The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot (24 page)

GOLETTY
Didn't you meet him on June 20, 1942?

PETIOT
This must be some sort of joke. Really, how can you expect me to remember the year in which I met someone?

GOLETTY
Why were some of his clothes found in suitcases which came from the rue Le Sueur?

PETIOT
I met Dr. Braunberger once in my life, and I am asking you one more time to at least show me these so-called clothes of his. You are certainly not unaware of the fact that all of these things which were stolen—because there was never any search warrant—spent over a year in the hands of the Franco-German police, and the Nazis could have removed or inserted anything they pleased. The least I can ask is to see them now.

GOLETTY
The letters from Dr. Braunberger coincide strangely with those from the aforementioned Khaït, Van Bever, and Hotin.

PETIOT
Could you give me the definition of this word “coincide”?

GOLETTY
These letters are all from missing persons. Their handwriting is all distorted, and the phraseology is similar.

PETIOT
I was not aware of this definition of “coincide,” but since these deductions were made by people working for you, I consider them utterly devoid of significance.

Petiot's final pretrial interrogation took place on December 28. Goletty had prepared forty-eight pages of questions covering every aspect of the case. Petiot refused to answer a single one.

Hastened by Petiot's attitude, the State moved into the final preparatory stages for the trial. Goletty submitted his dossier—weighing thirty kilograms—to the Chamber of Accusations, a panel of three Appeals Court magistrates (roughly equivalent in function to a grand jury in the United States) that determines whether a case should go to trial. They decided that it should, and turned the dossier over to the procureur général's office for drafting of the formal act of accusation.

The procureur général is nominally involved in a French criminal case from the beginning. In theory, the Police Judiciaire's investigation and the
juge d'instruction's
interrogations are conducted under the procureur's supervision and authority, though unless there is misconduct, he rarely really intervenes in routine cases; the procureur's function is not usually apparent until he or members of his staff of avocats généraux and substitutes draw up the act of accusation and prosecute the case in court. But when a crime has political overtones or attracts significant public interest, the procureur's office frequently plays a more active role throughout the investigation, and for an extremely important matter, the procureur général may personally take charge.

In the immediate postwar years, however, the authorities shied away from cases that even remotely concerned the Resistance. It was a delicate topic to begin with, and since many officials had retained their posts under the Vichy régime, they feared that their own honor might become involved in the debate. The procureur général had decided not to touch the Petiot case, and had passed it on to one of his assistants, who gave it to another assistant, who gave it to another—until finally it had reached the newest, youngest, and most inexperienced member of the office, Avocat Général Elissalde.

Elissalde, age thirty, had already devoted months to the case, attending interrogations and poring over the huge dossier, which he knew almost as well as Goletty. When the time came to construct the case summary, he carpeted the entire floor of his apartment with the dossier. He would leap from place to place and room to room, reading out scraps from here and there and shouting them out to his new bride, who spent her honeymoon taking dictation on Dr. Petiot.

Petiot was accused of murdering twenty-seven people for plunder. His loot was estimated at F200 million worth of cash, gold, and jewelry—which was never found, though treasure hunters searched his properties and picked through the rubble of 21 rue Le Sueur when it was demolished in the 1950s. Elissalde recognized that evidence to back up the accusations was flimsy and that, taken individually, few if any of them were strong enough to earn a conviction. Since French law permits a charge based on “presumption of guilt” when circumstantial evidence is so overwhelming as to leave no normal doubt in the minds of a jury, Elissalde took the position that, taken as an ensemble, the remarkably similar disappearances of so many people, virtually all of whom were last seen with Petiot or known to be in contact with him, were sufficient cause for presumption of guilt. He restricted his official summary to a concise thirty-eight pages; by law, the case summary, as well as the rest of the dossier, had to be shown to Petiot's lawyer, and Elissalde did not wish him to know what the prosecution's strategy was going to be. For the prosecution's own use, he wrote out two hundred cramped pages of additional notes expanding on details.

In late January 1946, the procureur général ordered Petiot sent before the Assize Court of the Seine on March 18. It was only then, after setting the trial date, that he appointed Avocat Général Pierre Dupin to prosecute the case; Dupin, who was not noted for courtroom brilliance, had only six weeks to read the dossier and no hope of mastering it. For the defense was René Floriot, then recognized as the greatest living criminal attorney in France—a great innovator, who had helped replace the emotional oratorical technique popular in the early part of the century with a logical courtroom style. A recent French minister, Françoise Giroud, described him as “a lawyer the way another might be a surgeon. When a surgeon operates on a stomach, he does not ask whether the stomach's owner is an honest man and whether he likes him or not. He fights against death, trying to save the man who has confided his life to him.”

A practicing lawyer since 1923, the forty-four-year-old Floriot had handled a number of major criminal cases. In 1936 he defended two youths accused of stealing F20 million in a train robbery and won their acquittal. A week later, evidence appeared proving them guilty. He had defended Mussolini's mistress, Magda Fontanges, who shot and wounded the French ambassador in Rome, and he got her off with a one-year sentence. After the war he represented the Nazi ambassador to occupied France, Otto Abetz, who was sentenced to twenty years at hard labor rather than a death sentence, and Jean Luchaire, a prominent journalist and collaborator who was ultimately executed. Most recently, he had unsuccessfully defended Henri Lafont, leader of the French Gestapo, basing his case on the dubious contention that Lafont, having been granted honorary German citizenship during the war, was simply an enemy soldier and could not be shot as a traitor. Public sentiment being what it was, no argument could have saved Lafont, who was shot with his aide Pierre Bonny and seven others in December 1944.

Floriot, a powerful, leonine man with horn-rimmed spectacles, was not married, did not smoke, and drank only before his final oration at a trial, when he had a single glass of champagne to give him the appropriate uplift. His only hobby was pheasant shooting, and he was reputedly one of the best marksmen in Europe. His life was the law, and his law was a logical genius and a calculated dramatic effect untempered by moral considerations. Whenever he received a new dossier, he picked it apart, memorized it, and rebuilt it as best suited his needs. He based his case entirely on the facts, and though he juxtaposed and interpreted them according to his own plan, the facts were always at his command to counter any attack. When the case had been built into a thing of beauty and the trial reached its end, Floriot showed no more interest. He never seemed to care particularly about the outcome.

Floriot had begun working on the Petiot murder case in March 1944 when Georgette and Maurice retained him as their lawyer. It seemed certain that he had spoken with Petiot at some point during his eight months of flight, and he had subsequently attended his every interrogation. Every morning for several months before the trial, Floriot wheeled out a cart with coffee and the Petiot dossier, which he discussed from every angle with three of his assistants: Paul Cousin, Pierre Jacquet, and Eugène Ayache. Each was assigned a third of the file and spent his full time studying it, pursuing investigations and discussing the results with Floriot. Cousin had recently married, and after a brief honeymoon he told his wife to go stay with her parents, since otherwise she risked being alone until the following April.

For both prosecution and defense, the task of collecting information was not always easy. The prosecution found it highly suspicious that Petiot so readily forgot some things and just as readily recalled others in detail. He in fact did have a fine but abnormal memory that often forgot names, faces, and places, yet held reams of extraneous information. When Floriot asked about a certain building important in preparing their case, Petiot could not remember anything about its location. But he described its proximity to an elevated métro line, a locksmith on one side, a bakery on the other, the wood molding around the door, and the tile floor of the vestibule. With the help of a map of the métro and several days of walking, the assistant Ayache was able to find it.

When the day of the trial arrived, Floriot was ready. Elissalde was lumping all twenty-seven cases together; Floriot was taking them one by one. Petiot was in an excellent mood and could hardly wait. He told guards and fellow prisoners at the Santé that this was going to be a wonderful trial, an amusing trial, and that he would make everybody laugh.

PART THREE

14

PETIOT ON TRIAL

The trial opened at the Palais de Justice on Monday, March 18, 1946.
*
The evidence, a teetering mountain of trunks, hat-boxes, and suitcases weighing several tons, occupied an entire wall of the wood-paneled courtroom and lent it the atmosphere of a railroad-station baggage office—a decor, as it turned out, not altogether inappropriate for the tone the proceedings would take. At the center of a long desk sat the president of the tribunal, Michel Leser, who would conduct the proceedings and, at least theoretically, maintain order and channel questions from lawyers to witnesses. On either side of him were two magistrates, who, pursuant to the French system, played little part in the trial itself but who, along with the president and the jurors, would ultimately deliberate on the evidence and determine guilt and the penalty. Flanking the scarlet-robed magistrates on each side sat the jurors. Beyond them, to the judges' far left sat the clerk of the court, and situated to the panel's far right were Avocats Généraux Elissalde and Dupin. This single long line of people, typical of a French criminal trial, constituted the State.

In front of and below the official prosecution and jury sat the civil-suit lawyers. In France, victims of a crime or their relatives are entitled to have their own lawyer present their case and, in the case of conviction, to request damages and negotiate their amount. In some situations the civil-suit lawyers are more effective than the State's attorney, and in the Petiot affair one suspected from the start that this might be true, since they outnumbered Dupin by a dozen to one. There was Maître Jacques Bernays for the Wolffs' family, Maître Jacques Archevêque for Madame Guschinov, Maître Claude Perlès for Madame Braunberger, Maître Dominique Stéfanaggi for the Piereschi family, Maître Charles Henry for Paulette Grippay's relatives, Maître André Dunant for those of Adrien le Basque's mistress Gisèle Rossmy, a Maître Gachkel for the Basch and Anspach families, a Maître Leon-Levy for the Knellers', and Maître Pierre Véron for the survivors of Madame Khaït and Yvan Dreyfus. Véron was assisted by Dreyfus's brother-in-law, Maître Pierre Rein; and several others had brought associates to swell the ranks crammed into chairs behind glass cases filled with umbrellas, canes, hardware, and mysterious packages that completed the assortment of evidence.

Next to the court clerk and at a right angle to the prosecution bench in the French courtroom is the defense: the prisoner's box, to the clerk's immediate left, is on a level with the judge and jurors; the defense attorney and his assistants are below it, level with the civil-suit lawyers. Whether by design or curious coincidence, the press is seated immediately to the left of the accused, thus assuring journalists the best seats in the house. Witnesses must stand, or lean, at a small curved railing situated at a focal point between the opposing sides—in front of and facing the president.

On this first day there were fifty visiting attorneys and magistrates, the eighty witnesses, a hundred journalists and photographers, hordes of police, and more than four hundred spectators. Yellow passes signed by Leser were required for admission, but as the Petiot trial was billed as the second-greatest theatrical event of the year after
The Madwoman of Chaillot,
enterprising black marketeers, trained under the Occupation, sold counterfeit passes, and sensation seekers packed every available space.

The trial opened at 1:20
P.M.
with the selection of all seven jurors and three alternates out of a larger pool drawn by lot from the voter-registration lists. Until 1941, the French criminal justice system had used twelve jurors (and since 1958 there have been nine). In all cases the jurors deliberate together with the three magistrates and decisions are reached on the basis of a two-thirds majority rather than unanimity. During the Occupation, the number of jurors used had been reduced to six, and a simple majority, even by a one-vote margin, was sufficient for condemnation. During a thirteen-year postwar transition period, an additional juror was added and a six-to-four majority was required for conviction. The alternates, today as then, sit through the entire proceeding, but play an active part only if a juror falls ill or is disqualified, at which point one of the alternates steps in and the trial continues without a break. Only five challenges were permitted, so the selection and swearing-in of the jurors—all men, it turned out—was soon finished.