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

an overdose of some generic drug, or perhaps a concoction of his own invention was not clear.
    Thanks to his connections, a German journalist for the DNB, Karl Schmidt, received one of the first tours of the triangular room. The butcher, he speculated, drugged his victim and then dragged her into the dark room, where she was tied up and suspended from the hooks on the back wall. The murderer projected twospotlights onto her face, watching the “human agony until the last convulsion.” The physician, using his medical skills, proceeded to inflict torture, presumably prolonging the pain as long as possible. He then dissected “the twisted corpse” and tossed it into the lime pit.
    Massu, however, was far from ready to draw any conclusion. Known for his caution, the commissaire preferred to move slowly, building his case piece by piece and proceeding with as much certainty as possible, rather than rushing into a mistake. He was skeptical, particularly of evidence that seemed too clear or obvious. “You have often heard mesay,” Massu said to Brigade Secretary Canitrot, “it is necessary to be suspicious of the so-called evidence.” When policemen make hasty conclusions based on “the evidence,” Massu believed, they often fall into a river of error, with potentially “catastrophic” results. The fundamental problem for a detective was how to interpret the evidence.
    On one hand, Massu was relieved to receive unambiguous instructions from the Gestapo, hoping of course that it would mean that German authorities would not interfere with or obstruct his investigation. At the same time, there was another concern. The Gestapo rarely expressed immediate interest in a French criminal case. When they did, particularly when ordering an arrest, it was usually to catch a culprit whose crime consisted of little more than opposing the Nazi regime. Did this mean that the owner of the house at No. 21 rue Le Sueur possibly served the French Resistance?
    The case was certainly perplexing. Unlike the case of the infamous French serial killer Henri Landru or the recent murder spree of Eugen Weidmann, it was not clear how exactly Petiot or the murderer had either killed or disposed of his victims. There was no sign of stabbing or physical blows, and there was no blood found on the bodies of the victims or in the basement. As the journalist Jacques Perry put it, there weremany bodies, but no signs of a murder.
    O N the morning of March 13, a saleswoman at the department store Grand Magasins du Printemps on Boulevard Haussmann contacted the police to tell her story. “I should have been killed this afternoon at three o’clock,” she said. Based on a referral from her pharmacist, she claimed to have consulted Petiot about a sore wrist on the afternoon of March 11. Petiot, she thought, looked more like a mason than a medical doctor, and his suit was supposedly stained with lime.
    “A shiver ran down my spine,” she claimed, describing her unease as the physician, staring intensely at her, touched her wrist to examine it. “His black eyes,” she said, “bored into me with such impertinence that I thought he was mad.” Petiot allegedly X-rayed her hand, diagnoseda sprain, and told her that her delicate bones needed more calcium. He prescribed treatment. But as he did not have the necessary equipment at his office, he asked her to consult a “special clinic.” The address was 21 rue Le Sueur.
    Although it was not easy to sift out the valuable pieces of information in the barrage of rumors and allegations already coming to his attention, Massu now had many leads. The chief priority, of course, was locating the physician. The obvious place to check was the forwarding address posted on the front door at rue Le Sueur: 18 rue des Lombards, Auxerre, just under one hundred miles to the southeast, in the central Burgundian region of Yonne. In addition, examining the note, Massu learned that there had originally been a different address—one