The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot

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The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot

Thomas Maeder

To Shawn

CONTENTS

A Note on French Currency

P
ART
O
NE

1 The Bodies in the Rue Le Sueur

2 The First Identified Victims

3 The Investigation

4 The Escape Network

5 The Weight of the Evidence

6 Departures without End

P
ART
T
WO

7 Marcel Petiot: The Dossier

8 Dr. Petiot and Mr. Mayor

9 The Doctor in Paris

10 The Arrest

11 Captain Henri Valéri

12 Petiot: Hero of the Resistance

13 “I Wish to Explain Myself in Court”

P
ART
T
HREE

14 Petiot on Trial

15 Monsieur de Paris

Image Gallery

Selected List of Characters

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

About the Author

A NOTE ON FRENCH CURRENCY

The official exchange rates for French francs (F) and U.S. dollars ($) at certain times between the years 1940 and 1946 (the period of particular concern in this book) were:

Taking into consideration the devaluation of the dollar over the past three decades, one can roughly translate these franc values into the following August 1979 purchasing-power equivalents.

There are no standard rate-of-exchange figures for the period from 1941 to August 1944 during which the Germans occupied France, as there was no normal international commerce. According to some sources, the figures for the year 1940 remained valid throughout the Occupation, though one must assume that depletion of the work force, rationing, and the effect of the black market made the actual worth of French money during the period somewhat less than its artificially fixed value.

PART ONE

1

THE BODIES IN THE RUE LE SUEUR

On March 6, 1944, thick, greasy, foul-smelling smoke began pouring from the chimney of an elegant private house at 21 rue Le Sueur in Paris. It was a three-story, nineteenth-century building with stables and courtyard located near the Etoile in the wealthy sixteenth arrondissement, and was the former residence of Princess Maria Colloredo de Mansfeld,
*
who had moved out in 1930 and allowed dust and dilapidation to take over. Since its purchase in 1941 by a Dr. Marcel Petiot, the building had remained uninhabited, though neighbors noticed several curious events. Almost every day, a man on a bicycle, dressed like a workman, arrived towing a wagon. Two trucks had come during the previous year—one removed forty-seven suitcases, and the other unloaded thirty or forty heavy sacks inside the double coach door. Otherwise no one entered or left the building. Neighbors would later tell police that a horse-drawn cart had stopped in the street at 11:30 every night for the previous six months. They believed it had stopped at number 21, and some even reported hearing the doors open and close; but since it was wartime and the city was blacked out at that hour for fear of Allied bombings, nothing was actually seen, and the significance of this occurrence was never made clear.

The smoke increased in volume over the next few days, and on Saturday, March 11, a contrary breeze kept the suffocating stench in the rue Le Sueur hovering at the level of Madame Andrée Marçais's fifth-floor apartment across the street. When her husband returned from work that evening, she insisted that he do something about it. Jacques Marçais knocked at number 21 several times before noticing the worn paper fastened to the door:
Away for one month. Forward mail to 18 rue des Lombards in Auxerre
. At 6:25, Monsieur Marçais telephoned the police.

Two uniformed, bicycle-mounted policemen, Joseph Teyssier and Emile Fillion, tried the door and shuttered windows, then made inquiries at the neighboring houses. The concierge next door told them number 21 was owned by Dr. Marcel Petiot, who lived two miles across Paris at 66 rue Caumartin. She even had his telephone number: Pigalle 77.11. Teyssier ran to the Crocodile, a café on the corner, and phoned the doctor's home. A woman who identified herself as Madame Petiot answered and passed the receiver to her husband. “Have you entered the building?” he asked Teyssier after being told there was a fire. “Don't do anything. I will be there in fifteen minutes with the keys.”

Half an hour later, no one had arrived. The smoke grew worse and the firemen were called. Fire Chief Avilla Boudringhin climbed to a second-floor window, pried open the shutters, smashed a windowpane, and entered with a few men. After searching the upper floors, they followed the stench to the basement. When they emerged from the coach door several minutes later, one of the young firemen leaned against the doorway and vomited, while a pale and shaken Boudringhin stepped up to the two policemen and said, “Gentlemen, I think you have some work ahead of you.”

Teyssier, Fillion, and a civil-defense officer who chanced to be passing by were led down to the basement, where they found two coal-burning stoves. The one on the left was cold, but the smaller one, to the right, was going full blast, and a human hand, apparently female, dangled from the open door. From the light of the fire the three officers discerned a pile of coal and the bottom steps of a short staircase on which were littered a head, skulls, arms, two nearly complete skeletons, shattered rib cages, feet, hands, jawbones, large chunks of unrecognizable flesh, and a quantity of small bones. They left hurriedly and Teyssier again ran to the Crocodile, this time to call his superiors.

As Teyssier was returning, a hatless man in a gray overcoat rode up on a green bicycle and dismounted in front of number 21. He was in his early to mid-forties, with piercing eyes of such dark brown as to look black. He seemed surprised to find the doors to the building ajar, but with an air of confidence and authority approached Fillion and identified himself as the brother of the building's owner. Teyssier returned from the café, and the two agents led the man into the building; he began climbing the steps toward the main floor, but they quickly motioned him downstairs. Gazing calmly at the litter of human remains in the basement, the man said: “This is serious. My head may be at stake.” The policemen were scarcely surprised. They accompanied the man back to the street to escape the smell of decayed and burning flesh. He turned to them and asked, “Are you Frenchmen?” Teyssier indignantly asked the reason for this strange and offensive question.

“The bodies you have seen are those of Germans and traitors to our country,” he replied. “I assume you have already notified your superiors and that the Germans will soon learn of your discovery. I am the head of a Resistance group, and I have three hundred files at my home which must be destroyed before the enemy finds them.”

By March 1944, Paris had already suffered nearly four years under the Occupation and German military rule. There were two Gestapo offices in the neighborhood of the rue Le Sueur, and a brothel reserved for German officers was just around the corner. The man spoke with conviction, and it seemed obvious to the French policemen that the carnage was the result of systematic executions by an organized group. Teyssier tipped his cap to a patriot and advised him to flee, promising not to mention the visit when his superiors arrived. And thus Dr. Marcel Petiot—for it was he himself—climbed back on his bicycle and rode off into the night.

Brigadier Henri Chanel soon arrived with three men from the local police station and, after briefly inspecting the still-burning stove, ordered the firemen back to their station and called the police commissaire for the
quartier
of Porte Dauphine and the appropriate judicial authorities. The commissaire arrived fifteen minutes later and promptly called back the firemen to extinguish the stove and remove some of the remains. He then examined the rest of the building.

Upon first entering the double front door of 21 rue Le Sueur, one came to a short vaulted passageway. Steps to the right off the passage led into the ground floor of the house, but if one continued straight along the corridor for thirty feet, one arrived in a flagstone-covered courtyard surrounded by the building on three sides and a four-story wall on the other; the yard was thus totally concealed from the neighbors' view. The house was large and had once been elegant, with six bedrooms, a spacious dining room and basement kitchen, half a dozen salons and other large rooms, and a library. It was presently in a state of filthy disrepair, and it was obvious no one had lived there for many years. A thick coat of dust covered everything, and most of the rooms were crammed with an incredible assortment of furniture, art objects, chandeliers, and gadgets stored in chaotic piles.

The outbuildings, located on the opposite side of the court from the main body of the house and connected on two floors by a narrow passage, had originally housed the stables and the servants' quarters. A second library was there now, as well as the only clean and orderly spot in the place: a doctor's consultation room. The commissaire found it odd that with dozens of large rooms in the house from which to choose, the owner had decided to repair a cramped, L-shaped passageway—little more than six feet wide and situated between a staircase, a storeroom, and the stable—and to neatly furnish it with a cabinet full of medical supplies and knickknacks, a tidy desk, a small round table, and two comfortable armchairs.