The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot (6 page)

Earlier that same day, Massu and several inspectors had accompanied Madame Petiot to the rue Caumartin apartment for a brief search. A thousand people mobbed the sidewalk outside, and photographers pressed in as the terrified woman tried to shield her face. As reporters followed them up the stairs shouting questions, she turned to scream: “You are assassins! You're making fun of my misery! You know that I only went to the Yonne to see my son!”

In addition to huge quantities of morphine and heroin, the search uncovered three sets of male and female human genitalia preserved in alcohol (anatomical specimens probably stolen from Petiot's medical school, as it later turned out) and a diabolical wood sculpture done by the doctor himself of a beast—half-animal, half-devil—with an exceptionally large phallus. There were no signs of the quantities of jewelry Judge Olmi had noticed the previous year, and police would later learn that, before leaving the house, Petiot had packed up all the available money and jewelry. In a locked medical cabinet they found quantities of black-market coffee, sugar, and chocolate, which Georgette was permitted to take with her to prison.

Georgette Petiot fainted again during the search and was taken to the police security ward at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital. Her health seemed so feeble that it was several days before she was officially informed that she was under arrest. For lack of any more concrete evidence, Judge Berry used her inability to verify the origin of a five-carat diamond ring her husband had given her to indict her for accepting stolen goods. It was a strange piece of judicial logic that no one but she cared to protest. She at first failed to understand the charge at all, and for several days the judge could not even persuade her to hire a lawyer. When she was fingerprinted by the Identité Judiciaire, it was found that her fingerprints spiraled in the opposite direction from all the other four million prints on file. It also appeared that a sixth finger had been amputated from both hands. Palmists assured the press that such oddities surely reflected a unique and sinister personality.

Questioned again the day after his previous interview, Maurice insisted he knew nothing about his brother's whereabouts. “Perhaps he committed suicide, or joined the Maquis, or left the country.” The police did not find his sarcasm amusing. But Maurice now admitted having gone to the rue Le Sueur three or four times: the previous July to put antimite powder on the furniture in the salon (true—powder was found there); in January, accompanied by an architect, to check for water leaks that were causing troublesome moisture in a house on the rue Duret that backed on 21 rue Le Sueur (there were still leaks at number 21); and in February to deliver the lime. In January he had investigated the entire building and found nothing unusual. Since that part of the rue Le Sueur building contiguous with the house on the rue Duret included the triangular room and the stable containing the pit, Maurice and the architect had toured these rooms together. The manure pit had been covered by two heavy marble slabs, he said, which he did not attempt to move. He had tried to open the double door in the triangular room but decided it was merely decorative; he felt certain there had been no iron rings in the wall at that time. Neither he nor the architect, whom police also questioned, reported noticing anything suspicious or smelling the pestilential odor that would have permeated the building had it contained dozens of rotting bodies. Why, Massu asked Maurice, had he felt obligated to do all these chores in a building belonging to his brother? Because, he replied, Marcel had been in prison at the time: “The Germans suspected my brother of treason.”

On March 15 Massu had been contacted by the German commissaire Robert Jodkum,
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who was willing to furnish details of Petiot's earlier arrest by the Germans. Jodkum was the interpreter and secretary of, successively, S.S. Hauptsturmführer Theo Dannecker and S.S. Obersturmführer Heinz Röthke, who directed Gestapo subsector IV-B4 on the rue des Saussaies—the Jewish Affairs division responsible for scheduling raids and determining which Jews should be sent to camps or deported; as such, Jodkum attended or conducted interrogations, occasionally participated in arrests, and gathered information. In early 1943, a French informer had told him of an escape organization that obtained false passports and smuggled Jews and downed Allied pilots to Spain and South America. The headquarters of this network were in a barbershop at 25 rue des Mathurins, a street that intersects the rue Caumartin a few hundred feet from number 66. The barber, Raoul Fourrier, and his friend Edmond Pintard were active members of the organization, the informer said, but the leader was a mysterious and elusive figure known only as Dr. Eugène. The Gestapo had arrested Fourrier and Pintard on May 21, 1943. After threatening them and beating Dr. Eugène's real name out of the barber, Gestapo officers had gone to the rue Caumartin apartment and arrested Dr. Petiot, along with René Nézondet, who happened by to deliver theater tickets for a musical comedy. Nézondet appeared totally innocent and was released two weeks later; Fourrier, Pintard, and Petiot were held in the Fresnes prison for eight months, until January 1944.

Massu's vision of the crimes abruptly took on a more horrifying dimension. He envisioned a new murder scenario: posing as the head of an escape organization, Petiot had lured desperate people into his home under some pretense and murdered them. Even the Germans had been fooled. But Massu was particularly puzzled by one thing: if Petiot had been in a Gestapo prison until January and, as Maurice avowed, visiting his brother at Auxerre for two weeks afterward to recuperate, and if as late as January 1944 there had been no bodies at the rue Le Sueur, as both Maurice and the architect claimed, how had the badly decomposed bodies gotten there? Was it really possible they were hidden there all the time—that the architect simply had not seen them and Maurice had lied? Surely if they were hidden there they would have given off an unmistakable stench. These conspicuous questions, which would never be answered, added themselves to the growing mountain of bizarre, contradictory detail.

Before he could investigate this new information, Massu's new theory was confirmed. That afternoon he was visited by a man named Jean Gouedo who, together with a Polish Jew named Joachim Guschinov, owned a fur store at 69 rue Caumartin. In late 1941, Gouedo told Massu, Guschinov was frightened by the increasingly harsh German treatment of Jews and toyed with the idea of leaving France. His physician and neighbor, Dr. Petiot, had told him this would be possible: for F25,000 he could obtain a false Argentinian passport and safe passage to South America. Gouedo had helped Guschinov pack on the eve of his departure. According to Petiot's instructions, all markings were removed from his clothes and $1,000 in U.S. currency was sewn into the shoulder pads of a suit. Guschinov also took a quantity of silver, gold, and diamonds worth F500,000–F700,000, another F500,000 in cash, and his five finest sable coats.

Massu summoned Guschinov's wife Renée, who told the rest of the story. On January 2, 1942, she and her husband had dined together; then he gathered his bags and consulted a map of Paris to find the street where he would meet Petiot. Madame Guschinov went with her husband as far as the rue Pergolèse, where he told her that he must continue the journey alone. They kissed and said good-bye, and Madame Guschinov had not seen him since. Massu also consulted a map, and saw that the rue Pergolèse intersects the rue Le Sueur.

Two months after her husband left, Renée Guschinov had gone to ask Petiot for news of him. The doctor had shown her a brief note in Guschinov's handwriting, undated, saying that he had traveled via Dakar and had safely reached Buenos Aires. Subsequent letters, one allegedly on the letterhead of the Alvear Palace Hotel in Buenos Aires, said that his new business there was doing well and that she should leave France and come at once. And why hadn't she gone? Massu asked. The reasons she gave the commissaire were obscure and contradictory (Petiot would later say she had found a lover she preferred to her husband). Joachim's letters stopped, and she wondered but did nothing. She was a Jew, and Jews did not like to make themselves conspicuous—which was perhaps one reason why she had not reported Joachim's disappearance to the police even now, after the Petiot affair had broken; she had been unwillingly dragged into it by Gouedo's report. Massu did not know what to make of her, but her husband's case seemed clear.

On March 17 Massu sent his men to pick up René Nézondet, whose name repeatedly came up in the Petiot investigation. Not only had he been arrested by the Germans along with Petiot the previous year, but back in 1942, when Petiot was questioned about the Van Bever and Khaït disappearances, the doctor claimed that Madame Khaït had told him of her wish to leave Paris and that he had given her Nézondet's address in Lyon, in the free zone. Inspector Gignoux had searched for Nézondet in Lyon, but he had recently been fired from his job at the newspaper
Le Figaro
for black-market activities and had then moved to Paris. When Gignoux found him there in 1943, Nézondet said that he and a girlfriend had successfully crossed the demarcation line on the Comte de Barbantane's property and that he might conceivably have mentioned this to Petiot at some point. But no, he had certainly never met Madame Khaït or Van Bever, nor could he understand why Petiot should have given anyone his name or thought he could be of help. When Massu's men now went to Nézondet's apartment at 15 rue Pauly in the fourteenth arrondissement, they found a viewer in his front door identical to the one in the wall of the triangular room at 21 rue Le Sueur.

René-Gustave Nézondet was an amiable, loose-fleshed man just over six foot three. His left eyelid drooped when at rest, and when he spoke he unconsciously compensated by raising that eyebrow—a habit that gave him a startlingly credulous expression. A forty-eight-year-old native of the Yonne, he had known Petiot for more than twenty years. When they first met, Nézondet had been the town clerk at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, but an injury to his right hand forced him to give up this position and he began raising trout and watercress and organizing Sunday-night dances at nearby Fontaine Rouge. After his marriage, his in-laws had insisted he see less of his friend Petiot, who was becoming actively involved in leftist politics in the village. Agreeable by nature, Nézondet bowed to their wishes, and apart from the occasions when Petiot and his wife put in an appearance at the Sunday-evening fêtes, he scarcely saw his former comrade until 1936, the year in which Nézondet's marriage broke up and he moved to Paris for the first time. Arriving in the capital, he had learned from another old friend from the Yonne, Roland Porchon, that Petiot, too, was living in Paris. Nézondet saw the doctor a few times, and their friendship rapidly resumed. Petiot found Nézondet jobs at a newspaper and as receptionist for a pharmaceutical company. Later, when police questioned Petiot's concierge about his acquaintances, the only person she could remember seeing at the doctor's rue Caumartin apartment was Nézondet. Despite their close association, Nézondet pleaded complete ignorance of Petiot's alleged murders, escape routes, or anything else outside the placid life of a dedicated local doctor. As for the viewers, they had both happened to buy one the same day at a flea market.

Roland Albert Porchon, Nézondet's friend, had already voluntarily gone to the police a day or two after the discovery at the rue Le Sueur. An overweight, middle-aged man whose very face inspired suspicion, Porchon was currently running a trucking firm and second-hand-furniture shop—the latest in a long series of semilegitimate ventures. His path had occasionally crossed that of the police, and in exchange for favors or oversights, or simply out of generosity toward close acquaintances, he sometimes supplied information to the police, particularly to Inspector René Bouygues of the Criminal Brigade, a friend for several years. On March 13 or 14 he had telephoned both Bouygues and Commissaire de Police Lucien Doulet saying he had important information to give them about Petiot. But his main reason for calling, police soon learned, was to cover up his own participation in an abortive attempt to send a couple to Petiot's ostensible escape network. Nothing was simple: the investigators grew accustomed to the fact that each new character who surfaced brought along a host of others—none of whom agreed with anyone else. Porchon brought the Maries.

In March 1943, a man named René Marie and his wife Marcelle heard, through an obscure chain of friends, that Porchon knew someone who could help them escape from France. According to Porchon, he had sent them to Petiot via Nézondet. According to the Marie couple, however, Nézondet had not been involved—Porchon had sent them directly to Petiot, who told them the escape price was F45,000 per person and that they should sell all their furniture. Porchon offered them F220,000 for their possessions. The Maries were worried and uncertain what to do, and when a friend reported unsavory rumors about Petiot's professional life, they resolved not to go. Immediately after learning of the rue Le Sueur discovery, Porchon came to the Maries, they reported, and instructed them not to go to the police; he suggested several rationalizations they could give if their names were found at Petiot's apartment and if the police should come to make inquiries. Porchon had enough problems already without risking implication in a murder case, and he hoped to keep out of it at all costs. He also went to Inspector Bouygues and asked him to cover up his involvement; the police officer initially agreed, believing, he later admitted, that here was a question of an honest escape organization that patriotism demanded he protect. He knew nothing of the Petiot affair at that time. But when he confidentially told an associate at headquarters of Porchon's visit, Bouygues learned what was now involved and immediately went to Massu.

When taken before
juge d'instruction
Berry on March 17, Porchon claimed that he had known of Petiot's crimes all along. In late June 1942, he confessed, Nézondet had told him everything and had proclaimed that “Petiot is the king of criminals. I never would have thought him capable of such a thing.” Porchon had asked him what he was talking about, and Nézondet told him of “sixteen corpses stretched out” at the rue Le Sueur that he had seen with his own eyes. “They were completely blackened; they were certainly killed by poison or injection.” Why had they been killed, Porchon asked? “I suppose he asked them for money to pass them into the free zone and instead of helping them escape, he killed them.” Nézondet had asked Porchon to remain silent about the murders and had assured him that he would go to the police himself as soon as the war was over.