The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot (34 page)

COURTOT
No one can lie for seventy-eight days and seventy-eight nights. Besides, he had no reason to tell me these things. I could very easily have been an informer planted by the Germans, and he was risking a great deal. But he never worried about his personal safety. It's not possible that he worked for money.

Petiot wept silently during Courtot's testimony.

Mademoiselle Germaine Barré had asked to be allowed to testify. She was a young seamstress and, during the war, had worked for the Allied intelligence service. She had been captured and sentenced to death, and was reprieved only because she was pregnant. She was awaiting torture in Jodkum's office at the rue des Saussaies when preparations were made for Petiot's release.

BARRÉ
I have read in certain newspapers that Petiot has been accused of collaborating with the Gestapo. I wanted to tell you that this is not possible. I was in Jodkum's office when he spoke to Petiot. When Jodkum asked him if he would pay a hundred thousand francs for his liberation, Petiot did not jump at the chance. Quite the contrary. He said: “I don't give a shit whether you condemn me or not. I have stomach cancer and I'm not going to live very long whatever you do. Don't do me any favors.” Jodkum telephoned Petiot's home, and then to his brother for the money.

PETIOT
Do you remember if he asked me to promise to do nothing against Germany?

BARRÉ
I remember very well, Doctor. You refused to sign anything of the sort. Petiot was insolent and condescending, and made it very clear just what he thought of them.

The witnesses had all been heard. The fourteenth day of the trial would consist of the civil-suit-lawyers' summaries of their clients' cases. The same facts would be repeated again with grandiloquence and rattling of swords. Spring had come to Paris, and the audience had more pleasant places to be.

Maître Archevêque reiterated the Guschinov case. He did not believe Guschinov was in South America, but had been basely murdered at the rue Le Sueur. Floriot lazily asked whether they had received an answer to their telegram. It had never been sent. Floriot lay down across his desk and went to sleep. Petiot had been dozing in exactly the same position all along.

Véron painted Petiot as a psychopath who eliminated Madame Khaït because she was a minor problem in a trivial lawsuit. He was a Cartesian who plotted his killings and line of defense well in advance.

VÉRON
When someone got in this man's way, he killed him. That is reason enough to have his head.

While Perlès spoke of Braunberger's hat and shirt, Petiot awoke and laughed, then went back to sleep.

Stefanaggi did not need to prove that Petiot had killed Piereschi, since he admitted it, but the lawyer leaned heavily on the sterling merits of an unsavory victim to prove that said victim had not been a collaborator.

Charles Henry was to present the case of Paulette Grippay, but in the heat of his passion he never mentioned her name, nor her case, once during his hour-long plea.

HENRY
I am here today to shed light. No one has understood the Petiot trial—neither the court nor the prosecution. Petiot is even more guilty than you think.

He retold the whole story despite Leser's efforts to stop him, and emphasized the role of what he called “the Nazified bestiary haunting the outskirts of the Gestapo.”

HENRY
[Petiot] worked for an anti-French organism operating on the fringe of the Gestapo to defend the interests opposed to this latter entity. Seen in this light, of course, the whole trial becomes perfectly clear.

Elissalde buried his face in a handkerchief, the audience broke into hysterics, and Leser turned bright red trying not to laugh.

PETIOT
[shouting] I would like to point out that it was not I who hired this man.

Henry took Floriot to task for apparently enjoying the trial.

LESER
Oh, leave Maître Floriot alone.

HENRY
[in conclusion] I have tried, amid general incomprehension, to explain that which no one, up until now, has explained. I hope that the gentlemen of the jury will condemn Petiot with full understanding. This is much better than to condemn without understanding.

He sat down.

LESER
What about your client?

HENRY
I have finished. I won't labor the issue.

André Dunant could scarcely hope to draw serious attention after Henry's speech; he briefly stated that Gisèle Rossmy could be reproached with no justifiable cause for her murder.

The following day the summaries continued. The newspapers complained that most of the lawyers began with “I shall be brief,” “I do not want to repeat what you have already heard,” or “I do not wish to waste the court's time,” and then charged right off repeating and wasting for hours on end. Bernays spoke for the Wolffs; Petiot stayed awake for an hour, finally dropping his head on his arms when the lawyer said, “You know my reputation for brevity.” Gachkel spoke for the Basches and their relatives, and Léon-Lévy for the Knellers. Almost everyone joined Petiot and Floriot in an afternoon nap. Véron woke them up.

With lucidity, force, and considerable oratorical skill, Véron went back, point by point, picking apart the defense, showing all the improbabilities, hesitations, and contradictions. He briefly summarized the Dreyfus affair, and proved once again that Petiot knew nothing of the Resistance.

VÉRON
I don't know whether or not some of Petiot's victims worked for the Gestapo, but if they did, he never knew it, and their ashes will join those of the dead from Auschwitz and Dachau.

There is a legend that you all know well: the story of the ship-wreckers. Cruel men placed lanterns on the cliffs to lure ashore ships in distress. The sailors, confident, never suspecting that such evil deceit could exist, sailed onto the reefs and died, and those who had pretended to lead them to safety filled their coffers with the spoils of their foul deeds. Petiot is just that: the false savior, the false refuge. He lured the desperate, the frightened, the hunted, and he killed them by turning their instincts for self-preservation against them.

The Resistance has a duty to defend its dead, who gave their lives that France and freedom might live. If three hundred fifty thousand of our men and women made the supreme sacrifice, it was not so that a depraved criminal like Petiot could conceal his shame beneath the flag of the Resistance. Your verdict must make it clear that his imposture is not sanctioned by you. You must condemn him to death.

PETIOT
Punk.

VÉRON
Say what you like. I'll go to your execution.

It was Pierre Dupin's task to summarize the prosecution's case and formally call for the death sentence. Since he still scarcely knew the facts, he was forced to rely on style.

DUPIN
Never in a hundred years, gentlemen of the jury, has such a monster appeared before a court. Petiot has outdone Landru: twenty-seven crimes instead of eleven. You see before you the Bluebeard of our century, a modern Gilles de Rais. It was with horror that I undertook this case. Petiot indiscriminately murdered men, women, and children simply to rob them of their few earthly goods.

Petiot yawned and began to draw caricatures of Dupin.

DUPIN
Petiot's perversity is equaled only by his skill as an actor in a self-created role. The man you see before you is the star performer in a fictional drama of the Resistance. It is a play that has grown within his imagination, and which contains not a single shred of real life. It will take me five minutes to show that everything he has said is a web of lies.

Petiot glanced at the clock and returned to his artwork.

Dupin spoke for two hours. At 7:00
P.M.
Leser asked him to continue the next day and adjourned the court.

April 4, the sixteenth and last day of the trial, drew by far the largest crowd. Extra chairs were placed around Leser for guests, political figures, and visiting magistrates. The spectators, armed with field binoculars and opera glasses to watch Petiot's face when he was condemned, burst through the police barriers and stood packed in the aisles and at the back of the courtroom. Several people fainted in the oppressive heat, but there was no room to extricate them, nor even for them to fall down. At one point during Dupin's summary when the audience proved particularly unruly, Leser asked the guards to remove the disturbing element, but no one would move and the guards felt unequal to the task. During recesses, people crowded around Petiot, who gave autographs and signed copies of
Le Hasard vaincu
with such blasé satisfaction that it seemed he regarded the trial as a reception organized for his own particular pleasure.

Dupin spoke for another hour and a half, and finally he reached his conclusion.

DUPIN
No, we will not let Petiot soil the sacred memory of the French Resistance. The imposture is over, Petiot, the hour of judgment rings.

PETIOT
Signed, the Procureur of the Vichy régime.

DUPIN
The role of judge does not suit you.

PETIOT
Nor you.

Journalists had speculated over the words Dupin would employ in requesting the death penalty. He was notoriously squeamish about using the phrase “sentenced to death,” and generally found some strange and elliptical substitute.

DUPIN
I have often hesitated before demanding the death penalty. Today I have no scruples about it. May Petiot soon go to join his victims.

The journalists did not think the phrase well chosen.

PETIOT
Thank God that's over.

René Floriot stood up at 3:00
P.M.
He had drunk his one glass of champagne. For the first time in his career, he would drink a second glass halfway through his plea—a plea that lasted six-and-a-half hours. The courtroom was silent, and no one posed a single question as Floriot thundered on.

FLORIOT
After such a long trial, so many days of interrogations and testimonies, my adversaries have just spent fifteen hours by the clock trying to convince you of Petiot's guilt. Fifteen hours! The case cannot be very clear or simple.

Rest assured; I will not plead for fifteen hours—I will spare you that suffering. I will be as brief as possible, but I, I will not spin you a tale. I will not take liberties with facts and dates. I will plead my dossier, and nothing but my dossier; nothing I am about to say is not confirmed by an element of this dossier, and should you doubt me, I can tell you where to find it. When I have finished, I am confident that nothing will remain, amidst an affair which sad events and the malice of men have complicated seemingly beyond all reason, which might permit you to return the guilty verdict Monsieur l'Avocat Général demanded just a moment ago.

Everything in this case has been falsified. I accuse no one except the horrifying times we have so recently lived through, and which have left their mark on the preparation of this case. Petiot came before you to be fairly judged, but he was preceded by a monstrous reputation; the reputation of a low assassin who killed for plunder, a sadist who enjoyed the spectacle of death. Under the Occupation, the press mentioned that Petiot had been previously arrested, but they could not, of course, say that the charge had been fighting for his country. He had been arrested, period. Imaginations ran wild. The papers went on about bodies burning in a stove. When the Germans were defeated and we discovered the horror of the crematoria, a simple mental association sufficed to turn Petiot into a collaborator, a torturer, a Gestapist. But the case is not so simple, and we have allowed ourselves to fall into one confusion after another.

Petiot, Floriot said, would never have been accused at all if not for the bodies at the rue Le Sueur. Having found them, the police went back, trying to find identities to match with these unidentified corpses. To show how flimsy their evidence was, Floriot stated there had been a hundred original, tentative victims, but most had been dropped because (1) the real murderer was found, (2) it was learned that the “victim” had been deported, (3) the victims were killed while Petiot was at Fresnes. By a process of elimination, then, anyone the police could not prove Petiot had not killed, they assumed had been killed by Petiot. On the other hand, Floriot continued, almost two years after the Liberation, there remained sixty thousand unsolved missing-persons cases in Paris alone—excluding Jews—and these represented only cases where family or friends remained and were willing to file a report. (No one knew where Floriot found this figure, but in using it he presumably hoped his listeners would see that out of sixty thousand cases, a determined police force could, by pure coincidence, find circumstantial connections between twenty-seven of them and Petiot, or anyone else. It was an ill-advised line of reasoning: one could easily turn it upside down and wonder how many more of these unsolved sixty thousand cases could have been Petiot's work.)

FLORIOT
Again, one imagines—and I owe this invention to the great talent of my learned colleague, Maître Véron—that one can make the following, very simplistic, rational construction: “Petiot has killed a certain number of people. He admits it. Either he killed them out of patriotism, in which case he is a Resistant, or else he killed them through cupidity, in which case he is a low criminal and a murderer.” There is no other possibility, there is no other hypothesis, there is no third choice. “Thus,” Maître Véron says to himself, “if I prove that Petiot is not a Resistant, I will automatically have proven that he is a murderer, and the jury will condemn him.” He believes that he accomplished this by asking a few questions. Yesterday Monsieur l'Avocat Général, during two hours of summation, spent one hour and forty minutes—I timed it by my watch—calling Petiot a quack doctor, a false Resistant, and showing you his own horror at the rue Le Sueur. He, like Maître Véron, and like all the rest of my colleagues here, based his case on emotion and not on fact. But the facts can speak for themselves, and you shall hear them.