Six years after Landru’s trial, a middle-aged woman stood in tears on the Quai de la Pinède in Marseille, watching a ship come into harbour. Louise Dieudonné did not recognise her former husband Eugène when he walked down the gangway, but she hugged him all the same and would not let him go. All Louise wanted was to marry her anarchist house decorator again and settle down like a proper couple, with none of this free love nonsense.
Dieudonné had returned to France after 13 years’ penal servitude in the swamps of Guyane for a crime he did not commit, only spared the guillotine because of a successful appeal for clemency by Moro. He had escaped twice – once in 1921, when he was soon recaptured, and again in 1926, when he fled from Guyane to Brazil. Now he was back in Louise’s arms, having been assured of a full pardon after a campaign led by Moro in the National Assembly.
Louise got her wish and once the pardon was granted she and Eugène remarried at a ceremony in the mairie of Paris’s 11th arrondissement. There was one surprising guest – a juror at the trial in 1913 who had contacted Dieudonné after his return to apologise for wrongfully finding him guilty. In an astonishing gesture of forgiveness, Dieudonné invited the juror to be an official witness at the wedding.
Dieudonné resumed his old trade, opening a small decorating business on Boulevard Saint-Germain, and in 1930 was persuaded to write a book about his terrible years of forced labour. As a token of gratitude, Dieudonné sent a complimentary copy to the lawyer who had saved his life.
“Mon cher Maître,” Dieudonné wrote to Moro, “you will perhaps feel a little joy in thinking that your efforts have not been in vain. Since, without you, I would not have been able to write this book.”
Dieudonné, a man he liked, and Landru, a man he despised, defined why Moro fought all his life for the abolition of the death penalty. By coincidence, on the same day in November 1921 that the newspapers reported Dieudonné’s failed escape attempt, Godefroy admitted at Landru’s trial that the prosecution had no idea how Landru had killed his victims. All Godefroy could offer was “hypotheses”. For Moro, the death penalty was not justifiable even if a defendant was deemed guilty beyond all reasonable human doubt. A higher standard of certainty had to be reached, too high for a jury of fallible mortals, because the sentence could not be reversed.
Moro did not win this argument in his lifetime, but he won it from beyond the grave. Twenty-four years after Moro’s death in 1956, the justice minister who had delivered his funeral oration became President of France. In one of his first acts of office, François Mitterrand abolished the death penalty on the advice of his justice minister, Robert Badinter, who as a young barrister had known and admired “le grand Moro”.
Moro’s legacy was complete.
***
I am also opposed to the death penalty, in any circumstances. For that reason, I like to think that I would have sided with the three jurors at Landru’s trial who took Moro’s advice and voted to acquit on the murder charges, safe in the knowledge that Landru would have joined Dieudonné in the tropical hell of Guyane. Yet if I am honest, I cannot be certain that I would have had the strength of principle to vote with the minority, rather than send Landru to the guillotine in a spirit of raw, visceral vengeance; for at his trial, Landru’s fate was settled by the heart, not the head.
I think the moment when Moro lost the case came early in the trial and had nothing to do with the evidence. It arrived when a woman wept helplessly for a younger sister who, in life, she had found exasperating.
Philomène Friedman was not a trustworthy witness, as Moro wished to demonstrate when he asked her to describe her dream about the ghost of Jeanne visiting her in the night. Philomène’s dream was a fantasy, yet unfortunately for Moro, what the jurors saw was a sister lost in grief, alone on the witness stand, beyond any consolation. No normal human heart could fail to be moved.
Again and again, other women bore witness to the sorrow and the pity of losing their loved ones, while Landru tried to glare them into submission: Mme Colin, Andrée Babelay’s mother, crying for her poor, foolish teenage daughter; Louise Fauchet, Annette Pascal’s elder sister and surrogate “maman”, frozen in fear as she gazed at the court; Yvonne Le Gallo, Marie-Thérèse Marchadier’s loyal prostitute friend, holding her dignity amid the laughter about her profession.
My breaking point came when Juliette Auger testified about the terrible scene she had witnessed in the little apartment at 45 Avenue des Ternes.
Of all the missing fiancées, the “disparue” I admired the most was Berthe Héon, the 55-year-old widow from Le Havre who had lost all three of her children and her long-term lover in the years before she met Landru. Despite this “cascade of sorrows”, culminating in her favourite daughter Marcelle’s death, Berthe had been determined to pick herself up and start her life again. This was why she had answered the cunning advert from a lonesome monsieur seeking a wife to live with him in a “pretty colony”.
I see Berthe now, dazed with grief, asking Marcelle’s best friend Juliette to take care of Marcelle’s grave. I see Landru, alias “Georges Petit”, an entrepreneur from Tunisia, sneering at Berthe that she could not “live with the dead”. And I see Berthe start to cry.
At that instant, I wanted Landru to go to the guillotine and the feeling never entirely left me.
***
This is not a story with a neat ending. It finishes, if at all, in more ambiguity and confusion.
In the spring of 1958, a builder in Vernouillet accidentally unearthed the partial, headless skeletons of an adult woman and a boy on land that had once formed the end of the rear garden of The Lodge. It appeared that Jeanne and André Cuchet’s remains had at last been found but the medical examiner was less sure. He concluded that the woman had been about 30 at the time of her death, nine years younger than Jeanne, while the boy had not reached puberty and was probably about ten or 11. The skeletons were never formally identified.
I think the builder did stumble across Jeanne and André’s remains in an area of the garden that Bonin had overlooked during his superficial search on 15 April 1919. The coincidence of the skeletons appears too striking to admit any other explanation, especially as the medical examiner’s margin for error was so narrow. Jeanne had not been so much older than the presumed age of the female skeleton, while André had been a slim, weedy youth.
I also think that the burial plot was dug one winter’s day in early 1915 by Landru and his unknowing son Charles, summoned to Vernouillet to assist his father with unspecified “gardening work”. But it is all conjecture, underlining Bonin’s mistake in treating The Lodge as a less important crime scene than the Villa Tric.
***
A few years before the discovery at Vernouillet, the bone debris found at the Villa Tric was removed from the Paris police laboratory and buried in the city’s Jardin des Plantes, a botanical garden on the left bank of the Seine, opposite the Gare d’Austerlitz. The transfer prompted a strong protest from forensic pathologists who argued presciently that advances in science might eventually allow some of the fragments to be matched with the missing women.
I went one spring morning to the Jardin des Plantes, hoping to bring some finality to the story of the disparues; not a conclusion, but at least the end of a trail. Following the transfer, a story arose that the fragments had been scattered beneath the shade of a weeping willow, a fittingly poetic resting place. For an hour I wandered around the garden, searching in vain for this tree, until I gave up and asked a park official to check the botanical records. There has never been a weeping willow in the Jardin des Plantes. The tale appears to have been a ploy by the park authorities to prevent macabre souvenir hunters from digging up the bones.
I do not mind this last deception. On a sunny day, in the heart of Paris, the Jardin des Plantes makes a peaceful refuge from the teeming, dangerous city. It is a good place to remember all Landru’s victims, known and unknown.