The Ability to Kill (15 page)

I feel it necessary to warn any of you gentlemen who may be thinking of basing a family excursion to France on those
assumptions, that the facts are different. Under the circumstances, too, I thought it as well to advise your Honorary Secretary that, much as I enjoy the company of female murder-tasters, it would, in my opinion, be prudent in this case to neglect to notify the female membership of the Society of the time and place of this little talk.

Attempts are always being made to ascribe to the murders of this country or that a distinct national flavour. The characteristic American murder, for instance, has been held to be the open air shooting; those murderers who cut their victims up, put the pieces in trunks and deposit them in the cloakrooms of main line railway termini are attributed mainly to England; the nineteenth century Scottish poisoners, it is said, form as clearly differentiated a group as the Renaissance Italians.

However, there is one fact about murder in France of which we can be absolutely certain. If there is such a thing as a characteristically French murder, it is not the
crime passionel.
Even in the thirties, the number of murders which came into that category was a bare twelve per cent of the total. And, gentlemen, take note of this; with a few pathetic exceptions, the only French killers who have ever successfully used the conception of the
crime passionel
as a defence have been women. Where a woman is concerned, indeed, a
crime passionel
does not have to be committed in a moment of sudden overwhelming emotion. It can be premeditated.

The case of Henriette Caillaux (1914) is a famous example.

She was the second wife of Joseph Caillaux, the French Minister of Finance, and their relationship had been a stormy one. As Mademoiselle ‘Riri’ Rainouard, she had been the Minister’s mistress, until in 1909 an unfortunate incident occurred. In a period of special ardour the Minister had written his Riri some letters. Interspersed with his protestations of love (‘A thousand million kisses on every part of your adorable
little body’) had been some candid explanations of his current political manœuvrings. When, on reflection, the Minister had decided that he had been indiscreet, he had asked her to send the letters back.

Riri had done so. However, the Minister’s mood of discretion had passed. Instead of destroying the letters, he had merely locked them in a drawer. The first Madame Caillaux, a watchful woman, had thereupon procured a duplicate key and taken possession.

For a time, she used the letters to blackmail him into giving up Riri, but, after a while, she seemed to relent, and in 1911 agreed (on her terms) to a divorce. However, the divorce contract stipulated that the letters were to be destroyed, and Madame formally assured the Minister that she had carried out that part of the bargain. In October, he married Riri.

For a while they were blissfully happy. Then, the Minister learned to his horror that the letters he had believed destroyed were being offered clandestinely to his political enemies. The couple waited wretchedly for the worst.

In 1914 it came. Gaston Calmette, director of
Le Figaro
, and the most influential French journalist of the day, began in January of that year a series of violent attacks upon the Finance Minister.

French political commentators have never been mealy-mouthed, but the virulence and ferocity of Calmette’s campaign was exceptional, even for those days. It is possible that he was driven by some other, more personal reason than the high-minded motives of public interest which he professed. We do not know. It no longer matters. The attacks went on, day after day, relentlessly. In March, he began to include extracts from those disastrous letters.

For a while the Minister and Riri squirmed helplessly. Then, as Calmette persisted, they became desperate. They were
advised to take legal advice. The judge whom they consulted told them that there was nothing to be done in law. Incensed by this confirmation of his impotence, the Minister shouted that he would break Calmette’s neck.

‘When?’ inquired Riri.

‘Never you mind,’ replied the Minister darkly.

Possibly, Riri was not satisfied with this reply. Possibly, knowing that her husband was a busy man, she wished to save him trouble. The following day she went to a gunsmith’s, selected a revolver and tried it out in the company’s private range. She then went home again, changed her dress and drove to the
Figaro
office.

She had to wait to see Calmette, but she got in at last.

‘No doubt you are surprised to see me,’ she said as he rose to greet her.

This was an understatement, but he bowed politely. ‘Not at all, Madame. Please sit down.’

Instead of accepting his invitation she drew the revolver, thumbed over the safety catch and fired all six chambers at him. Four of the bullets wounded him, one of them fatally.

Riri remained calm. To those who rushed into the office and disarmed her, she said loftily: ‘I am a lady. My car is waiting to take me to the police station.’

She remained calm—and ladylike—throughout her trial; and secured a complete acquittal.

Compare this with the case of the hapless Jean-Louis Verger, a mad priest, who stabbed the Archbishop of Paris to death during a service in the church of St Etienne du Mont.

Asked why he had committed the crime, he replied: ‘Because I do not believe in the Immaculate Conception.’

A ten-minute examination by a court physician was sufficient to dispose of the defence’s timid suggestion that Verger was insane, and to establish that he had a ‘most perverse and
dangerous nature.’ After that, the jury had no difficulty in deciding that this was a matter for the guillotine.

More fortunate was Marcel Hilaire, the millionaire miller, who was tried in 1953 for murdering his young mistress. His lawyer’s contention that it was a
crime passionel
succeeded. Instead of being guillotined, Hilaire was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour.

The French belief that, when murder has been done, there may sometimes be extenuating circumstances, should not be misunderstood. The patient Anglo-Saxon crowd waiting quietly outside the courthouse for a glimpse of the accused has no counterpart in France. There they make hostile demonstrations and may even try to lynch the wretch. Inside the court the same attitude prevails. Words like ‘monster’ and ‘vile assassin’ may be hurled by judge and prosecuting counsel at the accused.

Most premeditated murders are done not for passion but for profit. For the French, always hypersensitive where money matters are concerned, this makes the offence particularly disgusting. The Americans and British respond to this sort of murder with interest and requests for more details; the French respond with indignation and demands for the killer’s head.

They have had plenty to be indignant about. No other country has produced so many really business-like, profit-seeking
multiple
murderers.

Early in 1918, the mayor of the small town of Gambais, just outside Paris, received a letter that puzzled him. It was from a Madame Pelat, and she wanted to know if the mayor knew of the whereabouts of her sister, Madame Collomb, who had been living with a Monsieur Cuchet at the Villa Ermitage. It puzzled him because he had, not long before, received a similar letter from the sister of a Madame Buisson who had been living at the Villa Ermitage with a Monsieur Fremyet. On
looking into the matter, the mayor found not only that the registered occupier of the villa was a Monsieur Dupont, but that Dupont, Fremyet and Cuchet had all disappeared. The mayor suggested that the families of the two missing women might find it useful to compare notes. They did so. It did not take them long to conclude that Cuchet, Fremyet and Dupont were one and the same person. They informed the police.

Inspector Adam of the Criminal Investigation Department at Mantes was immediately interested. Other and similar cases of women disappearing had been reported. In the spring of 1919 a warrant was issued for the arrest of Fremyet. By one of those outrageous coincidences which make the career of the professional murderer such a heart-breaking business, Madame Buisson’s sister, while out walking in Paris, happened to spot a man in the rue de Rivoli whom she recognised as the missing woman’s fiancé. He was with an attractive girl. She followed the pair to a china shop and then informed the police. On being arrested, the man described himself as Lucien Guillet, engineer and mill-owner from Rocroi. His true identity was very soon established. His criminal record went back to 1900, since when he had served five prison terms for swindling. His name was Henri Désiré Landru.

When told that he was being held for murder, Landru made two remarks. ‘It is a terrible thing to charge one with murder, Monsieur le Commissaire—it means a man’s head.’ And then he added: ‘I will speak only in the presence of a lawyer.’

The first was undoubtedly prophetic, but it was the second that the police had most cause to remember. Landru’s skill as an obstructionist of the law must be unique.

It is generally conceded that he murdered eleven persons in all—ten women, and the eighteen-year-old son of one of them. The pattern of the crimes was consistent and by no means original. He would insert an advertisement in a daily paper:
‘
Widower with two children, aged forty-three with comfortable income, affectionate, serious and moving in good society, desires to meet widow with a view to matrimony.
’ Then, he would sort the replies, choose his victim and set to work. After a brief wooing, during which he would gain control of the victim’s money and possessions, he would take her for a holiday to the Villa Ermitage. Then, he would murder her, dispose of the body and return to Paris.

Yet, it took over two years from the date of his arrest to bring him to trial.

In France, the task of preparing a case for trial is in the hands of an examining magistrate, who has powers to examine witnesses, including the accused, bring about confrontations and cross-examine everyone to his heart’s content. The psychological pressure on the accused of such examinations, which can (and in Landru’s case did) go on for months, may be imagined. Yet Landru blandly refused to talk.

The law had one very important piece of evidence. This was a notebook found in Landru’s pocket when he was arrested. It should have been damning. It was nothing less than a profit and loss account of the murders, with names, expenses and receipts from the sales of property all meticulously recorded. From an analysis of the expenses, it was even possible to note that when he had taken a woman to Gambais to murder her, he bought a return railway ticket for himself, but only a single for the victim. But Landru was not disconcerted. Pressed for explanations of the facts disclosed by the book, he took refuge in an attitude of affronted dignity. ‘Monsieur le Juge,’ he would repeat huffily as the interminable questionings went on, ‘I will not reply to questions which are of a private nature.’

This steadfast assumption that, in pursuing their inquiries into the fates of the missing women, the examining magistrates were committing an unwarrantable and tasteless invasion of his privacy,
was the basis of his defence; and the fact that the police were unable to produce even one of the victims’ bodies made it peculiarly effective. It was alleged that he had burnt most of them in the furnace at Villa Ermitage, but the pathologists were only able to produce a number of small calcined bone fragments of dubious origin to support the allegation. Landru shrugged and said that the fragments had belonged to rabbits. Later, however, he was obliged to shore up his defences. He did this in a characteristic way. He became a man of honour who could not reveal the missing women’s secrets; a suggestion hovered in the air that they had asked him to arrange their transportation to the
maisons de rendezvous
of South America. In the early days of his trial he was sardonic, even jaunty. Of his refusal to answer questions he said: ‘It is not my business to help the police. Have they not been accusing me for years of deeds with which the women who disappeared never for one moment reproached me?’

But as the trial wore on, the jauntiness went. ‘These charges do not frighten me. I refuse to reply to you. This matter belongs to my private life. That is no affair of the police or of the Courts of Justice.’

‘Will you say nothing to save your head?’ demanded the Advocate-General.

‘No,’ said Landru sullenly.

He kept his word. Early one cold morning a few months later he was hurried from the prison at Versailles into the Place des Tribunaux outside, and guillotined.

Nineteen twenty-one was a good year for French murder. But for the carelessness of a prison official at Fresnes, it would have been a great year.

Admittedly, Henri Girard only succeeded in committing two murders; but that was not for want of zeal. The fault lay in his method.

Moralists will enjoy this story. It was his sex-life that was at the root of the trouble. Some men accumulate housing property or stocks and shares, others collect pictures or old motor cars. Girard went in for mistresses; and not just one at a time, but two or three, each in a separate establishment of her own. Moreover, he preferred to maintain in each the belief that she was the sole object of his affections. To the traditionally heavy expenses of that particular hobby, there must have been added a considerable item for taxi fares. Even if, with so many other calls upon his time, he had been able to apply himself effectively to his business as an insurance agent, his income would still have been inadequate. He was obliged to supplement it.

For a time, he swindled his family, but when that source at last dried up, he took to banking. His first venture, the
Crédit Général de France
, was unsuccessful. All he collected out of that was a fine and a suspended sentence of twelve months’ imprisonment. From then on, he said he was a bookmaker. In fact, he became a kind of confidence man, manipulating forged notes-of-hand and the like, and moved in that strange underworld which in France is called
le milieu
, but which in other countries has harsher names. For a man of his fastidious tastes it was no kind of life. He looked about for some other way of making money.