Free Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris by David King

cases combined for a total of 2,400 francs. Despite the verdict, many who worked on the case remained suspicious. Maître Véron, for one, urged Magistrate Olmi to charge Petiot with kidnapping or murder. He would later come to play an important role in the suspect’s life.
    The police continued to look for Madame Khaït, under that name as well as several possible aliases suggested by her family, including her maiden name, Fortin, and variations of her earlier name by marriage, Lavie, such as Lavic, Laric, and Lepic. They never found her. So just three days after Van Bever vanished, another witness in a separate case against Dr. Petiot had disappeared.
    The police eventually searched Petiot’s apartment on rue Caumartin, finding nothing whatsoever to implicate him in the disappearance of either person. They did, however, find a surprising number of jewels, linen, and other objects of value in an office drawer, which Petiot explained as “gifts of clients” who could not afford his fees. Almost apologetically, as the search failed to turn up any evidence of the missing persons, the presiding officer, Achille Olmi, turned to Petiot and said, “Rest assured, no one is accusing you of burning them in your stove.”

5.
“100,000 AUTOPSIES”
    M Y DEAR COMMISSAIRE , I DO NOT ENVY YOU INVESTIGATORS WHEN IT COMES TO PUTTING NAMES ON THIS DEBRIS .
    —DR. Albert Paul
    P ARIS’S newspapers devoured the story of the monster in the elegant 16th arrondissement. Marcel Petiot was dubbed “The New Landru,” after the infamous French murderer who had been convicted in 1921 for killing eleven people, ten of them lovers.
Le Petit Parisien
chose that sobriquet for its two-inch-high headlines on Monday, March 13.
L’Oeuvre
used it that morning as well, reporting that some twenty-five or perhaps thirty women had been killed or “burned alive” in the charnel house.
L’Oeuvre
and its many rivals in the capital competed in depicting the killer as a sadistic sex fiend who tortured women before he watched their “throes of agony” in his viewer and then mutilated their bodies.
    Le Matin
was also emphasizing the “demonic, erotic” nature of the crimes. All the bodies found at rue Le Sueur—that is, those that were not chopped up, burned, or caked with lime—were naked. When exactly had the killer removed the victim’s clothes? Was it before or after he latched them to the hooks of his padded cell? To complete the nightmare image,
Le Matin
was also reporting that Dr. Petiot would wear a frightening mask as he tortured and finished off his victims.
    As the controlled French press covered the Petiot case for the home market, the official state-run German news agency DNB, Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro, broadcast the news internationally of the “charred and dismembered skeletons of 25 women” found on the physician’sproperty. Almost every night, its bulletins detailed how Petiot pedaled to the empty house near the Arc de Triomphe to conduct the grim business that filled his lime pit and produced the nauseating smoke that emanated from his chimney.
    The DNB, like the Parisian press, sometimes reported that Georgette Petiot knew or participated in her husband’s activities; other times, she was presented as oblivious to hisdouble life. Usually, however, the German-controlled press emphasized that Petiot preyed on women. The physician was described as leaving his wife at home as he arranged nightly rendezvous on rue Le Sueur. Neighbors looked away, disinclined to interfere with the physician’s presumably romantic liaisons.
    The female visitors to his property—often assumed to be “shady ladies of the demi-monde”—sought packets of heroin, cocaine, or some other narcotic. What they received, however, was not “the white powders of forgetfulness, but death itself.” Petiot, with his hypodermic needle, was quickly deduced to have injected a poison into the veins of his victims. Whether it was a yet-to-be-identified substance,