The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot (14 page)

On September 12, after several months had passed and her husband had neither communicated further nor contacted their friends in Cannes, an alarmed Madame Braunberger reported her husband missing. The police did not investigate. In 1942 it was hardly worthwhile or wise to hunt for missing Jews, and to close the case the police fictitiously noted that the doctor returned home several days after the original report was filed. Petiot's name did not come up at the time, since the oblique mention of his house was merely another detail in a series of uncanny events. What connection could there be? As Madame Braunberger told police later, her husband and Petiot had met only once, at a party at Raymond Vallée's house almost ten years earlier. The two physicians had discussed cancer cures, and after they left, Braunberger told his wife he had just met either a genius or a lunatic. They had not made any effort to see one another again. At the time it did not seem suspicious, but retrospectively, after March 1944, Raymond Vallée found it peculiar that Petiot should quickly have learned of Braunberger's disappearance and inquired several times whether they had received news from him. And if Petiot had been involved in the affair, it no longer seemed so odd that Vallée should have received the first letter, since he was the only friend of Braunberger's whom Petiot knew.

The story grew even more complex the following year. In April 1943, the wife of Roger Allard, one of Braunberger's patients who had been involved in clandestine passages himself and who had even offered to help the Braunbergers if they needed it, told the doctor's cook, “I know who passed the doctor; a friend of one of my cousins told her, ‘It was my father who passed Dr. Braunberger.'” Madame Braunberger telephoned Roger Allard, who said the father of the friend who had spoken to his cousin was named José or Josian; he was not personally acquainted with him and did not know his address. Some time later, Braunberger's brother met Roger's mother, Andrée Allard, and told her, “We know that it was your son who passed my brother, and you don't want to tell us where he left him.”

She replied: “It was not my son, it was Josian who passed him. The doctor cried out when crossing the demarcation line and was almost caught.” This was almost the exact phrase the mysterious telephone caller had used when he spoke to the maid, and Madame Braunberger and her brother-in-law were now convinced that the Allards were involved. When asked where Josian lived, Madame Allard said she believed he was a railroad employee and lived on the rue Ordener, near the freightyards at the Porte de la Chapelle. She promised to ask Roger for details.

Finally, Roger Allard told the Braunbergers that his cousin's friend's father had passed not Dr. Braunberger, but a Dr. Ascher. The subsequent police investigation the following year only served to add another layer of confusion to this twisted tale: the Allards' stories became increasingly bizarre; police eventually found, in Dr. Braunberger's own address book, a patient named Chauzan who lived at 67 rue Louis-Blanc near the Gare de l'Est. “Chauzan” sounded similar to “Josian,” but investigators found that no one of either name had ever lived at that address. Nor was Chauzan or Josian found among the railroad employees, listed in the city-hall files, or inscribed on coal-ration lists. One more strange fact surfaced during the investigation. Braunberger's nurse informed the police that a man named Francinet had regularly called at the doctor's house to deliver wine, but a few months later she changed her mind and strenuously denied ever having said such a thing or heard such a name.

Aside from the mention of the doctor's house in the first letter, there was little tangible link between Braunberger and Petiot, and even less imaginable motive. After the discovery of the suitcases at Courson-les-Carrières, newspapers published relatively complete inventories of the clothes found there and in Paris. Among the items were a size-40 men's shirt, blue with white stripes, made by David, 32 avenue de l'Opéra, and a man's hat with the initials
P.B.
made by A. Berteil on the rue du Quatre-Septembre. Madame Braunberger asked to see these items and positively identified them as articles her husband had worn on the day of his disappearance. They would play a significant role in the trial.

On August 13, 1945, the French minister of justice received a letter from the American Joint Distribution Committee in New York; a Jewish refugee living in Bolivia had asked the committee to look into the whereabouts of members of his family in Paris—Kurt, Margeret, and René Kneller. The committee had written to the Knellers' landlady at 4 avenue du Général-Balfourier, but she was no longer there. Police found another inhabitant of the building, Christiane Roart, who was also René Kneller's godmother. She told them that the unfortunate family had departed with Dr. Petiot, ostensibly to flee the country. For some reason she had never reported this to the police, though she must have suspected her friends' fate after she recognized a photo of their doctor in the newspapers.

Kurt Kneller was a Jew born at Breslau in 1897 who emigrated from Germany to France on June 10, 1933. In France, he worked successively as codirector of the Cristal radio-and-home-appliance distribution firm and as technical consultant to a battery manufacturer. On December 6, 1934, he married Margeret (Greta) Lent, thirty-three, originally from Berlin, and their son René was born at Issy-les-Moulineaux on May 8 of the following year. Kneller requested French citizenship in 1937 and served honorably in the French Foreign Legion from September 1939 until the disarmament a year later. Police checked Kurt Kneller's record thoroughly. His loyalty to France seemed impeccable and the closest he had ever come to illegal activities was once when he had overdrawn his bank account.

Since June 1941 Jews had been circumscribed from most professional posts and forbidden access to theaters, restaurants, swimming pools, cafés, racetracks, public parks, and libraries, and they were not usually permitted to own a telephone. On July 8, 1942, they were forbidden entry to department stores and most other wholesale and retail shops except between 3:00 and 4:00
P.M.
—hours when most businesses were closed. Mass raids had already begun, though the Germans, hoping to arouse French antagonism as little as possible, started with immigrants rather than native French Jews and began publicity campaigns presenting them as aliens who stole food and jobs from the French. These people were stripped of their citizenship and deported as parasites on the national economy.

On Thursday, July 16, 1942, German officers came to the Knellers' apartment. Greta was visiting Mademoiselle Roart upstairs, and upon glancing down the stairwell to see who was at her door, she realized the family was in danger. When her husband returned home they left seven-year-old René with Mademoiselle Roart and went to stay with Clara Noé, a friend who lived around the corner on the rue Erlanger. The next day Kurt told Christiane Roart that his doctor was going to help them escape the country. He asked her to prepare their suitcases, which someone would fetch later that day, and to keep René until Saturday, then bring him to Madame Noé's apartment. That afternoon, a doctor whose name Mademoiselle Roart did not know but whom she later identified from mug shots as Dr. Petiot, came to her building with a handcart and an elderly man to help him. He played with René while they spoke for a few minutes, then left with two large and four small suitcases containing the most important of the Knellers' possessions. He wanted to remove all of the furniture as well, but the landlady would not permit him to do this.

At 6:00
P.M.
on Saturday, July 18, Mademoiselle Roart took René to the rue Erlanger; the same evening the doctor came for Kurt Kneller, who was to be followed the next day by his wife and son. The doctor asked Clara Noé to walk some distance behind them as far as the Etoile to make sure they were not shadowed. She accompanied them only about halfway and, seeing nothing suspicious, hurried home. The next morning Madame Noé was out buying milk for René's breakfast when the doctor returned for the mother and son; by the time she returned home they were gone. Clara Noé was pleased to have the Knellers out of Paris; she learned that the Gestapo visit to the Knellers' apartment had been part of a massive two-day raid in which 12,884 Jews had been arrested and herded into the Vélodrome d'Hiver, where they spent three or four days cramped in the grandstands without food before being shuttled to the camp at Drancy and loaded into freight cars bound for the east. Of the total 150,000 native and foreign Jews deported from France during the war, only 3,000 adults and 5 or 6 children returned.

In the weeks that followed the Knellers' departure, Mademoiselle Roart, Madame Noé, and another friend of the Knellers' received postcards from Greta. She said they had safely passed the line, though her husband was sick and had almost lost his mind. The grammar was strange and the words uncharacteristic. The cards were signed “Marguerite,” whereas Madame Kneller had never changed to the French form and still spelled her name “Margeret,” and the handwriting was fine and spindly—not at all like Greta Kneller's, said Madame Noé, but very similar to newspaper photographs she later saw of Dr. Petiot's prescriptions. Mademoiselle Roart said Kurt Kneller had shirts with his initials on them—similar to those found at the rue Le Sueur with the letters
K.K.
removed, and she positively identified a pair of child's pajamas found in Petiot's building as those worn by René on the last night he spent at her home.

The Knellers vanished on July 18 and 19. Three weeks later, on August 8, 1942, in the Seine near Asnières, barge men discovered the head, legs, feet, vertically sectioned thorax, upper arm, and pelvis of a seven- or eight-year-old male child, along with the head, femurs, pelvis, and arms of a middle-aged woman. A man's head was found some distance away three days later. All three victims had been dead for several weeks and their remains were putrified beyond all possibility of further identification.

PART TWO

7

MARCEL PETIOT: THE DOSSIER

Who was Dr. Marcel Petiot, the “Vampire of the rue Le Sueur,” “the new Bluebeard,” “the second Landru,” or, more simply, “the monster”? The French judicial system, unlike many others in the West, holds that the life history and previous record of an accused criminal provide an essential context within which to evaluate the case at hand. The presiding magistrate at a trial opens by presenting a brief biographical sketch of the accused, and the jury's opinion of the evidence is weighted by this knowledge. Within days of the discovery in the rue Le Sueur, the court assigned detectives to piece together Marcel Petiot's life story. They interviewed thousands of former patients and hundreds of old neighbors from the various towns where he had lived. Inspectors sifted through school, military, and professional records, court files and old newspaper accounts, and dutifully followed up all rumors and clues no matter how unlikely or bizarre. Rarely has a man been honored with such a professional team of biographers, and rarely has the picture of him that emerged been so grim.

Marcel André Henri Félix Petiot was born at 3:00
A.M.
on January 17, 1897, the son of Félix Iréné Mustiole Petiot, a post and telegraph employee, age thirty, and his wife Marthe Marie Constance Joséphine Bourdon, age twenty-two. They lived at 100 rue de Paris in Auxerre, an ancient town of about thirty thousand inhabitants located one hundred miles south of Paris in the rural Burgundian department of the Yonne.

The Auxerrois have a wealth of extravagant stories about Petiot's youth, some of them true, some doubtless invented as suitable for a future killer. People assured inspectors that he developed a cruel streak at an early age. One day when he was five, while he was sitting on the kitchen floor snipping his nursemaid's tape measure into individual centimeters and storing the numbers in a matchbox, the neighbors' gray kitten strayed in. He grew fond of the cat and threw fits and almost crushed it in his embrace if anyone tried to take it from him. But despite his affection, one day the nursemaid found Marcel standing beside a tub of boiling water she had prepared for her laundry; he was dipping the kitten's hind paws in the water and beaming rapturously as it howled with pain. That night the maid let him take the cat to bed; she thought that Marcel was upset by his behavior and felt remorse. The next morning she found his hands and face covered with scratches, and the kitten was dead, suffocated in his bed. A favorite pastime of the same period was to steal young birds from their nests, poke their eyes out with a needle, and delightedly watch them hurl themselves against the bars of a cage.

His schoolmasters agreed that Marcel was extraordinarily intelligent, but strange, solitary, incorrigible, and unable to show sustained interest in his work. At age five, he could read like a child of ten. His precocity showed in other ways, as when he was caught passing obscene pictures around the classroom or making indecent proposals to a male schoolmate. At eleven, he interrupted a history class on African civilization by firing a shot into the ceiling with a revolver stolen from his father, and he spent one recess period standing a classmate against a door and throwing knives into the frame around him, with astonishing accuracy. His parents once consulted a doctor about his eccentricity and such physiological or mental abnormalities as convulsions, somnambulism, and a tendency to wet his bed and trousers between ages ten and twelve, but the medical man could only tell them that time and hope might cure what he could not.
*

Petiot's mother died in 1912, when he was fifteen and his brother Maurice was five. The father accepted a job at the post office in the village of Joigny, some fifteen miles away, and his two sons stayed with their aunt Henriette Bourdon in Auxerre. Before the end of the year Marcel was thrown out of school for disciplinary reasons. He went to stay with his father at Joigny, and was thrown out of school there, too. Returning to Auxerre, he was once again thrown out of school, this time for more than mere unruly behavior and “over-excitation.” Using a stick with glue on the end, Marcel, now seventeen, had stolen mail from a postbox—possibly to cash money orders, perhaps out of mere curiosity, conceivably, as was once suggested, to blackmail townsfolk who wrote of their indiscretions. He was eventually caught, and in February 1914 was charged with damaging public property and mail theft.