The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot Read Free Page B

coroner’s inquest in the department of the Seine since the Landru case in 1920 (when he burned human heads in a kitchen stove to observe their rate of combustion) and whose macabre humor and love of morbid detail made him as popular at social affairs as in court. Dr. Paul, Dr. Léon Dérobert, Dr. René Piédelièvre, and two professors from the Museum of Natural History, specialists in skeletal assembly and the reconstruction of fossil remains, spent several months measuring and categorizing thirty-four specimens ranging in size from a single connected shoulder blade and breastbone to the eviscerated half-corpse found on the stairs. Their final, voluminous report, with 150 pages of photographs and reams of description, was sadly disappointing.
    Not even the number of victims could be accurately determined. There were:
Unpaired bones
Vertebrae
10 subjects
Sterna
7 subjects
Coccyxes
6 subjects
Paired bones
Collarbones
10 subjects
Shoulder blades
8 subjects
Pelves
5 subjects
    From these remains the experts concluded that there were at least ten victims—five men, five women. But taking into account the fifteen kilograms of badly charred bones, eleven kilograms of uncharred fragments, quantities of pieces too small to identify (“three garbage cans full,” Dr. Paul told the newspapers), and the fact that there were five kilograms of hair, including more than ten entire human scalps, Dr. Paul could only cautiously say that “the number ten is vastly inferior to the real one.”
    Identification of the victims was equally impossible based on the limited information provided by such mutilated and badly decomposed bodies. The youngest of the ten victims, the experts determined, was a twenty-five-year-old woman; the eldest, a fifty-year-old man. There were no old bone injuries that could be used for identification. The existing teeth were almost all in poor condition, though one had a porcelain cap. One woman had very small hands and feet, and the forearm of a five-foot-ten male victim was abnormally short. One man had a particularly voluminous skull, as did one woman, whose head was also round and flattened at the back. Another woman had a protruding lower jaw, which would have given her a distinctly simian appearance in life.
    Radiological examinations showed no traces of bullet or knife wounds, nor any similar marks of violence on bones. Some of the long bones of the legs and arms had been broken after death, apparently either to conceal telltale deformities or to make them easier to fit into the stove for burning; the breaks were so crude that Dr. Paul gaily theorized the bones had been wedged between a door and its jamb and yanked. Photographs and full-scale drawings were made of each piece, the teguments were removed, and insect larvae were lifted and placed in numbered test tubes; then each piece was cleaned, measured, photographed, and drawn again.
    Someone with an intimate knowledge of anatomy had dissected the bodies in a professional manner, though Paul noted that whereas a doctor would sever an arm at the shoulder, in this case the rib cage had been cut at the center and the whole arm, shoulder blade, and collarbone removed as a single piece—precisely, he pointed out, as one might carve a chicken. The dismemberment technique was identical to that used on a dozen batches of human remains, including nine severed heads, that were fished out of the Seine in 1942 and 1943—a flood of cadavers that ended when the culprit narrowly escaped detection after throwing a human hand off a bridge just as a barge passed underneath. Identification of these bodies, too, had been impossible, due both to decomposition and the fact that someone had stripped away the fingerprints and expertly removed the faces and scalps in a single piece. At the time, Dr. Paul had been concerned by scalpel marks in the fleshy parts of four thighs that floated ashore at La Muette on October 29, 1942. He knew firsthand