Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris (44 page)

Not everyone in the courtroom was swayed by the testimony. Robert Danger of
France-Soir
concluded that Petiot had not been able to “
kill everyone.”

T
HE most effective witness for the defense was the decorated Resistance fighter Lieutenant Richard Héritier, a member of the SOE’s RF unit that was dropped into Ruffey-sur-Seille in the Jura in February 1943. After his capture by the Germans, Héritier was imprisoned on June 10, 1943, at Fresnes, where for the next five months he had shared cell 440 with Marcel Petiot.

Héritier made several important claims about his cell mate. Given their many lengthy, detailed discussions in prison, often about the Fly-Tox organization and the clandestine escape network, Héritier had never doubted Petiot’s Resistance credentials. Petiot had not only shown his inside knowledge of the movement, but he had also furnished Héritier with contact information of other Resistants in Paris, should he ever escape.

Among other things, Petiot had coached him on surviving the horrific interrogations of the Gestapo. He had surprised and even impressed hardened Resistance fighters with his audacity. Héritier testified that he had repeatedly been amazed by Petiot’s almost complete lack of fear, to the point of taunting the Gestapo jailors. He was an inspiration to his prison mates, Héritier added, to a stunned courtroom, the audience and jury alike hanging on every word.

“
You spent five months with him,” Floriot said. “Do you think that a man can conceal his true feelings for five months?”

Héritier doubted that was possible. A prison cell was simply too intimate.

Floriot asked his opinion about the defendant.

“I think that first, Petiot did not act alone. Second, he was a member of a political party that was very active in the Resistance, but not the official Resistance that worked directly with the Allies. I believe that this party gave him orders which he carried out in his own way.” The unidentified party was of course the Communists, which had furnished France and other countries in Occupied Europe with many Resistance fighters.

“After the beating he took in the press,” Héritier continued, “the party that dared to claim Petiot would find itself sinking in the elections.” Petiot had in other words “sacrificed himself for the cause,” only to be unceremoniously discarded.

Petiot then asked the witness if a rational person could possibly think that he served the Gestapo.

“I don’t believe so,” Héritier said. “Whatever the outcome of this trial might be, I will always be glad to have shared a cell with Dr. Petiot.”

After another Resistant and former cellmate, Roger Courtot, testified that Petiot was “
without any question a real Resistant and a courageous one,” the defense called to the stand Germaine Barré, a stylish blond dressmaker who had served in the British Secret Intelligence Service. She had been present in Jodkum’s office when the Gestapo commissioner questioned Petiot.

Based on what she saw and heard, Barré was convinced that Petiot could not have worked for the Gestapo. She also told the court of Petiot’s response when Jodkum asked if he would like to purchase his release for 100,000 francs: “
I do not care whether you free me or not. I have stomach cancer and I do not have long to live anyway.” Barré then testified that Jodkum called Petiot’s brother to obtain the ransom.

Petiot asked the witness if she recalled his response when Jodkum wanted him to swear an oath never to engage in any activity against the German authorities. Yes, Barré answered. The defendant would not sign anything at all.

The court was hearing another side to Dr. Marcel Petiot. At the same time, one fundamental question remained. Although many witnesses had testified to Petiot’s devotion as a doctor and his courage during his imprisonment by the Gestapo, had the defense been able to establish the crucial point—namely, that Petiot had served the French Resistance and killed only Germans and collaborators?

B
Y the standards of the previous two weeks, attendance at the Petiot trial was once again low on the fourteenth and fifteenth days. “
We’re making a flop today” was how Petiot put it. The beautiful spring weather again offered many rival attractions, and the civil-suit attorneys, scheduled to present their cases, promised a great deal of repetition. On several occasions, Marcel Petiot would be seen and photographed sleeping in his box. One French newspaper summed it up as
EVERYBODY SLEEPS AT THE PETIOT TRIAL
.

Maître Archevêque outlined the Guschinow case, Véron the Dreyfus case; Maître Claude Perlès represented Madame Braunberger, Dominique Stéfanaggi the Joseph Piereschi estate, and Charles Henry the Grippay family. Very little new material emerged. Henry accused Petiot of working for a secret “anti-French terrorist organization” in close cooperation with the Germans—or, as he put it, a “
Nazi faun that haunts the outskirts of the Gestapo.”

Henry was often singled out for illustrating the problems of lengthy repetitive speeches that day. In the middle of his talk, in which he had promised to “cast light on the entire case,” Petiot stood and said to much amusement: “I would like to remind the court that I am not paying for this lawyer’s services.” Henry spoke of everything in his closing statement, it seemed, except his client. At the end, Président Leser asked him “What about your client?”

“I am finished,” Henry said. “I do not insist on anything further.” Indeed, he had little to connect the disappearance of his client to the defendant, other than circumstantial evidence.

Andrée Dunant, the only female attorney in the trial, performed more effectively with her summary on behalf of the Rossmy family. Building on Petiot’s admission on the third day of the trial that he had killed Gisèle Rossmy, Adrien the Basque’s girlfriend, and reminding the jury of his reasoning, namely that “
he did not know what else to do with her,” Dunant argued that the court had no other course of action than to declare the defendant guilty. She stuck to the essentials, avoiding the extended, tedious, and frequent digressions that dogged her colleagues.

Spectators in the gallery might have complained about the lack of drama in the last session of the trial, but they did not know what had happened earlier outside the courtroom. At ten thirty that morning, a red-haired woman wearing a houndstooth jacket had entered the bicycle repair shop of one of the jurors, André Molvault. The customer wanted to know if her bike was repaired; Molvault apologized for the delay, telling her that he was serving at the Petiot trial. “
Ah!” she said. “There are going to be reprisals, you know, believe me.”

When Molvault asked if he should consider that a threat, the answer was yes, the woman said, storming out of the shop. In doing so, she had forgotten to take her bicycle and so Molvault was able to give a name to the police, who then traced it to a Dutch woman who lived in Lyon. Président Leser himself wrote an account of this incident and asked the police to pursue this case of juror intimidation.

On the fifteenth day, Wednesday, April 3, Maître Jacques Bernays summed up the civil case for the Wolff family. Maître Gachkel spoke for the Basches and Maître Léon-Lévy for the Knellers, both attorneys concentrating on showing that the victims simply could not have been collaborators or secret agents of the Gestapo. The defendant, Léon-Lévy said, united families—that is, by “
uniting them in death.” The most effective speech of the day, however, came from Maître Pierre Véron, who spoke this time for the Dreyfus family.

“
I have the good fortune to defend an excellent case against a man
who is only an imposter,” Véron began, attacking Petiot’s claims to have been a Resistant. Based on the latter’s ignorance of basic facts and the many contradictions in his testimony, it was simply not possible that Petiot could have worked for the Resistance. A jury of eight-year-old children, Véron argued, could poke holes in his claims about his so-called secret weapon.

Véron provided one of the trial’s memorable moments when he compared Petiot to a popular legend of
naufrageurs
, or ship wreckers:

The members of the French Resistance had not died in combat, torture chambers, or the execution grounds so that Dr. Petiot could “wrap himself in the folds of their flag.”

Then, after reminding the jury of the fact that the Gestapo had released Petiot from prison, Véron pointed out that the Germans had certainly not been “
very curious” about his activities. “I do not know if Petiot worked for the Gestapo or not,” he said, “but one thing is certain: the smoke rising from the chimney of rue Le Sueur went to join … the smoke from the crematoria of Auschwitz or Belsen.” Petiot was actually more hateful than the executioners at the Nazi death camps, Veron then argued, because he “dared to claim that he did this in the name of the Resistance.”

For his unspeakable crimes, the jury must, Véron concluded, “
condemn him to death.” The court erupted in thunderous applause.

Amid the commotion, Petiot stood in his box shaking his fist and shouting insults at the attorney. Véron countered, as the applause died down, that he would attend his execution.

At this point, already well after five o’clock in the afternoon, Leser
asked Dupin to begin the prosecution’s closing arguments. Clearly he would not have time to finish the summary that day, and the obvious question was how much would splitting his concluding statement rob it of its power. Dupin began in an old-fashioned flowery rhetorical style, claiming “
the records of the Cour d’assises de la Seine, preserved for more than a century, are unable to provide an example of another trial as monstrous.” Petiot, looking down at his sketchpad, doodled and yawned.

“
Yes, to find as many cadavers, to see as much blood, to witness as many killings one must go to the other side of the Rhine to the terrible charnel houses of Buchenwald or Auschwitz, where so many of our people have been systematically murdered by Nazi barbarians.” On trial that day, however, was not a German war criminal but a Frenchman. Petiot, still sketching, acted as if he was barely able to stay awake.

Dupin described Petiot as “
remarkably intelligent and a wonderful actor, devoid of all scruples, deeply perverted and sadistic.” He covered his crimes by crafting his own personal “fictional romance of the Resistance.” But in a few minutes, Dupin said, “
I will show you without difficulty that all of this is only a tissue of lies.” Petiot made a show of looking at the clock.

The prosecutor spoke for another two hours, blasting Petiot as “a murderer, a thief, a con man, and an impostor,” that is, anything but a Resistant. To accomplish what he claimed, Petiot would have required personnel, matériel, and constant vigilance.
“It’s absurd,” he concluded. Dr. Petiot was simply a criminal dominated by the twin desires of greed and cruelty. He was the “
modern Bluebeard,” that is, “
a modern gangster” who “killed to rob.” Dupin would not be able to finish his speech that evening. Leser adjourned the court at seven o’clock. The prosecutor’s call for the death penalty would have to wait until the next day.

A
S the sixteenth and final day of the trial opened at one o’clock on Thursday, April 4, socialites, actors, athletes, dignitaries, and many other spectators once again squeezed together in the crowded courtroom, as Pierre Scize of
Le Figaro
said, like “
herrings in a cask.” It was estimated to be the largest attendance at that time in the history of the Cour d’assises de la Seine.

Petiot, wearing the same gray suit and purple bow tie that he had on the first day of the trial, appeared confident as he scanned the gallery for Georgette, Gérard, and Maurice, all of them there as always. Dupin resumed his summary of the prosecution’s case. Before he could launch into the bulk of his argument, however, there was a disruption in the audience. A woman or perhaps two women had fainted. People scrambled to help, and when the guards intervened, they also met resistance from spectators who refused to abandon hard-won seats. Président Leser seemed confused about what to do. The trial looked like it would end, as the correspondent for
Libé-Soir
put it, “
in a scandalous buffoonery.” Leser suspended proceedings at one forty-five.

Twenty-five minutes later, Dupin returned to his summary, reminding the court of the series of letters and postcards purportedly sent by victims after their disappearance. In each case, the content was similar, sometimes using almost identical language and word choices infrequently employed by the victim. Each time, too, the alleged writer signed his or her full name, even to a husband, a wife, or a lover.

Dupin classified Petiot’s victims into three groups: Jews hoping to escape the Occupation; gangsters and their mistresses; and a final category of patients who in some way threatened to put his medical practice in jeopardy. The latter group was murdered to prevent them from testifying about his activities. The gangsters and their mistresses were killed for their wealth, and if any of them belonged to the Gestapo, Petiot did not know it at the time and only took advantage of the fact afterward. As for Petiot’s calling the first group Gestapo agents and collaborators, this was a travesty. He had robbed and murdered Jews fleeing for their lives.

Petiot’s claims that the human remains had been planted were preposterous. The bodies at rue Le Sueur had been worked on by a skilled surgeon. The patterns of dismemberment corresponded to the pieces that had washed up in the Seine between the spring of 1942 and January 1943. Petiot admitted sixty-three “executions,” or liquidations as he called them, and Dupin reminded the court that there had probably been many more. He read a list of the twenty-seven people whom the state accused Petiot of murdering.