Landru was not a smoker but he bought a packet of cigarettes for Fernande on his way to Rue de Rochechouart to spend the night with her. His little apartment was becoming a real home from home for him and Fernande. He had his bust of Beethoven, his Japanese-style lamp, his volumes of Balzac and Victor Hugo and a nice big table where he could spend his evenings sketching his plans for a new automobile radiator. It was going to make him a fortune, he told Fernande.
She was happy enough, despite “Lucien” breaking his promise to marry her by Easter. Perhaps in recompense, he had begun to pay her an allowance, and she had given up her job as a fur shop assistant. Fernande could now spend long hours dreaming about how she would resume her theatrical career as soon as the war was over.
Landru had no trouble fooling Fernande about his frequent “business trips” out of Paris. One such journey in April or May, probably to Gambais, purportedly concerned a service contract with US forces based to the east of the city.
“Four long days without seeing you!” he wrote to Fernande. “… How much time has it been since we were apart for so long! But is it really a separation, since all my thoughts are close to you.”
Fernande’s mother was more of a problem. Mme Segret was still smarting from his refusal to let her stay at his villa during the bombardment of Paris. She began to suspect he was an imposter when Easter came and went while he continued to trot out his familiar excuse about lost identity papers. Shortly after Easter, Mme Segret dragged Fernande along to the Paris office of the exiled mairie of Rocroi, the little town on the Belgian border where Landru, alias Guillet, claimed to own a factory. A quick check of the municipal files found no record of anyone called Lucien Guillet.
Mme Segret was emphatic: the relationship with this conman had to end, she told Fernande. “Guillet” was summoned to Mme Segret’s apartment but he merely shrugged when she confronted him with her discovery. Obviously the mairie had been unable to evacuate all its files when the Germans invaded, he told her matter-of-factly. The same evening, he took Fernande out to the Opéra-Comique to make up for the needless distress her mother had caused her.
***
During the spring and early summer of 1918, the Germans attempted to blast their way through the British and French lines north of Paris. At times, the front came alarmingly close to the city but on 11 June the French counter-attacked near Compiègne, halting the German advance. Soon the road would be open, not to Paris, but to the occupied cities and towns of northern France, blowing Landru’s cover.
Mme Segret chose this moment to take Fernande to stay with relatives in Burgundy, well away from Landru. He went in search of company to share his bed at Rue de Rochechouart, patrolling the metro or hanging around factory gates to pick up girls. “Mlle L.” (her full name was never revealed) noticed him stalking her one evening as she went home after her shift:
“He finally approached me and asked where I worked and whether he could wait for me at the end of the day by the exit to my factory.”
Keen to land this “vieux monsieur”, she agreed to “clean” his apartment at Rue de Rochechouart one morning. The arrangement did not work out as she expected. He did not take her to bed, but locked the door on her and went out, supposedly to his office. Landru returned at midday, took her to lunch at a nearby restaurant and then sent her on her way with some money for the cleaning. For the next appointment, he locked her all day in the apartment, with enough food for lunch and supper. In the evening, he took her to a music hall and then back to Rue de Rochechouart, where she at last spent the night with him.
Mlle L. now pushed her luck too far. She confided to him that her family was hard-up, bringing an abrupt end to the cleaning job and the nights at Rue de Rochechouart. Landru had also made an error in underestimating this worldly working girl. She knew exactly where to find him and would not be shaken off so easily.
***
On 8 August, around 120,000 British, French and Dominion troops, supported by several hundred tanks, forced a 15-mile gap in the German lines south of Amiens. The Germans were finally on the run and so was Landru: for as summer turned to autumn, he moved into unfamiliar territory, besieged by a series of women who held the upper hand.
In early September, Fernande returned to Paris and moved back in at Rue de Rochechouart. Mme Segret’s plan to separate the couple had failed. One day, when Landru was out, Fernande answered the door to a young woman who refused to introduce herself. She came again when Landru was in and he went onto the landing to talk to her, shutting the apartment door so Fernande could not hear them.
His caller was Mlle L., his former “cleaning woman”, who claimed she was now pregnant with his baby. What, she asked, was Monsieur Guillet going to do about her, the baby, and the three of them generally? Her ruse worked. Landru agreed to give her an allowance and started spending the odd night with her, possibly at another room he rented near Rue de Rochechouart.
Like Fernande, Mlle L. had no idea that Landru was almost broke by the autumn of 1918, ruined by his extensive liabilities. He was paying several “allowances” to different women, and also had to find cash for the rent on at least three apartments, the house at Gambais, the garage space in Clichy, and a network of storage depots around Paris.
Squeezed from all directions, Landru turned to Mme Jeanne Falque, twice divorced, still only 42, well off, and minded to marry again. Once again, he miscalculated.
Mme Falque, whom he met via a matrimonial agency, had substantial savings and lived in a comfortable apartment only a short walk from Rue de Rochechouart. Landru, alias Guillet, took tea with her in late September. Soon Mme Falque was travelling down to Gambais with her new fiancé to admire his country estate.
The visit did not go well. Mme Falque shivered in the back garden while they ate an open-air picnic, unimpressed by everything. She broke off their engagement as soon as they got back to Paris.
***
Early on 11 November, a detachment of Italian soldiers “liberated” Lucien Guillet’s purported home town of Rocroi, which in reality had already been abandoned by the Germans. The Italians were only just in time to claim their victory, because at 11.00 am the armistice came into force. At Rue de Rochechouart Landru grumbled to Fernande that the war had finished too soon. Seeing the startled look on her face, he rambled on that “the cessation of hostilities” would create numerous difficulties for various military contracts he had negotiated.
Having failed with Mme Falque, Landru was scrambling for cash. On 14 December, President Woodrow Wilson’s train pulled into Paris at the start of a triumphal tour of Europe, the prelude to the peace conference due to begin in Paris a month later. As Wilson and his entourage checked into the Hotel Crillon, Landru hurried over to his garage in Clichy to cadge 40 francs off a man who also rented space there.
This hand-to-mouth existence could not last. In the run-up to Christmas, Landru somehow managed to persuade Mme Falque to see him again. Once the ice was broken, he tried to con her into letting him “invest” her savings. She told him to get lost. Landru next asked if she could advance him a loan. Mme Falque said she would consider the matter. After a week, she came back with a proposal apparently designed to pay him back for the lies he had told her about his country estate: she would lend him 900 francs for a month, at a punitive interest rate of 26 per cent. “Monsieur Guillet” could take it or leave it, Mme Falque said. He took it.
***
At this crisis in his financial affairs, Landru’s eye alighted irrationally on a debt-ridden prostitute.
Every day, 37-year-old Marie-Thérèse Marchadier walked her two little Belgian griffon dogs along the Rue Saint-Jacques, joking to passers-by that she much preferred dogs to men. Originally from Bordeaux, Marie-Thérèse also kept a pet canary, which matched the flamboyant green and yellow dresses and hats she liked to wear. The rest of her story depended on whom to believe.
Her best friend Yvonne Le Gallo, another prostitute, said she had lent Marie-Thérèse several thousand francs to lease other rooms in Marie-Thérèse’s apartment block during the war. Marie-Thérèse’s idea was to sublet the rooms, but her venture had flopped, leaving her heavily in debt to Yvonne, with no means to pay.
A “broker” and possible pimp called Moret, who later claimed to know Landru as a second-hand furniture dealer, said he had first introduced Landru to Marie-Thérèse in October 1918. According to Moret, the financially stretched prostitute had stuck a note on her apartment door, announcing the sale of her furniture.
The truth about how Landru met Marie-Thérèse may have been simpler. She had spent time during the war in Le Havre, a port that Landru knew well, and more recently in the town of Beauvais, 90 kilometres north of Paris, where Landru had also stayed on at least one occasion. It is therefore possible that when Landru went to Marie-Thérèse’s apartment on Christmas Day he knew her already and wanted sex. What he lacked was money to pay her. A deal needed to be struck between two people who were short of cash.
Events moved fast. On 27 December, Marie-Thérèse told her concierge that she was engaged to a man who had “the hots” for her; she would soon be leaving for his house in the country. She also told her friend Yvonne, who later said casually that Marie-Thérèse had “a mania for marriage”, implying that she was a veteran of previous “engagements” with other messieurs.
On New Year’s Eve, Landru passed by Mme Falque’s apartment: Could he perhaps borrow an additional 3,000 francs from her, just to tide him over? He did not tell Mme Falque that this sum would allow him to “buy” some of Marie-Thérèse’s furniture.
According to Mme Falque, she insisted that Landru first had to show her his garage in Clichy, so she could see for herself what kind of business he was running. Once there, she grudgingly agreed to lend him the money at the same extortionate interest rate, provided he could produce his identity papers. Landru, alias Guillet, went off to fetch his papers, only to return half an hour later empty-handed. He had just made a phone call, Landru told Mme Falque, and realised that he could borrow the cash from someone else.
***
New Year’s Day dawned, cloudy and mild. At 9.30 am, France’s Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau arrived at the Elysée Palace with the rest of his cabinet to present their greetings for 1919 to President Raymond Poincaré (whom Clemenceau loathed). Landru had a similar New Year’s duty, or so he told Fernande. He put on his best dark suit and bowler hat, informing her that he was off to wish his boss at Paris police headquarters a happy New Year. Pressed by Fernande, Landru revealed that he was, in reality, an undercover detective.
While he was out, a letter arrived from Marie-Thérèse, who told him that she asked “for nothing better than to live in the countryside”. On 2 January, Landru made a note to “bring to Hermitage [Villa Tric]: Petrol, lighting fuel, coal, small tongs, iron grate”. On 7 January, Marie-Thérèse went down to Gambais for the day, telling another prostitute friend on her return to Paris about her future country home. Landru remained in Gambais for a few days, so short of money that he had to borrow the price of his return train fare to Paris from the village cobbler who acted as the villa’s janitor. Meanwhile, Marie-Thérèse sold some of her furniture and paid a few bills, leaving her with 1,800 francs in cash.
In this dizzying round of transactions, Landru next cleared all the furniture out of Marie-Thérèse’s apartment and her sublet rooms, assisted by his silent teenage “apprentice” and his fellow tenant at the garage in Clichy.
On 13 January, Landru and Marie-Thérèse left for the Gare Saint-Lazare, in time to catch the afternoon train to one of the stations serving Gambais. She stood on the platform, resplendent in a bright green hat, yellow suitcase in one hand, bird cage in the other, as her pet canary twittered in terror. Beside her, Landru held three yapping griffon dogs on a lead; the third dog, called Auguste, had been lent by Marie-Thérèse’s friend Yvonne to give Marie-Thérèse a little more animal company in this gentleman’s desolate house. Marie-Thérèse was also carrying more than 1,000 francs in cash, the residue from her furniture sale.
Landru had to buy two single tickets, lacking the money for his usual return fare or the price of the cab at Houdan. Instead, they got off the train at either Garancières or Tacoignières, walking in damp, misty weather across country to the villa. Next morning, Marie-Thérèse was seen walking her adored griffons in the village, indifferent to the stares she attracted. Then she was gone.
***
Landru’s memory was becoming more and more “rebellious”, as he put it a few months later:
I have reached a point where I am obliged to write down everything that I need to recall, even the smallest things. At certain moments, my life flows before me like a dream without it being possible for me to say if it really happened to me or another person. At other times the details come back to me with a clarity and precision which make me suppose that the facts have just happened or, having lived another existence at another time in other places, I had died, and, coming back to life as another person, I had kept the memory.
Shortly after dealing with Marie-Thérèse, he found a blank page in his carnet. In his neatest handwriting, he drew up a list, trying to make his “rebellious” memory obey him. It read:
Cuchet, J. Idem
Brésil
Crozatier
Havre
Collomb
Babelay
Buisson
Jaume
Pascal
Marchadier
He left it there, since no one else came to mind.
***
Célestine Buisson’s housemaid sister Marie Lacoste was back on Landru’s trail. For more than a year, Marie had tried hard to put Célestine’s disappearance out of her mind. In Marie’s thinking, Célestine had gone off in a sulk, offended by Marie’s correct assessment that her sister’s fiancé was a fraudster. So be it, Marie told herself, as she made the beds and washed the dishes at her employer’s house near the Rue du Rivoli.
In December 1918, Célestine’s blind son Gaston dictated another letter to Marie from his home in Biarritz. Gaston explained that he had suffered a serious accident and needed to contact his mother, who had not replied when he had once again written to her. Could Aunt Marie try one last time to see if she could track down Célestine?
Marie went to the apartment near the Porte de Clignancourt where she supposed that Célestine was still living, either with or without her so-called fiancé. She was dismayed to learn from the concierge that Célestine had left in the summer of 1917 and never been seen since. The concierge added that not long after Célestine’s departure, a younger woman (Fernande) had spent the night at the apartment with Mme Buisson’s monsieur. He had then returned in October 1917 to hand in Mme Buisson’s notice and clear her furniture.
Marie sensed that “Frémyet” might be worse than a swindler, perhaps even a murderer. She was so alarmed that she painstakingly prepared a dossier, containing all the information she knew about Célestine’s relationship with “Frémyet”. Despite her lack of education, Marie was a born sleuth. She described Landru’s appearance, his sinister house at Gambais, his fleecing of Célestine, and his efforts to persuade Marie that her sister was still alive – in sum, everything the police might need to pursue and arrest this man.
On 11 January 1919, Marie took her dossier to a nearby police station, bringing along her fellow maid Laure Bonhoure, who remembered “Frémyet” very well. In Laure’s considered opinion, the man looked downright fishy.
The officer who saw Marie and Laure said he could not help at all. He explained that Mlle Lacoste would need to direct her enquiry to the authorities in Gambais, where Mme Buisson had last been seen. It was not a matter for the Paris police.
Suppressing her fury, Marie dutifully wrote to the mayor of Gambais, Alexandre Tirlet, who repeated his obstructive performance of eighteen months earlier when Anna Collomb’s sister Ryno had made an almost identical enquiry. With regret, Tirlet’s secretary, the village schoolteacher François Bournérias, informed Marie that no man called “Frémyet” was known in the village.
At this moment, Tirlet had his little crise de conscience and ordered Bournérias to add Ryno’s name and address, in case Marie wanted to compare notes with her.
***
Marie and Ryno were not natural comrades in arms; one, a lowly, unmarried domestique from southern France, the other a beautiful, recently married Parisienne. When the two women met in late January at Ryno’s parents’ apartment on Boulevard Voltaire, it took a while for Marie to feel at ease with this bourgeois family. What drew Marie and Ryno together was the similarity between their two sisters’ disappearances and the brush-off they had both received from police and village officials.
Tellingly, Ryno did not put her name on the formal complaint about Anna’s disappearance that her elderly father filed at the start of February in Mantes, the capital of Seine-et-Oise, where Gambais was located. Monsieur Moreau had played almost no part in Ryno’s quest to find Anna. However, he had the priceless advantage of being a man and was therefore more likely to be taken seriously by the authorities than Ryno. Following up next day, Marie sent her own, handwritten complaint, copying much of the language from Moreau’s lawsuit.
Ryno’s use of her father as a frontman worked. The public prosecutor in Mantes opened two case files on Anna and Célestine and after a week, sent the dossiers to a police officer in Versailles who was charged with tracing missing persons. This detective then put the two complaints to one side until he had time to pursue them properly.
***
In Paris “Mlle L.”, the factory girl who had faked her pregnancy, was pestering Landru again. She had just lost her job and kept calling at Rue de Rochechouart, demanding an increase in her allowance. If he was out, she took care not to reveal her identity to Fernande. When he was in, she would not budge from the landing until he slipped her some money to go away. He tried another tack, proposing that she come down to his country retreat for a nice, relaxing time. She declined his invitation. “He told me the house was isolated and I didn’t like the sound of this adventure,” she recalled tartly.
Mme Falque also kept appearing at Rue de Rochechouart, demanding that he repay her overdue loan, with full interest. On one occasion, Fernande answered the door when Landru was out and Mme Falque introduced herself by name, without explaining the nature of her business. On his return, Landru told the disbelieving Fernande that Mme Falque was his boss at police headquarters, come to discuss his latest top secret assignment.
He finally paid back Mme Falque in the middle of March, using some of his profit from his dealings with Marie-Thérèse Marchadier. Meanwhile in Houdan, the Collomb and Buisson case files had at last landed on the desk of Jules Hebbé, a mounted gendarme whose beat included Gambais.
On 14 March, Hebbé saddled his horse and set off along the road to Gambais to investigate the Collomb and Buisson cases. Hebbé’s route took him straight past the Villa Tric but he did not stop, because he had no arrest warrant for the man known as “Dupont”. Besides, Hebbé could see that the shuttered house was empty.
In Gambais, Hebbé interviewed the 73-year-old village constable, who did not realise that he had once seen Célestine at the villa, when he paid a call in the summer of 1917 to remind Dupont about a local tax he had not paid. Hebbé also interviewed the cobbler who was the part-time janitor at the villa; he said he barely knew Dupont. It was a similar story with the mayor, the schoolmaster and the grocer’s wife. There seemed a general consensus in the village that the man was dodgy, often seen with women, and therefore might well be a spy.
All things considered, Hebbé thought the man sounded like a suspicious customer. “I could not tell you what happened in this house but there is something strange going on,” he wrote in his report to the prosecutor in Mantes, 30 kilometres north of Gambais. Hebbé noted that he had ordered the constable in the village to alert the authorities the next time he saw Dupont.
Hebbé’s report contained one detail whose significance he failed to recognise. In August 1917, when the constable had visited the Villa Tric to enquire about unpaid taxes, Landru had given the address of Célestine’s apartment near the Porte de Clignancourt as his permanent residence. The prosecutor in Mantes noticed the same address in Marie’s carefully assembled dossier and decided to refer the two cases back to Paris. They landed on the desk of Inspector Jules Belin of the Paris flying squad (brigade mobile).
***
At the age of 34, the unmarried Belin ate, drank and smoked the life of a full-time detective. Belin was a fan of Sherlock Holmes, whose adventures he had read in translation, and fancied himself as a similarly cerebral investigator. Where Holmes wore a deerstalker and puffed on a pipe, Belin favoured a crumpled Homburg hat and half-smoked cigarette, perched perilously on his lower lip. Yet unlike his fictional hero, Belin had a carefree relationship with facts.
Belin claimed in an internal police report that he visited Gambais and interviewed villagers about the dubious tenant at the Villa Tric. All the facts gleaned from these “interviews” came from Hebbé’s report, while the “multiple and difficult researches” Belin said he had conducted in Paris were lifted almost entirely from Ryno and especially Marie’s research.
On 4 April, while Belin pursued his desultory enquiry, the constable in Gambais failed to notice the arrival by car of Landru, Fernande and Landru’s blond-haired “apprentice” turned chauffeur. They stayed one night, and then drove back to Paris.
By the afternoon of Friday, 11 April, Belin was obliged to concede that the trail had run cold. He did not know that Marie’s friend and fellow maid Laure Bonhoure was about to crack open the case.
Laure had gone shopping that afternoon and was in a crockery shop on Rue de Rivoli when she spotted the man she knew as Frémyet at the counter, accompanied by a young woman. Quickly, Laure hid behind a display stand and watched the monsieur as he purchased a tea set, left his business card for home delivery, and walked out of the shop with his girlfriend. Laure followed the couple a few blocks west along the Rue de Rivoli to the Place du Châtelet, where the monsieur and his companion got onto a bus heading north towards Montmartre.
At the last moment Laure hopped on board, only to jump off again when Landru caught her eye. Convinced he had recognised her, Laure ran east along the Rue de Rivoli, past the Hôtel de Ville, and then north until she made it to Rue du Plâtre, gasping for breath, and relayed her news to Marie.
Marie had no confidence in Belin, who had interviewed her the previous week and made a poor impression. She did, however, have his phone number. Marie now called Belin, who went to the crockery shop, where the sales assistant retrieved the man’s business card. It read: “Lucien Guillet, 76 Rue de Rochechouart”. When Belin arrived at this address, the concierge confirmed that Guillet rented an apartment on the first floor.
Much later, Belin gave various explanations for why he did not proceed upstairs and arrest Landru on the spot. In one version, Belin said he learned from the concierge that “Guillet” and Mlle Segret had departed for their country villa. According to Belin, he had to wait three weeks to make the arrest. In reality, Belin needed an arrest warrant, which he collected next morning. Belin had not considered the possibility that Landru might leave the apartment before the detective returned to Rue de Rochechouart with two fellow officers as back-up. Yet this is exactly what happened.
At about 10.15 am on Saturday, 12 April 1919, 35-year-old Adrienne Deschamps was travelling on the metro between the Réamur and Opéra stations when she was accosted by a bearded man who introduced himself as Lucien Guillet. Adrienne was interested in Guillet’s proposal but did not wish to continue their discussion in front of the other passengers. The two of them got off at Opéra where they carried on chatting for some time on the platform.
They fixed a rendezvous for the following Wednesday, outside Denfert-Rochereau metro station in southern Paris. Landru also gave Adrienne his fake name card, with the address of a room he rented near the Gare du Nord – the same lodging where he had taken the teenage nanny Andrée Babelay in the spring of 1917. His business done, Landru returned to Fernande at Rue de Rochechouart.
Belin subsequently gave two different times for Landru’s arrest: 10.00 am and 11.00 am. However, if Adrienne’s testimony was accurate, Landru could not have returned to the apartment before about 11.30 am. In all likelihood, Belin and his fellow detectives did not show up until almost midday, suggesting a distinct lack of urgency on their part. As far as Belin was concerned, he had come to arrest a run-of-the-mill marriage swindler, not a serial killer.
Eventually, Landru unlocked the door and the police officers barged in. Landru refused to answer any questions and demanded a lawyer. He also declined to produce any identity papers. Years later, Belin put out a story that Fernande chose this moment to collapse “stark naked on the floor”. However, Belin did not mention this probably invented melodrama in his internal police report.
What is certain is that Landru and Fernande were brought back to Belin’s police station on Rue Greffulhe, a quiet side street just south of Boulevard Haussmann. Here, Belin’s commanding officer immediately took charge.
Commissioner Amédée Dautel sized up the silent suspect, dressed in a bowler hat and dull yellow tunic, and ordered him to empty his pockets.