Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris (30 page)

Commissaire Massu lives on today in Simenon’s gruff, earthy fictional detective Jules Amédée François Maigret.

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S Captain Simonin later revealed, he had discovered Marcel Petiot’s exact whereabouts thanks to a tip from one of Petiot-Valeri’s subordinates at the Reuilly armory. FFI Corporal Jean-Richard Salvage told him that the suspect was staying in an apartment owned by his mother at 22 rue Paul-Bert. Simonin had investigated the lead. Sure enough, Petiot left the building every morning, took the métro at Saint-Mandé-Tourelle station, and exited at Reuilly-Diderot for a quick walk to the armory.

After making the arrest, Simonin did not immediately hand Petiot over to the police. Instead, he decided to question him about his activities. From the beginning, Petiot took on a brash, condescending tone, claiming to be, as Simonin put it, “
a hero of the Resistance.” He bandied about the terminology of the Communist Party, blasting the “hirelings of the capitalists” and “mercenaries in the service of the Americans.” He spoke vaguely about only “obeying orders” and implied that his comrades in “the party” would not hesitate to free him.

According to Simonin’s account of the interrogation, which eventually ended up in the files of the Paris police, Petiot elaborated on his many alleged services for the Resistance. He identified himself as an investigations officer and captain in the First Infantry Regiment of the FFI based at Reuilly. Later Simonin would say that he believed
Petiot had chosen to apply to this particular armory because of the prominence of several Communist leaders there, including Commandant Raffy, a former ranking member of the Resistance group FTP (Franc-Tireurs et Partisans), who would serve as Petiot’s supervisor at Reuilly. It is also significant that Reuilly—so recently evacuated by the Germans—was also taking a lead in forming the tribunals to purge former collaborators.

Petiot denied that he had revealed his real name when he arrived at the armory in September 1944 looking for a commission. He presented himself, he said, as Dr. Wetterwald, who in turn used the alias Dr. Valeri. Simonin later said that he was positive that Petiot was lying. Petiot would only admit that he believed that Raffy’s own boss, the head of the First Infantry Regiment, Colonel Ruaux, knew his true identity. In time, Petiot added, other people at the armory learned about his past. He defended them by pointing out that they had not put much credence in the wild slanders of the German press.

After discussing his medical practice, which he said earned 500,000 francs a year, an ironic boast perhaps for an avowed Communist, Petiot told Simonin that he had begun working for the Resistance in 1941. He had used his work as a physician to “demoralize German officer patients who came to consult me.” He made contact with a Resistance organization based on rue Cambon, to send him French workers who had returned ill or wounded from their work in Germany. These Frenchmen, Petiot said, often provided “very interesting intelligence,” which he readily passed on to the Allies.

Petiot mentioned specifically informing the American consulate in Paris about a secret German weapon, based on the principle of the boomerang, that was being developed just over forty miles southwest of Berlin. He identified his contact at the consulate as a man named Thompson. The American consul was Tyler Thompson, but he would later deny having any contact with the suspect. As for how Petiot could have known his name, Thompson had a theory. At the beginning of the Occupation, when he served as third secretary, Thompson had signed more than one thousand red certificates to be placed
on American-owned buildings and businesses all over Paris, declaring them inviolable according to international law.

By late 1941, Petiot had allegedly made many more contacts in the Resistance. He claimed to be working with a group of anti-Franco Spaniards in the outlying district of Levallois and receiving training from a man from London who organized Resistance in Franche-Comté. Who was this British agent? Petiot said that he never knew his name, or even his code name. He did mention working with a man called “Cumulo,” who operated the Resistance group Arc-en-Ciel, which in turn served under Pierre Brossolette in Charles de Gaulle’s intelligence service, the BCRA.

There were already many allegations to investigate, and authorities would pursue them, but Petiot was not done talking. As in the letter to
Résistance
, Petiot described how he had worked for a supposed Resistance group, “Fly-Tox,” that specialized in tracking down and executing informers, or
mouchards
, a slang term derived from the French word for fly (
mouche
). The name “Fly-Tox,” Petiot later said, had been inspired by a commercial fly-killer product because, like the pesticide, his men liquidated
mouchards
.

When Simonin asked Petiot to provide names “and all the information in your possession” about members of his alleged group, Petiot replied calmly that his organization was well known and it was unnecessary to provide further details. He did, however, elaborate on Fly-Tox’s methods of operation.

Members of his organization staked out the offices of the Gestapo on rue des Saussaies. Any civilian who left the premises was followed. The Fly-Tox Resistant, posing as a member of the German secret police, waited until the target went to a secluded spot and then seized him. If the latter protested that he worked for the Germans, he had, as Petiot later put it, “convicted himself.” The suspect was then thrown into a truck. Interrogations took place at his property on rue Le Sueur, which he had used since his purchase earlier that year to store his antiques and “the bulk of his fortune.”

The suspected collaborator—“once we acquired the certainty of his
guilt”—would be executed by revolver or a secret weapon that Petiot claimed to have invented, which could fire in silence up to one hundred feet with deadly accuracy. The bodies were then dumped in the forests of either Marly-le-Roi or Saint-Cloud. Petiot claimed to have killed sixty-three people this way. As for the exact place his group disposed of the bodies, he said that he could not remember. He did not know the names of his victims either, as he had not recorded them and often could not determine with any certainty if his men knew a suspect’s true identity. “We only knew that they were enemies who had to disappear.”

In December 1941, when the United States entered the war, Petiot claimed to have offered the design of his secret weapon to the American consulate (and this was also when he first adopted the pseudonym Dr. Eugène). By this time, Fly-Tox was supposedly managing a clandestine organization that helped Frenchmen escape Occupied Paris. False papers were obtained from a man close to Lucien Romier, Vichy minister of state, and another person known as “Desaix,” or more probably “De C,” who served the embassy of the Argentine Republic. A police commissaire based in the 7th arrondissement of Lyon further helped Petiot’s clients cross the border. The identification documents allowed Frenchmen to cross into Spain, then Portugal, and from there, reach safety in Argentina.

All this work as a Resistant, Petiot said, led to his arrest, imprisonment, and torture by the Gestapo. Then, after his release, Petiot realized that he was under close surveillance by the Gestapo, and still shaken by his prison ordeal, he retreated to Auxerre to recuperate. He returned to rue Le Sueur for the first time in early February 1944. It was then that he discovered that his building had been filled with bodies.

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FTER this unofficial interrogation, Captain Simonin handed Petiot over to the Police Judiciaire. The following day, Simonin would himself be brought before an official purge tribunal that examined cases of suspected collaboration. It was a five-minute hearing. Receiving a
guilty verdict, Simonin was ousted from his position in intelligence. He disappeared.
Years later, when he reemerged, he was convinced that his punishment had emanated from a certain faction that sought revenge for his arrest of Marcel Petiot.

Petiot, in the meantime, was met at the Police Judiciaire by Lucien Pinault, Commissaire Massu’s successor, and Ferdinand Gollety, the
juge d’instruction
, the examining magistrate, who, in French law, conducts pretrial questioning, summons the witnesses, and compiles the dossier. Then, if he finds sufficient reason, the
juge d’instruction
forwards the evidence to the public prosecutor to draw up the indictment. Gollety, a short man from Boulogne-sur-Mer, on the northern coast, was regarded as a rational, no-nonsense magistrate with a scrupulous regard for detail. He was also a thirty-two-year-old official in his first posting.

The defendant was, at this point, required only to declare his identity, not make a statement. Petiot made one anyway:

Petiot also retained as his legal counsel a rising star in the world of criminal defense, the forty-one-year-old Sorbonne-trained Maître René Edmond Floriot. “
A demon for detail,” Floriot had already defended Petiot in the two narcotics cases of 1942. Petiot had first seen Floriot’s talents firsthand in 1937, when the attorney successfully defended one of his patients, Magda Fontages, for attempted murder of the French ambassador to Italy, Count Charles de Chambrun. Fontages was also known for seducing many powerful men, including Benito
Mussolini, who at the height of passion liked to rip off her black silk scarf and pretend to strangle her.

Pretrial questioning would be an elaborate process that would ultimately
last fourteen months. It would not begin for another thirty-six hours, however, as it was already late in the evening of the 31st and November 1 was a public holiday. Petiot was taken to cell 7 of Sector 7 of Prison de la Santé, a large gray building constructed in 1867 in the 14th arrondissement. Petiot would join many suspected collaborators, Gestapo agents, black market profiteers, and other people who were accused of benefiting from the German Occupation.
Petiot’s sector was reserved for prisoners on death row.

“
I have been a member of the Resistance since the Germans first arrived in Paris,” Petiot said in his first official interrogation on November 2, 1944. He would repeat many of the claims he had made to Captain Simonin, but also add a few details. He had issued false certificates of disability to help Frenchmen avoid deportation to Germany and other requisitions or demands from Occupation authorities. He told of using his secret weapon twice, fatally wounding a German motorcyclist on rue Saint-Honoré and another soldier on rue La Fayette. He said that the Americans had declined to adopt his invention, and that was a mistake. “A five-ton truck,” Petiot said, “could have carried enough of the gadgets to liquidate the million Germans trampling France under their jackboots.”

Petiot refused to provide more detail about this supposedly deadly weapon. There was still too much uncertainty, he argued, and the Germans might return at any time and use it against his country. However unlikely this may have sounded, this belief was actually common in some circles, particularly in rural southern France. Many people feared that former collaborators were hiding in the countryside and planning to sabotage the Liberation with hopes of installing another German-friendly authoritarian regime.
When a handful of former collaborators were uncovered in December 1944 after in fact secretly returning to France, probably as part of the Nazi Ardennes offensive, the unlikely rumor would gain more credence.

Then, in his blunt fashion, Petiot gave another reason for his reticence to describe his invention: His interrogators were “
too uncultivated in scientific matters to be able to understand.”

When Gollety mentioned that Petiot would be well advised to reconsider, given that he was likely facing twenty-four counts of murder, Petiot countered unexpectedly that the
juge d’instruction
was ill-informed. He had killed sixty-three people. But these, he emphasized, were
not
the bodies at his house. The people he killed had been buried in the forest.

Upon his release from prison, Petiot explained to Gollety, he had been eager to avenge himself. He tried to contact his colleagues in Fly-Tox, but the organization had been vanquished, and its members who had not been imprisoned or executed had fled. It was difficult to reconnect with any of his remaining comrades because everyone used code names and they had all been changed. At the same time, Petiot had hesitated in finding his colleagues because he knew that the Gestapo often released prisoners in order to track their activities. He was certain that he was being watched and followed, and he did not want to put his fellow Resistants in harm’s way.

Petiot also related how, since being tortured by the Gestapo, he had suffered terrible headaches and increased bouts of anxiety. He felt sick upon his release from prison and needed to relax. In the end, he decided to visit his brother in Auxerre. He only returned to his apartment in Paris on or around February 8, 1944. What he found had immensely disturbed him.

Not only had the Germans stolen much of his medical equipment, including an ultraviolet machine, an infrared machine, and many other items that he had hoped to use in his clinic after the war, but Petiot found the house itself “
in a great disorder, furniture knocked over or broken, cupboards disemboweled.” The old manure pit, which he had sealed long before to keep out the rats, had been uncovered and filled with various missing items from his property, including tools, smaller instruments, a portable electrical heater, and two large cushions from the waiting room. Also in the pit were a number of corpses.