The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot (37 page)

The photographers' flashguns illuminated the hollow, exhausted eyes of the spectators, who stared with curiosity and horror at the man whose life was now forfeit. A single person in the courtroom seemed neither stunned by the sentence nor perturbed at the thought of a human being's death, and that was Dr. Marcel Petiot himself. As he had predicted, it had been a good trial, a memorable trial, and he had made people laugh. Beyond that, it seemed, he didn't really give a damn.

As Petiot was led out of the courtroom he turned and shouted, with an unexpected show of passion, “I must be avenged!” Some observers thought he spoke to his wife, some to his brother Maurice, and yet others that it was a call to arms addressed to incognito members of Fly-Tox present during the trial. Even more people assumed this was simply the last contrived enigma in the dramatic role Petiot had written for himself.

The trial was over, and the civil-suit attorneys swarmed around the three magistrates who, alone, would determine the damages to be paid to families of the victims—amounts intended to compensate the survivors for the loss of their parents, brothers, sisters, or children, and based on the deceased person's estimated worth. This came to F880,000 for Dreyfus, F700,000 for Dr. Braunberger, F100,000 each for Guschinov and Paulette Grippay, F80,000 for the Anspachs, F50,000 each for Gisèle Rossmy and Madame Khaït, and F10,000 for Piereschi. Curiously, though the relatives of the Wolffs and Knellers asked for compensation, they received nothing. This made a grand total of F1,970,000, or about 1 percent of the amount Petiot was believed to have taken from his victims after murdering them. There was also an assessment of F312,611.50 in court costs. In time, Georgette Petiot paid about half of this amount, and justice, presumably, was done.

*
Since no official court transcript was made, the trial sequence that follows has been reconstructed entirely from contemporary journalistic accounts, supplemented by material from interviews with some of the participants.

*
Pierre Etienne Flandin, former prime minister, originally from the Yonne. During the war he was a collaborator by sympathy and briefly served as Vichy foreign minister. At the time of Petiot's trial, Flandin was in prison, charged with treason. He was acquitted in July 1946. Though a good person for Petiot to have the reputation of attacking, he had, in fact, left the Yonne before Petiot became involved in politics there.

*
Several neighbors had, in fact, told the
juge d'instruction
that the firemen had entered the building before the policeman Teyssier went to call Petiot. Petiot was quite possibly right.

*
Floriot's facts were correct, but he neglected to mention one important point: the Wolffs entered France with a German passport in 1933; they did not have German passports in 1942.

*
After reading about this debate in the newspapers, a man wrote to Leser to say that he had regularly obtained and employed plastic explosives during the period Petiot mentioned.

*
He was, strangely, found guilty only of fraud. This was based on the fact that he had obtained money from Madame Dreyfus for her husband's freedom, knowing full well that her husband would not be unconditionally released. Guélin was forced to repay the entire sum he and Dequeker had gotten from her.

*
Lhéritier was referring to the Communist Resistance, which had functioned independently of and often in competition with de Gaulle's forces during much of the war. Following the Liberation, there were bitter disputes as to who would control the new government, and some accused the Communists of unscrupulous and illegal actions both during and after the war. Petiot was carrying a recently issued Communist-party card when he was arrested. A few, but only a few, lend credence to Lhéritier's theory.

*
Actually, Petiot never had admitted killing Dreyfus, but apparently it seemed easier to prove that Dreyfus was a collaborator than that he had not been killed.

*
Floriot distorted some of the facts slightly, as here. Article 687 was the interrogation of someone who had worked as an undercover agent at the rue des Saussaies and
thought he had heard
that Martinetti existed and had been arrested. In reality, Martinetti was never found.

15

MONSIEUR DE PARIS

Floriot appealed the case on three technicalities: a complaint of false testimony by Madame Braunberger, a similar objection regarding her maid, and another pertaining to the jurors who had been quoted in the
Herald Tribune.
The complaints were lodged on May 13, and were rejected on the twenty-third. He had a meeting with the president of the Republic, the reasons for which were obscure. Neither Floriot nor Petiot had requested a presidential pardon, and none was given.

During a routine daily search of Petiot's cell on May 22, an ampoule was discovered in the hem of the prisoner's uniform. An investigation was opened to see how the vial had been smuggled in; police suspected it was cyanide, and that Petiot hoped to commit suicide before his execution, as Pierre Laval had attempted the previous year.
*
Petiot's vial turned out to contain a mild sedative that he had somehow managed to conceal when he arrived at the Santé. No one knew why he wanted it. He was perfectly calm, and spent his days smoking and writing poetry, which he gave to the two guards constantly posted outside the door of his cell. He was allowed visits only from his lawyer, from the prison doctor, and from the chaplain or a magistrate, for religious or juridic confessions—but he had no need for confessors and preferred to “take his baggage with him.” Each day he asked, “When are they going to assassinate me?”

The man who would guillotine Petiot was a large, small-featured, quiet, white-haired man of sixty-nine years named Henri Desfourneaux, or, as the executioner is known in France, “Monsieur de Paris.” The post of headsman is hereditary, passed down to a son or nephew or, if there are no willing male descendants in the family, to a descendant of one of the other great executioner families that had flourished in the days when there was more beheading to be done. Until a century ago, there were executioners for almost all of the large cities in France and, considering the hereditary nature of the business, it is not surprising that the same family often held office in various cities. Ten years before the French Revolution, seven brothers from the notorious Sanson family were executioners in seven different cities, and to distinguish themselves they each assumed the name of the town where they plied their trade: Monsieur de Rennes, Monsieur de Blois, and so on. In the late nineteenth century, all but one of these positions were abolished, and Monsieur de Paris became the sole executioner for all of France.

The guillotine is the private property and responsibility of the executioner and is handed down with the position. Anatole Deibler, Desfourneaux's predecessor, owned two of them—a large one for use in Paris, and a smaller one that could be loaded onto a railroad flatcar and used for executions elsewhere in the country. Deibler was clever with his hands and had made a number of improvements on the machines, such as mounting the weighted blade on wheels so that it would drop more smoothly than it had in soaped tracks.

Deibler died of a heart attack in February 1939 while on his way to his 301st execution. Commonly, the post goes to one of the three valets who help Monsieur de Paris, and generally these men are all from executioner families, since the population shuns them and it is difficult to leave the profession or marry outside the clan. The first valet, André Obrecht, was not of an executioner family, however, and could not be appointed. The second, Desfourneaux's uncle, was too old. So third valet Henri Desfourneaux, who had worked in a factory when not helping with executions, became the new Monsieur de Paris.

His first important job did not go well. It was the last public execution in France, that of mass murderer Eugen Weidmann in June 1939 at Versailles. The executioner's tilting table, to which the prisoner is strapped while standing, should be aligned so that when it is flipped into place the condemned person's neck fits in the semicircular notch called the
lunette.
Weidmann's did not, and the valets had to tug at his hair and ears to drag him into the proper position. When his head dropped, the assembled crowd burst through the police lines and women eagerly dipped their handkerchiefs in the pool of blood on the pavement. The spectacle was so appalling that soon afterward the law was changed and executions henceforth were made private.

There were repeated delays in the scheduling of Petiot's execution. Desfourneaux went on strike for higher wages, and claimed that his guillotine had been damaged by Allied bombing raids and would not work. Simultaneously, there was some debate as to whether Desfourneaux should not be replaced as Monsieur de Paris by his valet Obrecht, since during the war Obrecht had fought for the Resistance, while Desfourneaux had guillotined a number of Frenchmen under German pressure. Some people asked whether Petiot could not be shot to avoid all these problems, but this was impossible, as the firing squad was reserved for traitors. Petiot threatened to die laughing if they couldn't hurry and make up their minds to kill him another way.

Finally the problems were resolved. Article 327 of the penal code absolved the executioner of all responsibility for the people he killed: he was simply doing his job. Desfourneaux was made to understand that he should be happy with his yearly salary of F65,000 for part-time work plus the annual stipend of F10,000 for upkeep of the guillotine. He suddenly remembered that his traveling guillotine—the one used for executions in the provinces—was in good shape and could be set up rapidly.

Petiot had made Floriot promise to tell him when the execution would take place. This was forbidden by French law, and the announcement of the date was customarily made after 6:00 on the evening before the execution. The gates of the Santé were locked at that hour, and thus no one could enter and speak to the condemned. But there were always ways of finding out earlier. On the afternoon of May 23, Floriot learned that the execution had been scheduled for the following morning. He was in court, and so asked his assistant Paul Cousin to inform Petiot. Cousin was terrified. He walked around the Santé for two hours, unable to summon the courage to tell a man he was about to die. When it was almost 6:00
P.M.,
he forced himself to enter.

“When are they going to assassinate me?” asked Petiot.

“I think,” Cousin muttered, trembling, “that it could well be tomorrow morning.”

“There, there,” said Petiot, laying his hand on the lawyer's shoulder, “don't let it affect you so much. Let's talk about something else.”

The execution did not take place the next day. Desfourneaux was having real problems with the guillotine, and it was postponed until the twenty-fifth.

At 2:00 on the morning of May 25, hundreds of policemen barricaded the streets within a radius of 250 yards around the Santé prison. At 3:30, Monsieur de Paris arrived at the prison gates with his three blue-clad valets and a horsecart carrying the guillotine. The mechanism is so precisely constructed that not a single hammer blow is required during its assembly; there were only faint sounds of wood knocking together in the dark courtyard as the heavy, fifteen-foot-high grooved uprights were fastened to the supporting base. There was a faint glimmer of light when Desfourneaux removed the seven-kilogram triangular steel
couperet
from its leather sheath and mounted it on the forty-five-kilogram weight that would send it plunging home. At 4:10
A.M.,
the streetlights around the prison were extinguished, and the basket, the size of a small office wastepaper can, was placed beneath the guillotine.

Ten minutes later, four cars drew up in front of the prison gates, bringing Floriot, his assistant Ayache, Dupin, Goletty, Dr. Paul, and a dozen other police and court officials. Eight minutes later, just after dawn, Dupin, Goletty, Floriot, and Ayache entered cell number 7 and awakened Petiot, who was sleeping peacefully.

Dupin spoke the traditional words: “Petiot, have courage. The time has come.”

Petiot made an obscene reply.

The chains were removed from Petiot's hands and feet, and he changed from the black prison uniform into the suit he had worn during the trial. He asked for paper and ink, and for twenty minutes calmly wrote letters to his wife and son, then gave them to Floriot. Goletty appeared to be feeling faint. Petiot jokingly pointed out that he was a doctor and could give him an injection if he liked. Floriot asked Ayache to take Dupin's arm, since the avocat général, too, was pale and weak when faced with the carrying-out of the sentence he had demanded.

“Maître, my friend,” Petiot said to Floriot, “if anyone publishes something on my case after my death, ask them to include photographs of the people I have been accused of killing. Then, perhaps, one day they will be found, and my innocence can be proved.” He turned to Dupin and Goletty. “Gentlemen, I am at your disposal.”

As Petiot was led into the corridor, prisoners in the neighboring cells pounded infernally on the doors and bid him farewell. He was offered the traditional cigarette and glass of rum. He refused the rum and was smoking peacefully when the prison chaplain asked if he had a confession to make or would like to hear mass.

“I am not a religious man, and my conscience is clean,” Petiot said. “But I will talk to you as a man.”

“Your wife wanted you to hear mass.”

“If it will help my wife, please go ahead.”

He was led past the door that opened on the courtyard; paper had been taped over its windows to hide the guillotine only two feet away. In the clerk's office, he signed the register, his hands were tied behind his back, the nape of his neck was shaved, and his shirt collar was cut off.

Two valets led Petiot out the door and down three steps to the courtyard. Dr. Paul, after fifty years and hundreds of executions, later said: