It takes a quarter of an hour to reach The Lodge on foot from the station that serves Vernouillet, passing through quiet suburban streets on the outer fringe of Paris’s commuter belt. The Rue de Mantes has been renamed since Landru’s time and the house has a different street number, but it is still recognisably the same property: an odd, double-fronted residence near the bottom of a steep lane, with a smaller annexe tacked onto the main villa.
The more one looks at The Lodge, the more striking its lack of privacy becomes. Landru’s neighbours had a clear sight of the back garden, as did anyone walking across the fields behind the house. It seems an improbable place for Landru to have chosen to kill Jeanne and André Cuchet, quite unlike the isolated Villa Tric at Gambais.
As I worked through the immense file on Jeanne at the Paris police archives, I came to believe that Landru had no plan to murder her and André when the three of them arrived at The Lodge at the start of December 1914. Something happened in December or January to make Landru decide in his desperation that Jeanne and André had to die.
***
“We are in the presence of facts which are reproduced identically.” Such was Bonin’s accusation against Landru during one of their many interrogation sessions. Yet in almost every detail, the case of Jeanne and André Cuchet differed from the nine subsequent murders on the charge sheet.
Jeanne and André represented the only double murder in the series; two victims at the same property, one straight after the other. André was the only male victim and crucially, he and his mother were the only victims who knew Landru’s true identity and were aware of his criminal past. Nonetheless, they came to live with him at The Lodge.
There was another version of Jeanne’s strange, sad tale that Bonin either never considered or jettisoned because it was impossible to reconcile with his hypothesis of identical murders. This story told of a humble Parisian seamstress who hated her job and dreamed of a new life abroad with her one true love: not Landru, but her only son André.
Until the outbreak of war in August 1914, Jeanne’s relationship with Landru fitted the pattern of a hard-up woman in search of a husband who would provide for her and André, or at least act as her vieux monsieur (sugar daddy). Jeanne was poor, a fact proved by her financial records, the will of her husband and the testimony of two well-placed witnesses: her friend Louise Bazire and her probable lover, the shirt-maker Pierre Capdevieille. In 1914, Landru had plenty of cash as a result of his latest swindle and his seizure of his father’s legacy. All Jeanne had to trade in return was her sex appeal, which she used to get Landru into bed.
Bonin expended an enormous amount of time trying to make Jeanne fit the template for all the murders that followed. Yet she kept breaking the mould. There was no hard evidence that Landru was after her pitiful savings and plenty of circumstantial evidence that Jeanne was quite unlike her portrayal in the réquisitoire définitif as a dim, emotionally vulnerable woman.
Jeanne’s sister Philomène and brother-in-law Georges Friedman did their best to suggest to the police that Jeanne was naïve about men. On the contrary, she seems to have been quite calculating in her dealings with potential suitors after the death of her husband, who had left her destitute. Before meeting Landru in early 1914, Jeanne rejected at least two potential suitors, a wine merchant and a commercial traveller, while the only man she appears to have trusted was Capdevieille, who may have been married.
Why, then, did Jeanne “fall” for Landru? Mme Hardy, the nosy neighbour who lived above the couple in La Chaussée, saw a woman who was quite cool, even distant in her exchanges with Landru. Viewed through Mme Hardy’s eyes, it appears plausible that Jeanne could have become engaged to Landru to advance a specific project.
Five witnesses recalled Jeanne speaking about her desire to start a new life with André in Britain or America: her friend Louise Bazire, her concierge Mme Pelletier, her former employer Albert Folvary, her brotherin-law Louis Germain and Germain’s wife. All five dismissed Jeanne’s plan as a fantasy, on the grounds that she spoke no English. Yet it was not so far-fetched.
It is easy to see why a single working-class mother, scrimping a living as a seamstress, might have wanted to emigrate; in belle époque Paris, there were plenty of other women in a similar situation to Jeanne who felt the same way. It is also understandable why Jeanne’s ambition suddenly became an urgent goal when war broke out in August 1914: for her prime concern as France mobilised was the safety of the one victim on the charge sheet whom the authorities scarcely bothered to investigate.
***
André Cuchet merited just one slim police report in his mother’s bulging case file, where he was cast as a mere victim of circumstance, killed because of Jeanne’s obsession with Landru. “The son followed the mother to his death,” the réquisitoire declared, “and an eleventh corpse was added to the mournful list.”
André’s status as a footnote overlooked the testimony of Mme Morin, the mother of André’s best friend Max. Mme Morin remembered how Jeanne was “heartbroken” when she heard a false rumour in the autumn of 1914 that André, still 17, might soon be able to volunteer for the army, without her permission.
Jeanne’s behaviour in the war’s opening months bore all the signs of a mother who was terrified that her callow son, gripped by military fervour, would soon be killed by the Boches. At the start of August 1914, Jeanne rushed back to Paris from La Chaussée, unwilling to leave André on his own. In October, she pulled André out of pre-army training, telling him it was pointless. In November, she forced André to give up his newly found factory job to come and live in cosseted seclusion with her and Landru in Vernouillet.
Jeanne’s fears for André were entirely rational because the war was rapidly descending that autumn into carnage. On 11 October, as André began his pre-army training, Le Journal published a “bitter, vehement, superb” letter from two sisters who had already lost four brothers at the front; a fifth had been severely wounded. Now they addressed their sixth brother, also mobilised, on behalf of their grieving mother:
“Maman weeps, she says you must be strong and wishes you can avenge their deaths… God has given you life, He has the right to take it back, this is maman who says so.”
Some French families took what the nationalist press called the cowards’ option. They emigrated, with distant North America a particularly appealing prospect. During the war, more than 50,000 people left France each year for the United States, many of them speaking little or no English. Jeanne’s challenge in following their example was her lack of money and connections. She needed someone who could make possible her and André’s escape.
Did Landru encourage Jeanne to think he was that person? A passing remark by Landru to Mme Oudry, the estate agent in Vernouillet who looked after The Lodge, suggests that he might have done. Landru told Mme Oudry that Jeanne worked for a Paris fashion house, a position that required her to make business trips to America.
Why might Landru have encouraged Jeanne’s dream of emigrating? I think the reason was straightforward. He enjoyed having sex with her and wanted to keep the relationship going by stringing her along. Landru was besotted with Jeanne, not the other way round.
Until Jeanne prised open his locked chest on 16 August 1914, Landru could use the excuse of his “lost” papers to delay their promised marriage and subsequent emigration, en famille. The balance of their relationship changed completely when Jeanne discovered Landru’s identity and, critically, the fact that he was a criminal on the run. Based on the evidence in the case archives, I believe she decided to blackmail him. In return for allowing him to sleep with her again, Landru had to get her and André out of the country, with or without him. Otherwise she would have him arrested by the police.
Jeanne does not appear to have reached this decision lightly. Following her discovery of Landru’s papers, she confided her misgivings about him to three people: her friend Mme Bazire, Max’s mother Mme Morin, and her former assistant seamstress who visited her at the end of August.
Jeanne probably decided to resume her relationship with Landru and blackmail him for two reasons. One was André’s incorrigible naïvety about the war, expressed in his letters to Max Morin; the other was the mounting slaughter at the front.
Landru might well have looked like a plausible escape agent to Jeanne. Even his criminality could have appeared an advantage, because here was a swindler loaded with cash, with a car and false identity papers, adept at getting past military checkpoints. In addition, Landru knew his way around the Atlantic port of Le Havre. The point is not that Landru could have engineered Jeanne and André’s flight from France. It is that he might have convinced her that he had the means to do so.
Why, then, their sudden move to Vernouillet at the start of December 1914; so rapid, that “everything was rushed through”, according to Jeanne? Mme Oudry, the Vernouillet estate agent, may have provided another clue. Mme Oudry recalled that Landru told her he could not sign the rental contract for The Lodge after his first inspection of the property, because his “wife” needed to see the place for herself.
Landru’s remark appears unusual, given his repeatedly expressed opinion about the subordinate position of women and their duty to obey men. I have no firm proof, but I suspect it was Jeanne, not Landru, who initiated the abrupt move to Vernouillet, because of some unwelcome development in Paris: perhaps a visit by her meddling sister Philomène to her apartment near the Gare de l’Est.
In this plot, Jeanne panicked at the end of November, ordering Landru to find a discreet base near Paris where she and André could leave France unnoticed – or she would hand him over to the police. Having approved Landru’s choice of The Lodge, Jeanne then went to ground. She made no effort to get to know her neighbours in Vernouillet. Over the Christmas holidays, she wrote careful letters to her sister-in-law Mme Germain and to Mme Morin, discouraging them from paying a visit because of the “poor weather”.
Jeanne behaved as if she had turned her back on her former life.
***
Landru’s lack of urgency in the weeks following the move to Vernouillet reinforces the impression that he had no plan to kill Jeanne and André. His dawdling may also have revived Jeanne’s doubts over whether he could be trusted; a dangerous position for Landru, since she only needed to walk up the hill to the police station at the top of Rue de Mantes in order to get him arrested.
Sometime in the first half of December Landru went off for several days to retrieve his car from the farm in Normandy where he had billeted his family. Nothing of any note happened at The Lodge for the next month. And then something did happen.
In the middle of January, André’s prospects suddenly changed when the government brought forward the mobilisation of his contingent – the socalled “class” of 1917 – to the summer of 1915. André now knew that his possessive, fretful mother would soon be powerless to prevent him leaving home to fight the Germans. He would shortly be “savouring the pleasures of garrison life”, André told Max without irony in his last letter to his friend, dated 20 January 1915.
From Jeanne’s perspective, any project to emigrate with André would collapse when André left for barracks. André’s impending departure was also bound to alarm Landru because the boy, like his mother, knew Landru’s true identity. At his trial, Landru made the curious remark that he could not keep André under “surveillance” after he “left” Vernouillet, purportedly for England. In the same indiscreet aside, Landru also let slip his low opinion of André’s final letter to Max.
André feelings about Landru and his mother’s liaison with a convicted crook can be deduced from what is known about his character. Monsieur Folvary, Jeanne’s employer at the dress shop, recalled that André disapproved of his mother’s plan to marry again. André’s “ardent” patriotism and boyish sense of honour shone through his correspondence with Max, while his silence about Landru was also eloquent. It was as if André could not bear to write about a man he despised and probably feared.
The situation at The Lodge was already unstable because once André turned 18 in June 1915 he would be entitled to volunteer for military service, provided he had parental consent. However, André’s last letter to Max implied that Jeanne would withhold her permission. Her refusal to yield to André’s wishes almost certainly explains his excitement about the advancement of his compulsory mobilisation; for Jeanne would not be able to stop him joining Max in the trenches.
By 20 January, when André wrote his last letter to Max, it is possible to imagine several crises erupting in this toxic, combustible household. Perhaps Jeanne told Landru that he had to get her and André abroad in a matter of weeks, if not days, before André received his call-up papers. Perhaps Landru stalled, and Jeanne at last saw through his deceit, telling him she was going to the police. Or perhaps Jeanne told André the full details of her project to get him overseas, before he was killed by the Boches; and André, fired up with esprit de combat, told his mother and Landru that he was having no part in their illegal scheme.
In all these scenarios, Landru had been cornered by Jeanne and André, who could send him to New Caledonia for the rest of his life. To avoid that fate, Landru had only two options. He could disappear, which would be difficult, although not impossible, as the next four years would prove; or he could kill this dangerous mother and son.
***
How did Landru pull off the only double murder on the charge sheet? The detective Riboulet, who did not attend the police search of The Lodge, thought Landru probably used a gun. This theory falls apart as soon as one looks at the house, hemmed in on either side by neighbours who would certainly have heard the shots.
It seems most likely that Landru strangled Jeanne and André, taking advantage of The Lodge’s peculiar two-sided construction to catch each of them in turn by surprise. He could have waited till one of them left the house and then hidden the first body out of view in the garage or the uninhabited pavilion-style annexe, before Jeanne or André returned.
It is an opinion, nothing more, but I decided that killing Jeanne and André gave Landru an appetite for murder and specifically murdering women. Nothing else satisfactorily explains the frenzy of activity that followed, as he bought the carnet, opened his filing system and raced around Paris trawling for female targets. I also felt that the act of murdering the Cuchets finally tipped Landru across the frontiers of madness.
Before Jeanne and André’s deaths, Landru’s actions seem recognisably rational, based on the immoral goals he had set himself. He pursued Jeanne because he found her attractive; he fled his home in Malakoff to avoid arrest; he removed his wife to Le Havre to prevent her testifying at his trial.
Conversely, Landru’s behaviour after he killed Jeanne and André appears increasingly wayward. He did not act in his own best interest, pursuing the “logic” of a remorseless, lethal marriage swindler, as described in the réquisitoire. Instead, his choice of victims was illogical. He killed the Argentinian-born Thérèse Laborde-Line, who had almost no money, before the relatively affluent retired governess Marie-Angélique Guillin. He then murdered the penniless Berthe Héon while pretending to the relatively welloff Anna Collomb and Célestine Buisson that he was on a lengthy business trip abroad.
I think it is conceivable that Landru got rid of Thérèse because he resented the long climb upstairs to her dingy sixth-floor apartment. During the investigation and at his trial, he was still grumbling about this irksome chore. I also believe that with the same vicious caprice, Landru singled out Berthe for punishment because she had lied to him about her true age.
All of this lay ahead as Landru contemplated the dead bodies of Jeanne and André. He had two corpses on his hands, in a house overlooked by its neighbours. At this critical juncture, he could have done with some help. Did he receive it?
***
On 14 April 1919, two days after Landru’s arrest, his younger son Charles told the detective Dautel an intriguing story. Charles said that one day in late 1914 or early 1915, his father summoned him to Vernouillet. According to Charles, he spent the whole day with Landru at The Lodge, but only went into the garage and the kitchen in the pavilion-style annexe. Incredibly, Dautel did not ask Charles to explain the purpose of his visit.
Several months later, Charles provided one more detail about this visit to the detective Riboulet. Charles said that his father had required him at The Lodge for some unspecified “gardening work” (“jardinage”). In another extraordinary lapse, Riboulet did not ask Charles to describe the nature and precise location of this “gardening”.
Bonin eventually gave up trying to gauge the degree of complicity of Landru’s family in his crimes and the task is still just as difficult. At times, as in this episode involving Charles, members of the family are so close to a murder scene that it seems they must have known Landru was a killer. Only Suzanne, Landru’s younger daughter, kept her father at a distance, by moving out of the family’s apartment in Clichy to live with her fiancé; and it was this young man, an automobile mechanic called Gabriel Grimm, who shed the most light on Landru’s overbearing relationship with his wife and children, in a long witness statement that Grimm gave to the police.
In April 1914, soon after his engagement to Suzanne, Grimm visited the family at their apartment in the southern Paris suburbs. “I found them all in tears,” Grimm recalled. “They told me that Landru had done some bad business at his garage in Malakoff and had had to flee.”
Grimm did not say whether Marie-Catherine and her children were rueing the fact that Landru had committed a crime, or the prospect that he might get caught. Either way, Grimm made clear in his statement that Landru, a fugitive from justice, remained in close, regular contact with his family throughout the war.
Grimm was mobilised in August 1914 and did not see Suzanne again until the autumn of 1915, when he was assigned to work in a factory engaged in war production in the northern Paris suburbs. Conveniently for Grimm, the factory was near the family’s apartment in Clichy.
Soon, Grimm asked Landru for permission to marry Suzanne. Landru refused, explaining that he could not do so while he was living under a false identity. Without telling Landru, Grimm and Suzanne decided to rent an apartment of their own in Clichy, so they could live as man and wife. Landru pursued them, insisting that he would “make them comfortable” by providing all the furniture for their new home. Grimm and Suzanne knew better than to refuse this offer from her possessive, interfering father.
On his and Suzanne’s frequent visits to the family’s apartment, Grimm remembered how Marie-Catherine could not bring herself to escape from Landru by sueing for divorce: “One day she would appear to have made up her mind, the next she was undecided. It was enough for Landru to make an appearance for only a few minutes for her to excuse his way of life.”
Overall, Grimm left an impression of a criminalised household that was complicit in Landru’s thefts and frauds, while maintaining a state of wilful ignorance about the rest of his activities. And in the end, that is how I came to see Marie-Catherine and her children.
Charles’s “gardening work” at The Lodge illustrates graphically the fine line that the family never dared cross. On a first reading, Charles looks like an accomplice to murder. It seems probable that Landru summoned Charles directly after Jeanne and André’s deaths in late January or February 1915 and possible that the gardening work concerned the disposal of some or all of their remains. Yet it does not follow that Charles saw Jeanne and André’s corpses or realised what he was doing.
Charles volunteered his disclosure about the visit, suggesting he was unaware that he might be incriminating himself. He was also quite specific about which parts of this lopsided property he had visited: the garage, where he may have helped Landru reassemble the recently dismantled camionnette; the kitchen in the side annexe, possibly for lunch; and the garden. All this time, Jeanne and André’s bodies could have been stored by Landru in the upstairs bedrooms of the main villa, well out of Charles’s view, because the garage offered a passageway between the street and the rear garden.
Did Charles, still only 14, ask his father about the purpose of the “jardinage”? He may have done and Landru may have lied in response. However, I think Charles was telling the truth when he said he kept his mouth shut. As he explained to Dautel, he was so afraid of his father’s temper that he never dared ask about Landru’s “way of life”.
***
A century later, we can see how it was not just Landru’s family who stepped back from the horror, allowing him the freedom to operate almost at will. So did the mayor and the village schoolmaster in Gambais, who refused to take seriously the exact, detailed enquiries of two sisters of the missing women. The police turned a blind eye, both before and after Landru’s arrest, when they pretended in public that they had traced all his female contacts. Ultimately, the authorities cared more about sending Landru to the guillotine than gauging the full extent of his crimes.
Boundless misogyny ran through Landru’s dark psyche; it was the thread that tied together all the murders he committed after killing Jeanne and André. Yet Landru appeared “normal” because he operated in a society that took women’s inferiority for granted and in the middle of a terrible war, valued men’s lives more highly.
Misogyny distorted the prosecution case, reducing the ten women on the charge sheet to chauvinist stereotypes. They were foolish, vulnerable, feeble, loose – never individuals whose personalities deserved any deeper enquiry. The defence case also reeked of chauvinism. Moro seized any chance to portray Landru’s victims as promiscuous, as if this undermined the charge that his client was a murderer. In one especially distasteful crossexamination, Moro humiliated Marie-Thérèse Marchadier’s friend Yvonne Le Gallo, simply because she was a prostitute.
The press complained about the “invasion” of the courtroom by women spectators, even as journalists at the trial revelled in images of startling sexual violence. One reporter, a well-known drama critic, fantasised about an actress who attended the hearing being burnt, naked, on stage. Newspaper cartoonists drew pictures of female hearts being roasted on a spit or dolls being stuffed into ovens.
This was the world in which Landru thrived and it is not so very distant; for while the past is a foreign country, it has borders with the present.