The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot (19 page)

Several months passed; Petiot was not released and he soon began to fire a barrage of letters at the judge, the procureur de la République, and even the president of France complaining of his unjust and inhumane treatment. The court appointed three well-known psychiatrists—Drs. Claude, Laignel-Lavastine, and Génil-Perrin—to examine the patient. They were instructed to recommend either further hospitalization or immediate release.

“When one compares Dr. Petiot's various statements with each other,” their report began, “and examines his version of objective facts, one finds obscurities and contradictions leading to strong doubts as to his good faith at any point during this affair.” They went on to note that although Petiot had pointedly told the police and the court that his army hospitalizations had been for psychiatric reasons, as soon as his internment was a certainty, he had denied it all, claiming to have been treated for suspected syphilis in nonpsychiatric military wards that just happened to be located in mental hospitals. Speaking to the psychiatrists, he maintained that he had never had troubles with the law previously, despite firm evidence to the contrary. When asked about the death of his patient Raymonde Hanss, he replied—in a mocking tone that offended the panel—that the girl had killed herself by stupidly taking ten times the prescribed dose of her medication and that her mother was a nasty German who had accused him out of spite. The psychiatrists did not like Petiot, did not believe him, and strongly suspected he had feigned insanity to obtain his acquittal. “But in our present report,” they concluded,

it is not our job to shed light on these obscure matters.… The aim of the preceding exposition was to present the true nature of Petiot, who is an individual without scruples and devoid of all moral sensibility.… This picture of an amoral and unbalanced person corresponds closely to that depicted by Dr. Rogues de Fursac who, in August-September 1936, deemed that Petiot was no more or less sick, no different than he had been throughout his life, and, we might add, from what he shall be for the rest of it.…

At present, though, we are simply presented with a hospitalized subject, and we are required to evaluate his current state to determine whether he exhibits mental disorders necessitating the continuation of his internment. As did Dr. Rogues de Fursac, we find that he does not. Petiot is free from delirium, hallucinations, mental confusion, intellectual disability, and pathological excitation or depression. In consequence, he does not fall within the limits of the Law of 1838 and should be released.

Petiot, they knew, was far from insane, and they had no wish to keep him. What irritated them was that he had used a transparent ruse to elude justice. It was too late to do anything about his acquittal now, but they took the unusual step of adding a warning in hopes of preventing such a thing from happening again.

… it is in the public interest that we draw attention to his very peculiar situation, and point out that in the event of a future criminal indictment, the present internment should not weigh excessively in the deliberations of whatever panel of experts may be assigned to evaluate him. Such panel should go back to the beginning and examine in detail the question of Petiot's criminal responsibility.

Perhaps Petiot was told of this warning, which was placed in his permanent police dossier, for he never used the same tactic again. For the moment it did not matter much, and on February 20, 1937, after seven months in the hospital, Petiot was again a free man.

For the next several years Petiot was on his best behavior—at least he was not caught doing anything wrong except for cheating on his income taxes. The legal results of this fraud were negligible, but Petiot's attitude toward it was interesting. For years he reported less than one-tenth of his earnings. In 1938, with an average annual income of F300,000–F500,000, he declared only F29,700. From this he deducted F16,600 as office expenses, leaving a mere F13,100—scarcely more than his annual rent at 66 rue Caumartin.

The controller finally noticed this trend and fined Petiot F25,000 for fraud. Petiot defended himself with embarrassing fervor. He claimed that his returns were accurate. Business was terrible, he wrote to the controller, even though he worked incessantly. He made house calls on foot. He had not taken a vacation or bought a new suit in three years. He was so poor that he had not smoked or entered a café in five years, and didn't even have a bedroom to sleep in (he had several). He said he was ashamed to admit that he supported his family only through loans from his family, his in-laws, and friends, and even so had to insist that his wife and son spend vacations with relatives in order to cut expenses. His income had suffered further when he was hospitalized for eight months (which, of course, he was—though not during that tax year), and he constantly dreaded the next catastrophe, which would wipe him out.

The controller did not relent, and the fine had to be paid. Petiot seethed with anger, but he was fortunate that the controller's office did not make an investigation. Even six years later, Judge Berry was able to piece together Petiot's true 1938 financial status. Petiot owned several houses and properties in and out of Paris, though most of them were purchased in his son's name (as the rue Le Sueur house would be). He bought and sold small fortunes' worth of jewelry at the Paris auction house. Investigators even suspected that some of Maurice Petiot's large purchases were made with his brother's money. Whatever the total, the doctor's income clearly seemed greater even than F300,000–F500,000 per year. Where it came from, no one has ever found out, but Petiot was certainly not particular about his methods. A few years later he would resort to wholesale murder, and despite psychiatric and criminal records that strongly hinted at danger, no one managed to stop him until it was much too late.

*
France's Law of 1838, one of the earliest legal attempts to humanize the situation of the mental patient, required the opinions of two psychiatrists, the authorization of a government official, and periodic reports from a mental hospital to institute and maintain the forcible internment of a patient. One of the law's main purposes was to avoid the prevalent abuse of internment such as by parents wishing to rid themselves of promiscuous or boisterous children by declaring them insane. It also contained a set of conditions for such legal internment—chief among them that the person must be medically diagnosed as dangerous to himself, to society, or both.

10

THE ARREST

By April 1944, ten suspects in
l'affaire Petiot
were in prison: Maurice and Georgette Petiot, Fourrier, Pintard, Porchon, Nézondet, Malfet, Monsieur and Madame Albert Neuhausen, and Léone Arnoux. Charges against them ranged from murder and conspiracy for Maurice and Malfet down to receiving stolen goods. Curiously, while Maurice, Nézondet, and Neuhausen were held for over a year, Georgette, Fourrier, Pintard, and Malfet were released with the others after four or five months. Ultimately all charges against the “conspirators” were dropped. The prosecutor concluded that although Pintard, Fourrier, and the other procurors had played revolting roles and had accepted money under guise of patriotism, they appeared to have been ignorant of Petiot's real activities. He signed the release for Maurice and Georgette with mixed feelings, consoling himself with the thought that “even if Justice can do nothing against them, the name that they bear and whose sad reputation affects them personally, may serve as a constant source of shame unless Petiot's amoral numbness has conquered them as well.” The decision to release Maurice, who quite obviously knew much more than he cared to admit, was probably partly due to the fact that he was found to have terminal cancer (he would die not long after his brother's trial). Above all, as the case against Petiot grew more complex, the prosecutor saw that trying to juggle ten incidental charges of complicity would only turn the trial into a circus and weaken his case against the one central figure.

Meanwhile, where was Dr. Petiot? As the weeks and months went by, the police gained fairly thorough knowledge of who Petiot was and just what he had done, but the man himself had vanished without a trace when he hopped on his bicycle and rode away from the rue Le Sueur. The reported sightings inevitable following any well-publicized crime began pouring in. An occultist wrote that Petiot had escaped to Morocco via Marseille; another insisted that he was alive and living in the Neuilly section of Paris, at either number 4 or 20 boulevard Jukermann or else 2 or 4 rue de Chartres. Still another occultist said he lay dead on a country road in the Yonne. The police checked all of these leads, not because they believed them, but out of fear of looking ridiculous should they prove correct. People reported seeing Petiot all over France. It was simultaneously reported that he had been arrested at the Spanish and the Belgian borders, and that he had been seen boarding a ship for South America. A tip from a town in northwestern France led police to a stock of contraband tobacco, but not to Petiot. Papers were found at Nantes with the name Marcel Petiot and a rue Le Sueur address, but these proved to concern another Marcel Petiot, a cinematographer who had briefly lived at number 18. Among the rue Le Sueur mail forwarded to Massu were a coded letter—

NE FINMXVCREI RSWV NI 15 PSXIOFTI C 14 LGYTIU – XKIPW – VSK TSIV

RAVILO

—which could have been a message from one of Petiot's Resistance comrades or a ruse by Petiot to make one believe that it was; and a morbidly humorous notice from a fire-insurance company warning the owner of 21 rue Le Sueur that a F1,063.50 premium had not yet been paid. Several more “missing persons” were also identified as victims, but most of them subsequently returned from vacation and were surprised to find themselves listed among the dead.

By the end of April 1944, Petiot was no longer front-page news. Every few days the newspapers published the results of Judge Berry's latest interrogation or an updated list of victims, but there was not much else to report. On June 6 the Allies landed in Normandy, and from then on the Nazi-controlled press spoke of little but the shattering Allied defeats. The Germans were victorious everywhere, they said, yet each day the Allies paradoxically retreated from a point a little bit closer to Paris. On August 19, with General Jacques Leclerc's French Second Armored Division still miles from the city, the Paris police went on strike and held the Préfecture against German tank attacks. The Resistance set up barricades and engaged in bloody street-fighting against the better-equipped but disorganized German troops. The city was surrendered to the French army on August 25.

As the war moved east toward Germany, the purge began in France. Pétain, Laval, and the Vichy government, French Gestapists and collaborators of all kinds were hunted down. The collaborationist press had disappeared on August 18, and the new newspapers, many of them former clandestine publications, printed lists of collaborators and announced imminent purges: next week begins the purge of factory workers; the week after, the purge of writers; police, the following week; and so forth. The French historian Robert Aron estimates that more than 125,000 civilians were legally tried for collaboration, 120,000 functionaries and officers purged, dozens of thousands arrested and held for weeks or months, then released without trial, and dozens of thousands more marked for life by accusations neither proved nor dismissed. At least 30,000–40,000 Frenchmen were summarily tried and executed by vigilance committees that sometimes broadened their criteria to include personal vendettas and business competition. Chaos reigned in a country with 500,000 dead, 1.5 million homes destroyed, and 3 million people returning from prison and labor camps. Finally, in 1945, the government decided that the unabated lust for vengeance was hurting the reconstruction of France; it disbanded the official anti-collaborationist offices and sealed, until 1995, the records on collaborators who had not yet been tried.

In a sense, the spirit of the purge almost led to Petiot's capture. On June 24, a man named Charles Rolland reportedly presented himself at Massu's office and told the commissaire an incredible story. In November or December 1937, Rolland said, he had been in Marseille, where he met a prostitute who asked if, for F100, he would be willing to make love to her in front of one of her clients. Rolland did it, and he later talked with the voyeur, who identified himself as Dr. Marcel Petiot. Since Rolland was in difficult financial straits, his new friend the doctor helped him out by initiating him into the drug traffic. Petiot would meet Rolland at the Cintra-Bodega Bar and give him a packet of cocaine. Rolland would take it to the American Bar, hide it on top of the toilet tank in the men's room, and signal to a waiting customer. The customer, sidling out of the toilet, slipped the money to Petiot, who was sidling in. These dealings lasted three weeks, until Rolland reported to Tunisia for his military service. He returned in October 1939, chanced upon Petiot again, and briefly resumed his old job of pushing drugs in Marseille bars. Petiot was only passing through Marseille at the time, and when he left he gave Rolland his Paris address at, as the latter told Massu, 21 or 23 rue Le Sueur.

In early 1940, Rolland said, he went to Paris and decided to look up Petiot. He went to 23 rue Le Sueur, which he meticulously described to Massu. Petiot told Rolland never to come to his house again and promised to write to him care of general delivery at the rue Legendre post office if he required his services. Shortly afterward, Petiot did contact him, and Rolland recommenced the cocaine sales in a café on the place de l'Opéra. Subsequently Rolland was arrested for another crime; he did not see Petiot again until he returned to the rue Le Sueur in January 1943, at which time the doctor said he did not want to work with him anymore and ushered him out quickly. But Rolland ran across Petiot in Marseille in late February of that year. In the course of their conversation, Petiot claimed he possessed an infallible aphrodisiac, in suppository form, which he had successfully used on more than sixty women. Petiot also mentioned that he had joined the Parti Populaire Français, a French collaborationist political and military group known to work with the Germans to fight against Resistants. Rolland said he had later heard that Petiot, dressed in a German uniform, had left on March 7 for Pont-Saint-Esprit, near Avignon, to engage in “anti-terrorist” activities.