Copyright © 2011 by David King

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered

trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

is available upon request.

ISBN 978-0-307-45289-4
eISBN 978-0-307-45291-7

Printed in the United States of America

Frontispiece: Dr. Marcel Petiot at the time of his arrest. Used with permission of
Associated Press.

book design by barbara sturman

jacket photography © martin amis/archangel images

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First Edition

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 P R E FA C E

M a r c h 11 , 1 9 4 4

A
THICK black smoke streamed into Jacques and Andrée Mar-
çais’s fifth-floor apartment at 22 rue Le Sueur in the heart of
Paris’s fashionable 16th arrondissement. The smoke had begun
five days before, but now, in the unusually warm weather, it was getting
worse, seeping through closed windows and soiling the furniture. In the
air was a nauseating smell described variously as burnt caramel, burnt
rubber, or a burnt roast of poor quality. The source of the disturbance, it
seemed, was a building across the street. “Do something,” Andrée Mar-
çais told her husband when he returned home just before six o’clock that
evening, and she sent him over to investigate.
Neither Jacques nor his wife knew who, if anyone, lived in the
neighboring two-and-a-half-story town house at 21 rue Le Sueur. A
man was sometimes seen riding there on a green bicycle, towing a cart
whose contents were concealed under a heavy canvas. On rare occa-
sions, he appeared to receive visitors, who arrived almost invariably at
night curiously lugging a couple of heavy suitcases.
As Jacques approached the stately structure with its blackened gray
stone façade, he could tell that the smoke was indeed pouring out of its
narrow chimney. He could not, however, see inside the house. The shut-
ters on the ground floor were closed, and the curtains on the second
floor were drawn. Jacques rang the bell. After no response, he pressed
the button a few more times. Then, noticing a small, weather-worn

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 2 • David King

piece of paper attached to the large double door that had once served as
a carriage entrance, he took it down and read: “Away for a month. For-
ward mail to 18, rue des Lombards, Auxerre.”
Worried about a chimney fire blazing in an empty house, Jacques
returned home and called the police.
Moments later, two bicycle patrolmen arrived on the scene. After
trying in vain to enter the premises, the men, Joseph Teyssier and Emile
Fillion, went looking for someone who could identify the owner of
the property. The concierge at No. 23, Marie Pageot, informed them
that the town house was unoccupied but belonged to a family physi-
cian named Marcel Petiot, who lived at 66 rue Caumartin near Gare
Saint-Lazare, in a bustling commercial district just south of a seedy cen-
ter of strip joints, brothels, and nightclubs.
With the physician’s name and telephone number in hand, Teyssier
entered the nearby grocer shop, Garanne, and dialed: Pigalle 77–11. A
woman answered and then put Dr. Petiot on the line. Teyssier informed
him of the fire at his property.
“Have you entered the building?” the physician asked.
“No.”
“Don’t touch anything. I will bring the keys immediately. Fifteen
minutes at the most.”
When Teyssier exited the shop, the unusual smoke had attracted
a few residents onto the sidewalk. Other neighbors watched from
upper-story windows, the officers and onlookers alike scurrying about
as they awaited the arrival of the owner. Fifteen minutes passed, and
Petiot was nowhere in sight. Another ten minutes passed, and still no
Petiot. Biking from his apartment on rue Caumartin at that time of the
evening should not have taken more than ten to twelve minutes.
After almost half an hour, the patrolmen decided that they could not
wait any longer and called the fire department, which immediately dis-
patched a truck from the station at 8 rue Mesnil. The leader of the fire
brigade, thirty-three-year-old Corporal Avilla Boudringhin, grabbed a
ladder and climbed onto a second-floor balcony. Opening the wooden
shutter, he smashed the glass, released the window lock, and stepped

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 De at h in t he Cit y of Light • 3

inside the darkened mansion. Two of his men followed. With the aid of
a flashlight, the small team of firefighters traced the peculiar, nauseat-
ing smell to a small room in the basement. One of the two coal stoves
there was roaring furiously. It was fireman Roger Bérody who opened
the iron door.
Jutting out were the charred remains of a human hand. On the far
staircase was a pile of debris, which turned out to be a skull, a rib cage,
and several other recognizable bones. Arms and legs had been strewn
about in parts. A split torso and two other skulls lay on the floor. The
stench of scorched and decomposing flesh was overpowering. Horrified,
the fire chief ordered his men out of the basement. As the firefighters
exited the grisly site, one of the younger men leaned over an iron banis-
ter and vomited.
“Gentlemen, come and take a look,” Boudringhin told the patrol-
men once he emerged onto the street through the old carriage entrance.
“I believe that your work will be cut out for you.”
Teyssier was not the least prepared for the carnage that awaited him in
the basement. He rushed back to Garanne and telephoned headquarters.
A large crowd soon gathered outside the town house, many of them
curious about the smoke, the commotion, and now also the sight of a fire
truck that was not yet extinguishing the fire. Among the arrivals was a
slim, dark-haired man of medium height, pushing a bicycle through the
throng of onlookers. He was pale and clean-shaven, and wore a dark
gray overcoat and a fedora. He was sweating profusely.
When he reached the front of the crowd, he leaned his bike against the
building, walked up to the fire chief, and identified himself as the brother
of the owner. He demanded to be taken inside, speaking with such convic-
tion that the fire chief waved him through to Patrolman Fillion. While the
two men were talking, Patrolman Teyssier returned to the scene.
“Are you good Frenchmen?” the man asked.
“What kind of question is that?”
“Then listen carefully. What you see there are the bodies of
Germans and traitors to our country.” Discreetly, he asked if the author-
ities had been notified. Teyssier nodded.

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 4 • David King

“That’s a serious mistake,” the man said. “My life is at stake, as are
the lives of several of my friends who serve our cause.” He explained
that he was in charge of a French Resistance organization and handed
over a document to that effect, though the details were difficult to read
in the darkness. In the meantime, he reached down and picked some-
thing off the ground, shoving it into his pocket.
The man then professed to have some three hundred secret files and
identification cards of fellow Resistants at his house. “I must destroy
them at once before they fall into the hands of the Germans.”
Sympathetic to the work of the Resistance, Teyssier and Fillion had
no desire to see so many patriotic Frenchmen handed over to the Nazis
and carted off to prisons, concentration camps, or some other horrific
fate. They agreed to allow the man to leave the scene of the crime, even
though he clearly had information that could have helped the investi-
gation. What’s more, the officers agreed not to inform their superiors
about his visit. The stranger biked away into the night.
Later, when Teyssier saw a photograph of the physician who owned
the building, he was mortified to learn that the man on the bicycle had
been Marcel Petiot.

CROSS town, at 48–50 Boulevard Diderot, Commissaire Georges-

A Victor Massu, the chief of the Brigade Criminelle, had just fin-
ished dinner with his wife, Mathilde, and twenty-year-old son, Bernard.
Massu had settled into his favorite chair to talk about the day’s activities:
a burglary, an assault case, and the usual routine of reports, interroga-
tions, and seemingly endless paperwork. Bernard, a law student at the
University of Paris, had retreated to his room to prepare for exams.
Minutes before ten p.m., after Massu had just climbed into bed, the
telephone rang. “I still remember that call as if the crackle of the bell
rang in my ears today,” he said many years later. At that hour, he knew
it could only mean one thing. This was not, as he put it, another “stab-
bing in the vicinity of Montmartre.” Massu took the receiver with the
steely composure of a gambler trying to bluff a rogue cardsharp.

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 De at h in t he Cit y of Light • 5

On the line was Secretary Canitrot at the Brigade Criminelle. With-

out relaying the details of the discovery at rue Le Sueur, Canitrot urged
the boss to come as quickly as possible and sent over a car right away.
Fifteen minutes later, a long black Citroën 11 CV was waiting outside
Massu’s residence, the chauffeur with a hand at his cap.
Bernard wanted to tag along, as he sometimes did on the most seri-
ous or interesting cases. The commissaire agreed. Massu, a stocky man
in his fifty-fifth year, with a shock of black hair and a dark mustache, put
on his black overcoat and gray fedora. The two Massus, each wrapped
up for the night chill, hopped into the car and drove across the city that,
years before, would have been swirling with activity. That evening,
however, Paris looked, as Massu put it, “somber and deserted.”
The city was suffering the fourth year of the Nazi Occupation. Huge
red and white banners emblazoned with a black swastika had flown
atop the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and many other landmarks
and buildings near Petiot’s town house. White placards with Gothic
script directed traffic, mostly German and many of them, in that area,
Mercedes-Benzes or Citroëns with small swastika flags on the fenders.
The few people on the streets after the official ten p.m. curfew were
Germans, “friends of the occupiers,” and the “workers of the night.” A
brothel exclusively for Nazi officers was located just around the corner
from Petiot’s property.
As the car pulled up to 21 rue Le Sueur, a single streetlamp, hooded
for the wartime blackout, cast a dim bluish light on the activities of the
police, which, as Massu already realized, were inspiring an “uneasy curi-
osity” among the street’s residents. Some officers controlled the crowd
eager to watch from balcony windows; others followed the commissaire
inside the town house. Policemen were now arriving every few minutes.
Massu entered the mansion, which had a grand salon, a petit salon,
a large formal dining room, a billiards room, a library, six bedrooms,
and two kitchens. The house had previously belonged to Princess Marie
Colloredo-Mansfeld, a sixty-seven-year-old Frenchwoman whose hus-
band’s family had borne the title of imperial prince since 1763. The
French actress Cécile Sorel, the comtesse de Ségur and doyenne of the

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 6 • David King

Comédie Française, had lived there in the 1930s, a neighboring con-

cierge was telling people. This would be claimed for years, but it is not
accurate. Sorel had only rented the house to store her extensive ward-
robe and trunks of memorabilia from her long career on the stage.
The current owner of the property was far less known to the general
public than either the princess or the actress. “The name Marcel Petiot
meant absolutely nothing to me,” Commissaire Massu admitted. It was
the first time he had even heard it.
From what Massu could tell, the owner was an assiduous collector of
fine art. Many of the rooms boasted a splendid array of crystal chande-
liers, oriental rugs, antique furniture, marble statues, Sèvres vases, and
oil paintings in gilded frames. At the same time, there was a startling
state of neglect. The rooms were not only dusty and full of cobwebs, but
also, in some cases, the furniture was turned over or stacked in corners
as if at a flea market. In several rooms and corridors were torn wallpaper,
loose baseboards, and dangling panels. Massu saw exquisite Louis XV
furniture alongside filthy couches with visibly protruding springs.
When one officer warned that the case would most likely turn out
to be appalling, Massu was unfazed. He had heard this before. In fact,
almost every time a new crime was discovered, someone usually noted
that it would be a “terrible histoire.” He had no doubt that this might well
be the case. As chief of the Brigade Criminelle, he was used to investi-
gating disturbing affairs.
Still Massu was taken aback at the macabre spectacle in the base-
ment of 21 rue Le Sueur: the half-burned skull in the furnace, the pile
of tibias, femurs, and other bones on the floor. A foot, Massu saw, was
“blackened like a log that had been slowly consumed.” A dismembered
hand, curled up tightly, “grasped the thin air in desperation.” A wom-
an’s torso lay there, with the flesh “gnawed away to reveal the splinters
of the ribcage.” The stench—“the sinister odor of roasted human flesh,”
as he put it—gripped his throat.
A few steps away, Massu found a shovel, a dark-stained hatchet, and
then, underneath the stone stairs, a gray bag containing the left half of
a decomposed body, minus the head, foot, and internal organs. Massu

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 De at h in t he Cit y of Light • 7

did not know how to describe the ghastly site other than by using a ref-
erence to medieval literature. The basement of the elegant town house
looked like a scene from Dante’s Inferno.

XITING into the courtyard, Massu, Bernard, and a couple of

E detectives, including Inspector Principal Marius Battut, entered one
of the smaller buildings in the back. In the first room was a polished
desk, along with two leather armchairs, a lounge sofa, and a small round
table topped with magazines. A cupboard full of medical supplies stood
against one wall; against another was a glass-lined bookcase in which
medical treatises were shelved. What particularly struck the commis-
saire, however, was the room’s appearance: It was cleaner, tidier, and
in much better condition than the more stately main building. It also
seemed to have been recently renovated.
Opening a second door, located near one of the bookshelves, Massu
exited into a narrow corridor, about three feet in width, which led to
another door, this one with a thick chain and padlock. The investigators
entered. It was a small, triangular room, about eight feet on the longest
side, six on the shortest. The walls were thick, two of them of rough
cement and the third covered by beige wallpaper. There were no win-
dows or furniture, only two unshaded lightbulbs and a plain metal cot.
Attached near the corners of each wall, about one meter from the ceil-
ing, were a number of iron hooks.
A gold-trimmed double wooden door on the far wall appeared to
lead to some grand salon, but when one of the inspectors tried to open
it, the doorknob simply turned around. With the help of a crowbar,
the men ripped the door from the hinges to discover that it had been
glued there. To the right of this false door was a bell, which did not
work either. Actually it was not even connected, as its wires had been
cut from the outside. As for the door through which the inspectors had
entered, Massu noticed that it had no handle on the inside.
Examining the beige wallpaper, which looked freshly applied, Ber-
nard peeled it back and discovered a viewing lens fitted in the wall at

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 8 • David King

a height of almost six feet. The purpose of the room was not clear, but
there was already a disturbing hunch that this small space with its iron
hooks, many decoys, and virtually soundproof walls might well be
where the victims had met their demise.
After retracing their steps to the courtyard, Massu and his team en-
tered the old carriage house, which had been converted into a garage and
crammed with tools, boards, slop pails, paintbrushes, gas masks, and
old mattress springs. A sliding door in the back led to another building,
probably the former stable. There, on the ground, beyond a pile of rusty
scrap iron was a metal cover that hid the night’s most horrific discovery.
It was the entrance to a pit. A newly greased pulley, with a hook and
a thick rope tied to form a noose, hung over the hole. A horrible stench
left little doubt as to what lay inside. Massu, nevertheless, climbed down
the wooden ladder, watching each slippery step, and landed in the mid-
dle of a revolting mix of quicklime and decomposing bodies of varying
stages—the dumping ground, in effect, of a veritable slaughterhouse.
But who could say how many bodies lay in the pit? With a depth
estimated at ten to twelve feet, there were clearly many more here than
in the basement. The bones crunched under Massu’s foot on landing.
When the commissaire exited, reeking from his descent, he ordered spe-
cialists to retrieve the bones for analysis at the police laboratory. His
assistants, however, refused. They looked as frightened, Massu said, as
if they expected a bomb to explode or had met the devil himself.
Commissaire Massu had made some 3,257 arrests in his thirty-
three-year career investigating crime in the French capital, but he had
never seen a case as heinous or as perplexing as this one. Who was
responsible for this “nightmare house”? Who, for that matter, were the
victims, how many were there, and how exactly had they died? Most
perplexing of all, what was the motive? The murderer—whoever he
was—was not just killing his victims, he was dismembering them. The
attempt to solve what Massu soon dubbed “the crime of the century”
had begun.

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 1.

GER M AN NIGHT
The German night has swallowed up the country. . . .
France is nothing but a silence; she is lost
somewhere in the night with all lights out.
—Antoine de Saint- Exupéry, letter to the New York Times
Magazine, November 29, 1942

F
OUR years before, many of Paris’s richest and most privileged
residents had begun fleeing the capital. The duke of Windsor;
Prince George of Greece; Princess Winnie de Polignac and her
niece, Daisy Fellowes, the heiress to the Singer sewing fortune, had all
departed. The Aga Khan set out for Switzerland. Peggy Guggenheim
stored her art collection in a friend’s barn and drove away in her Talbot,
in the direction of the Haute Savoie ski resort of Megève.
Not far behind were a number of writers, painters, and artists who
had turned the City of Light into what New York Times art critic Har-
old Rosenberg called “the laboratory of the twentieth century.” James
Joyce left for a village outside Vichy before continuing into Zurich.
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas departed for Culoz, near Annecy.
Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, René Magritte, and Wassily Kandinsky
headed south. Vladimir Nabokov secured the last ocean liner to New
York. Walter Benjamin hiked across a mountain passageway into Spain,
but made it no farther than Portbou, where he committed suicide at age
forty-eight.
The scale of departures from the French capital had accelerated in
May 1940 with the Nazi invasion of Belgium, Luxembourg, and the
Netherlands. On the afternoon of June 3, when the air raid sirens began

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 10 • David King

to wail, the Luftwaffe pounded the Renault and Citroën factories, the
bombs also falling onto the Air Ministry on Boulevard Victor. The
one-hour raid left a trail of street craters, massive piles of rubble, and
a block of apartment buildings looking, as journalist Alexander Werth
put it, “like a badly-cut piece of cheddar.” Two hundred and fifty-four
people had been killed and another six hundred and fifty-two injured.
As the Nazi Wehrmacht advanced closer to the capital, nearly encir-
cling it from the north, the east, and the west, the exodus soon reached
epic proportions. Trains were booked far beyond capacity, forcing many
Parisians to leave by motorcar, truck, horse-drawn cart, hearse, or any
other contraption. More often, residents fled on foot, pushing selected
personal belongings, from mattresses to birdcages, onto bicycles,
motorcycles, prams, wheelbarrows, oxcarts, hay wains, coffee vendor
carts—virtually anything with wheels.
Legions of refugees struggled, under the hot summer sun, against
almost completely blocked roads, under the occasional strafing of the
Luftwaffe and, after Mussolini declared war on June 10, the attacks
of Italian planes. Automobiles were abandoned for lack of gasoline.
Rumors thrived in the oppressive climate of heat and hunger, feeding on
the painful memories of the First World War and the feelings of uncer-
tainty that swirled around the present crisis. No one knew when, or if,
they would be able to return home.
Of France’s forty million people, an estimated six to ten million
inhabitants clogged the roads. Paris saw its population fall from nearly
three million to about eight hundred thousand. The mass exodus was
replicated in cities all over northern and eastern France, as the popula-
tion headed south or southwest. The pilot and future author of The Little
Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, peering down from his observation
mission on the 2/33 Reconnaissance Squadron, thought that the mass
movements looked like “a boot had scattered an ant-hill,” sending the
unfortunate refugees dispersing “without panic. Without hope, without
despair, on the march as if in duty bound.”
Beginning on June 9, the French government itself fled the capital.

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 De at h in t he Cit y of Light • 11

Heading south, first to Orléans and then to the châteaux of the Loire,
the leaders retreated to Bordeaux. Five days after their flight, the first
German motorcyclists reached Paris, rolling into the Place Voltaire
from the northern suburbs of Saint-Denis. By the early afternoon, the
Nazi Wehrmacht had staged the first of its daily marches goose-stepping
to drum and fife down an otherwise silent Avenue des Champs-Élysées.
“There never has been anything like the eerie atmosphere in Paris,”
Robert Murphy observed from his office at the United States Embassy
on the Place de la Concorde.
At least sixteen people in Paris took their own lives that day. The
neurosurgeon and head of the American Hospital, Comte Thierry de
Martel, stuck his arm with a syringe filled with strychnine. Novelist
Ernst Weiss, Franz Kafka’s friend, swallowed a large amount of barbitu-
rates, but when this overdose failed to have its intended effect, he slashed
his wrists, dying twenty-four hours later. The sixty-four-year-old con-
cierge at the Pasteur Institute, Joseph Meister, shot himself in the head
rather than obey the German invaders—he had been the first person
cured of rabies by Louis Pasteur.
Many Parisians were in shock. What the German army under the
kaiser had failed to do in four years of vicious slaughter in the First
World War had been accomplished under Adolf Hitler in six weeks.
France had suffered the most humiliating defeat in its history. Worse,
however, was to come.

HE Germans would occupy three-fifths of the country, seizing a

T vast swath of territory north of the Loire that included two-thirds
of France’s population, two-thirds of its most fertile agricultural lands,
and three-fourths of its industry. The occupying power would control
not only Paris but also the strategic Atlantic and Channel coastlines.
France would have to pay the costs of the German Occupation, which
were set at an exorbitant daily rate of 400 million francs and pegged to
an inflated 20–1 franc-mark exchange rate. Over the next four years,

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 12 • David King

France would pay the Third Reich a total of 631,866,000,000 francs, or

almost 60 percent of its national income.
The rest of France was to be carved up. Germany seized Alsace
and Lorraine, as well as the northeastern territories of the Nord and
Pas-de- Calais, the latter governed by Wehrmacht Command in Brus-
sels, with entrance strictly forbidden to Frenchmen. A slice of territory
from Menton to the southeastern border was handed over to Germany’s
ally, Italy. The remaining part, located south of the Loire, became the
“free” or the unoccupied zone, a nominally independent state with its
capital in Vichy, a spa and casino resort known for its mineral water.
When the French government had resettled there in the summer of
1940, it had to acknowledge “the rights of the occupying power.”
Collaboration—once a benign word for “working together”—soon
took on a sinister new meaning.
In Paris, the Blitzkrieg was rapidly followed by a Ritzkrieg. Nazi
officials arrived en masse to take control of the capital and commandeer
prime real estate in the elegant western districts. The High Command
of the German Military Occupation, which would govern the occupied
zone, moved into the Hôtel Majestic on avenue Kléber. The Komman-
dant, or governor-general, of Grand-Paris, chose the Hôtel Meurice on
rue de Rivoli; the military intelligence and counterespionage organiza-
tion, the Abwehr (Abwehrstelle Frankreichs), set up headquarters in
the Hôtel Lutétia nearby on the Boulevard Raspail. The Luftwaffe took
over the Palais Luxembourg, while the Kriegsmarine settled into vari-
ous properties on and around the Place de la Concorde.
For Nazi officers and their favored French collaborators, Paris
had become the Babylon of the Third Reich. There were lavish
champagne-and-caviar parties hosted by Ambassador Otto Abetz on
rue de Lille, and equally extravagant affairs organized by Luftwaffe
General Friedrich- Carl Hanesse in the Rothschild mansion on Avenue
de Marigny. Famous restaurants, like Maxim’s, Lapérouse, and La Tour
d’Argent, catered to every whim, as did cabarets, nightclubs, and broth-
els, many of which enjoyed exemptions from the official curfew. As New

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 De at h in t he Cit y of Light • 13

York Times correspondent Kathleen Cannell put it, at the time of the
discovered bodies on rue Le Sueur in March 1944 Nazi-occupied Paris
seemed to be “dancing with false gaiety on a rumbling volcano.”
For most Frenchmen, however, the last four years represented
fear, cold, hunger, and humiliation. No group of people, of course,
fared worse than the Jews. Almost immediately after the conquest,
the 200,000 Jews of France began losing their basic civic rights. As of
October 3, 1940, they could no longer serve in positions of authority in
government, education, publishing, journalism, film, and the military.
The following day, civil authorities were granted the power to intern
foreign-born Jews in “special camps.” Three days later, the repeal of the
Crémieux Act stripped citizenship from another 1,500 Algerian Jews.
The flurry of discriminatory laws was relentless. By early 1941, Jews
could no longer work in banking, insurance, real estate, or hotels. Quo-
tas restricted the number of Jews allowed to practice the legal and medi-
cal professions to 2 percent, though this, too, was later expanded into an
outright ban. Jewish shops were soon to be “Aryanized,” that is, seized
by the state and the ownership handed over or sold at a bargain rate to
non-Jews. The aim was to “eliminate all Jewish influence in the national
economy.”
It was not long before the rafles, or roundups, began. On May 14,
1941, the first rafle resulted in the arrest and internment of 3,747 inno-
cent Jewish men. Ten months later, on March 27, 1942, “special train
767” left France with the first convoy of 1,112 Jews packed into over-
crowded third-class passenger cars, bound for the new extermination
camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Eighty-four deportations would follow,
most of them in sealed cattle cars. SS Lieutenant General Reinhard Hey-
drich and his deputy Adolf Eichmann would continually press French
authorities to quicken the pace. In all, 75,721 Jewish men, women, and
children would be deported from France to Nazi death and concentra-
tion camps in the east. Only 2,800 of them would return home.
Paris under the Nazi Occupation was, in the words of historian
Alistair Horne, the four darkest years of the city’s two-thousand-year

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 14 • David King

history. For many Parisians indeed, it was a nightmare of tyranny and

terror, resulting in a desperation to escape that would be ruthlessly
exploited by one man in its midst.

HAT Massu did after his initial search of the town house might
W seem peculiar at best. He did not go straight to rue Caumartin
to look for Dr. Petiot, nor did he send any detectives there. Instead, he
went home.
A French law, dating back to December 13, 1799 (22 Frimaire of the
French Revolutionary Calendar), prohibited the police from barging in
on citizens during the middle of the night unless there was a fire, flood,
or an invitation from inside the residence. Article 76 of the Constitution
of Year Eight, as it was known, had been written to stop the late-night
arrests that occurred during the Reign of Terror. But in a case of this
magnitude, Massu could have simply posted men outside Petiot’s apart-
ment to wait for the legal hour. Clearly, there was another explanation
for his inaction.
The commissaire suspected that 21 rue Le Sueur had been used by
the Gestapo, the German secret state police, that had seized control of
French internal affairs. Established in April 1933 to eliminate “enemies
of the state” as part of Adolf Hitler’s consolidation of power, the Gestapo
had swelled from some three hundred officials in a former art school
on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse in Berlin to a total of forty thousand agents
and many more informers across Occupied Europe. In the name of law
and order, they could spy, arrest, imprison, torture, and kill with almost
complete impunity. The organization was above the law, and there was
no appeal.
Massu had reasons for presuming a possible Gestapo connection.
There was not only the butchery and brutality of the crime scene, but
also the fact that the German security forces had preferred to set up its
offices in the chic 16th arrondissement. Around the corner on the Ave-
nue Foch, for instance, were Gestapo buildings at Nos. 31, 72, 84, and
85, along with offices of the related SS secret service the Sicherheits-

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 De at h in t he Cit y of Light • 15

dienst, or SD, at Nos. 19–21, 31 bis, 53, 58–60, 80, and 85. Many other
German military, counterespionage, and Nazi Party offices were located
on this street as well.
A swastika had flown over the building across from Petiot’s prop-
erty. The garage at No. 22 had been appropriated by Albert Speer’s
Organization Todt, a vast supply company that supervised German con-
struction projects in Occupied Europe. In Paris, this group was doing
everything from melting down bronze statues for armaments to sending
laborers north to construct the Atlantic Wall against an Allied invasion.
The French police, of course, had no authority over the Gestapo
or any of its activities. In a protocol signed with SS Brigadier Gen-
eral Karl Oberg on April 18, 1943, the secretary general of the French
police, René Bousquet, had to agree to work with the occupying power
to maintain “calm and order in an always efficient manner.” Specifically,
the French would have to help German police combat the “attacks of
the communists, terrorists, agents of the enemy and saboteurs as well as
those who support them: Jews, Bolsheviks, Anglo-Americans.” To add
further insult to humiliation, French policemen had to salute German
officials whenever they encountered them in the street—this was the
notorious Grusspflicht.
This subordination was to be endured, the argument went, because
it was preferable to the alternative: namely, a police force staffed only
by the occupying power and the many extremist militaristic organiza-
tions that collaborated with the Nazis. Such circumstances would not
only lead to frightening police brutality, but also offer few chances to
sabotage German authorities. Many members of Resistance organiza-
tions, on the other hand, scorned this position as a mere rationalization
of a cowardly, self-interested collaboration between enemy and traitors.
Still, despite his initial hunch that the human remains on rue Le Sueur
were somehow tied to the Gestapo, Massu had some nagging doubts. For
one thing, he had not been warned off the site, as surely would have hap-
pened in advance or soon after the discovery of the bodies on its prem-
ises if there had been a Gestapo affiliation. Nor had he encountered any
Gestapo agents on the property, which also would likely have occurred

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 16 • David King

if the building had served as an extension of the secret state police. Hours
after the initial phone call from his secretary, Massu had still not received
any communication from German authorities.

OMMISSAIRE Massu arrived at his office at 36 Quai des

C Orfèvres on the Île de la Cité about nine o’clock on the morning of
March 12, 1944. His windows on the third floor of the sprawling Police
Judiciaire overlooked the horse chestnut trees of the place Dauphine, the
restaurant Le Vert- Galant, and the Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris
and still standing despite the increased threat of Allied bombing raids.
Some inspectors were drawing up reports; others looked after
detainees in the corridors, none of whom, unfortunately, would turn
out to have anything to do with 21 rue Le Sueur. Picking up the Petiot
file, which was begun the previous night, Massu prepared to return to
the town house to meet a team of dignitaries and officials that included
his immediate superior, the prefect of police Amédée Bussière, who was
eager to inspect the site for himself as he would have to report to both
French and German authorities.
At ten o’clock that morning, the German-controlled broadcast-
ing organization Radio Paris first announced the gruesome discovery
of the charnel house on rue Le Sueur. “Petiot has fled Paris,” the pre-
senter said, not wasting any time to speculate on the suspect’s where-
abouts. “He will likely return to the terrorist bands of Haute-Savoie,” as
officials dubbed the Resistance fighters in the Alpine region bordering
Switzerland, “and resume his position as médecin-major.” In this initial
broadcast, as well as many others that followed that day, the radio sta-
tion painted a portrait of the killer as an outlaw terrorist who opposed
the Third Reich.
But Radio Paris had a poor reputation as a source of information.
“Radio Paris lies, Radio Paris lies, Radio Paris is German” was a popu-
lar refrain sung to the tune of “La Cucaracha.” Was Petiot really with
the Resistance? Rumors inside the police force already circulated of
the suspect’s ties to clandestine patriotic organizations. Massu had also

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 De at h in t he Cit y of Light • 17

heard that a leader of a Resistance network had arrived at the crime

scene, spoken with police officers, and then, after having been shown
inside the building, left with their permission. Patrolmen Fillion and
Teyssier still denied this allegation, but Massu planned to question the
patrol officers himself.
As news of the discovered human remains spread, many people
began to take detours to see the building on rue Le Sueur, a short walk
from the Arc de Triomphe, the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, and the
Bois de Boulogne. Many women with handbaskets stopped by on the
way to and from the daily ritual of standing in long lines at the bakery,
the dairy, the butcher, the greengrocer, the tobacconist, and elsewhere,
where they hoped to obtain expensive, often poor-quality rationed
goods, if they were still available. When one of Petiot’s neighbors,
Madame Legouvé, went for a walk with her daughter that morning, she
heard two people speak of the discovery. One gasped at the stench out-
side the physician’s town house, claiming that “it smells like death,” and
the other replied that “death has no odor.”
Inside Legouvé’s rue Le Sueur apartment building, discussion was
more animated. One of her neighbors noted that the smell on the side-
walk was of no consequence compared to the courtyard: “There, it is
truly, truly foul.” Another neighbor, Monsieur Mentier, shrugged his
shoulders, unwilling to speculate other than to state that the smell might
well be explained by a crack in the main line of the sewer. The concierge
hinted at something more sinister: “If I told you everything I know, it is
likely that you would change your opinion.”

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