The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot (7 page)

Judge Berry was stunned. This was the first time anyone had admitted to knowing anything and, if it was true, the case against Petiot was suddenly blessed with firm support. But as questioning continued, Porchon showed himself to be a more and more unreliable witness. He had told Inspector Bouygues, for example, that he had once seen Petiot dressed in work clothes toiling away at foul deeds in a cellar. Called before the
juge d'instruction
again, he retracted this story, saying that he had recently undergone a minor foot operation, and that when he spoke to Bouygues he had been hallucinating as a result of the anesthetic.

Nonetheless, Porchon had certainly known something long before the police did. Commissaire Doulet, another of Porchon's many friends on the force, now remembered that the year before, on August 2, 1943, during the period that Petiot was in the Gestapo prison at Fresnes, Porchon had come to his office about some minor police matter and had told the commissaire he was about to go to the Police Judiciaire to discuss a very important case. “According to him,” Doulet said, “it concerned a Parisian doctor who, under the pretext of passing young people out of the country, asked them for sums of money between F50,000 and F75,000 and then did away with them after payment. This doctor supposedly got rid of the bodies by burying them in the courtyard of his building.” Porchon, according to Doulet, claimed to have heard about the murders from the Gestapo, “who did not want to interfere since it was a purely French matter.”

Doulet encouraged Porchon to report immediately and without fail to the Police Judiciaire. When Doulet later asked if he had done so, Porchon assured him: “Yes, I saw a police officer whom I know well. He didn't seem to take the matter very seriously, but in the next few days I intend to give him additional information which should interest him.” The officer in question, of course, was Bouygues, who now recalled that, yes, sometime in the summer of 1943 Porchon had briefly mentioned something about someone who sent people “to the other side,” but had also said that this unnamed person was then arrested and imprisoned by the Germans. Porchon had never furnished additional details, nor had he mentioned Petiot's name until after the rue Le Sueur discovery, and Bouygues had completely forgotten the event until he was reminded of it. Judge Berry was dumbfounded. Witnesses rarely agree completely, but this case was truly incredible. Now, on top of everything else, he was faced with police officers who were told about mass murders and not only didn't investigate the reports, but soon forgot all about them.

Hoping someone would crack, Berry had Porchon and Nézondet confront each other in his chambers. Nézondet said Porchon's story was laughable, and to prove his point he laughed. He had never heard anything so ridiculous in his life! A day or two later, however, the police interrogated Madame Marie Turpault, a friend of Nézondet's mistress Aimée Lesage, whom the couple had once sent to Petiot for rheumatism treatments. In December 1943, Madame Turpault said, she had been at Nézondet's apartment and had asked about Petiot. “He's a real bastard,” Nézondet had told her. “He's in prison right now, and he should stay there.” Nézondet further said, according to Madame Turpault, that he had met Petiot's brother Maurice, who had found bodies in a pit at the doctor's house and a book with a list of sixty names. Maurice had asked Nézondet to help him dispose of the evidence and hush up the matter; Nézondet claimed he had refused to do this and had threatened to go to the police at the end of the war.

Nézondet was now confronted with Madame Turpault, and he said that she, too, was inventing fabulous stories, even though much of her tale closely resembled Porchon's testimony. Madame Turpault stubbornly stuck to her earlier statement, and added that Maurice Petiot had asked Nézondet to help him build a wall to conceal the cadavers. On March 22, Nézondet, unable to hold out any longer, announced that Porchon and Turpault were telling the truth and that he would now tell the whole story. His version, which Judge Berry's clerk copied down and added to the rest, was as follows.

In November or December 1943, while Petiot was still in prison at Fresnes, Nézondet met Maurice at the Hôtel Alicot, the same hotel where Georgette later stopped while in flight to Auxerre. Maurice was pale and trembling. He told Nézondet: “I have just come from my brother's house. There's enough there to have us all shot.”

“Enough what?” Nézondet asked. “An arms cache? A secret transmitter?”

“I wish that's all it was,” Maurice replied. “The journeys to South America begin and end at the rue Le Sueur. There are bodies piled in a pit, with their hair and eyebrows shaved off. I found a book where he [Marcel] wrote down the names of his victims; there must have been fifty or sixty of them.” Maurice described to Nézondet the method of killing. A syringe filled with poison was somehow arranged so that it could be operated from a distance, though Nézondet did not recall the formula of the poison Maurice allegedly described, and his own descriptions of the syringe, which in some of his varying statements he claimed Maurice said had been mounted in the false doorbell in the triangular room, were incomprehensible. No mounting of any kind was found in the doorbell. Nézondet added that Maurice had also mentioned finding large quantities of clothing at the rue Le Sueur, both civilian apparel of all kinds and German army uniforms. Maurice had packed everything into crates and taken the stuff away in a five-ton truck.

A few weeks after Maurice recounted this horror story, Nézondet continued, Georgette Petiot and her son Gérard came to Nézondet's apartment for dinner. Sometime during the evening she mentioned that the accusations the Germans leveled against her husband were really not very serious, and she expected his release shortly. Nézondet drew her away from Gérard. Without mentioning Maurice's name, he informed her of the bodies at the rue Le Sueur. She fainted three times and threatened to commit suicide. Nézondet, with a peculiar notion of assuagement and tact, advised her to get a divorce and find a lover. When Georgette pulled herself together she went to Maurice, who was in Paris on business, and recounted Nézondet's incredible story. Nézondet was summoned by them the next day to explain himself. Maurice now feigned ignorance of the whole matter, according to Nézondet, and so he remained silent. He assumed Maurice's attitude must mean he wished to protect his sister-in-law from knowledge that might endanger her sanity. When Judge Berry questioned Aimée Lesage, who had been present at the dinner, she supported everything her lover had said about the evening's events. She suspected Madame Petiot had contrived her fainting spells and was really neither so surprised nor horrified as she seemed.

Georgette Petiot told Judge Berry that this 1943 incident really had happened, but that when Nézondet refused to repeat his extraordinary claims in front of Maurice she had concluded that he was lying. When he had suggested she take a lover she thought he was offering himself for the role, and she surmised that his slanders against her husband were only a weird means of attaining this end by forcing her into a divorce.

Nézondet also now told Judge Berry that he had gone to the police about Petiot. Inspector Gignoux had questioned him about Madame Khaït in July 1943. At that time Nézondet had simply said that Petiot was in prison, without mentioning anything about Maurice's alleged confidences. When the Germans released Petiot in January 1944, Nézondet said he had been extremely worried and uncertain. He knew that Petiot had killed, but since Maurice had told him about German army uniforms at the rue Le Sueur, and since the Germans had released Petiot, he wildly theorized that his friend was killing German deserters with the approval of the Gestapo. But he wasn't sure. Nézondet had gone to the Police Judiciaire and told Inspector Gignoux that Petiot was now free, vaguely hoping that the police would keep an eye on him. According to Nézondet, Gignoux told him: “The Petiot affair is over; besides, we can't follow him.” And another inspector in the room muttered to himself, “I wouldn't be surprised if there were thirty or forty victims in this case.” All of this led Nézondet to believe the police were completely aware of what was going on. Gignoux and the other inspector denied having said any such thing and said that though Nézondet had come to tell them of Petiot's release, they had not understood the point of his visit. Curiously, immediately after telling the Police Judiciaire about Petiot, Nézondet, by his own admission, told Petiot that he had spoken to the authorities—perhaps thinking that the doctor would not dare harm him with the police in the picture. Since, as he told inspectors, he feared for his life, he and Aimée Lesage had insisted on meeting Petiot and his brother in a public café.

The investigators found Nézondet impossible to figure out. Maurice Petiot naturally denied the whole extraordinary tale, and the entire Petiot family called Nézondet a buffoon and a lunatic. “He was very upset when the Germans arrested him,” Maurice explained gently, “and his mind has never completely recovered from the shock. Nézondet always used to keep me well entertained because he told a lot of amusing stories. This time I don't think he's very funny.” Maurice's wife Monique recounted to police and reporters that when Nézondet lived in Lyon, he had reportedly discovered the location of a buried treasure by dowsing with a pendulum. He had bought the field under which the treasure lay, only to have his pendulum change its mind and indicate that the treasure was in an adjacent field. Rather than purchase that field, he began digging a tunnel underneath. Nézondet did not deny this story; he dryly commented: “So? That doesn't prove that I'm a buffoon.”

For a week, the investigation remained at an impasse. Though the police could never prove that Maurice had truly told him of the bodies at the rue Le Sueur, Nézondet was charged with non-denunciation of a crime—an offense instituted by the Germans in October 1941 to discourage the French from concealing Resistance activity. Technically the law concerned only those who were witnesses to a crime or who learned of projected crimes, and Nézondet's lawyer argued that his client fell into neither of these categories. Nonetheless, Nézondet was to spend fourteen months in the Santé prison. The court was using any possible pretext to keep everyone connected with Petiot in custody until the maze of complicity could be untangled. Besides, Commissaire Massu assured Aimée Lesage, her lover was really much safer imprisoned by the French than at the mercy of the Germans.

*
After Batut's visit, Maurice had gone to Joigny hoping to arrange for his nephew Gérard to be transferred to a school there—so that the youth would be more isolated from the trauma of the investigation. For whatever reason, this plan came to nothing and Gérard remained in Auxerre.

*
Or Jodkun, Jokum, Jodkuhn. According to the French historian and former police commissaire Jacques Delarue, “Jodkum” was a pseudonym. Robert Jodkum was arrested by the Germans later in 1944, for reasons unknown, and imprisoned at Fresnes. He was subsequently sent back to Germany, and neither his fate nor real name was ever discovered by the postwar French authorities who investigated war crimes.

4

THE ESCAPE NETWORK

The German report had presented Massu with two other key names: Fourrier and Pintard, who had been arrested for helping Petiot with his “escape network.” Edmond Pintard was fifty-six years old, but the flesh had shrunk on his stooped, large frame, his teeth were broken and discolored, and he looked much older than his age. In the twenties, as a vaudeville actor, he had performed song-and-dance routines at various cabarets under the stage name of Francinet. But changing times and the war had squeezed him out, and he now earned an irregular living doing odd jobs and working as a free-lance cinema makeup man for Paramount. The rest of the time he loitered about cafés in the less desirable
quartiers
of Paris and reminisced about the old days. He responded to Massu's questioning like an indignant, wronged innocent.

“Monsieur le Commissaire, do you have any idea who you're talking to?”

“Yes, I do. Edmond Pintard, makeup artist, currently threatened with indictment for complicity.”

“Complicity? Me? The great Francinet? Yes, the great Francinet, a personal friend of every music-hall director in Paris, specialist in songs for weddings and banquets. My name, Monsieur le Commissaire, was on the Morris columns in letters
that
big. If today you find me a mere makeup artist, it is because I chose to retire at the height of my glory.”

“How much did Dr. Petiot give you to be his recruiting agent?”

“You dare …”

“I dare say that if you keep telling me the story of your life, I'm going to get very angry. We are not at the theater here, and in this file that you see here on this desk there are the names of nine people, innocent men and women, who were murdered through the diligent care of your friend Petiot. Murdered and perhaps tortured before being neatly dissected and dropped into a lime pit. I don't suppose you have ever smelled the fragrance of burning human flesh, have you? I asked how much Petiot paid you. I don't believe I heard your answer.”

Pintard was quickly broken and confessed everything. As he left, he begged: “Monsieur le Commissaire, could you ask the photographers to leave me alone? The people who know me … I'm ashamed …”

“I can't do anything about it,” Massu replied with a shrug. “They're only doing their job.” And the photographs of Pintard that appeared in the papers, like those of Fourrier, Nézondet, Porchon, and the others, would show them leaving interrogations tired, unshaven, and frightened, giving readers the impression that Petiot was aided in his work by a band of crazed derelicts.

Raoul Fourrier, the sixty-one-year-old barber, was as short and square as Pintard was lean. The beret thrust down about his ears would have made him look comical but for his tightly clenched teeth and the terrified expression in his eyes. He was crushed in advance. Droplets of sweat ran through the deep wrinkles of his neck, his eyelids fluttered uncontrollably, he never lifted his head or raised his voice above a low monotone as he told his story. Aside from the question of money—for each witness wished to retain a vestige of pride and present himself as a patriot rather than an opportunist—Fourrier and Pintard told exactly the same tale of how they had unwittingly sent a dozen people to their deaths. Their story, as follows, was borne out in every detail by the few surviving witnesses as well as by the German dossier Robert Jodkum surreptitiously loaned to Massu.