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  LANDRU’S SECRET

  For Hannah and Tess

  LANDRU’S SECRET

  The Deadly Seductions of France’s Lonely Hearts Serial Killer

  Richard Tomlinson

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by

  Pen & Sword History

  An imprint of

  Pen & Sword Books Ltd

  Yorkshire - Philadelphia

  Copyright © Richard Tomlinson, 2018

  ISBN 978 1 52671 529 6

  eISBN 978 1 52671 563 0

  Mobi ISBN 978 1 52671 562 3

  The right of Richard Tomlinson to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

  Croydon, CR0 4YY

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  Contents

  List of Characters

  Note on Money

  Prologue: Alas, I Have Little Hope

  PART ONE: THE DISAPPEARANCES (JANUARY 1915 – APRIL 1919)

  Chapter 1: The Locked Chest

  Chapter 2: The Lodge at Vernouillet

  Chapter 3: The ‘Carnet Noir’

  Chapter 4: The Villa Tric

  Chapter 5: Madame Sombrero

  Chapter 6: Lulu

  Chapter 7: Sacré Coeur

  Chapter 8: The Fatal List

  PART TWO: THE INVESTIGATION (APRIL 1919 – NOVEMBER 1921)

  Chapter 9: The Enigma of Gambais

  Chapter 10: Why Would I Have Killed Them?

  Chapter 11: I Will Tell You Something Horrible

  Chapter 12: Conscience Recoils Before Such a Monster

  PART THREE: THE TRIAL (7 – 30 NOVEMBER 1921)

  Chapter 13: Chivalry No Longer Exists

  Chapter 14: Philomène’s Dream

  Chapter 15: Her Private Life Does Not Concern Me

  Chapter 16: You Accuse Me, You Prove It

  Chapter 17: Let Us Not Look for Tragedy

  Chapter 18: You Cannot Live With the Dead

  Chapter 19: A Veritable Puzzle

  Chapter 20: You Have Death in Your Soul

  Chapter 21: Do You Feel Nothing in Your Hearts?

  Chapter 22: A Terrible Doubt Came to You

  PART FOUR: LANDRU’S SECRET

  Chapter 23: The Signpost

  Chapter 24: The Road to Gambais

  Chapter 25: The Road to Vernouillet

  Afterword: From the Quai de la Pinède to the Jardin des Plantes

  Notes

  Note on Sources

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  List of Characters

  The Accused

  Henri Désiré Landru: inventor, swindler, romancer, born Paris, 1869

  His principal aliases

  Raymond Diard: an engineer from German-occupied Lille

  Raoul Dupont: an automobile trader from Rouen

  Lucien Forest: an industrialist from German-occupied Rocroi

  Georges Frémyet: a manufacturer from German-occupied Lille

  Lucien Guillet: a factory owner from German-occupied Ardennes

  Georges Petit: a manufacturer from German-occupied Lille

  Georges Petit: a colonial entrepreneur fromTunis

  His wife

  Marie-Catherine Landru, née Rémy: laundress, forger, born Mutzig, Alsace, 1868

  Their children

  Marie Landru: born, Paris, 1891

  Maurice Landru: born, Paris, 1894

  Suzanne Landru: born, Paris, 1896

  Charles Landru: born, Paris, 1900

  His mistress

  Fernande Segret: born, Paris, 1892

  The Missing Women*

  (*Age at time of disappearance)

  Jeanne Cuchet (39): seamstress, mother of André Cuchet (17), who also disappears

  Thérèse Laborde-Line (46): unemployed

  Marie-Angélique Guillin (52): retired housekeeper

  Berthe Héon (55): cleaner

  Anna Collomb (44): typist

  Andrée Babelay (19): nanny

  Célestine Buisson (47): housekeeper

  Louise Jaume (38): dress shop assistant

  Anne-Marie (‘Annette’) Pascal (37): seamstress

  Marie-Thérèse Marchadier (37): prostitute

  The Investigation

  Gabriel Bonin: investigating magistrate, Paris

  Jules Belin: detective, Paris police

  Amédée Dautel: detective, Paris police

  Louis Riboulet: detective, Paris police

  Dr Charles Paul: forensic pathologist, director of the Paris police laboratory

  The Trial

  Maurice Gilbert: presiding judge

  Robert Godefroy: chief prosecuting attorney

  Vincent de Moro Giafferri: chief defence counsel

  Auguste Navières du Treuil: assistant defence counsel

  Note on Money

  In 1913, when this story begins, 1 old French franc had the purchasing power of just below 3.1 euros in 2017. I have used this rate for all conversions into modern money.

  Prologue: Alas, I Have Little Hope

  On Sunday, 12 January 1919, a housemaid in Paris, 32, single and poorly educated, sent a letter to a village mayor in the best French she could muster.

  “I am writing a few words to ask you for some information, unfortunately very serious,” Marie Lacoste began. In her despair, Marie forgot her full stops, as she raced on:

  “You have in your commune a house at about 100 metres from the church, which is called the Maison Tric, the name of the owner, I do not know him, but the house was rented in 1917, to a gentleman around 40 years old, who had a long brown beard and who has as his name Monsieur Frémyet. Therefore this gentleman lived in this house for a good part of the summer of 1917 with a woman of about 45 to 50, or more exactly 47, with blue eyes and chestnut hair, medium height.”

  The woman was Marie’s widowed elder sister Célestine Buisson, who had vanished that summer at Gambais, a village 50 kilometres south-west of Paris, and never been seen again.

  “Since then the gentleman has disappeared, but one sees him with other women and this woman who was with him, has not reappeared to her family since the end of August 1917, at Gambais, in the house in question, I know the house and the area.”

  Marie also knew enough about men and how they disregarded humble women like her to keep her letter short, for she wanted the mayor’s full attention. She did not tell the mayor how she and Célestine had huddled
together on the man’s cot bed, beneath his picture of the wolf in sheep’s clothing, while he slept across the corridor. She did not describe how she had peered through the keyhole of his locked garden shed and glimpsed strange shapes, almost like bundles, piled in a heap.

  Instead, Marie got to the point. Could the mayor please check “whether my sister has not been officially buried in your area?” If not, “would you have the kindness to make a visit to the house in question and in the garden and question the inhabitants of the area if there is nothing mysterious, but alas I have little hope, for it is too long since that happened.”

  The mayor of Gambais asked the village schoolmaster, who acted as his secretary, to send Marie a careful reply. No one called Célestine Buisson had been buried in Gambais, the teacher wrote, and no one called Frémyet lived at the Maison Tric. Given these facts, the mayor did not have the authority to investigate the house and the garden.

  The mayor and the schoolteacher had not lied. Like everyone else in Gambais, they knew the man who rented the Villa Tric (its correct name) as Monsieur Dupont. He described himself as an automobile trader and had been seen coming and going with a series of women ever since his arrival at the house three years before. As far as the mayor was concerned, Dupont’s business with these women was his private affair.

  Yet something about Marie’s letter – perhaps a sense that she would not be put off so easily – pricked the mayor’s conscience. He told the teacher to add another line. It so happened that another young woman had written to the mairie a while ago with a similar enquiry concerning her own sister, the teacher wrote. Mlle Lacoste might want to compare notes with this correspondent. Here was her address.

  ***

  This is the story of Henri Désiré Landru, the most notorious serial killer in French criminal history, who would never have been arrested without the detective work of Marie Lacoste and the woman to whom she now wrote. When the police finally caught up with Landru at a dingy apartment near Paris’s Gare du Nord, they found a short, bald, bearded 50-year-old with a mistress half his age, and a roomful of clutter that included a bust of Beethoven, a volume of romantic poetry, and a patent application for a revolutionary new automobile radiator.

  Eventually, the police concluded that Landru had made romantic contact with 283 women during and immediately after the First World War. They were wrong. The true figure was certainly higher, while the official number of Landru’s victims – ten fiancées and one young man – was almost certainly too low. The horror unleashed by Landru at two country houses outside Paris transfixed the French public to the point where one newspaper speculated that the entire story had been concocted by the government to distract attention from its hapless performance at the 1919 peace talks.

  Landru’s trial, held in Versailles in November 1921, was the hottest ticket that autumn in Paris, less than an hour away by train. Celebrities fought to get special passes, including the novelist Colette, the singer Maurice Chevalier, and Rudyard Kipling, who was passing through Paris to collect an honorary degree. Landru was a showstopper, firing off caustic barbs at the judge and the prosecuting attorney as he insisted on his innocence. “My only regret is that I have just the one head to offer you,” he sneered at the court, while he mocked the “elegant ladies” in the audience who came each day to gawp at him.

  This is also the story of the women who brought Landru to justice in the hope of some kind of vengeance. They were the female relatives and friends of his victims, who tracked him down and confronted him in court, determined to send the killer of their loved ones to the guillotine.

  In the beginning Landru was the hunter, at large in a wartime Paris stripped bare of eligible men. He preyed on women via lonely hearts adverts and matrimonial agencies, on trams, buses and metro trains, in public parks and at the apartments and houses he rented in the city and nearby countryside.

  When women became his pursuers, Landru still held the advantage of being a man. Parisian detectives and village constables, cobblers, coachmen, and shopkeepers all declined to enquire about this promiscuous monsieur who was entitled, in his words, to a “wall” around his private life.

  Landru clung to all his presumed rights over women at his trial, secure in the knowledge that the men in the court shared his views about the “feeble sex”. The judge disparaged Landru’s ten missing fiancées as foolish, feeble, wanton, ignorant, and naïve. The newspapers deplored the presence of women in the audience and made fun of the concierges, seamstresses, prostitutes and village “gossips” who testified against Landru. As for Landru, he could scarcely be bothered with the “cackling” of these female accusers. They could not be trusted, Landru declared, precisely because they were women.

  Landru preferred to address the prosecutor, the judge and the allmale jury with a single question. “Your proofs, messieurs, where are your proofs?” he demanded again and again, wagging his finger aloft. For l’affaire Landru was a murder case with no bodies, where the only forensic evidence was some charred bone debris of doubtful origin beneath a pile of leaves, and a few burnt scraps of women’s apparel. Even the prosecutor “loyally confessed” that the authorities had no idea how Landru had killed his 11 known victims or how he had disposed of their remains.

  ***

  A solution did exist to the puzzle, hidden amid 7,000 pages of case documents, only a fraction of which were ever seen by the prosecution and defence at Landru’s trial. Buried in this vast depository of witness statements, interrogation transcripts and forensic reports was a more disturbing narrative.

  This untold story began in the same time and place as the official version of events: a busy street near Paris’s Gare de l’Est on the eve of the First World War. At this point the police and the investigating magistrate lost sight of the one clue that might have allowed them to understand how a petty Parisian conman was driven to kill more women – probably many more – than the ten missing fiancées on Landru’s charge sheet.

  PART ONE

  THE DISAPPEARANCES

  January 1915 – April 1919

  Chapter 1

  The Locked Chest

  In the autumn of 1913, a year before the Germans swept towards Paris, a mother and her teenage son could often be seen on Sunday mornings bicycling along the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis. Sometimes they headed north past the Gare de l’Est and then up the long hill to Montmartre. At the top, they would pause to catch their breath and look down on the teeming, dangerous city.

  She was Jeanne Cuchet, a 38-year-old seamstress whose husband had died five years earlier. Jeanne’s friends all agreed later that she was pretty, a fact confirmed by a studio portrait probably taken shortly after Martin Cuchet’s death. The photographer caught Jeanne’s full lips, the dimple on her chin, her brown curly hair tied loosely in a bob, an air of faint bemusement playing across her face. This puzzled expression was familiar to those who knew Jeanne, for she was rather deaf, often failing to hear what people said.

  Jeanne had much on her mind as she and her 16-year-old son André biked around Paris. She had tried in vain to marry again, but she was hard to please on the subject of men. A string of potential suitors had come and gone at her fifth-floor apartment on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, including a commercial traveller and a wine trader. None had lasted long.

  Jeanne might have found another husband more easily if she had not been so poor. Martin Cuchet had left Jeanne nothing apart from his medical and funeral expenses, obliging her to borrow 1,000 francs (about 3,100 euros) after the funeral in order to tide her over. She cursed her “stupidity” in renting a larger apartment than she could afford, on the advice of the dress shop manager for whom she worked from home. Her savings were almost exhausted; all that remained of her nest egg were some municipal bonds, barely worth 300 francs.

  Jeanne wanted to marry again for André’s sake, as she told the shop manager, a well-intentioned man called Monsieur Folvary. She thought her only child needed a proper father who could help him get on in life,
especially since André carried a social handicap. He was illegitimate, and probably not the son of Martin Cuchet, despite taking Cuchet’s surname. From time to time, Jeanne also told Folvary that she wanted to leave France with André for a new life abroad in America. Folvary found it hard to take her seriously, since Jeanne did not speak a word of English.

  André had a rather different view of his mother’s situation. One day in Folvary’s dress shop near the Opéra, when Jeanne was out of earshot, André told Folvary that he was not keen on her plans to find a husband. A slim, rather weedy youth, André was increasingly impatient to escape from under Jeanne’s possessive wing. The prospect of a stepfather ruling the roost displeased him, for life was looking up for André that autumn.

  He had just started working at a shirt factory called “Fashionable House”, where he had fallen in with a gang of older lads. André’s best friend, his hero really, was Max Morin, the leader of this group, who was everything André wanted to be – self-confident, at ease with girls, a real man. Privately Max thought André was a bit of a “little girl”, but André did not notice his new friend’s condescension. For the first time in his sheltered upbringing, André felt like a proper grown-up.