The Ability to Kill (16 page)

The great idea came to him at last; as it has come to so very many others. Why not insure someone’s life, kill him and collect?

Girard was not foolhardy. He had been an insurance agent. He knew the ropes. The deaths had to appear natural. Very well! If they had to appear natural, why not
make
them natural. In the house of one of his mistresses in Neuilly, he set up a laboratory and began to study pathology. Later, from a firm which supplied medical schools with such materials, he bough a number of bacteria cultures.

For his first victim he chose a friendly numbskull named Louis Pernotte, who had been one of his innocent partners in the banking venture. Having insured Pernotte’s life substantially with two companies, Girard set to work. A little while later the victim contracted typhoid. However, this did not prove fatal. Soon he began to get well again. Girard did some more experiments in his laboratory and then took to visiting the convalescent. On one of these visits he offered to save Madame Pernotte the trouble of giving her husband an injection prescribed by the local doctor. As she was not very good at using the hypodermic syringe, she accepted. The doctor attributed the death to complications following on typhoid. In a way, he was right.

A few months later, Girard tried the typhoid again on a man named Delmas. He recovered completely, however, and Girard began to get discouraged. But not for long. His enthusiasm for bacteriology may have waned, but he had a fresh interest to replace it—poisonous fungi.

The variety which took his fancy was that of
Amanita phalloides
and the chosen subject this time was another friend, Duroux. Having insured him in the usual way, Girard invited him to dinner and tried out the new method. It was a failure. Duroux was not even sick. Girard now prepared a stronger brew in liquid form and a day or so later continued to spike his friend’s drinks with it. What followed is no tribute to his skill.
Amanita phalloides
is a deadly poison and, even today, the chances of recovery are not much better than fifty per cent. All that happened to Duroux was that he had an attack of gastric trouble.

And he came back for more. When he was well again he had another drink with Girard, and the same thing happened; and again he recovered. Girard did not bother with this unsatisfactory subject any more.

Instead, his attentions moved on to the friend of one of his mistresses, a Madame Monin. With her the stuff worked properly. He had taken out four policies on her life with four different companies. All except one paid up. The fourth asked questions and then started an inquiry.

That was the end of Girard. While he was in prison, one of his mistresses succeeded in smuggling in a culture from his laboratory. The hours he had spent there were not after all to be wasted. He died (of ‘natural causes’) before he came up for trial.

The greatest amateur laboratory worker of them all, however, was undoubtedly Jean-Baptiste Troppmann. Beside him, Girard was a bungler. Troppmann was only twenty-one when he was executed in 1870; yet in that short life he had not only devised a means of making prussic acid in the home, but murdered an entire family of eight persons—for money, of course. At his trial, a professor of chemistry called as a witness said of Troppmann’s distillation apparatus: ‘I am astonished that a man ignorant in chemistry could think out such an ingenious, intelligent method.’

Troppmann was the youngest child of a large family. The father, who ran a small engineering business at Cernay in Alsace, was a clever mechanic but a poor business man. Most of his life had been spent in fending off bankruptcy and nursing the gloomy conviction that he was the victim of plots hatched by his competitors. In her youngest child, her little Jean-Baptiste, his wife found consolation. He became her favourite, her confidant, her hope for the future.

He grew up an undersized, sickly, sour little boy, liable to sudden rages of terrifying violence. He soon compensated for his poor physique by an obsessional preoccupation with muscle-building. At school, and later as an apprentice in his father’s workshop, he was loathed and feared. By the time he
was fifteen he was already hard at work in his home laboratory, on the extraction of morphia from poppies. He was looking for a means with which to conquer the world of high finance. When morphia extraction proved too difficult, he turned to prussic acid.

At nineteen he was sent to assist in the erection of a machine supplied by his father to a factory in Roubaix in north-east France. It was there that he met the Kinck family.

Jean Kinck had come from Alsace, too. In Roubaix, he had built up a prosperous brush-making business and married a local girl. They had six children, the eldest of whom was fifteen. Now, homesick for Alsace, he made a friend of the young Jean-Baptiste whose cleverness he, a stupid man apart from his skill in brush-making, so much admired.

What Jean-Baptiste saw was a small fortune in the hands of eight beings less worthy than he. He decided, as a first step on his road to the summit of power, to liquidate the entire Kinck family and take over their assets.

The mechanics of the trick by means of which he induced Jean Kinck to take a trip to Alsace are unimportant. Kinck was murdered (prussic acid) near a place called Bollwiller. Then, Jean-Baptiste went to Paris. From there he sent a series of forged letters in Kinck’s name to Madame Kinck, telling her of a big deal he was consummating and urging her to bring the family and all Kinck’s legal papers (birth certificates, title deeds and so on) at once. He followed the letters with telegrams. Madame Kinck, who could not read and had to ask a neighbour to do so for her, finally obeyed orders. Gustave, the eldest boy, was sent first; and killed. Madame and the other children followed. Jean-Baptiste met them at the station, took them to a quiet place in the suburbs and butchered the lot. He used no prussic acid now—just a spade, a knife, an axe and his bare hands.

Perhaps he became tired; perhaps he was careless. He did not bury them deeply enough. The following day a farm labourer found them; and a few days after that the police found Jean-Baptiste.

The defence said he was not sane; but, as we have seen, pleas of insanity in murder cases have never been very successful in France.

Eugene Weidmann, tried in 1939 for the murder of six persons, had no better luck. A hopeless schizophrenic, he had been in and out of prison and psychiatrists’ offices since he was fourteen. Yet the prosecution showed that he had murdered for profit and the die was cast. Useless to argue that the profits were paltry and their significance merely symbolic. Profits there had been and that was enough. ‘Must justice always be a slaughter house?’ demanded Weidmann’s lawyer in his speech for the defence. A Versailles jury replied in the affirmative. A large crowd collected to whistle and boo as the condemned man was led to his execution.

Frankly, Weidmann only just escapes amateur status. What, it may be asked, has France to offer that can compare with the phenomena of Murder, Inc., in America or of John George Haigh in Britain?

The answer is Marcel-André-Henri-Felix Petiot, the greatest business man of them all.

His fabulous career began when he was sixteen; and it began typically. He was caught pilfering from letter boxes.

That was just before the first World War. He was an orphan in the care of a respectable woman, an aunt who was his legal guardian, and not too much was made of the letter box affair. When he left school he studied medicine until, in 1916, he was conscripted into the army.

His next criminal venture was more profitable. He peddled narcotic drugs stolen from casualty clearing stations in the
field. When the army finally caught him, they decided that he was a shell-shock case (he had earlier been wounded in the foot) and gave him an honourable discharge on medical grounds. He was a good-looking, friendly, likeable fellow.

On leaving the army he resumed his medical studies and, after a period as a student in an insane asylum, was awarded his doctorate. In 1921, he set up practice in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne.

He was immediately successful; at least in building up the practice. Later came periods of difficulty and embarrassment. Quite early in his career, for example, an attractive girl whom he had employed as a housekeeper became pregnant and disappeared. She was never heard of again. And then in 1930, a woman who managed a local store was murdered by someone who removed a substantial sum of money from the till. An imprudent gossip, who suggested that Dr Petiot might have been concerned, also died. Dr Petiot had been treating this person for rheumatism at the time; but Dr Petiot, who also conducted the autopsy, was able to reassure the townsfolk; the man had died from natural causes.

The doctor was in a strong position by then, though. He had been elected Councillor and was now Mayor of the district, a married man with a family, respected by all. The slanders of his political opponents were beneath contempt.

In 1932, however, he made an error of judgment. There had been a number of thefts of municipal property. The police set a watch. Mayor Petiot was caught in the act of stealing and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. Upon his release, he moved his practice to Paris.

We next hear of him there in 1936, when he was arrested for shop-lifting. The good looks and the charm worked yet again. The court advised him to seek psychiatric treatment. He went back to his practice.

The war of 1939 came. The doctor remained in Paris during the German occupation, and 1942 found him up to his old tricks. He was charged with peddling narcotics; but the charges never came to anything. The witnesses just disappeared; usually after a consultation with the doctor. By now, he had more serious matters on his mind.

In 1941 he had acquired a house in the rue Lesueur, a fashionable street near the Etoile, and he had commissioned a firm of builders to carry out certain alterations. Their major task was to construct a windowless and sound-proof room, in which, he said, he wished to carry out scientific experiments involving electrical apparatus which might cause annoyance to the neighbours. A small glass-covered peep-hole was to be let into the wall of the room.

At the same time, the doctor had let it be known in the right quarters that those who, because of their race or political opinions, wished to leave conquered France for Spain or Britain or America might do worse than consult Dr Petiot.

Then he sat back and waited for business.

It came. The mechanism was apparently quite simple. At the first interview the would-be traveller was given his orders. He was to report at such and such a time, with a minimum of baggage and any valuables he wanted to take with him plus a fee of two thousand American dollars. He must tell no one where he was going or when. At the second interview, the fee was collected and traveller ushered to the ‘secret exit.’ This was the sound-proof room.

There are two theories about the method Dr Petiot used to kill his victims. One says that he ‘inoculated’ them for the journey. The other maintains that he gassed them in the room. Nobody who got as far as the room ever returned to tell us. The doctor was very efficient; so efficient, that he was even
arrested by the Gestapo for aiding the escape of disaffected persons, and held for a time on suspicion.

It was not until March, 1944, that things went really wrong for him.

The doctor’s next-door neighbour in the rue Lesueur complained to the police of a bad smell coming from a chimney in the doctor’s house. The chimney appeared to be on fire. The police investigated and sent for the fire brigade. They also summoned Dr Petiot from a house near by. By the time he arrived, the fire brigade had broken in and found a corpse burning in the furnace. They had also found the remains of twenty-six other men and women in the cellars.

The doctor was equal to the situation. Drawing the senior police officer aside, he explained impatiently that the house was used by the resistance movement as a place of execution. By blundering in like that the police had risked the lives of countless patriots. Furtively and apologetically, the police withdrew. It was some hours before they had second thoughts on the subject. By then the doctor had left for the country.

It took six months for the police to catch up with him. At his trial, he claimed that the total number of his victims was sixty-three, but said that they were all Germans or collaborators. There was no reason to question his arithmetic; but the charm had worn thin and nobody believed the rest of his story.

The French psychiatrists who examined him found no signs of insanity. His trouble, they said, was that he was ‘morally retarded.’

Unmoved, the French public expressed their disapproval in the usual manner. In May, 1946, he was guillotined.

Ladies and gentlemen, it was with deep emotion that I learned of your Society’s plan to make a pilgrimage to London during the forthcoming year. I well know how much hope and encouragement the news will bring to British murder-tasters in their struggle to preserve the murder-homes of England. If, as your President has so flatteringly suggested, these talks of mine have in some measure contributed to the project, then I am proud as well as happy.

I know, of course, that some members have expressed concern as to the possible effects of the pilgrimage on Anglo-American relations; but let me reassure them.

Naturally, inevitably, there will be newspaper headlines—‘American Ghouls to Honour Christie,’ ‘Disgraceful Scenes in Hilldrop Crescent,’ and so on—but there will be no real unfriendliness. As long as members are aware of certain truths, certain contradictions, both sides will have a thoroughly good time.

There is nothing that the Londoner relishes more than a good crime, unless it is the moral indignation that goes with his enjoyment of it. Nor is this a recent enthusiasm, the result, as some censorious persons claim, of the corrupting influence of prurient newspapers and magazines.

Allow me to read to you a passage from a book about London.

‘Who would imagine that in a Kingdom so fertile in all sorts of wholesome discipline, there should grow up such ranck and such pestilent beds of hemlock; that in the very hart of a state so rarely governed and dieted by good lawes, there should breede such loathsome and such ulcerous impostumes? that in a City so politick, so civill, and so severe, such ugly, base, and bold impieties dare shew their faces? What an Army of insufferable
Abuses
, detestable
Vices
, most damnable
Villanies
, abominable
Pollutions
, inexplicable
Mischiefes
, sordid
Inquinations, horrible
and
Hel-hound-like perpetrated
flagitious enormities have beene here ministered together?’