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

that had been removed and then replaced, in a different handwriting. The original was 55 or 56 rue du Pont, Auxerre.
    Massu asked one of his assistants to make the travel arrangements. Trains ran less regularly during the Occupation, only twice a week to Auxerre, and the next one did not leave for a few days. But Massu obviously did not want to wait. He called a friend in the garage of the préfecture de police and obtained car number 3313 and gasoline for his trip, which, in the strict rationing system, was not always an easy prospect even for the head of the Brigade Criminelle. The brigade secretary and two inspectors joined him. By six o’clock that morning, they were on the road.
    Massu was still trying to figure out how the murderer selected his victims, lured them into the town house, and, as he imagined the terrifying scenario, pulled out a long syringe to deliver a deadly injection. The killer then chopped up the bodies, disposed of the internal organs, and dropped the remaining debris into the lime pit, which would further dehydrate the bodies and make them easier to burn. Massu’s hypothesis sounded, as he put it, as “horrible and icy as any story of Edgar Allan Poe.”
    Massu needed to find out how and when the doctor obtained his lime, and who had helped him. Clearly the doctor—or whoever the murderer was—could not have killed so many people on his own.How, too, could he have escaped detection by his neighbors? Massu was nowhere near understanding the case, let alone finding the killer and the evidence to convict him. For the first time in his career, the commissaire washaving trouble sleeping.
    “Boss,” the secretary asked in the car, “is it true, as it’s said, that some engravings of the devil were found in the office at rue Caumartin?”
    “Yes,” Massu said. “There was better than that, or worse, depending on your view.” The commissaire did not elaborate more than mentioning some “bestial and smutty drawings” found in Petiot’s office.
    “Is the doctor a drug addict?” another inspector wondered, picking up on another rumor.
    “It’s almost certain,” Massu answered, probably too hastily. Drugs were too easy an explanation for how a respectable physician by day could become a monster at night.
    Before reaching Auxerre, the investigators stopped at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, the town where Dr. Petiot had served as mayor. Chief Inspector Marius Battut and Inspector Rochereau went first to the murder suspect’s former home at 56 rue Carnot. The current occupant, another physician, told them that he had lived there since July 1934. He had seen Dr. Petiot only once and had never had any dealings with him. The home owner, Battut summed up in his report, “did not want to provide any interesting information.”
    The gendarmes at the Villeneuve-sur-Yonne police department, however, were more helpful. They told the officers of the Brigade Criminelle that Petiot suffered from a “very bad reputation.” During his term as mayor, he had been suspected of committing a number of thefts, including cans of oil and gasoline. One time, he was charged with stealing electricity by tampering with the meter attached to his property. What’s more, the brigade inspectors learned that another one of his suspected lovers had died in mysterious circumstances.
    O NMarch 11, 1930, fourteen years to the day before the discovery at rue Le Sueur, Armand Debauve, the owner of a dairycooperative outside Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, was having a drink at Frascot’s bistro. About eight o’clock that evening, a villager arrived with news that his dairy was on fire. Debauve rushed home to find his house in flames and his wife, firefighters informed him, sprawled out dead on the kitchen floor, her head covered in blood.
    It did not take long for detectives to conclude that the fire had been intentionally set, and the victim, forty-five-year-old Henriette Debauve, had received a series of blows to her skull. The size of the