The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot (2 page)

In the garage next to the consultation room, the commissaire discovered a pile of quicklime—fourteen feet long, eight feet wide, and three feet high at its peak. Interspersed throughout the pile were fragments of flesh and bone, among which he recognized a jawbone and a detached human scalp. In the adjacent stable he found a former manure pit; a block and tackle was rigged above it and a wooden ladder propped inside. Leaning over, the commissaire discovered it was half filled with several more cubic yards of lime and human remains. On a landing of the staircase leading from the courtyard down to the basement he found a canvas sack containing the headless left side of a human body, complete but for the foot and internal organs. At the bottom of the stairs, next to the mound of coal and corpses, was a hatchet covered with rust-colored stains and, a short distance away, a shovel.

Commissaire Georges Massu had just climbed into bed at 10:00
P.M.
when headquarters called. Massu was a thirty-three-year police veteran with 3,257 arrests to his credit, and after recently solving a spectacular case he had been promoted to chief of the Criminal Brigade of the Police Judiciaire—a detective force that does for the Paris region what the Sûreté Nationale does for the rest of France. Massu had participated in most of the major criminal affairs of the past three decades, including the celebrated case of Eugen Weidmann, who murdered six people for profit and whose death on the guillotine in 1939 was the last public execution in France. Ten years earlier, Massu had befriended the young mystery writer Georges Simenon, who was then looking for realistic atmosphere to improve his novels, and the taciturn and methodical Massu was gradually transformed into the fictional commissaire Maigret. Massu himself claimed the pipe and habits of Maigret were more like Simenon, but details of some cases were so close to his own that Massu's own memoirs seemed redundant when they appeared. On this evening in 1944, Massu was awakened to investigate what he was later to call “the greatest criminal affair of the century.”

Thirty minutes later, Massu arrived at the rue Le Sueur with his son Bernard, a seventeen-year-old law student who worked as a part-time inspector under his father whenever there was a case more interesting than his studies. Georges Massu stared at the piles of remains. He took off his overcoat and climbed into the pit; the bones crunched sickeningly under his shoes and his trousers became covered with lime. In the basement kitchen he noticed that the large double sink was just long enough for an outstretched body and that its sloping bottom was steep enough for blood to flow down without coagulating before reaching the drain.

Meanwhile, the other investigators had found, joined to the consultation room by a small corridor, a triangular chamber—six feet on the short side, eight feet on the longest, and completely empty except for eight heavy iron rings fixed in one wall and a naked light bulb attached to the ceiling. Opposite the entrance was a double wooden door, and beside it an electric doorbell. Given the layout of the building, the doors presumably led to a street in the rear, but when Massu forced them open he found that they were attached to a solid wall. The wires of the bell led nowhere. A zealous policeman began to remove the room's wallpaper and was rewarded by the discovery of the wide end of a spyglass such as those placed in apartment doors to identify visitors. The eyepiece was just over six feet off the ground in the stable on the other side of the wall, and next to it were two light switches: one for the stable itself, the other for the triangular room. As an experiment, Bernard Massu positioned himself between the eight iron rings in the room as though lashed to them. Through the viewer in the stable, the commissaire saw his son's enlarged face perfectly framed in the field of vision. On his way to the stable, Georges Massu noticed that the door to the triangular room had no knob on the inside.

As yet, there was no indication of who the victims might be nor why they had been killed, but the death scenes the house's arrangement conjured in Commissaire Massu's mind grew increasingly horrifying. Under some pretext, he imagined, the doctor instructed a patient to leave his consultation room by the back door. The patient, already drugged or poisoned—gas, perhaps, or an injection—entered the triangular room, whose one true door, virtually soundproof, he could not reopen once it closed. Perhaps Petiot lashed his victims to the rings, then watched their death agonies from the stable. The room seemed arranged especially for this purpose, though the viewer was placed inconveniently high, the white plaster wall of the stable was unblemished by dirt from the face and hands of a peering observer, and, most puzzling of all, the wallpaper had obviously been placed over the lens many years ago. There were no marks indicating a captive trying to escape his prison, nor any signs of struggle in the triangular room or elsewhere. There were no poisons or drugs in the consultation room—no needles, no gas, nothing of use to a murderer. To Massu and everyone else involved, this would remain the most puzzling aspect of the Petiot affair; and no one would ever discover how the victims were killed or what purpose was served by the triangular room, which the press found the most sinister and horrifying aspect of the case, and around which they spun the most gruesome hypotheses.

By 1:30
A.M.
Massu had learned all he could at the scene, and was about to leave with two inspectors for Petiot's apartment at 66 rue Caumartin when a telegram arrived from police headquarters:
ORDER FROM GERMAN AUTHORITIES. ARREST PETIOT. DANGEROUS LUNATIC.
Word had filtered up through the hierarchy, and some German bureau had communicated this enigmatic order to the director of the Police Judiciaire. Massu hesitated. At the time of the Occupation, the police had been faced with the choice of abandoning their posts or remaining at them under German rule. The first alternative would have compelled the enemy to use its own soldiers as policemen; the latter, the police reasoned; kept civil disputes among Frenchmen, and incidentally left room for sabotage. The Germans, however, did not adhere strictly to their agreement to leave domestic crimes and those only to the French police, who thus sometimes found themselves forced to chase “criminals” and “terrorists” whose only crime was allegiance to France. When the Germans showed particular interest in a case, the police tactic now was to display considerable oversight and error. Thus, when Massu received his telegram and learned how eager the Germans were for Petiot's arrest, his suspicions were aroused. Pleading exhaustion, he instructed the two inspectors to wait until the following morning and went home to bed.

The next morning, the police contrived to waste several hours on irrelevant details of the case. They seemed in no hurry to capture Petiot. As they knew 21 rue Le Sueur had previously belonged to the Princess Colloredo de Mansfeld, they went to find the princess. Her house on the rue de la Faisanderie had been requisitioned by the Secretary of the Navy, and it was some time before they tracked down the sixty-seven-year-old princess on the avenue de Friedland. She informed them that she had lived at the rue Le Sueur from 1924 to 1930, that subsequently friends had lived there, that the actress Cécile Sorel had used it to store her costumes, and that she had sold the building to Dr. Petiot via the Simon agency in 1941 and had not seen him since signing the agreement of sale.

An express letter had been found at 21 rue Le Sueur addressed to “Camille,” asking him to come fetch his delivery cart. Inspectors soon persuaded themselves that they believed Petiot had sublet his luxurious house to a deliveryman. They spent two hours tracking down the sender of the letter, Raymond Lion, and the intended recipient, Camille Vanderheyden, who worked with him at the Maison Lepesme. Lion, not knowing his fellow employee's exact address, had randomly written “21,” whereas Vanderheyden actually lived in a small apartment at 20 rue Le Sueur, where he was nursing a head cold when the police made their dramatic entrance. He had never even heard of Petiot, and it took the police some time to make him understand why they were there. They did not tell him they were there only to waste time—but they were.

It was late in the morning when Chief Inspector Marius Batut of the Police Judiciaire arrived at the rue Caumartin with two other detectives. They stopped at the concierge's loge to ask whether Petiot was in. The concierge was out, but her twelve-year-old daughter, Alice Denis, told the police officers she had seen the doctor and Madame Petiot at 9:30 the previous evening and believed they were still at home. Batut knocked on the door of their first-floor apartment and, receiving no reply, automatically tried the latch and found it unlocked. He took this as possible evidence of a hasty departure (police later learned that, in reality, Petiot never locked his door, believing that a determined burglar would get in anyway, and by leaving the door open he would at least save himself the expense of repairing a broken lock); indeed, the apartment proved empty and the bed had not been slept in. It was several days before the police discovered that Petiot had not left in haste at all; he had been there packing only half an hour before the detectives' arrival and had persuaded Alice Denis, who had often enjoyed Madame Petiot's cakes and cookies, to lie to them about his movements.

The police did not spend the rest of the day searching train stations and circulating photographs of Dr. Petiot as one would expect. Instead they went to the Simon Real Estate Agency. They learned that Monsieur Simon was a Jew and had fled France when the Germans dissolved his business. A further search turned up a former employee of the agency and the notary who had handled the sale of the rue Le Sueur house. Petiot had purchased the building in his son Gérard's name on August 11, 1941. He paid F495,000—F373,000 down, the balance payable in annual installments of F17,500.

Investigators then located the construction firm that had built the triangular room, installed the iron rings, and erected the wall that sheltered the courtyard from the eyes of curious neighbors. Two masons and several workers had done the job in October 1941 at a cost of F14,458.52. They had seen Petiot frequently at the time, they told the police, and the doctor had said he intended to install a clinic in the house after the war. The wall was to prevent neighbors from bothering his patients and to keep children from throwing peach pits into the yard. He intended to set up an electrotherapy apparatus in the triangular room and monitor its functioning through a viewer in the wall. The workers had found Petiot quite an amiable fellow.

The police found these details of mild interest but such information did little in helping to capture the criminal. Nor was it intended to at first—as headquarters soon came to realize. Superiors learned that the agents Teyssier and Fillion had let a prime suspect escape, and the two fled France for fear of reprisals (they did not return until after the Liberation). The Germans now told Commissaire Massu they were astonished that Petiot had not yet been caught. Massu replied that he was surprised by their astonishment, since the files showed that the Germans had once actually held Petiot in prison and had voluntarily released him. The impasse lasted only briefly, after which it became all too evident that Petiot's crimes, far from being committed in the name of France, were gruesomely personal. By then, however, the authorities had lost valuable time, and Petiot had vanished completely.

French newspapers during the Occupation were completely under German control and largely printed German propaganda as well as enlistment calls for the French Gestapo. Their circulation dropped more than 50 percent as they ceased to publish anything of interest except amended rationing regulations. Fewer than 18 percent of the major prewar Parisian dailies and periodicals survived, while the rest fled to the free zone or succumbed to Nazi censorship. Those that remained and the handful of new publications were forced to collaborate actively (and their staff members were among the most harshly treated when the Liberation and purge finally came).

The Germans had no wish to censor the Petiot affair, and may even have welcomed it as harmless diversion for a subjugated Paris. On Monday, circulations shot up as every newspaper in France exaggerated the discovery at the rue Le Sueur in an orgy of sordid detail and carried banner headlines about the “new Landru.”
*
Estimates ranged as high as sixty victims, and most reporters assumed all of them were women. Petiot, in the speculating press, became a drug addict and abortionist, a sadist and a lunatic who had a dozen means—each more outlandish than the last—of murdering helpless, lovely ladies in his triangular chamber. More than one paper carried rumors that the lower part of the bodies in the pit had been more severely damaged than the upper, indicating that the victims had been forced to stand in the caustic lime and dissolve alive. Even for people oppressed by years of war, the bizarre cruelty of the crimes soon became the favorite topic of conversation and, later, of wry amusement. One cartoon depicted a woman at a physician's office door saying, “I'll only come in for my appointment, doctor, if you swear you don't have a stove.” Another showed a group of psychics communicating with the beyond through table-tilting: “If we put our hands on the stove instead,” one of the mediums suggested, “maybe we could contact Dr. Petiot.”

The police did not find it entertaining as they began seeking answers to a long list of questions. They methodically set out to discover: who and where was Petiot? who were the victims and how many were there? how and why had they been killed? how and by whom had the building been equipped for murder? where did the lime come from? and were there accomplices? Experts from the police forensic lab photographed and made scale drawings of 21 rue Le Sueur. They took fingerprints from every available surface—and perhaps intentionally mishandled that job; how otherwise explain the fact that no useful prints were found at either the rue Le Sueur or the rue Caumartin?

In closets and corners of the basement, inspectors found a jumbled collection of objects, including: