Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris Read online

  ALSO BY DAVID KING

  VIENNA, 1814

  How the Conquerors of Napoleon

  Made Love, War, and Peace at

  the Congress of Vienna

  FINDING ATLANTIS

  A True Story of Genius, Madness,

  and an Extraordinary Quest for a

  Lost World

  Copyright © 2011 by David King

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-45291-7

  Frontispiece: Dr. Marcel Petiot at the time of his arrest. Used with permission of Associated Press.

  JACKET PHOTOGRAPHY © MARTIN AMIS/ARCHANGEL IMAGES

  v3.1

  TO JULIA AND MAX

  With special thanks to the Préfecture de

  Police for granting me access to the entire

  Petiot dossier, which has been classified

  since the time of the events.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  1. German Night

  2. The People’s Doctor

  3. Preliminary Findings

  4. Two Witnesses

  5. “100,000 Autopsies”

  6. The Woman with the Yellow Suitcase

  7. “Beside a Monster”

  8. A Delivery

  9. Evasion

  10. “Goodbye Arrogance”

  11. Sightings

  12. The Gestapo File

  13. Postcards from the Other Side

  14. Destination Argentina

  15. War in the Shadows

  16. The Attic

  17. Frustration

  Illustration Insert

  18. Nine More

  19. The List

  20. Apocalyptic Weeks

  21. “P.S. Destroy All My Letters”

  22. At Saint-Mandé-Tourelle Station

  23. Interrogations

  24. Beating Chance?

  25. The Knellers

  26. The Petiot Circus

  27. “Not in Danger of Death”

  28. Two to One

  29. Inside Murder House

  30. Black Fingernails

  31. “A Taste for Evil”

  32. The Hairdresser, the Makeup Artist, and the Adventuress

  33. Walkout

  34. Naufrageur

  35. The Verdict

  36. Timbers of Justice

  37. The Loot

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  Notes

  Illustration Credits

  About the Author

  PREFACE

  March 11, 1944

  A THICK black smoke streamed into Jacques and Andrée Marçais’s fifth-floor apartment at 22 rue Le Sueur in the heart of Paris’s fashionable 16th arrondissement. The smoke had begun five days before, but now, in the unusually warm weather, it was getting worse, seeping through closed windows and soiling the furniture. In the air was a nauseating smell described variously as burnt caramel, burnt rubber, or a burnt roast of poor quality. The source of the disturbance, it seemed, was a building across the street. “Do something,” Andrée Marçais told her husband when he returned home just before six o’clock that evening, and she sent him over to investigate.

  Neither Jacques nor his wife knew who, if anyone, lived in the neighboring two-and-a-half-story town house at 21 rue Le Sueur. A man was sometimes seen riding there on a green bicycle, towing a cart whose contents were concealed under a heavy canvas. On rare occasions, he appeared to receive visitors, who arrived almost invariably at night curiously lugging a couple of heavy suitcases.

  As Jacques approached the stately structure with its blackened gray stone façade, he could tell that the smoke was indeed pouring out of its narrow chimney. He could not, however, see inside the house. The shutters on the ground floor were closed, and the curtains on the second floor were drawn. Jacques rang the bell. After no response, he pressed the button a few more times. Then, noticing a small, weather-worn piece of paper attached to the large double door that had once served as a carriage entrance, he took it down and read: “Away for a month. Forward mail to 18, rue des Lombards, Auxerre.”

  Worried about a chimney fire blazing in an empty house, Jacques returned home and called the police.

  Moments later, two bicycle patrolmen arrived on the scene. After trying in vain to enter the premises, the men, Joseph Teyssier and Emile Fillion, went looking for someone who could identify the owner of the property. The concierge at No. 23, Marie Pageot, informed them that the town house was unoccupied but belonged to a family physician named Marcel Petiot, who lived at 66 rue Caumartin near Gare Saint-Lazare, in a bustling commercial district just south of a seedy center of strip joints, brothels, and nightclubs.

  With the physician’s name and telephone number in hand, Teyssier entered the nearby grocer shop, Garanne, and dialed: Pigalle 77–11. A woman answered and then put Dr. Petiot on the line. Teyssier informed him of the fire at his property.

  “Have you entered the building?” the physician asked.

  “No.”

  “Don’t touch anything. I will bring the keys immediately. Fifteen minutes at the most.”

  When Teyssier exited the shop, the unusual smoke had attracted a few residents onto the sidewalk. Other neighbors watched from upper-story windows, the officers and onlookers alike scurrying about as they awaited the arrival of the owner. Fifteen minutes passed, and Petiot was nowhere in sight. Another ten minutes passed, and still no Petiot. Biking from his apartment on rue Caumartin at that time of the evening should not have taken more than ten to twelve minutes.

  After almost half an hour, the patrolmen decided that they could not wait any longer and called the fire department, which immediately dispatched a truck from the station at 8 rue Mesnil. The leader of the fire brigade, thirty-three-year-old Corporal Avilla Boudringhin, grabbed a ladder and climbed onto a second-floor balcony. Opening the wooden shutter, he smashed the glass, released the window lock, and stepped inside the darkened mansion. Two of his men followed. With the aid of a flashlight, the small team of firefighters traced the peculiar, nauseating smell to a small room in the basement. One of the two coal stoves there was roaring furiously. It was fireman Roger Bérody who opened the iron door.

  Jutting out were the charred remains of a human hand. On the far staircase was a pile of debris, which turned out to be a skull, a rib cage, and several other recognizable bones. Arms and legs had been strewn about in parts. A split torso and two other skulls lay on the floor. The stench of scorched and decomposing flesh was overpowering. Horrified, the fire chief ordered his men out of the basement. As the firefighters exited the grisly site, one of the younger men leaned over an iron banister and vomited.

  “Gentlemen, come and take a look,” Boudringhin told the patrolmen once he emerged onto the street through the old carriage entrance. “I believe that your work will be cut out for you.”

  Teyssier was not the least prepared for the carnage that awaited him in the basement. He rushed back to Garanne and telephoned headquarters.

  A large crowd soon gathered outside the town house, many of them curious about the
smoke, the commotion, and now also the sight of a fire truck that was not yet extinguishing the fire. Among the arrivals was a slim, dark-haired man of medium height, pushing a bicycle through the throng of onlookers. He was pale and clean-shaven, and wore a dark gray overcoat and a fedora. He was sweating profusely.

  When he reached the front of the crowd, he leaned his bike against the building, walked up to the fire chief, and identified himself as the brother of the owner. He demanded to be taken inside, speaking with such conviction that the fire chief waved him through to Patrolman Fillion. While the two men were talking, Patrolman Teyssier returned to the scene.

  “Are you good Frenchmen?” the man asked.

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “Then listen carefully. What you see there are the bodies of Germans and traitors to our country.” Discreetly, he asked if the authorities had been notified. Teyssier nodded.

  “That’s a serious mistake,” the man said. “My life is at stake, as are the lives of several of my friends who serve our cause.” He explained that he was in charge of a French Resistance organization and handed over a document to that effect, though the details were difficult to read in the darkness. In the meantime, he reached down and picked something off the ground, shoving it into his pocket.

  The man then professed to have some three hundred secret files and identification cards of fellow Resistants at his house. “I must destroy them at once before they fall into the hands of the Germans.”

  Sympathetic to the work of the Resistance, Teyssier and Fillion had no desire to see so many patriotic Frenchmen handed over to the Nazis and carted off to prisons, concentration camps, or some other horrific fate. They agreed to allow the man to leave the scene of the crime, even though he clearly had information that could have helped the investigation. What’s more, the officers agreed not to inform their superiors about his visit. The stranger biked away into the night.

  Later, when Teyssier saw a photograph of the physician who owned the building, he was mortified to learn that the man on the bicycle had been Marcel Petiot.

  A CROSS town, at 48–50 Boulevard Diderot, Commissaire Georges-Victor Massu, the chief of the Brigade Criminelle, had just finished dinner with his wife, Mathilde, and twenty-year-old son, Bernard. Massu had settled into his favorite chair to talk about the day’s activities: a burglary, an assault case, and the usual routine of reports, interrogations, and seemingly endless paperwork. Bernard, a law student at the University of Paris, had retreated to his room to prepare for exams.

  Minutes before ten p.m., after Massu had just climbed into bed, the telephone rang. “I still remember that call as if the crackle of the bell rang in my ears today,” he said many years later. At that hour, he knew it could only mean one thing. This was not, as he put it, another “stabbing in the vicinity of Montmartre.” Massu took the receiver with the steely composure of a gambler trying to bluff a rogue cardsharp.

  On the line was Secretary Canitrot at the Brigade Criminelle. Without relaying the details of the discovery at rue Le Sueur, Canitrot urged the boss to come as quickly as possible and sent over a car right away. Fifteen minutes later, a long black Citroën 11 CV was waiting outside Massu’s residence, the chauffeur with a hand at his cap.

  Bernard wanted to tag along, as he sometimes did on the most serious or interesting cases. The commissaire agreed. Massu, a stocky man in his fifty-fifth year, with a shock of black hair and a dark mustache, put on his black overcoat and gray fedora. The two Massus, each wrapped up for the night chill, hopped into the car and drove across the city that, years before, would have been swirling with activity. That evening, however, Paris looked, as Massu put it, “somber and deserted.”

  The city was suffering the fourth year of the Nazi Occupation. Huge red and white banners emblazoned with a black swastika had flown atop the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and many other landmarks and buildings near Petiot’s town house. White placards with Gothic script directed traffic, mostly German and many of them, in that area, Mercedes-Benzes or Citroëns with small swastika flags on the fenders. The few people on the streets after the official ten p.m. curfew were Germans, “friends of the occupiers,” and the “workers of the night.” A brothel exclusively for Nazi officers was located just around the corner from Petiot’s property.

  As the car pulled up to 21 rue Le Sueur, a single streetlamp, hooded for the wartime blackout, cast a dim bluish light on the activities of the police, which, as Massu already realized, were inspiring an “uneasy curiosity” among the street’s residents. Some officers controlled the crowd eager to watch from balcony windows; others followed the commissaire inside the town house. Policemen were now arriving every few minutes.

  Massu entered the mansion, which had a grand salon, a petit salon, a large formal dining room, a billiards room, a library, six bedrooms, and two kitchens. The house had previously belonged to Princess Marie Colloredo-Mansfeld, a sixty-seven-year-old Frenchwoman whose husband’s family had borne the title of imperial prince since 1763. The French actress Cécile Sorel, the comtesse de Ségur and doyenne of the Comédie Française, had lived there in the 1930s, a neighboring concierge was telling people. This would be claimed for years, but it is not accurate. Sorel had only rented the house to store her extensive wardrobe and trunks of memorabilia from her long career on the stage.

  The current owner of the property was far less known to the general public than either the princess or the actress. “The name Marcel Petiot meant absolutely nothing to me,” Commissaire Massu admitted. It was the first time he had even heard it.

  From what Massu could tell, the owner was an assiduous collector of fine art. Many of the rooms boasted a splendid array of crystal chandeliers, oriental rugs, antique furniture, marble statues, Sèvres vases, and oil paintings in gilded frames. At the same time, there was a startling state of neglect. The rooms were not only dusty and full of cobwebs, but also, in some cases, the furniture was turned over or stacked in corners as if at a flea market. In several rooms and corridors were torn wallpaper, loose baseboards, and dangling panels. Massu saw exquisite Louis XV furniture alongside filthy couches with visibly protruding springs.

  When one officer warned that the case would most likely turn out to be appalling, Massu was unfazed. He had heard this before. In fact, almost every time a new crime was discovered, someone usually noted that it would be a “terrible histoire.” He had no doubt that this might well be the case. As chief of the Brigade Criminelle, he was used to investigating disturbing affairs.

  Still Massu was taken aback at the macabre spectacle in the basement of 21 rue Le Sueur: the half-burned skull in the furnace, the pile of tibias, femurs, and other bones on the floor. A foot, Massu saw, was “blackened like a log that had been slowly consumed.” A dismembered hand, curled up tightly, “grasped the thin air in desperation.” A woman’s torso lay there, with the flesh “gnawed away to reveal the splinters of the ribcage.” The stench—“the sinister odor of roasted human flesh,” as he put it—gripped his throat.

  A few steps away, Massu found a shovel, a dark-stained hatchet, and then, underneath the stone stairs, a gray bag containing the left half of a decomposed body, minus the head, foot, and internal organs. Massu did not know how to describe the ghastly site other than by using a reference to medieval literature. The basement of the elegant town house looked like a scene from Dante’s Inferno.

  EXITING into the courtyard, Massu, Bernard, and a couple of detectives, including Inspector Principal Marius Battut, entered one of the smaller buildings in the back. In the first room was a polished desk, along with two leather armchairs, a lounge sofa, and a small round table topped with magazines. A cupboard full of medical supplies stood against one wall; against another was a glass-lined bookcase in which medical treatises were shelved. What particularly struck the commissaire, however, was the room’s appearance: It was cleaner, tidier, and in much better condition than the more stately main building. It also seemed to have been recently renov
ated.

  Opening a second door, located near one of the bookshelves, Massu exited into a narrow corridor, about three feet in width, which led to another door, this one with a thick chain and padlock. The investigators entered. It was a small, triangular room, about eight feet on the longest side, six on the shortest. The walls were thick, two of them of rough cement and the third covered by beige wallpaper. There were no windows or furniture, only two unshaded lightbulbs and a plain metal cot. Attached near the corners of each wall, about one meter from the ceiling, were a number of iron hooks.

  A gold-trimmed double wooden door on the far wall appeared to lead to some grand salon, but when one of the inspectors tried to open it, the doorknob simply turned around. With the help of a crowbar, the men ripped the door from the hinges to discover that it had been glued there. To the right of this false door was a bell, which did not work either. Actually it was not even connected, as its wires had been cut from the outside. As for the door through which the inspectors had entered, Massu noticed that it had no handle on the inside.

  Examining the beige wallpaper, which looked freshly applied, Bernard peeled it back and discovered a viewing lens fitted in the wall at a height of almost six feet. The purpose of the room was not clear, but there was already a disturbing hunch that this small space with its iron hooks, many decoys, and virtually soundproof walls might well be where the victims had met their demise.

  After retracing their steps to the courtyard, Massu and his team entered the old carriage house, which had been converted into a garage and crammed with tools, boards, slop pails, paintbrushes, gas masks, and old mattress springs. A sliding door in the back led to another building, probably the former stable. There, on the ground, beyond a pile of rusty scrap iron was a metal cover that hid the night’s most horrific discovery.

  It was the entrance to a pit. A newly greased pulley, with a hook and a thick rope tied to form a noose, hung over the hole. A horrible stench left little doubt as to what lay inside. Massu, nevertheless, climbed down the wooden ladder, watching each slippery step, and landed in the middle of a revolting mix of quicklime and decomposing bodies of varying stages—the dumping ground, in effect, of a veritable slaughterhouse.