Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris (48 page)

He sent three British men, who had served the gang since their desertion, to pose as downed Royal Air Force pilots hoping to flee to Spain. After a lengthy process, including help from Eryane Kahan to arrange the meeting, the physician, Dr. Eugène, received the pilots, heard their pleas, and then promptly doubled the asking price to 50,000 francs apiece. At the next meeting, in late June 1942, also arranged by Kahan, Bonny sent a team to follow the false pilots. Dr. Eugène inadvertently led the thugs straight to rue Le Sueur.

The men seized the physician, threw him to the ground, and snapped handcuffs on his wrists. At this point, Paul Clavié and an associate, Pierre Loutrel (later the notorious “Pierrot-le-Fou”), arrived, each wielding two pistols. Clavié was astonished. Dr. Eugène of the underworld was none other than his friend Marcel Petiot. The physician was released. With the tension diffused, Petiot offered everyone a drink. Before leaving rue Le Sueur, Bonny decided to take a look around the town house. It was his turn to be shocked. He saw jars with genitals in Formol, and two bodies in the process of being chopped up in the basement. Lafont, hearing of the butchery, apparently realized that he could make use of this doctor’s scalpel and his willingness to wield it.

Lafont could not only take a cut from the profitable escape agency, but also use the opportunity to extend his reach farther. For instance, when a gang member committed a breach of confidence that could not be atoned for with the payment of a fine (he charged 1,000 to 10,000 francs for minor infractions), he soon realized that the only way to escape Lafont’s wrath was to follow Jo the Boxer, Adrien the Basque, and their colleagues out of Occupied Paris. Alternatively, if Lafont did not want to make an example out of the offender, he could magnanimously allow that person to escape with his life, provided he left the country. Either way, Lafont would win, punishing irregularities that
threatened to undermine his discipline and, at the same, turning a profit. And given the valuables that many gangsters were certain to carry, this could be substantial.

It was indeed this time—from the summer of 1942 to Petiot’s arrest in May 1943—that represented the height of the Petiot reign of terror, when
Dr. Paul started finding the first dismembered body parts, with the signature scalpel marks, pulled out of trunks from the Seine or parcels dropped around town. It was also after this summer confrontation that every known gangster sought Petiot’s escape agency. Every one of them, too, had ties to Lafont. Indeed, given the extent of Lafont’s power and knowledge of the criminal world, which was fueled by many informers, it is difficult to believe that an operation with the ambitions of Petiot’s agency could have flourished without his awareness or approval.

The Liberation ended the golden age of crime for Lafont and his gang. The French Gestapo went on the run, its members fleeing to Spain, South America, Quebec, pre-Castro Cuba, or sometimes into the underground or hiding inside the Resistance. After handing out false papers to his own men, and insisting on the destruction of his gang files, Lafont fled to a small estate some forty-five miles from Paris, outside Bazoches. There, thanks to a tip from one of his own men, Joseph Joinovici, Lafont and Bonny and Paul Clavié were arrested on August 30, 1944.

One of Clavié’s letters from his prison cell 120 on the quai de l’Horloge was intercepted by authorities. Writing to an unknown recipient, as he awaited his upcoming trial for treason, Clavié now urged that a certain “Dr. P” be immediately arrested. Clavié described how he had worked with him since 1938, and the physician was “very guilty.” After confessing that he had found the doctor frightening, Clavié identified the reason why this man must be immediately arrested: the doctor “knows everything.”

D
ESPITE winning a conviction for twenty-six murders, the prosecution never satisfactorily explained how the defendant was supposed to have killed his victims. In the opinion of the vast majority of biographers, Petiot used an injection, perhaps of strychnine or, as John V. Grombach proposed, an injection of an air bubble into the victim’s veins. Other suggestions have included a
distance-operated syringe, poison gas, or even a simple glass of wine laced with poison and drunk in a toast to the upcoming journey to freedom. Few, however, have offered any arguments or evidence for their theories.

Throughout the narrative, I have attempted to make clear what is fact and what is speculation. What follows is speculation, because no one knows for certain what Petiot did to his victims. He never made a full confession and authorities never cleared up the mystery.

There are good reasons for suspecting that Petiot used an injection. As a doctor, he could easily obtain poison and concoct a credible excuse to administer it. As both Renée Guschinow and Jean Gouedo testified, Joachim Guschinow was told by Petiot that he would require injections before his journey to South America. Ilse Gang also heard that the Wolff family would receive injections, and Michel Cadoret de l’Epinguen said that Petiot had personally told him that health regulations for entry into Argentina mandated them. The press latched on to the theory of
injections, circulating it widely by the time of the trial, leaving a lasting impression on Petiot biographers for sixty-five years.

When I began researching this book, I also assumed that Petiot’s modus operandi was an injection. I have since qualified my stance. Petiot did use one, but the aim was probably not to kill. Under the guise of vaccinations or inoculations for the journey, or visa health requirements, or some other excuse, Petiot probably used an injection to weaken the resistance of his victim. It was not poison—after all, no poison was ever found on the premises at rue Le Sueur, rue Caumartin, or any of his other properties. Morphine and peyote, on the other hand, were present in vast quantities.

These particular narcotics have powerful sedative effects. They would allow the victim to cooperate with Petiot’s demands, whatever these might have been. At the same time, either of these drugs would allow the victim to remain coherent enough to copy a text or take dictation. The victims then wrote out the short letters to relatives, which Petiot said he would send once he had confirmed their safe arrival. This use of drugs would also account for the curious claims in many of the letters (Braunberger’s, Guschinow’s, and Kneller’s, for example) that the writer or a family member had fallen sick on their journey, thereby explaining in advance any irregularities in the handwriting. Then, after writing the cards, the victim would be moved into the triangular room. The use of morphine or peyote would also explain another fact that puzzled observers, namely, how Petiot could handle strong gangsters like Adrien the Basque—and then also why investigators never found any physical evidence of anyone having attempted to break out of the small room.

As for the triangular room, was it really necessary for Petiot to make extensive renovations if he simply planned to kill by injection? Was it by chance that he had hired a firm that had just that year finished the construction of a major municipal slaughterhouse in Limoges? The particular changes he made are indeed curious: Petiot was creating a small room, located separately from the main building, with no windows, very thick, reinforced walls with a viewing lens on the outside, and all of this also being soundproof and almost airtight—and it could
be made so, Professor Griffon testified at the trial, by the mere insertion of a rug under the door. Even if the prosecution could not produce a rug, Petiot, a dealer in antiques, would not have had any difficulty. As for the gas masks inspectors found, all of these did not necessarily have to have belonged to the victims, and the gas mask found in Petiot’s office may not have been only for covering the stench of the cadavers. And when Petiot explained his renovations to the builders, he told them he was constructing a radiation chamber—a good alibi, I suspect, for his real purpose: a gas chamber.

My doubts about death by injection grew over the years, but increased most of all when I had the good fortune of unearthing a rare source about Marcel Petiot, published in Belgium in March 1944, only a couple of weeks after the discovery of the remains at rue Le Sueur. The small book, Albert Massui’s
Le cas du Dr Petiot
, was indeed valuable, but it had one piece of extraordinary testimony: a firsthand account of a young man who applied to Petiot’s escape organization and claimed to have lived through the entire selection process. Could this possibly be genuine? After much consideration, I believe so.

The man was identified only as Raphaël K. His last name was withheld because at the time of publication, the Nazis still occupied Paris and he hoped to find a way to flee Europe. His family urged him to remain quiet. People would be skeptical, he was told, and indeed, this was an all-too-frequent occurrence at that time (1942), when the first Jews who escaped from Nazi camps tried to warn other people about the shocking, incomprehensible atrocities that they had experienced. Note, too, that this young man’s account appeared in print before Petiot’s methods were widely known.

In June 1942, Raphaël K applied to Petiot’s escape organization. After paying his fees, which were lower than any other known charge (5,000 francs), Raphaël received instructions very similar to other clients’. He was told to arrive at the corner of rue Championnet and rue Damrémont, in the 18th arrondissement, where he was taken in a disorienting way across the city until he arrived at the hair salon. There, in a back room, Raphael reconfirmed his intention to leave Paris. “I do
not have to know why,” the doctor told him. “I am sure it is for excellent reasons.”

After learning that the young man wished to leave as soon as possible, the doctor told him of his “extraordinary luck” in that a group was leaving the following morning. He would travel through Casablanca, as Guschinow had been told five months earlier. “Given the circumstances,” Petiot said, “I would advise you to take with you as much money as possible.”

Raphaël was instructed to write letters to relatives. As he was single, he wrote to his parents, telling them not to worry and that he would return home when the situation improved. In Raphaël’s case, he was asked to write the letters before he arrived at the meeting with the physician. This was not likely standard procedure. For one thing, in the case of other letter writers, like Van Bever, Khaït, and Braunberger, each one had disappeared without warning, and as they did not carry any luggage, it is not likely that they carried any letters informing of their departure, either. It is also possible that the procedure was later changed. Raphaël would have been one of the early travelers in the false network.

The evening of the departure, Petiot escorted Raphaël to rue Le Sueur. “Still decided? Are you really afraid?” Petiot asked his new client, who answered that he was not. “Good, so much the better.” He took the young man into his office, which was where Massu placed it, in the outside building, with the polished desk, armchairs, and magazines on the table. The applicant was told to enter a room down the corridor where he should await departure. This was the triangular room. He was told he would leave from this room, exiting onto a side street, today’s rue Bois de Boulogne. A chauffeur would soon arrive to take him on his journey to freedom. Raphaël did not know this, but the so-called exit was the false door inspectors found glued onto the wall.

“You see, it is important that you completely master your nerves,” Petiot advised his client, explaining the difficulties that lay ahead. Raphaël remembered the physician telling him that he would probably have to go three days at least without sleep. To help him cope with the
physical and mental challenges of the escape from Occupied Paris, Petiot offered an injection.

The injection was not by a distance-operated syringe, as Nézondet claimed, attributing the story to Maurice Petiot. It was probably an ordinary hypodermic needle; it did not elicit any special description or commentary. After the injection was administered, Dr. Petiot escorted Raphaël into the small room and returned to his “office.” Raphaël was now alone in the triangular room. There was no forced entry or incarceration. He was free to walk around the room. He stared at the bare walls. No windows, a door with a button, and an odd array of hooks. He waited. He sat down on one of his suitcases. It was completely silent.

As he described the sensation, he began to feel weak. His head became heavy, his heartbeat seemed to slow, and he felt a sudden sense of fatigue. There was still no sign of the chauffeur or the doctor, who he thought must have been detained by a patient. Then, as Raphaël described it, he felt an “unbearable torpor seize [him].”

After what seemed like several hours, though of course he could not say for sure, Raphaël woke up in a great deal of pain. He compared it to being “spread out on a pile of wood or on iron bars.” His wrists, he discovered, were now locked in iron bolts, and so were his ankles. A rope, tied from the ceiling, passed around his body. He was now hanging on the wall, suspended from the iron hooks. He could not move. He felt exhausted and nauseous, with an excruciating pain in his back. His ears buzzed, his muscles cramped, and he saw visions. His head was more congested than at any time of his life. His body was one big overwhelming pain. Everything felt hopeless, he said, but he knew that his only chance of survival was to maintain hope.

Suddenly it became difficult to breathe. As he described it, the room was overtaken by a “stinking atmosphere.” He believed it was carbon monoxide, but as he was not a chemist and that particular gas has no odor or taste, this could not be correct. A gas of some sort, however, had entered the room. What was it?

In the 1980s, an unidentified former member of the French Gestapo living in South America gave a startling admission to a French historian
using the pen name “Henry Sergg” while writing the book
Paris Gestapo
. In a wide-ranging conversation, accompanied by a glass or two of tequila, the former French Gestapo member mentioned that some people in his gang knew how Dr. Petiot killed his victims. The standard theory of death by injection was, as he put it, “
a load of crap.” What Petiot did was gas them. Of course, a single anonymous source cited by a historian using a pseudonym is hardly ideal evidence (at the time, historians researching the French Gestapo still received death threats). That comment passed without much notice and no other biographer besides Sergg has mentioned it.