The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot (16 page)

Much worse suspicions were aroused several years later, in 1926. One of Petiot's patients was an aged woman, a Madame Fleury, who had a beautiful twenty-six-year-old housekeeper named Louise, or Louisette, Delaveau. When Madame Fleury made an extended visit to Paris, Louisette decided to stay behind. A few days later the people of Villeneuve were surprised to discover that Petiot had dismissed his old housekeeper and Louisette had moved in. Ostensibly she was employed only as cook and housekeeper, but soon it was common knowledge that she had also become his mistress—a surprising change for Petiot, who had never previously shown much interest in any of the women who lavished their attention on the eligible young bachelor. Soon after Louisette moved in, the house next door to the Fleury home was burglarized, and several days later the Fleury house itself was robbed and set on fire to cover the traces of the burglary—incidents significant, perhaps, in the light of later events.

For several months the communal life chez Petiot went on more happily than anyone would have suspected, and Nézondet himself noticed that Petiot seemed calm and relaxed for a change. The only problem was that Louisette seemed to be gaining weight, and gossips murmured that she was pregnant. Then on the Monday after Pentecost, in mid-May, Louisette disappeared. Several days later, while attending a funeral in the village, Petiot asked a local gendarme if the people of Villeneuve were not concerned about Louisette's departure; his manner of asking was so odd that the officer mentioned the incident to his chief. Someone then reported he had recently seen Petiot loading a large trunk into his car. A similar trunk, containing a decapitated and unidentifiable young female corpse was found floating in the river not long afterward. The brief police search for Louisette ended, however, without official suspicion seriously cast on the respectable Dr. Petiot.

René Nézondet fended off unpleasant rumors. He said he had met Petiot on the street one day. He was weeping in a state of utmost misery, bemoaning the fact that Louisette had abandoned him. Throughout lunch, Petiot stared straight ahead, his hands trembled, and he barely spoke as he seemed to search for some kind of solution to his woeful state. Suddenly he appeared to find it. He calmed down, poured himself a drink, and announced to Nézondet: “I think I will get involved in politics.” Nézondet also angrily rebutted local newspaper stories that he and Petiot had been seen late one night pushing a corpse-shaped package in a handcart. He said that Petiot had an automobile and he had a van, and if they wanted to tote corpse-shaped parcels about under cover of darkness they would not do so in a wheelbarrow.

Nézondet thought Petiot was joking when he announced his intention to run for office, but several weeks later his friend's name appeared on the ballots as Socialist candidate for mayor of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. The campaign was long, hard, and not always scrupulously honest. At his best, Petiot was an excellent speaker and actor who knew how to amuse, cajole, and seduce an audience that was already largely indebted to him for his medical services. At one performance he dragged himself painfully onto the platform with the air of a man crushed by guilt and sorrow, and said, “I confess that I am guilty of a serious crime.” The crowd gasped, and waited breathlessly while he stood, head bowed, eyes moist, seemingly overcome by emotion. “I stand accused of loving the people too much. I confess: it is true.”

As the campaign neared its close, the tireless Petiot seemed to be everywhere, and his tactics took on a more perfunctory tone. On the evening of a major electoral debate at the town hall, Petiot furnished a supporter with a length of copper cable and a set of detailed instructions. Petiot spoke first and had timed his speech to the minute. At 9:45
P.M.
, as his opponent stepped to the podium, Petiot's aide short-circuited the main power supply of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. The town and hall were blacked out, a few small fires were started, and the opponent's speech came to a swift end. On July 25, 1926, Marcel Petiot was elected by a landslide.

Not everyone was pleased with the new mayor. Besides the small but vocal political opposition, some townspeople took umbrage at Petiot's campaign tactics and his blatant dishonesty. A Monsieur Gandy wrote to the Commission de Réforme complaining that during his campaign Petiot publicly boasted of having feigned insanity to fool the army into discharging him with a pension. The commission went back over the medical records and upheld their earlier decisions. Petiot really was sick, though as their conclusions depicted it, his sickness was curiously flexible:

The very fact mentioned by Monsieur Gandy—the alleged admission of a fraud perpetrated to obtain a pension—is but another manifestation of the subject's mentally unbalanced state.…

This form of mental disorder can very easily escape detection by lay persons who are inclined, as Monsieur Gandy, to attribute the same significance to the words and actions of someone mentally ill as they would to those of a perfectly normal individual.

In addition, to fully appreciate this sort of infirmity, one must take into consideration the fact that in the course of its evolution, the affliction can show rather long periods of remission which might lead lay persons to believe it has actually been cured.

As far as the degree of invalidity, the previous evaluation of the experts and the commission is equitable.

In conclusion, there is no cause to review Monsieur Petiot's pension, and the matter should be closed.

Petiot was officially established as a part-time lunatic. Conveniently, he was quite sane enough to carry on a normal political and professional life, but not always sufficiently responsible to be prosecuted for his misdemeanors. This would serve Petiot well again.

As mayor of the town, Petiot's petty offenses took on greater breadth. City funds were stolen from the town clerk's (Nézondet's) desk, and rumor accused the mayor. An ultrapatriotic band whose music and political orientation were distasteful to Petiot and his friends discovered one day that their bass drum had been stolen. A few days later Petiot founded another band and donated a similar, freshly painted drum. He complained that a stone cross at the entrance to the town cemetery—a cross eight feet high and weighing nearly twelve hundred pounds—was ugly and obstructed the hearses. One Christmas Eve he warned the police that the cross just might vanish that night. The police laughed. The next morning the cross was gone. When Petiot was questioned, he laughed: “I don't believe I have it on me. Besides, what on earth would I ever do with it?”

Dr. Eugène Duran, a physician from Villeneuve who was called as a character witness during the police investigation in 1945, would state: “Petiot, Marcel, was a politician to the depths of his soul, knowing how to flatter the people and make them love him. Nonetheless, his altruism was but an appearance, since his overriding passions were money and personal power. He was very intelligent, but had occasional mental lapses which made him seem truly abnormal.… He was never honest as a mayor, as a doctor, or as an individual.” Former city-hall employee Léon Pinau said he had quit his job for fear of being dragged into some awful scandal by the mayor and because he could not tolerate Petiot's many thefts and innumerable exhibitions of odd behavior. Once, he said, Petiot hurled himself off the express train from Paris, which did not happen to stop in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne.

If Petiot did leap from the train, it may have been to make a point, for at the time Monsieur Pinau resigned, Petiot was trying to persuade the railroad company to schedule more stops in his town. However unorthodox his methods, Petiot did get things done. He installed a sewer system, completely renovated the elementary school, and constantly lobbied for State-funded improvements—sometimes beginning work on them before the necessary authorizations came through. An anti-Petiotist newspaper complained that Villeneuve did not really have a municipal government: it had nothing but Marcel Petiot, filling the roles of mayor, municipal council, street commissioner, commissioner of everything else, director of public works, municipal court, and representative for the canton. Nor was the newspaper far wrong. The municipal council, theoretically a balancing power, functioned merely as a rubber stamp. In 1926 Petiot decided to revive an 1881 proposal to construct a slaughterhouse. The municipal council gave its unanimous approval. The following year, after plans had been drawn and approved, Petiot abruptly changed his mind and the councillors voted thirteen to seven against it—solely, it appears, to prove their complete sympathy with the mayor's decisions and their willingness to obey his every whim. Some time later, when Petiot was in disfavor, a new municipal council unanimously voted the project in again and castigated its predecessors for a ridiculous action that simultaneously proved their unthinking allegiance to the mayor and their complete disregard for the wishes and interests of the townspeople. Petiot's rule was absolute, efficient, and highly irregular. Twenty years later, the Villeneuvians were still sharply divided among themselves. Some bemoaned the loss of the best mayor they had ever had—the only one who got things done. Others claimed with equal vehemence that he was the most unscrupulous scoundrel ever to sully their town.

Petiot himself loudly proclaimed his innocence of all crimes and irregularities. He accused nameless “political enemies,” who resented his progressive Socialist stand, of resorting to slander because they had been impotent against him in an honest election. Many people believed him. Petiot seemed able to convince people of almost anything, and some credited him with hypnotic powers. Once when he was arrested for driving without headlights and led before the judge, he was so commanding that Captain Mourrot, the confused and intimidated arresting officer, who began with clear certainty of the charge, ended up by strangely testifying that Petiot's headlights had indeed been lit but that no one could see them.

On June 4, 1927, Petiot married Georgette Valentine Lablais, twenty-three, the beautiful daughter of a wealthy landowner from the nearby town of Seignelay. Monsieur Lablais, who initially opposed the marriage, was commonly known as Long Arm because of his powerful connections. From 1918 to 1936 he owned one of the most expensive restaurants in Paris—on the rue de Bourgogne, right next to the Chambre des députés (now the Assemblée Nationale) and amidst half the ministries in France—and many of the country's most influential politicians were his steady customers and friends. It was intimated that Petiot, scarcely a wild romantic, had been partly attracted to Georgette by the possibility of using her father's influence to his own benefit, since his own political ambitions did not seem limited to a small town. At first, though, the couple led a quiet existence, and their household was augmented by the birth of Gerhardt Georges Claude Félix Petiot on April 19 of the following year. Petiot never did use the influence apparently at his disposal; or perhaps he never had the opportunity.

At 8:00
P.M.
on March 11, 1930—fourteen years almost to the hour before the rue Le Sueur discovery—an incident erupted that was to trouble Villeneuve for many years. Armand Debauve, the director of the local dairy cooperative, returned home that evening to find his house on fire. He raised an alarm and smashed into the kitchen, where he stumbled over the body of his wife Henriette. She was carried outside and artificial respiration was begun before someone noticed that one side of her head had been completely smashed by blows with a heavy instrument. As firemen extinguished the blaze and police examined the grounds, Marcel and Georgette Petiot drove by. They stopped for a few moments, but to the great indignation of spectators who believed the mayor's and a doctor's place was at the scene of the tragedy, they continued on to a movie theater in nearby Sens, where other patrons noted Petiot's unusually nervous and distracted air.

The great depth of the wounds and the area over which blood had spattered testified to the viciousness of the assault on Madame Debauve. The killer had poured gasoline around the house and set it alight in a poor attempt to conceal the crime. Recent footprints led from the dairy across marshy fields, along the river, and toward the town of Villeneuve, confirming the suspicion that the killer was someone from the town. Only someone who knew the terrain well could have negotiated the path in the dark. It was obvious, too, that the criminal knew that Armand Debauve went to a café every evening and did not return home until 7:30 or 7:45. The heat of the fire had stopped the kitchen clock at 7:13.

The murderer also seemed to know that on the second Wednesday of every month the Debauves made payment for the milk they had collected from neighboring regions. That day would have been March 12, meaning that on the evening of the crime an entire month's take, F235,000, would be in the house. The murderer had not found the money, which was hidden under a kitchen counter; instead he had tried to force open a safe in the bedroom with an engraving tool taken from the daily toolshed. Police found the tool buried in the folds of an eiderdown quilt where the killer apparently laid it while he searched a closet. He took F20,000 from the closet, leaving three distinct bloody fingerprints on a cardboard box during his search. The only other objects missing were a hammer and a wallet containing several hundred francs. The hammer, which perfectly fit Madame Debauve's skull wounds, was subsequently found in a small stream the killer had crossed in his flight. By the time it was discovered, the hammer was so covered with rust and slime that it was impossible to lift any fingerprints or detect traces of blood.

In a town of forty-two hundred inhabitants, it was frightening to know that a neighbor was the author of such a brutal crime. There were dozens of denunciations: anonymous messages composed of cut and pasted newsprint, a groundless accusation of his former mistress by a jealous man whom she in turn accused, muttered stories about mysterious strangers glimpsed lurking in the trees by the river, and speculations such as those about a local café owner, Léon Fiscot, who suddenly paid long-standing debts the day after the crime. The twenty-one employees of the dairy were fingerprinted, as were most others whom popular opinion accused, but no solid leads turned up. A series of newspaper articles in
Le Petit Régional
made snide comments about the inefficiency of the police, cast aspersions on the character of Madame Debauve, described in intimate detail the nature of the wounds made by each blow, and concluded with the observation that the crime would doubtless remain unsolved, as had the Fleury theft and arson, several other burglaries, and the disappearance of Louisette Delaveau. People were offended by the ironic tone of the articles. An inspector helping to investigate Petiot's past read them in 1945 and was sufficiently impressed to make inquiries at the newspaper's offices. The anonymous author of the articles, it turned out, had been Dr. Marcel Petiot. It seemed surprising that Petiot could have known all the details of the wounds, since they had never been made public and the man who had been coroner at that time never cared for Petiot and would not have been likely to discuss the case with him.