella,” one journalist put it. With quivering voice, she retraced the reasoning behind her husband’s decision to leave Paris and how Dr. Petiot had invited him to rue Le Sueur to discuss his escape to Argentina.

Guschinow’s attorney, Maître Archevêque, turned to Petiot and asked why he took his client to rue Le Sueur if he was a patient at rue Caumartin.

Petiot replied that he could not organize flights where his wife lived, his housekeeper worked, and medical practice flourished. The physician added with sarcasm that he would like to invite the court to his apartment, but he would have to give the matter some thought because of the mess everyone made at rue Le Sueur.

“
You are very intelligent,” Archevêque said.

“You know, Maître, intelligence is only relative.”

Archevêque asked about the injections Petiot had allegedly administered, wondering why they would be necessary for a clandestine journey to Argentina.

“That’s totally idiotic,” Petiot said. The Australian INS correspondent for the trial remarked that Petiot seemed again to turn angry. “There were certainly no health regulations for admittance to Argentina. Everyone who thinks, like you, that I gave injections has just read the newspapers.”

Madame Guschinow testified that her husband told her that Petiot would take care of all the details and he was not concerned, except for the injections.

“Nonsense!” Petiot interrupted. “I gave him injections for a year. Why would he be worried?” He accused her of making up the story based on an article she read in
Paris-Soir
.

Leser warned Petiot to choose his words wisely. The witness was testifying under oath.

“No, that is just what she is not doing,” Petiot said.

Leser, grabbing the edge of the table, lunged forward in anger at the defendant for this latest defiance. Petiot, however, was correct. The witness had not been sworn in; as a party to a civil suit, she was not legally required to take an oath.

Maître Archevêque asked about the handwriting in the postcards and letters, which appeared shaky and more strained than usual. He was leading into his theory that Petiot had kept Guschinow as hostage for three days, forcing him to write letters to his wife.

“It’s normal,” Petiot said, brushing aside the irregularities in the script. “He was a sick man on the point of making a long journey.” Petiot then challenged the witness, her attorney, and the prosecution to produce a single piece of Guschinow’s clothing or jewelry found at his apartment.