The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot Read Free Page A

were gruesomely personal. By then, however, the authorities had lost valuable time, and Petiot had vanished completely.
    French newspapers during the Occupation were completely under German control and largely printed German propaganda as well as enlistment calls for the French Gestapo. Their circulation dropped more than 50 percent as they ceased to publish anything of interest except amended rationing regulations. Fewer than 18 percent of the major prewar Parisian dailies and periodicals survived, while the rest fled to the free zone or succumbed to Nazi censorship. Those that remained and the handful of new publications were forced to collaborate actively (and their staff members were among the most harshly treated when the Liberation and purge finally came).
    The Germans had no wish to censor the Petiot affair, and may even have welcomed it as harmless diversion for a subjugated Paris. On Monday, circulations shot up as every newspaper in France exaggerated the discovery at the rue Le Sueur in an orgy of sordid detail and carried banner headlines about the “new Landru.” * Estimates ranged as high as sixty victims, and most reporters assumed all of them were women. Petiot, in the speculating press, became a drug addict and abortionist, a sadist and a lunatic who had a dozen means—each more outlandish than the last—of murdering helpless, lovely ladies in his triangular chamber. More than one paper carried rumors that the lower part of the bodies in the pit had been more severely damaged than the upper, indicating that the victims had been forced to stand in the caustic lime and dissolve alive. Even for people oppressed by years of war, the bizarre cruelty of the crimes soon became the favorite topic of conversation and, later, of wry amusement. One cartoon depicted a woman at a physician’s office door saying, “I’ll only come in for my appointment, doctor, if you swear you don’t have a stove.” Another showed a group of psychics communicating with the beyond through table-tilting: “If we put our hands on the stove instead,” one of the mediums suggested, “maybe we could contact Dr. Petiot.”
    The police did not find it entertaining as they began seeking answers to a long list of questions. They methodically set out to discover: who and where was Petiot? who were the victims and how many were there? how and why had they been killed? how and by whom had the building been equipped for murder? where did the lime come from? and were there accomplices? Experts from the police forensic lab photographed and made scale drawings of 21 rue Le Sueur. They took fingerprints from every available surface—and perhaps intentionally mishandled that job; how otherwise explain the fact that no useful prints were found at either the rue Le Sueur or the rue Caumartin?
    In closets and corners of the basement, inspectors found a jumbled collection of objects, including:
22
used toothbrushes
15
women’s combs
7
pocket combs
9
fingernail files
24
tubes and boxes of
pharmaceutical products
3
shaving brushes
5
gas masks
5
cigarette holders
1
pair of women’s trousers
1
three-piece suit
7
pairs of eyeglasses
2
umbrellas
1
cane
    They also found: a black satin evening gown, with golden swallows embroidered on the bosom, bearing the manufacturer’s label Sylvia Rosa, Marseille ; a jaunty woman’s hat made by Suzanne Talbot in Paris; a man’s white shirt from which the initials K.K. had been maladroitly removed; and a photograph of an unidentified man, which the newspapers published at the request of the police.
    The large human remains had been taken to the morgue on Sunday. Policemen refused to touch the piles of quicklime, and four gravediggers from the Passy cemetery were hired to sift through them with a sieve and pack the human elements in plain wooden coffins. The examination was headed by the celebrated forensic expert Dr. Albert Paul, who had directed every major