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.