Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris (6 page)

Apparently Louisette had not said good-bye to her friends or anyone else in town, either. She left no forwarding address and did not pack her personal belongings. “
If she returns to the house when I am not here,” Petiot told Suzanne, who replaced her as cook and maid, “her things are there and you should give her this envelope.” The new employee did not know what was in the envelope. Louisette never returned.

Few at the time suspected anything sinister. One anonymous letter to the police did accuse Petiot of murdering his lover, but investigators did not find any evidence of foul play. The official search was abandoned after a few months.

Not long after Louisette’s disappearance, it had been reported,
Petiot was seen loading a large wicker basket into the trunk of his sports car. This testimony gained additional relevance a few days later, when the body of a young woman in her mid-twenties was retrieved from the same kind of basket outside Dijon. What’s more, Commissaire Massu was in a position to appreciate the importance of something that had escaped investigators at the time. The corpse in the basket had been
decapitated, the body had been dismembered, and the inner organs and intestines had been cut out.

M
ASSU approached crime methodically and with as little emotion as possible, trying not to differentiate between major and minor crimes, or what he called interesting and uninteresting ones. In each case, it was only a matter of victims and criminals—the former had to be identified and the latter apprehended and brought to justice. No more, no less. “
A murder is a murder,” he said.

Massu was a native Parisian, born on December 9, 1889. His father had died in Massu’s second year, and his mother had supported the family by working at a grocer’s shop. At the age of thirteen, Massu had gone to work for a butcher on rue des Capucines. He would spend the next five or six years working for various butchers around the capital.
In January 1908, just after his eighteenth birthday, Massu volunteered for the army, joining the 117th Infantry Regiment. He was discharged two years later with the rank of sergeant and eventually found work again in the credit office of the large department store Galeries Lafayette, just a few steps from Dr. Petiot’s future home. Massu stayed there until his application to the police was accepted.

On December 16, 1911, at age twenty-two, Massu began work under Charles Vallet in the Brigade Mobile, which had been established to supervise the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition. His first days on the force coincided with the pursuit of the infamous band of anarchists known as the Bonnot Gang.

Viewing theft as liberation, Jules-Joseph Bonnot and his men had stolen automobiles and rapid-reloading rifles, which they then used to burglarize everything from shops to homes. On December 21, 1911, for instance, when they robbed a Montmartre branch of the Société Génerale Bank, they fled in an automobile; the police, at the time, pursued criminals on horseback and bicycle. The reign of the “
Motor Car Bandits,” as the press dubbed them, ended with its leaders killed or captured, all during Massu’s first year on the force.

After years of chasing pickpockets, which he called “
good training” for teaching him how to follow a suspect, watch that person closely, and ultimately catch him or her in the act of committing a crime, Massu had developed into a patient and observant detective with a mastery of police procedure. He was praised for his psychological insight into the criminal mind. As he gained more responsibilities, rising to secretary in August 1921 and eventually commissaire of police in January 1933, Massu would also earn a reputation for his ability to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of the men who served on his team. Some superb interrogators, Massu said, could not catch a pickpocket, and many detectives, veritable bloodhounds in the hunt for a criminal, would be lost in the interrogation room. His job was to delegate the tasks of an investigation accordingly.

Massu’s own specialty was interrogation. He placed an enormous value on its importance to an investigation. Evidence at a crime scene was often complicated, subject to a variety of interpretations; witnesses may lie, mislead, or make mistakes, and science, even in the best of circumstances, was not infallible. But an interrogation could produce a detailed confession—and this, when corroborated by outside verification, represented the most certain way to determine if someone was guilty and, what’s more, ensure that justice was in fact being served.

Success in the interrogation room meant tailoring his strategy to suit the suspect sitting in the green velvet chair in his office. Whether dealing with a thug or a sophisticated swindler, it was always essential to create a calm environment for questioning. A glass of beer or a dry white wine, the commissaire said, was more productive than screaming in the suspect’s face, threatening reprisals, or resorting to blows. Massu prided himself not only on gaining the most confessions at the Quai des Orfèvres, but, more important, on the fact that he had achieved these results “
without raising the voice or the hand.”

In 1937, when the International Exposition had returned to Paris, Massu established the “Brigade Volante,” a mobile police squad to fight crime, which had risen dramatically at the 185-day World’s Fair that drew some 31.5 million registered visitors. Massu tried to make sure that
this “ritual of Peace and Progress” would not be scarred by murder or tragedy. He averaged about three hundred arrests per month, but in one key respect, Massu and all his colleagues had not succeeded.

A German drifter named Eugen Weidmann had been luring tourists away to a small villa west of Paris, at St. Cloud, where he killed and robbed his six victims and then buried most of them in his basement. Weidmann was eventually caught, sentenced to death, and guillotined in June 1939.
The massive, unruly crowd outside St. Pierre’s prison at Versailles that day would prompt the French president LeBrun, nine days later, to abolish public executions.

Now, four and a half years after Weidmann, there was another serial killer in Paris, this one more prolific and far more disturbing.

W
ITH the order from the German authorities in hand, Commissaire Massu hurriedly drafted a warrant for the arrest of Marcel Petiot and his wife, Georgette. The latter was described as “
about forty years old, small stature, light complexion, thin face.” Dr. Petiot, age forty-seven, was presented as being “about 180 cm [just under 5′11″], rather corpulent, dark chestnut brown hair, thrown back, slight frontal baldness, clean-shaven, strong jaw, chin slightly prominent, and wearing a large overcoat.” Petiot is, the notice warned, “considered dangerous.”

“
The steps of an investigation,” Massu said, “are always the same: statements, interrogations of witnesses, picking up clues and fingerprints at the scene of the crime and everywhere it seems necessary.” All of this would be “compared and examined scientifically,” looking for “anything that can be useful to the demonstration of the truth.” As for finding the suspect, Massu was confident. No matter how clever a murderer had been, how perfect his plan, or flawless its execution, a murderer was always, at some point, “an idiot.” A mistake would eventually be made and he would pounce.

Investigator Marius Battut and a couple of homicide detectives
headed to Petiot’s apartment on rue Caumartin, which was not too far from the métro stations Caumartin and Saint-Lazare. The apartment was in the middle of the lively Opera District, full of hotels, restaurants, cafés, theaters, nightclubs, brothels, and many other commercial establishments on and around the Boulevard Haussmann.

The officers walked up to the five-story building at No. 66. Two businesses were on the ground floor: the hairdresser salon Gaston Coiffure and the bistro La Chope du Printemps. An air raid shelter was in the basement. To the right of the front door was a black marble plaque with engraved gold letters advertising the medical practice and office hours of Dr. Petiot, a graduate of the University of Paris Medical School.

The bistro, the hair salon, and Petiot’s practice were all closed. The concierge, Raymonde Denis, happened to be away from her lodge when the police team arrived. Her twelve-year-old daughter, Alice, on the other hand, told the officers that she had seen Marcel Petiot and his wife, Georgette,
about nine thirty the previous night, when they had returned home together on foot. She thought that they might still be in their apartment.

The officers walked up two flights of stairs and knocked. No one answered. The door, the officers discovered, was unlocked. Later the police would learn that Petiot never locked his doors, because a skilled burglar, he reasoned, would always find a way inside, and this way, he would not have to make repairs. The police, however, did not enter.

Although they held a warrant for the arrest of the couple, and authorization to search rue Le Sueur, they did not have permission to search Petiot’s apartment. The Germans might flaunt French laws, but Battut was determined to follow procedure. On their way back to the headquarters to obtain the necessary paperwork, the officers met Petiot’s concierge.

“
Yesterday evening,” thirty-nine-year-old Raymond Denis said, “I saw Dr. Petiot for the last time at seven o’clock.” He was leaving the apartment on his bicycle. About eight o’clock, Georgette had stopped by the concierge lodge with some cakes for her daughter. Madame Denis
did not know anything else about the evening, other than the fact that at about nine thirty p.m., after she had gone to bed, her daughter said that she had seen Marcel and Georgette come home.

When the police officers returned to rue Caumartin the following morning with the search warrant, there was no one there. In contrast to the chaos at rue Le Sueur, the rooms here were neat and tidy. Papers, personal belongings, and other objects of value were conspicuously absent. What they did find was a large supply of coffee, sugar, chocolate, and spirits, all difficult to obtain in wartime Paris—
a veritable prewar café, Massu said. There was also a variety of prescription drugs and narcotics, including peyote, a hallucinogenic drug popular in Parisian nightclubs, and some
504 vials of morphine, worth a fortune on the black market.

This was a large amount, even for a physician who, as reports indicated, claimed to treat drug addicts in his practice. Was Petiot a drug user himself? Was he dealing in drugs on the side? Early rumors suggested that Petiot catered to a diverse clientele, and his office was located in a notorious drug district. Physicians, too, investigators knew, were the most readily available source of illegal drugs in Occupied Paris.

In addition, the inspectors found a collection of bizarre artwork and a number of masks described as “
diabolical and grimacing.” On a pedestal in the doctor’s office, between the cupboard and the wall, was a wooden statue, about two feet in height, of a beast, a devilish or Pan-like creature with a grotesquely large phallus. Dr. Petiot, police soon learned, was the artist.

M
ARCEL Petiot had indeed been selling drugs. By March 1944,
no fewer than ninety-five registered drug addicts were attending his “detoxication program” at rue Caumartin, ostensibly to be cured of their addiction by a series of increasingly smaller doses. Petiot had gained a reputation for this treatment and also for being a sympathetic doctor who indulged his patients. His waiting room was regularly packed. Georgette, who did the bookkeeping for the practice, was busier than ever.

Massu now learned that Petiot had a sizable file with the Brigade Mondaine, a specialized force of the Police Judiciaire that dealt with, among other things, prostitution, procurement, pornography, and drugs.
In early 1942, in another periodic clamp-down on the rampant illicit drug trade in Paris, the Brigade Mondaine had launched a campaign to arrest suspected addicts. Among the people taken into custody was one of Petiot’s patients, and the subsequent inquiry had raised a number of questions about the physician, which, in light of the later investigation, would prove to be a key piece of evidence.

The patient was
Jean-Marc Van Bever, a forty-one-year-old coal deliverer. This was his first steady job, gained only a few months before, with the rising demand for this scarce resource to heat offices, apartments, and other buildings. Previously Van Bever had invested his inheritance into a number of printing businesses that had gone bust. For most of the late 1930s, he had lived in poverty, eking out an existence
thanks to social welfare and various charities. This was an unexpected result for a man of his background.

After graduating from the prestigious Louis-le-Grand Lycée, Van Bever had studied at university, including a year in law school. He spoke English and knew a smattering of Spanish and Italian. His father, Adolphe Van Bever, had coedited a noted anthology of French poets, and his great-uncle was the painter La Quintinie.

At the time of his arrest, Van Bever had protested that he was not an addict himself, claiming only to have mixed in the environment thanks to his relationship with a prostitute named Jeannette Gaul. At thirty-four years of age, Gaul had a severe addiction to morphine and one of its more potent derivatives, heroin, which had grown in popularity in Paris after expanding beyond its original use as a cough suppressant and cure for a variety of diseases of the “air passages,” ranging from bronchitis to pneumonia. Both morphine and heroin flourished in the demimonde, not least among prostitutes trying to escape hazards of the trade.

After working as a chambermaid with a family in Fontainebleau and later moving on to a number of brothels in Nantes, Clamecy, and Auxerre, Gaul had arrived in Paris just after the Occupation. Her last pimp, Henri “The Jailbird” Baldenweek, had abandoned her and she became an unlicensed streetwalker,
the most exposed and dangerous of the main types of prostitution that flourished in the Occupation. In November 1941, not far from La Madeleine, Gaul met Van Bever. After three weeks of regular visits, he asked her to move in with him in his small rented room at 56 rue Piat in the 20th arrondissement. She promised to quit her job. This was two days before Christmas 1941.