Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris (47 page)

Leaving the Seventh Sector, they turned left onto an open area of the Fifth Sector and then descended the thirty-nine steps to the Sixth.
They arrived in the clerk’s office, where Petiot signed the register, which released him from prison and into the hands of the executioner. The blinds in the office were down to prevent him from seeing the instrument for as long as possible. The handcuffs were removed and replaced by a cord. “
I only see that condemnation to death distinguishes a man,” Petiot said, citing the words of Mathilde de la Mole in Stendhal’s
The Red and the Black
. “It is the only thing that you cannot buy.”

Did Petiot have a last confession or any final words? “
No,” he said. “I am a traveler who is taking all his baggage with him.”

After the nape of his neck was shaved, Desfourneaux tied Petiot’s arms behind his back at the wrist and elbow. His shirt collar was ripped. “
A pity,” Petiot said. “So beautiful a shirt, which cost my wife so much. Think, it was a Christmas gift.”
According to Obrecht, present as the assistant executioner, Petiot then joked of a sudden crisis of uremia and asked to urinate.

“
For the first time in my life,” Dr. Paul noted, “I saw a man leaving death row, if not dancing, at least showing perfect calm. Most people about to be executed do their best to be courageous, but one senses that it is a stiff and forced courage. Petiot moved with ease, as though he were walking into his office for a routine appointment.”

Outside, in the prison courtyard in the early-morning gray, Petiot smiled at the executioner and turned to the delegation that waited nearby. “
Gentlemen, I have one last piece of advice. Look away. This will not be pretty to see.”

His feet were tied together and he was strapped to the wooden tilting table and lowered into place with his neck in the lunette. A lever was released. At five minutes after five, the head rolled into the wicker basket with a thump.

J
O the Boxer’s gold watch, Joachim Guschinow’s fur coats, Lulu’s emerald ring—the profits of the false escape agency can only be imagined. How much gold, silver, currency, how many diamonds, emeralds, signet rings, bonds, and other valuables were sewn into clothes, hidden in shoes, and packed into suitcases with dreams of a new life abroad? Add to this figure the fees Petiot collected for promising to supply forged papers and arrange the passage over rugged mountains, across a frontier, and then onto an ocean liner bound for Argentina.

Sometimes, too, the client had handed over property. Ilse Gang testified how Petiot carted away the Wolff furniture; Christiane Roart described the many attempts to gain possession of the Kneller property; and Raymond Vallée noted the strange messages, purportedly from Dr. Braunberger, asking him to transfer his furniture. Petiot also probably earned a percentage of the profits when he referred his clients to secondhand dealers, as both Joseph Scarella and René Marie experienced. As for the suits, shirts, shoes, dresses, coats, and wide variety of personal belongings in the suitcases found in Neuhausen’s attic, how long was it before they ended up on the black market or sold to a German purchasing agency?

Without knowing the true number of victims or what each person carried to rue Le Sueur, there is no meaningful estimate of Petiot’s
profits. Indeed, no one has ever established the total number of victims, which could be anything from a handful to 26 (the court’s opinion), 63 (Petiot’s claim), 150 (Dr. Paul’s off-the-record estimate), or perhaps even more (Director of the Police Judiciaire René Desvaux’s guess). Clearly, however, the profits were substantial. The fifty-odd suitcases that had lined the back wall of the courtroom represented only a fraction of the lucrative enterprise.

But where was this fortune now?

Some of Petiot’s wealth was clearly invested in property. Although rumors often exaggerated the number of buildings he owned, Petiot had snapped up several bargains as real estate prices plummeted during the Nazi Occupation. In addition to rue Le Sueur, he purchased buildings at 52 rue de Reuilly, as well as properties in nearby Auxerre, Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, and Seignelay. Some were purchased in his name, or that of his son, his brother, or his father-in-law. What about the rest of his treasure that he did not sink into real estate?

At one of the first interrogations, Petiot told Gollety that he kept the bulk of his fortune at rue Le Sueur. He never elaborated beyond that, and neither subsequent interrogations nor testimony at the trial had clarified the matter. In 1952, an architect bought the rue Le Sueur town house and proceeded to tear down the building “
stone by stone.” The demolition and rebuilding were closely watched, but no treasure was uncovered there or, as far as anyone knows, in any of his other properties.

As the defendant refused to discuss the fate of his alleged riches, rumor naturally filled in the gap. Some people believed that he had buried the treasure. At one point, René Nézondet claimed that Petiot had instructed him upon his release at Fresnes to relay a message to Georgette: “
Go where you know to go and dig where you know to dig.” This, however, was almost roundly dismissed. Some believed it was simply a joke on Petiot’s part. Others interpreted it as another manifestation of Nézondet’s tendency to exaggerate his own importance in the affair. At any rate, the likelihood of Petiot recruiting the talkative Nézondet for this special message was slim.

In 1968, the British writer Ronald Seth suggested that the fortune
had been seized by the Communist Party.
According to this theory, the Communists had protected Petiot during his flight from the police and therefore taken his wealth, securing his cooperation by threatening to harm his wife and son. Unfortunately, Seth did not cite any evidence. What he did not know, however, was that the man who had arrested Petiot, Captain Simonin, would later reveal that the suspect did in fact claim that the Communists had sheltered him. And from his own investigations, Simonin believed that this was probably correct. But that is a far cry from saying that the wealth ended up in Communist possession, and no evidence of that has ever emerged.

Indeed the climate in autumn of 1944—when Petiot presented himself to Communist leaders at the Reuilly armory—was dramatically different from the one that prevailed a few years before, when he was luring people to his town house on rue Le Sueur. Although the evidence is tenuous at best, there was probably a different protector at that time, and another possibility for where he hid his wealth.

I
N early February 1944, two shiny black cars had pulled up in front of a small house in the town of Joigny, on the bank of the Yonne River. Among the arrivals was Marcel Petiot. He was accompanied by six men in flashy suits, flaunting gaudy rings on every finger. They had arrived for the funeral of the physician’s distant cousin, Céline Petiot, a reclusive widow who had died poor and without children.

That night, Petiot volunteered to keep watch at the vigil while the members of the deceased’s extended family got some much-needed rest. As the relatives went into the kitchen for a late snack, the physician entered the room where he would spend the night alone with the casket. He brought two large, bulging suitcases.

The next morning, when the pallbearers arrived, they discovered that the coffin, already nailed shut, was extraordinarily heavy. Immediately after the burial, Petiot and his entourage filed into their cars and sped away. The doctor’s suitcases, this time, appeared to be very light.

One of the men in the car with Petiot was very curious about what
Petiot had buried in the grave of this relative. Several months later, in the autumn after the Liberation, he decided to take a look. Bringing along a friend, he returned to the grave site, removed the tombstone, and went to work with shovel and pickaxe. The two men opened the coffin. No treasure. Remarkably, however, there was no skeleton, either. There was nothing at all inside. Someone, they believed, had beaten them to the loot.

Whether Petiot actually hid his treasure, or more likely a part of it, in the grave of his relative is hard to say. But this small country funeral raises a number of questions. For one, only a couple of weeks earlier, Petiot had been released from Fresnes prison by the Gestapo. No one has ever adequately explained this release—arguments that the Gestapo would suddenly free him for only 100,000 francs or, as Jodkum said, by virtue of his insanity, strain credibility. The hypothesis that someone intervened on his behalf seems more plausible, but if so, then who was it, and more to the point, why did this protector allow Petiot to be arrested in the first place, let alone endure almost eight months of prison, including torture?

The timing of the funeral and the presence of the strange men at his side, on the other hand, suggest that the Gestapo men of office IV B-4 might well have released Petiot in order to follow him—not, as Petiot said at his interrogation, to arrest his so-called Resistance comrades, but rather to track down his treasure. Given that these Gestapo men sometimes tried to profit from their positions of authority, and unquestionably suspected that Petiot had accumulated a fortune, it is difficult to imagine that they would not have tried to lay their hands on it. A token payment would suffice to free their prisoner, and then Jodkum’s men could follow him to the real source of his wealth, which Jodkum had hoped to seize from the moment they began seriously to investigate Dr. Eugène’s organization.

Perhaps this attempt to conceal the treasure gives insight into another curiosity about the Petiot case that has never been adequately explained: the dangling panels, the ripped-up floorboards, cut-open divans, and holes in the walls found at rue Le Sueur when the French
police arrived on March 11, 1944 (and later, too, at rue des Lombards in Auxerre). Was this evidence of a search of Petiot’s property for concealed wealth?

But by whom? The Gestapo?
As remarkable as it sounds given their interrogations and attempts to follow him after prison, there is no evidence that Jodkum and his men actually knew of his property at 21 rue Le Sueur before March 11. Someone else in Occupied Paris, however, did, and this brings us back to the men who accompanied Petiot to the funeral. Clearly they seem to have been providing protection, as one of them later admitted, and their identity would suggest that whatever Petiot carried in those suitcases was of significant value. This is because one of the men with the physician was Abel Danos, “The Mammoth” or “The Bloodthirsty.”

A giant, cruel man with a long history of burglaries including a famous train robbery in 1936 and the first major holdup of the Occupation, a coup in February 1941 that resulted in some 8 million francs,
Danos served the gangster Henri Lafont. In fact, Danos was one of Lafont’s most valued toughs, belonging to the crime boss’s inner circle or “war council” and selected to take on Lafont’s most important tasks. The other men in Petiot’s entourage—Gé les Yeux Bleus, François-le-Marseillais, André or Dédé-la-Mitraillette, Jo la Remonte—also worked for Lafont.

So if the coffin at Joigny might take us one step farther in seeing how Petiot dispersed his wealth, it does not ultimately reveal the fate of his treasure, which, alas, remains unknown. What it does offer, however, is support for an allegation first made by
Adrien the Basque’s brother, Emile Estébétéguy, of a Petiot-Lafont connection. Estébétéguy, also a member of Lafont’s gang, claimed that Lafont had sent Adrien the Basque to Petiot.
Lafont officially denied any knowledge of Petiot or rue Le Sueur, and the physician’s name never appeared on the list of payments made by the French Gestapo. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to establish links between the two men.

One of Dr. Petiot’s patients was Paul Jean Marie Joseph Clavié, a short, violent man who showed up at his office on rue Caumartin in the
late 1930s, probably 1938, for treatment of gonorrhea. Clavié, then aged twenty-three, had selected Petiot, he said, because he was a respected “
physician of the pissoir.” Clavié was at this time a small-time hoodlum. A couple of years later, however, he was one of the most powerful men in the criminal underworld. Clavié was the nephew of Henri Lafont.

Lafont had, at this time, no immediate family, and he treated Clavié almost like a son. On January 10, 1941, while on an early mission with Lafont to establish an espionage center with radio transmitter-receptor at
Cap Doumia, outside Algier, Clavié wrote a letter to Dr. Petiot, concluding with the postscript “my uncle greets you and will see you on his return.”
Lafont had just received permission from the Abwehr to expand his gang, along with hundreds of thousands of francs to finance his search for new recruits. By April 15, 1941, he was back in Paris doing just that, and by the end of May, he had moved into his office at rue Lauriston. That was the same week that Petiot purchased the property at rue Le Sueur. The physician paid the bulk of the price in cash, the source of which neither he nor anyone has ever been able to explain.

This, of course, does not mean that Lafont supplied or secured any of the funds for the town house. But assuming for the moment that Petiot could have raised the money from the profits of his medical practice, antiques dealing, and other assets, which is by no means certain, it is striking that he would choose to invest in that particular location. The Germans had already requisitioned numerous buildings in the neighborhood. What made Petiot so sure his newly purchased property would be immune from the ever-expanding ambitions of Occupation authorities to take over buildings in that area?

Oral testimony from a former member of the French Gestapo suggests that the relationship between Petiot and Lafont developed more significantly the following year. In early 1942, after breaking up a false escape organization in Tournus that pretended to take Jews across the line of demarcation (run by a police inspector who brought down the anger of the Germans when he stopped sharing his profits), the French Gestapo had been encouraged to continue this work, more actively
seeking
passeurs
and escape organizations alike. By the early summer, an informer reported another such agency run by an unidentified physician who helped people escape Occupied Paris. Lafont’s associate, Pierre Bonny, decided to investigate.