A bluebeard is a man who kills his wives. It started with a fifteenth-century man named Gilles de Rais, who had a blue-black beard and was a child-killer. Somehow the term became attached to a folk tale about a man named Chevalier Raoul, whose seventh wife discovered the bodies of his first six in a room he had forbidden her to enter. However, twentieth-century Henri Landru seems to have taken permanent possession of the word.
One of the curious things about Landru was that, though he seemed to have no problem attracting females, he was hardly the cliché image of an attractive man. He was a short, stocky, balding man with a long red beard. (It is said Landru was the real-life inspiration for Charlie Chaplin’s black comedy Monsieur Verdoux, in which an unattractive man supports his family by marrying and murdering rich women for their money.) But Landru appeared extremely charming and caring, and he came across as someone who had all that it took to appeal to women—a persona that was obviously a performance because he cared nothing about his victims, except for their wealth.
Perhaps his success with women was mostly a matter of timing. When World War I started in 1914, he had already been in the army, having been discharged in 1894 after four years of service. Hence, he was one of the few men available for the host of women keeping the home fires burning.
A Life of Crime
This bluebeard’s career in crime kicked off in 1900, when he was thirty-one years old, when he spent two years in jail for fraud. That was followed by additional stints in jail for fraud, two years in 1904 and a little more than a year in 1906. In 1908 he was again convicted of fraud and sentenced to three years, and later managed to get himself an additional three years for having swindled fifteen thousand francs from a woman he had lured into his clutches with what would become his stock-in-trade, a lonely hearts ad. By the start of the war, he was tried and convicted in absentia of various crimes and sentenced to four years and permanent deportation to New Caledonia. Unfortunately—for a series of women—he was not captured for quite awhile.
One of these women, drawn by one of his lonely hearts ads, was Madame Cuchet, who took up residence with him in 1914. Landru told her his name was Diard. He met her family, who didn’t like “Diard” and warned her against involvement, but she was smitten and set up a household with him and her sixteen-year-old son in the town of Vernouillet. By January 1915 both Cuchet and her son had gone missing, and Landru got away with five thousand francs.
Six months later, one of his ads lured a Madame Laborder Line, and she went to live with Landru in Vernouillet—but not for long. By the end of June she was missing, and the not exactly grief-stricken Landru immediately sold her securities and possessions. Just over a month later, on August 2, fifty-one-year-old Madam Guillin went to live with him at Vernouillet. Predictably, she disappeared only a few days after she arrived. Landru sold off her securities and was able to withdraw twelve thousand francs from her bank account with forged documents.
Landru waited until near the end of the year before striking again, this time luring a Madam Heon to a villa he had rented in Gambais in the south of France. Soon, he was writing plaintive letters to relatives who had inquired after her that she was too ill to visit them. Of course, she had gone way past the point of sickness. She was his fifth murder victim. The sixth victim was Madam Gambais, who met Landru in November 1916. By Christmas Day, she was missing and he was in possession of her assets.
Illicit profit was undoubtedly Landru’s main motivation for killing, but he was a serial killer at heart and didn’t necessarily need financial gain to murder. Buttressing this belief is the fact that he killed one female who didn’t have any money. At the end of the war, he met Andree Babelay, a servant girl who was much younger than Landru. She told her mother that she was getting married, and then she left to move in with Landru. By April 12 she was gone with the wind, never to be seen again.
Landru continued his homicidal Houdini act with a number of other women, but like most serial killers, he eventually went too far. Two families, the Collombs and Buissons, who had lost daughters to Landru, applied pressure to the police to take action. Finally, on April 2, 1919, they arrested him.
It was then that Landru’s meticulousness in thievery and murder backfired. Police found a notebook containing cryptic notes about all his victims—eleven in all—and they launched a full-scale investigation, including digging out the land around his villa. The search unearthed nothing incriminating, but inside the house they found articles of clothing and other possessions that could be traced to the victims. This evidence, plus the note-book, weighed heavily against Landru; at his trial in Versailles in November 1919, and he was found guilty. He appealed, but on February 23, 1922, he met the guillotine and was no longer a threat to lonely women.