The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot (20 page)

Neither Massu nor any other police officer took this extraordinary statement seriously. They could prove that Petiot had been in Paris on most of the dates when Rolland presumably saw him in Marseille, and he was preparing to liquidate Adrien le Basque and his friends when he supposedly marched off in uniform. Petiot had ostensibly given Rolland the rue Le Sueur address almost two years before he bought the house, and the building in which Rolland claimed to have met Petiot in 1940 (still a year before its purchase) differed from 21 rue Le Sueur in every possible detail. Among other errors, he said it was in the fifteenth arrondissement, that it was a corner building, that there was a concierge, and that Petiot lived in an apartment there. He even had the house number wrong. A real mythomaniac could have woven a more convincing tale by using facts from the newspapers. This, combined with the ludicrous extravagance of the story and the fact that Rolland was never called at the trial or confronted with Petiot, made some people suspect that Charles Rolland never existed at all, and that Commissaire Massu had composed the entire story himself in the hope that it would provoke the proud Dr. Petiot into doing something foolish. Not inconsistent with this theory is the additional fact that Massu took the strange step of turning over Rolland's complete deposition, and no other, to Jacques Yonnet, a journalist for
Résistance,
a major daily newspaper. Yonnet published it on September 19, 1944, under the heading “Petiot, Soldier of the Reich,” and prefaced it with the remark that he assumed no responsibility for the truth of its contents.

The ruse, if such it was, succeeded. Several days later a letter was given to
Résistance
via Petiot's lawyer, René Floriot, which the newspaper published on October 18. The letter explained in detail Petiot's Resistance activity, claimed Rolland existed only in some policeman's sick imagination, and ended with these noble words:

The author of these lines, far from having committed dishonorable acts, far from having forgiven his torturers and even farther from having aided them, adopted a new pseudonym immediately after his release by the Germans [in January 1944] and asked for a more active role in the Resistance so that he could avenge the hundreds and thousands of Frenchmen killed and tortured by the Nazis. He remained in contact with his friends, and fought for the Liberation to the best of his abilities despite the constant fear of arrest. He is still doing all he can for the cause, and begs your pardon if he cannot take the time to get involved in polemics on this matter. Having lost everything but his life, he is selflessly risking even that under an assumed name, scarcely hoping that pens and tongues finally freed from their shackles will now tell a truth so easy to guess, and forget the filthy kraut lies that it takes about two grains of good French common sense to see through.

[signed] P
ETIOT

The police were elated. Certain oblique references and the rapidity of his reply made them suspect that he was still in Paris and probably serving in the French Forces of the Interior (FFI). In a mass effort, with the help of military security, they decided to compare the handwriting in the letter with samples from thousands of FFI officers in Paris. Meanwhile they asked several well-placed army officers to keep an eye out among their men for someone matching Petiot's description. Among those assigned to this task was Captain Henri Valéri, in charge of counterespionage and interrogations at the army base in the Reuilly section of Paris.

This tactic did not have the chance to succeed. On October 31, 1944, a Captain Simonin and three other military officers went to the métro station Saint-Mandé-Tourelles, just outside the eastern city limits, at 7:00
A.M.
and loitered there inconspicuously for more than three hours. At 10:15, Dr. Petiot, alias Henri Valéri, entered the station and walked toward the platform. One of Captain Simonin's men asked him the time. As he raised his arm to look at the late Joseph Réocreux's watch, handcuffs were slapped on his wrist. A violent kick sent him to the ground, and the four men pounced on him and bound his feet, then carried him out to a waiting car. Simonin conducted the first interrogation before turning him over to military security, which in turn sent him to Police Judiciaire headquarters. It was only later that people began to wonder how Simonin had identified Petiot, why he had arrested him without telling any of his superiors, and why he had conducted the interrogation—something he had no reason or right to do. When they thought of this, it was too late. Simonin had disappeared and would never be found. Soon afterward police learned that his real name was Soutif, and that he was a notorious collaborator who had been responsible for hundreds of deportations and the execution of dozens of patriots.

11

CAPTAIN HENRI VALÉRI

The Petiot case had been the major news story for months after it broke, and now that the manhunt had reached a conclusion, few people were interested. The fact that the Occupied press had used it to boost circulation, and that the Germans had apparently favored it as a harmless diversion for the French people, was now a prime reason to shun it. At a time when self-righteousness was the order of the day, when Resistants were glorified, collaborators legally or illegally purged, and when everyone who had simply “managed to get by” during the Occupation dredged his memory for some small action he could boast as an example of his Resistance activity, Petiot was not a particularly popular topic, and the newspapers treated him cursorily or with disdain. The former underground publication
Combat,
which had become a daily paper after the Liberation, scarcely mentioned Petiot's capture at all except to point out that it did not intend to give it further coverage:

Doctor Petiot, whom the Occupation press, for its own reasons of strategic necessity, rendered inordinately famous, was arrested yesterday and turned over to the Police Judiciaire. His first declarations depict him, too, as a hero of the Resistance.… We believe we have fulfilled our journalistic obligations by relaying this news without commentary. We will do the same each day, but we refuse to glorify an affair which is repugnant from so many points of view. Too many tragic or urgent problems demand our attention for us to permit ourselves to go into the scandalous details of sensational news items.

After the first few days following Petiot's capture, neither
Combat
nor any other paper continued to “do the same each day” in reporting on his case. There were no stupendous new developments, and there was not much to report. For nearly a year and a half, until the opening of the trial, the Petiot case sank into the obscurity of the
juge d'instruction
's chambers.

Captain Valéri was leaner than the photographs of Dr. Petiot, and a heavy beard concealed his features. In his pockets police found a loaded 6.35mm automatic, F31,700, and fifty documents, including a Communist-party card issued only eight days previously, identification papers in the names Valéri, Wetterwald, Gilbert, de Frutos, Bonnasseau, and Cacheux, and a set of orders indicating that he would be assigned to duty in Indochina. Another few weeks or months, and he might never have been found. The Valéri papers gave various addresses in Paris or the suburbs, and bore photographs of Petiot both with and without his beard. One ration card would prove particularly embarrassing to Petiot: it was in the name René, rather than Henri, Valéri, and stated that its bearer had been born on May 8, 1935, at Issy-les-Moulineaux. The entire surface of the card had been damaged by water, apparently to conceal the fact that the original name, Kneller, had been rubbed out and replaced. Petiot showed uncanny nerve in keeping this obvious clue; what, then, was one to think of two other documents he was carrying—the original and carbon of a tract Petiot had written demanding that an official accusation of collaboration be drawn up against Commissaire Georges Massu.

Massu had, in fact, been suspended from his post and confined to his office on the quai des Orfèvres several days earlier for suspicion of collaboration under the Vichy government, and thus narrowly missed the long-awaited pleasure of seeing Petiot behind bars. No specific charges were made, and it appeared the case was the unfortunate result of ambitious officers who coveted his position and a rather natural suspicion of everyone who had held an important post during the Vichy government's reign. Massu was held in his office for days without being told why, and in a fit of humiliation and despair, the proud commissaire slit his wrists and was rushed to the Hôtel Dieu close to death. He recovered and his case finally came up before a commission that found him innocent of all charges. He was eventually given a new post on the force, which he held until 1949, when he retired to become security chief and an agent for the American embassy in France.

Petiot, in his tract, dredged up a case in which Massu had been inadvertently responsible for the arrest of a young Resistant who had hidden weapons and Communist-party propaganda in a café. The youth was later shot by the Germans. This was never held against Massu even during the official inquest on his case, and given the commissaire's initial caution in the Petiot investigation, one could hardly accuse him of wanton overzealousness. Doubtless, unfortunately, he had thought he was going after a criminal and ended up catching a Resistant. But, referring to Massu's arrest, Petiot wrote:

One might think that Massu has been suspended—at the end of a rope. Not at all. Massu was simply suspended from duty and sent into retirement with all his rights and benefits intact, including that to be paid for information he sent to certain Resistance newspapers [that is, the Charles Rolland deposition]—information from dossiers he compiled while so faithfully serving the Gestapo.

Granted that part of Petiot's mission in the FFI had been to search out and denounce traitors, and considering the recent dates of the tract and of Massu's arrest, one is almost led to wonder whether the hunted had not blithely turned and captured the hunter. But whether or not Petiot had actually played a role in his pursuer's arrest, it was evident that the fugitive had not spent his nearly eight months at large fearfully concealed, but had placidly changed his name and life and carried on much as before.

Police found that for several days after the discovery of the bodies at the rue Le Sueur, Petiot had stayed with various friends whose names were never learned, then met a house-painter named Georges Redouté, age fifty-six, a casual acquaintance whom he had treated once or twice. The unfortunate Redouté, who would spend months in prison for harboring a criminal, told police that on March 27 he had met Petiot walking in the street with two suitcases. Petiot said he had nowhere to stay and claimed he was a Resistance member fleeing the Germans. Redouté took Petiot home to his apartment at 83 rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, just a few blocks from the café where Pintard had found so many future victims. Redouté gave Petiot a mattress on the floor and shared his meager supply of rations. The painter had read the newspapers, and he asked his lodger if bodies had really been found at the rue Le Sueur. “Yes,” replied Petiot, “but they were bodies of Germans and informers.” That evening as they went to bed, still uneasy, Redouté asked him to swear on his son's head that he had not killed. “I cannot swear, because I have killed. But I assure you those were German corpses.”

Petiot stayed at Redouté's home for months. He went out infrequently and then only at night. He let his beard grow. During the day he sat around doing puzzles or reading the newspapers, and talked to Redouté about his Resistance activities. In the past, he said, he had made regular trips to the provinces and to I'Isle-Adam, a town fifteen miles north of Paris, to fetch arms dropped by English planes and bring them back to Paris. He and his group had killed enemies of France and thrown them in the Canal de l'Ourcq (which runs through Paris and feeds into the Seine, where bodies linked to Petiot had been found) and the Bois de Boulogne. Petiot assured his host that the triangular room and viewer were stupid lies dreamed up by the collaborationist press to discredit him. Redouté's remaining doubts were quickly dispelled, and the housepainter firmly believed he was protecting a patriot who would be vindicated after the war's end.

In the days following the uprising against the Germans, Petiot was out all day long, and he returned in the evening with hand grenades and other objects he claimed his comrades and he had taken from Germans they killed. On August 20, he said he had taken part in the fierce battle that day at the place de la République, and he brought home a drum.
*
Three or four days after the Liberation, Petiot appeared at Redouté's wearing a tricolor armband; he told his host he had enlisted in the FFI at the Caserne de Reuilly to ferret out collaborators and carry on the work of purifying and rebuilding France. He was quickly promoted to captain and had an automobile at his disposal. One day Redouté suggested that, now that the Germans were gone, Petiot could go to the police and clear himself of the false charges leveled against him. Petiot replied he would not do this as long as his wife and brother were still in prison. Shortly afterward, Redouté returned home from work to find Petiot and all his possessions gone, and he had never seen the doctor again.

Petiot had not, as Redouté believed, simply gone to the barracks and enlisted under a false name. He went first, the investigators learned, to the army post on the quai de Valmy, where he picked up some useful information, including the fact that a Dr. Henri Gérard had been arrested and sent to Germany. Petiot needed identity papers, and he particularly wanted to be known as a doctor—one aspect of his old identity he did not care to relinquish. Wearing an armband and an official air, Petiot presented himself at the Gérard home as a representative of the International Red Cross charged with negotiating the return of prisoners from Germany. As he was unfolding his tale and explaining to Madame Gérard that the prisoner's identity papers would facilitate his task, Dr. Gérard himself walked into the room; he had not, in reality, been deported, but only held in a Paris prison for several weeks and released. Petiot did not lose his poise, and impressed the doctor with stories of his Resistance activity, his captivity, and his torture—he even exhibited his filed teeth. While the two medical men sat and drank together, Petiot casually inquired whether Gérard knew of other doctors who were still held by the Germans. Gérard gave him the name of Dr. François Wetterwald, who had been arrested by the Gestapo for Resistance activity on January 15, 1944, and deported to the concentration camp at Mauthausen, Austria, in April.