Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris (32 page)

Chance as commonly understood, Petiot argued, was really an illusion. “There is no chance,” but only “probabilities that submit to special laws.” All of these could be discovered with reason and application because, as he put it, “there is no effect without cause, and all effects result from a certain number of causes,” which are often multiple and complicated. But once a person discovers those laws, he or she can control them and apply them with profit. Petiot promised to guide the reader through this uncharted territory, this “virgin forest bristling with calculus.” The attempt to play games and master “chance” reveals a great deal about the murder suspect—Petiot the gambler and risk-taker who prided himself on overcoming opposition, regardless of the odds, the obstacles, or evidently any moral scruples.

Authorities, in the meantime, continued looking for the identity of his alleged victims. On November 10, 1944, any person who had a member of the family or a friend disappear between January 1, 1942, and March 11, 1944, was invited to the quai des Orfèvres to look through a collection of clothing, household goods, and other personal items believed to have belonged to Petiot’s victims.

Fifty-three suitcases would be on display, including the forty-nine found last spring in Neuhausen’s attic in Courson-les-Carrières. The remaining four bags consisted of items discovered in closets at rue Le Sueur, or at Neuhausen’s house. These included three blouses, thirteen dresses, fourteen nightgowns, sixteen girdles, and twenty-four pairs of panties. One journalist referred to this macabre exhibition as the “
Petiot Exposition at the Gallery Orfèvres.”

Like many Parisians that autumn, Petiot followed with interest the high-profile chase and eventual arrest of Henri Lafont and Pierre Bonny. On November 30, thanks to a tip from a former member of the French Gestapo who had hidden inside the Resistance, Lafont and Bonny were found on a Burgundian farm outside Bazoches. This hideout was suspected of serving as the center of a network to help former Gestapo men and informants escape the country. The police barged in on this embryonic “French Odessa,” captured the men, along with a stash of five to ten million in francs and jewels, a fraction of the treasure they had looted during the Occupation.

On December 12, 1944, less than two weeks after the arrest, the jury reached its verdict. Both Lafont and Bonny, as well as five of their men, were guilty and would be executed by firing squad on December 27, 1944. Petiot said sarcastically that these traitors had been “honorably” executed while he would likely be sent to the guillotine for doing the same thing as French justice: punishing traitors.

T
HE new commissaire, Lucien Pinault, was questioning some of Petiot-Valeri’s closest FFI colleagues at the armory. One of them, Jean Emile Fernand Duchesne, recalled that Valeri had arrived at the end of September or early October. Valeri was, Duchesne said, “
very esteemed” for his work, and he rose quickly. As far as he knew, the authorities did not know his real identity. The general consensus was that “
he had belonged to a group called Fly-Tox and he had killed many Germans.”

Duchesne admitted, however, that he had eventually come to
suspect that Valeri was Dr. Petiot, and he believed that one or two other people shared his opinion. At one point, Valeri told him that he had “
participated in the murder, or rather execution of 63 people, including a boxer, whom he himself had killed with a revolver.”

Yvonne Salvage,
the owner of the five-room apartment where the murder suspect stayed at the time of his arrest, told police that she had no idea of her guest’s real identity. She had loaned the apartment to this man as a favor to her son Jean, who had approached her with the request at the end of October. It would only be a few days, he had said. All she knew, Salvage added, was that his name was Dr. Valeri. Police now wanted to question her son, but he had taken flight.

If Petiot had stayed in the Salvage apartment for only a few days, there was someone else who had sheltered him for months. This was Georges Redouté, a fifty-five-year-old Belgian housepainter who lived on the fourth floor at 83 rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis. On November 4, 1944, police began to question this man.

About nine o’clock one evening in late March, probably the twenty-fifth, Redouté was returning home from work when he found his friend and physician, Marcel Petiot, wearing a large gray overcoat, a brown suit, a beige fedora, and a pair of dark horn-rimmed glasses. He also carried two small suitcases and a third, larger one. Dr. Petiot immediately launched into a discussion of the newspaper accounts of rue Le Sueur. “The cadavers,” he said, “are the cadavers of Germans that I executed myself.”

At that point, Redouté had known Petiot for almost three years, having met him when the physician came to treat the wife of a friend, bistro owner Louis Bézayrie. Petiot appealed to their past friendship. “You know that I was incarcerated for eight months by the Germans for clandestine passages. I am still sought by the German police. Perhaps you can put me up for a few days?”

Redouté had accepted, bringing a hungry, tired, and apparently broke fugitive to his small apartment. He gave him a bowl of soup and a piece of bread. The next day, Redouté asked for more details about rue Le Sueur. Petiot repeated his answers, adding that he had hidden parachutists,
retrieved weapons dropped by British planes, and dispersed them to the Resistance fighters in the countryside.

“I should tell you,” Redouté said, “Dr. Petiot was not very talkative and did not always respond to my questions.” On one occasion, he said that the bodies burned in his basement should have been removed by a truck, but it had broken down and his colleagues had decided to “make the cadavers disappear by burning them.” He did not name these comrades. As for the triangular room with the iron hooks and viewing lens, Petiot dismissed it as mere nonsense.

In May, Redouté’s twenty-one-year-old daughter, Marguerite Durez, also moved into the apartment. Redouté had introduced his male guest as Captain Henri Valeri, a member of the Resistance on the run from the Gestapo. By this time, Dr. Petiot had grown a beard, and he continued to wear dark glasses, at least outside the apartment. Durez remembered her father calling him
a “Corsican” and did not ask any questions, though she noticed that he often wore the same clothes and his shoes were in poor repair.

Did Dr. Petiot appear to be working for the Resistance?

“
During the time that I sheltered him,” Redouté said, “he never gave the impression that he was engaged in any clandestine action.” He rarely left the apartment, and then, almost never at night. And for someone who claimed to be a leader of Fly-Tox, Petiot received surprisingly few visitors. Petiot was, the housepainter said, “always alone.”

This was not completely true. Speaking with Marguerite Durez, police learned that there had been one visitor: Redouté’s friend and bistro owner Emilie Bézayrie. Detectives would soon question her, but first they searched Redouté’s apartment.

In the dining room where Petiot slept was “
a drum with German colors with two drumsticks and a third one with rubber at the end.”
Petiot had called this a trophy from the battle of Paris, Redouté said. Police also found two bicycle license plates and two books, Joseph E. Mills’s novel
L’Enigma du Maillet—Scotland Yard
and a yearbook of the
Comite de forces françaises 1933–1934
. In a drawer in Durez’s room was a notebook entitled “Thoughts,” which Redouté said had belonged to his
daughter. Police also found forty-seven wooden dice. Dr. Petiot used these, Redouté said, to play
a “game of poker.”

On November 6, 1944, police questioned Emilie Bézayrie about her contact with Petiot during his months in hiding. She had learned of his whereabouts at her bistro thanks to her friend Redouté. It was only a couple of visits, she said, and always as consultations for her three-and-a-half-year-old son. They never spoke of rue Le Sueur. “
I was convinced at that moment that he was innocent of the accusations made by the newspapers.” Bézayrie would later admit that they had in fact spoken of “the war, the Germans, and perhaps the police hunt of which he was the object.” But she insisted that she carried no message from Georgette or anyone else.

A
S pretrial questioning continued, Petiot’s version of the events of March 11 differed substantially from the police record. After the telephone call to his apartment, Petiot said that he had biked over to the building immediately, arriving in about twelve minutes, not thirty minutes. The police and firefighters had concocted the story of his late arrival to cover for their hasty decision to break into his building.

Petiot denied that he had ever posed as his brother. He identified himself, he said, as a Resistance fighter who had just been released from the Gestapo prison. At this point, he had wanted to wait on the arrival of the police chief, but the patrolman at the site had been a “
true patriot” and advised him to leave because he did not know how closely allied his boss was with the Nazis. The patrolman promised to cover for him. He also instructed him to call the police the following morning and ask for “Monsieur Wilhelm or William.” Joseph Teyssier’s middle name was William.

When Petiot complied, he said that he was told that the Germans were interested in his case and he should disappear. Petiot took the advice. He stayed that night with an unidentified friend, before his Fly-Tox comrades took him to Redouté’s apartment. Petiot spent the next five months there, not far from the home of the alleged victim
Dr. Paul Braunberger and the bars and cafés where Edmond Pintard recruited for the escape organization.

The Nazi-controlled press had seized on the story, slandering him with a barrage of lies and sensationalism. Compromised, Petiot no longer received important missions with the Resistance. Dr. Eugène was relegated to the background. Under his new code name, “Special 21,” Petiot labored among a series of mundane duties largely confined to writing tracts and administrative drudgery. He was bored and frustrated beyond belief.

It was the Liberation that saved Paris—and also, Petiot said, himself. August 1944 had been thrilling, as the capital rose up against the Nazis. After emerging from hiding, Petiot claimed to have participated in the battle, collecting a number of souvenirs, such as German hand grenades, a gun from a fallen Resistance comrade, and, as police had already discovered, a drum from the place de la République. In early September, he went to a number of Resistance offices, hoping to renew his contacts with Pierre Brossolette of de Gaulle’s BCRA, then called the DGER. Brossolette could explain his Resistance work at rue Le Sueur, help him obtain the release of his wife and brother from captivity, and find him continued employment in intelligence.

It was this desire to serve the country, Petiot said, that forced him to assume the false identity Dr. François Wetterwald, alias of Captain Henri Valeri. As a thirty-three-year-old, he’d hoped to see more action than he did as a forty-seven-year-old, as his Valeri papers described him. He also told his FFI colleagues that he had to adopt the false identity to escape former Gestapo agents, Nazi informers, and other enemies who wanted to punish him for his services to the Resistance.

If Petiot had committed so many patriotic services for the Resistance, Gollety asked, why did he not simply tell the police his story after the Liberation? Petiot said that the accusations made against him by the “German press” were so “manifestly false” that he could not imagine anyone believing them. Besides, he said, “I did not go to the police because the police had not yet been purged of collaborators, and I was more useful to France continuing the fight than discussing my personal affairs.”

Gollety, no surprise, sometimes suffered migraine headaches during the pretrial questioning. On one such occasion, when he looked particularly disturbed, Floriot reminded him that there was a doctor present.
Petiot, laughing, offered to give his interrogator an injection.

A
S Gollety could not evaluate the merits of Petiot’s claims to have served the Resistance on his own, he summoned two consultants, Lieutenants Jacques Yonnet and Albert Brouard of the military security organization Direction Générale des Etudes et Recherches (DGER). Both men, well-versed in the culture and traditions of the underground, would question Petiot at length about his activities.

Lieutenant Jacques Yonnet was the author of the
Résistance
article about Petiot that helped uncover his whereabouts. A twenty-nine-year-old who had been
wounded by a German grenade and captured at Boult-sur-Suippe in June 1940, Yonnet had escaped and returned to Paris, where he taught in a vocational college, collected material for a history of the city of Paris that he hoped to write, and hung out with a smart bohemian set with radical leanings. Yonnet had begun using the alias “Ybarne,” which he had borrowed from a priest who had died in his prisoner-of-war camp.

Joining the Resistance in 1943, Yonnet had operated a clandestine radio and mapping service. One of his main tasks was helping London coordinate bombing raids against sites most likely to harm German interests and yet result in the fewest French casualties. Yonnet had expanded his role, recruiting and personally hiding a downed Allied pilot in his apartment on the Left Bank. His associate, Albert Brouard (Brette), a forty-three-year-old former police inspector who joined the Resistance in May 1942, had helped Allied pilots escape to Spain.

Neither Yonnet nor Brouard had heard of Fly-Tox. When they asked him for names of colleagues, Petiot refused to answer. That would have been an understandable position under the Occupation, when the lives of his comrades and their families were at stake. But now, after the Liberation, this stance seemed peculiar at best. Even when Yonnet and
Brouard promised complete confidentiality, Petiot scoffed at their guarantees. He would not—or could not—name a single person from his organization.

The names he did mention, however, raised many questions. When Petiot had said that Pierre Brossolette could attest to his activities, that man could not confirm anything because he had been dead for seven months. On March 22, 1944, after his arrest by the Gestapo, Brossolette had jumped from a sixth-floor window on avenue Foch rather than risk betraying fellow Resistants under torture. Another Resistant Petiot mentioned was “Cumulo” of the Arc-en-Ciel (Rainbow) network. Jean-Marie Charbonneaux (“Cumuleau”) had among other things worked in the information section of Arc-en-Ciel, concentrating on industrial and military intelligence and establishing a network to help Allied aviators evade capture.