more than sixty victims. For at his trial two months before, the jury had been shown forty-seven suitcases that belonged to the men and women he’d murdered – containing over 1500 items of their clothing. All had been found at his death house on the rue Le Sueur.
Pétiot, born in 1897 in Auxerre, was, it later transpired, a childhood sadist who stole from his schoolmates, and while serving at a casualty clearing-station in World War I, started out on another career: selling drugs. He qualified as a doctor in 1921, and soon set up shop in the village of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, where he made a reputation for himself as a drugs-supplier and provider of illegal abortions. As a result of dogged canvassing on his part, he was elected mayor in 1928, by which time he’d married. But question marks began to gather about the doctor. He was caught stealing twice – and there was worse. Screams were heard coming from his surgery late at night. His housekeeper became pregnant and then disappeared. Later a woman patient was robbed and killed; another patient, who persisted in accusing the doctor of being responsible, suddenly died – of ‘natural causes’, wrote the doctor on the death certificate.
All this persuaded Pétiot to up sticks to Paris, where he took up what came to be a successful practice in the rue Caumartin. Outwardly, again, he was respectability itself, with a wife and child; and no doubt it was this that enabled him to survive charges, once more, of shoplifting and drug-dealing, for which he received only fines. He was popular with his patients, and no one seemed to pay any attention when, after the German occupation of Paris, he bought another house on the rue Le Sueur and started having it rebuilt to his own specifications.
The rebuilt house contained a new furnace in the basement beneath the garage, and an airtight triangular room with peepholes let into the door, ‘for my mental patients,’ said Dr. Pétiot. It was, in fact, for something a lot more sinister. For once the house had been finished, he put out word that he was in touch with the French Resistance, and could smuggle people out of Paris.
Dr. Marcel Pétiot went to the guillotine in 1946
He immediately had customers, among the first a rich Jewish businessman and his family, who paid him two million francs for his help. He treated them exactly the same as all the others who were to follow – Jews, Resistance fighters, those on the run from the Gestapo: he gave them an injection of poison – the injection was to protect them against typhus, he said – and watched them die behind the peepholes in the airtight room. He then treated their bodies in quicklime, bought in bulk from his brother in Auxerre, and burned what was left of them in the furnace below. In each case – and there were sixty-three of them – he kept scrupulous records, including of the furs, cash, jewellery and precious metals his ‘clients’ had brought with them to take into exile.
It was the furnace which in the end proved Pétiot’s undoing. For in March 1944 a neighbour complained about the smoke that was billowing from it and called the police and the fire brigade. The police went off to find the doctor at his house on the rue Caumartin. But the firemen broke in, and soon found the furnace surrounded by dismembered corpses. The doctor, though, when he arrived at the scene, had a plausible and patriotic explanation: they were the bodies, he confided, of Nazi soldiers and of collaborators condemned to death by the Resistance, for which he was working.
The French gendarmes, half convinced, returned to their headquarters without him; and he, his wife and seventeen-year-old son immediately fled before senior officers demanded – as they later did – a proper search of the premises. Once Paris was liberated a few weeks later, Pétiot became France’s most wanted man. But instead of leaving the country, he belatedly joined the Free French forces and handwrote a letter to
Pétiot, born in 1897 in Auxerre, was, it later transpired, a childhood sadist who stole from his schoolmates, and while serving at a casualty clearing-station in World War I, started out on another career: selling drugs. He qualified as a doctor in 1921, and soon set up shop in the village of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, where he made a reputation for himself as a drugs-supplier and provider of illegal abortions. As a result of dogged canvassing on his part, he was elected mayor in 1928, by which time he’d married. But question marks began to gather about the doctor. He was caught stealing twice – and there was worse. Screams were heard coming from his surgery late at night. His housekeeper became pregnant and then disappeared. Later a woman patient was robbed and killed; another patient, who persisted in accusing the doctor of being responsible, suddenly died – of ‘natural causes’, wrote the doctor on the death certificate.
All this persuaded Pétiot to up sticks to Paris, where he took up what came to be a successful practice in the rue Caumartin. Outwardly, again, he was respectability itself, with a wife and child; and no doubt it was this that enabled him to survive charges, once more, of shoplifting and drug-dealing, for which he received only fines. He was popular with his patients, and no one seemed to pay any attention when, after the German occupation of Paris, he bought another house on the rue Le Sueur and started having it rebuilt to his own specifications.
The rebuilt house contained a new furnace in the basement beneath the garage, and an airtight triangular room with peepholes let into the door, ‘for my mental patients,’ said Dr. Pétiot. It was, in fact, for something a lot more sinister. For once the house had been finished, he put out word that he was in touch with the French Resistance, and could smuggle people out of Paris.
Dr. Marcel Pétiot went to the guillotine in 1946
He immediately had customers, among the first a rich Jewish businessman and his family, who paid him two million francs for his help. He treated them exactly the same as all the others who were to follow – Jews, Resistance fighters, those on the run from the Gestapo: he gave them an injection of poison – the injection was to protect them against typhus, he said – and watched them die behind the peepholes in the airtight room. He then treated their bodies in quicklime, bought in bulk from his brother in Auxerre, and burned what was left of them in the furnace below. In each case – and there were sixty-three of them – he kept scrupulous records, including of the furs, cash, jewellery and precious metals his ‘clients’ had brought with them to take into exile.
It was the furnace which in the end proved Pétiot’s undoing. For in March 1944 a neighbour complained about the smoke that was billowing from it and called the police and the fire brigade. The police went off to find the doctor at his house on the rue Caumartin. But the firemen broke in, and soon found the furnace surrounded by dismembered corpses. The doctor, though, when he arrived at the scene, had a plausible and patriotic explanation: they were the bodies, he confided, of Nazi soldiers and of collaborators condemned to death by the Resistance, for which he was working.
The French gendarmes, half convinced, returned to their headquarters without him; and he, his wife and seventeen-year-old son immediately fled before senior officers demanded – as they later did – a proper search of the premises. Once Paris was liberated a few weeks later, Pétiot became France’s most wanted man. But instead of leaving the country, he belatedly joined the Free French forces and handwrote a letter to
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