Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris (35 page)

Cameras popped and flashed a dazzling light. The defendant first raised his hands to shield his face, before relenting and turning his favorite profile to the photographers. “
Gentlemen, please,” Petiot eventually said, when he had had enough. He scanned the crowded room looking for his wife, son, and brother, all of whom, of course, were in attendance, as were three widows and the few surviving family members of his alleged victims.

The clerk of the court read out the
acte d’accusation
, or indictment, charging Marcel Petiot with twenty-seven counts of “
willful homicide … committed with premeditation and malice aforethought, for the purpose of preparing, facilitating or affecting the fraudulent appropriation of clothing, personal items, identity papers, and a portion of the fortune of the above-mentioned victim.” The statement ran to more than twenty closely typed pages.

Of the victims, there were fifteen Jews; nine gangsters, prostitutes, and other people wanted by the police, the Gestapo, or both; and three people who had no known connection with the escape agency: Jean-Marc Van Bever, Marthe Khaït, and Denise Hotin. One victim was unidentified, described as a young woman who’d disappeared in late 1942 or early 1943. This was the second woman who had accompanied Jo the Boxer in an attempted departure from Occupied Paris.

During the indictment, rather dull, monotonous, and hardly audible for most people in the packed room, many of the attendees watched the defendant closely. Although stooped over or propped up on an elbow leaning onto the ledge of the prisoner’s box, Petiot had a formal bearing that still somehow looked dignified. He had the high forehead of an intellectual, with prominent cheekbones and thin lips “
like the edge or blade of a knife.” His hair was thinning, and, for many, like Kenneth Campbell of the
New York Times
, he looked younger than expected. Perhaps the most commonly noted feature was his hands. They were those not of a doctor or a surgeon, but rather, it was said, of a strangler or a butcher. The press was clearly not going to change its tune in painting a portrait of a killer, regardless of the fact that he had not yet been convicted and faced a trial with his life at stake.

Petiot, acting like the star in his own film, listened to the indictment, already looking bored. He brushed his hair back from his forehead with one hand and then the other.
The dark circles under his eyes reminded the writer Jean Galtier-Boissière of the makeup applied to sleepwalker Cesare in the German expressionist film
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
. The defendant gazed out into the distance, sometimes fixing his “
famous hypnotic stare,” as one journalist recalled, on a specific member of the audience. At other times, he looked down, concentrating on his doodling in the margins of his own copy of the indictment. The drawings, it was later discovered, were caricatures of the prosecutors, and not poorly done either.

During the roll call of the witnesses enlisted to testify in the trial, which included about ninety people, Floriot raised his first question: “
What about Colonel Dewavrin?” This was a key official in the
Resistance, the chief of the DGER, the military intelligence and counterintelligence organ of the Free French. Petiot had identified him in his pretrial interviews as someone who could vouch for his activities in the Resistance. Leser answered that the witness was “on a mission.”

“I am anxious to know the duration of this mission,” Floriot said.

“That’s my thought as well,” Dupin, the prosecutor, said.

At a quarter after three, after the hour-and-a-half
acte d’accusation
seemed to drag on interminably, Président Marcel Leser opened with the
interrogatoire
, a detailed examination of the charges that included a brief biography of the accused. In French law, a defendant’s past record plays a more important role for the prosecution than in Anglo-Saxon countries. In addition, the president of the court questions the defendant and may, if he chooses, comment on the answers as well. The accused may challenge witnesses or the prosecuting attorney, even in the middle of a testimony, and indeed failure to allow such a question may be grounds for a mistrial. Any of the lawyers—prosecution, defense, or civil attorney—may intervene at any time as well. To an outsider, a French trial might seem somewhat disordered; the Petiot case would look like pure chaos.

Indeed, in recounting the introductory overview of Petiot’s life, Leser had only gotten to the defendant’s work as a student at the University of Paris, which he called “mediocre,” when Petiot interrupted: “I did however get ‘very good’ on my thesis. I should be modest about these things.”

“You enjoyed a lot of popularity as a doctor. You were quite seductive.”

“Thank you.”

“
Don’t mention it,” Leser answered spontaneously, prompting laughter. Leser then reminded the court of other crimes that Petiot had been accused of committing as a young man. He mentioned a woman who leased Petiot his first house in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne and claimed that he had stolen furniture, including an antique stove, which he had tried to replace with a replica.

“She told everyone that she was having sexual intercourse with me,”
Petiot said. “I declined this honor. She lied.”

Leser asked about Petiot’s former maid and suspected lover, Louisette Delaveau, who had disappeared in 1926.

“
My first murder,” Petiot said sarcastically. “I assume of course that you have a witness.”

Pierre Scize of
Le Figaro
noted that Petiot had good fortune in drawing Leser for his trial. The president would be accused of being too lenient with the defendant. Jean Galtier-Boissière thought that Leser seemed like a plump, jovial
St. Antony on the bench. In Leser’s defense, it was early in his career and he had no experience with witnesses as brazen as Petiot, or trials as high profile as this one. Leser simply pressed ahead in his biographical introduction, noting the suspected thefts of oil, gasoline, and tires and, one example that the press would particularly seize on, a supposed Christmas Eve theft of a cross from a cemetery.

“
That was a story spread by all the bigots and hypocrites in the country.” The cross, Petiot said, “disappeared two hundred years ago. There must be a statute of limitations, isn’t there, Monsieur le Président?”

“But you were convicted for tapping electricity?”

“Yes, I was convicted,” Petiot said, “but that does not prove that I was guilty.” The audience roared in approval.

“
Next you are going to tell me the whole dossier is false.”

“No, I would not say that. Only eight-tenths of it is false.”

The prosecutor, Dupin, apparently uneasy about how the
interrogatoire
had opened, intervened. At this point, Petiot lost his temper in a startling outburst of anger. “Stop!” he shouted, glaring at the prosecutor and clenching his hand into a fist. “Would you please be so kind as to allow me to finish?”

Leser reprimanded him. “I forbid you to speak in that tone.”

“All right,” Petiot said, described as waving off the president with the back of his hand. “But I don’t care to be treated like a criminal. And I ask the gentlemen of the jury, who will be the referees of this battle, to note all the lies in the dossier.”

After recounting the scandals of Petiot’s career as mayor in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, with frequent interruptions, Leser discussed his Parisian medical practice. He noted the leaflet Petiot handed out announcing his arrival, which boasted his ability to cure everything from appendicitis to pain in childbirth. Leser, unimpressed, called it “
the prospectus of a quack!”

“Thank you for the advertising,” Petiot said, “but I would ask you to keep your opinions to yourself.”

Floriot objected. “The first requirement of a court is to be impartial. I request that you withdraw the epithet ‘quack.’ ”

“I never said that,” Leser replied, before agreeing to retract the statement. He next questioned Petiot about his substantial wealth, particularly the contrast between his “astronomical salary” and the paltry sums he declared on his tax returns.

“Oh, astronomical,” Petiot said, again with sarcasm, adding that his 300 to 500 thousand francs a year hardly qualified as astronomical. When Leser pointed out that Petiot had only claimed 25,000 francs in income, the defendant said he was observing a long-standing medical tradition: “When a surgeon earns eight or ten million a year, he declares a hundred thousand francs. That proves that I am a Frenchman. I didn’t want to seem like some kind of sucker.”

At this point, some members of the audience laughed, and others applauded. The audience was indeed having a taste of Petiot’s wit, a hint of the verbal sparring to come, and a preview of the many difficulties the
président
would face in a trial already on the verge of slipping out of control.

A
S Leser continued his preliminary examination, he turned to the charges of shoplifting against Petiot at the Joseph Gibert Bookshop in April 1936. The defendant denied stealing anything. It was raining, he said. “I was engrossed in my invention. I consulted the book, and then I put it under my arm by distraction.” When Leser asked which invention, Petiot launched into a monologue about his device to cure
chronic intestinal problems and claimed that “everyone with a fancy for invention is suspected of being crazy.”

“But it was you who pretended to be insane every time you had trouble with the law.”

“No one ever knows if he is crazy or not,” Petiot said. “You can only be crazy by comparison.”

Turning to the subject of rue Le Sueur, Leser recounted the defendant’s history with the building and began to describe its features. When he made it to the triangular room with its false door, fake alarms, iron hooks, and one-way viewing lens, Petiot interrupted. “
Nothing is simpler,” he said. This was going to be the room of his clinic that would house his radiotherapy equipment. The bell did not work because he had not yet installed the electrical wires. The “false door” was mere decoration, with the wood chosen for its ability to protect against humidity. As for the viewer, what good was it when it was “obstructed by wallpaper”? The small room had been exaggerated beyond recognition by the lies of the Nazi press. “You understand me, don’t you?”

Petiot also repeated his assertion that the bodies found in his house had been planted there by Germans while he was imprisoned as a Resistance fighter at Fresnes. Before drawing this conclusion, the defendant admitted that he had first blamed his Fly-Tox colleagues for dumping the dead bodies of Germans and traitors on his property.

“But what comrades?” Dupin asked. “What are their names?”

“I will not deliver the names of the comrades of my group because they are not guilty, no more than I am anyway. Some of them offered to testify here for me, but I didn’t want them to do so because these men deserve the Croix de la Libération for eliminating thirty
Boches
and you would put them in handcuffs.”

“Let them come, and I will give them the Cross. I promise you.”

“No, no. I will not give you their names so long as the purge [of collaborators] is incomplete, and people are still free who swore an oath to Pétain.”

As several eyewitnesses described it, Leser then threw his arms into the air and claimed that he had never seen anything like this.

“Don’t lift your arms to the sky, Monsieur le Président,” Petiot said.

“I’ll lift my arms to the sky if I want!”

“Then you’ll have reason to lift them even higher in a little while.”

Clearly Petiot was scoring points with a
public that looked back on the discredited Vichy regime with extreme distaste. Leser moved the conversation on to Petiot’s assertion of having joined the Resistance from the very beginning and noted that “there was no Resistance at that time.” At this unpopular position, the audience booed.

“No organized Resistance, I mean.” Leser retreated, asking Petiot to elaborate on his purported invention of a secret weapon.

The defendant refused, claiming that it was not appropriate to discuss it as the
Boches
might use it against Allied troops stationed in Germany. He then repeated his claims of having killed German soldiers with his weapon, mentioning hitting a man on a horse in the Bois de Boulogne.
After a heckler suggested that they call the horse to the stand, Petiot spoke of his Resistance group, its work with the Arc-de-Ciel network, and its relationship with the same unnamed English special operations officer who supposedly trained Resistance fighters in the Franche-Comté. He told how he and his comrades in the Fly-Tox organization blew up German trains in the Chevreuse Valley.

When Leser ordered a short recess, many members of the audience refused to budge from their seats. Some ate sandwiches in the courtroom; others ventured out only after ensuring their seat was saved and returned with a copy of Petiot’s book,
Le Hasard vaincu
, which was being sold in the street outside the Palais de Justice. Often in intermissions throughout the trial, Petiot would leave his box and sign copies.

After the break, the attorney representing the Khaït and Dreyfus families, Maître Pierre Véron, began to question Petiot on his alleged Resistance activities. Tall, broad-shouldered, with close-cropped hair and a
Legion d’honneur
pinned on his gown, the thirty-six-year-old Véron was well qualified for this task. A Resistance fighter himself, Véron had detonated many bridges, as he helped protect the right flank of Patton’s army while it approached Paris in the summer of 1944.
One film producer working for the U.S. Army and in attendance at the trial
said that Véron was one of three people in the room who could play himself in a Hollywood production. The other two were Leser and Petiot.

Véron opened with a simple question about a subject Petiot claimed expertise in: “
What are plastic explosives?”

Petiot stammered, appeared ruffled, and, some thought, reddened with embarrassment. Véron charged ahead as if his suspicions of Petiot’s ignorance were confirmed: “How do you carry plastic explosives? How do you prime them? How do you detonate them?”