The butcher of Paris: the trial of Marcel Petiot (final chapter)
When the Gestapo learned from the media that Dr. Petiot was a murderer wanted by the police, it realized the error of judgment it had made in releasing him months earlier, when it had not obtained any confessions under torture. But now it was too late, the doctor had already disappeared into the dust.
The situation was not the best for Germany, which had been suffering one defeat after another. But the Gestapo soon realized that Dr. Petiot's case was a gift from heaven. Drawing the public's attention to this macabre story would divert their interest from the news from the front and the setbacks the Nazis were facing. The Gestapo then began making numerous statements to the newspapers calling Dr. Petiot “the greatest murderer in history”, “the butcher of Paris”, “Doctor Satan”, or even the “Bluebeard of modern times”.
By the end of July 1944, Germany's defeat was imminent and interest in the Rue le Sueur case waned until, on August 20, the commissaire Massu who was investigating the case was imprisoned on charges of collaborating with the Nazis. When Germany signed its surrender five days later, Marcel Petiot was still missing.
A month after France's liberation, the newspaper La Résistence published an article calling Petiot “the soldier of the Reich”, accusing him of being associated with the underworld of prostitution and drug trafficking, as well as having used the Rue le Sueur mansion to dispose of the bodies of opponents of the Nazi regime. About a month later, the editor of La Résistence received a handwritten letter. The author of the letter claimed to be Dr. Petiot himself, who was trying to defend himself against the false allegations made against him in the published article. This time, the tricks used by the police to lure the psychopath seemed to have worked: they had asked the newspaper to publish a fictitious story by a non-existent journalist in order to hurt his pride and, if possible, make him go public. In the letter, he said that he was fighting alongside the Resistance to avenge the murder of hundreds of thousands of French people by the Nazis. He also claimed to have only killed Nazis and their collaborators.
As the police suspected that Petiot was still living in the vicinity of Paris and working as a doctor, she asked the nearby villages to send her documents with handwriting samples of all the doctors working there. The comparison of these samples with the handwriting on the letter sent by Petiot to the newspaper led the police to suspect Dr. Henri Valéry, who had been working as a military doctor in Reuilly since his enlistment in September 1944, after the liberation of France. On October 31 of that same year, Petiot was arrested during a routine patrol at the Reuilly railway station without putting up any resistance.
During the investigations that followed his arrest, the police discovered that Petiot had appropriated the documents of François Wetterwald, imprisoned in Germany, and changed his name to Henri Vallery. When the police arrested Dr. Petiot, they found in his pockets some ration cards in the name of René Wetterwald. However, closer examination showed that they had been altered and that the original name was René Kneller, the son of Kurt Kneller, who owned the monogrammed shirt that had been cut out and turned into a child's pyjamas. For the first time, the police were able to establish a real connection between the belongings of the victims who had disappeared and Dr. Petiot!
His trial began in March 1946 and lasted just under 20 days. Despite all the efforts made, it was never possible to determine the identity of the dismembered bodies, the method used to kill them, or the whereabouts of the owners of the suitcases - whether in France or any other South American country. In addition, there were several flaws in Petiot's statements about the workings of the Resistance, the names of his contacts and his identification number. And even the Resistance cell he claimed to belong to, Fly-Tox, was unknown to anyone. In the end, Petiot assumed that he had murdered 19 of the 27 cases that had been attributed to him, only those that, in a tortuous way, he could justify as having been carried out at the behest of the Resistance. If the murders were considered war crimes in his country's interest, he could not be sentenced to prison.
Despite the lack of concrete evidence, the jury, made up of just seven citizens, considered that he was neither a real Resistance soldier nor a legitimate operator of an escape route. Nor could his access to an inexhaustible quantity of strictly rationed products such as coal, quicklime, morphine and mescaline be elucidated. He was therefore condemned and executed at the guillotine on May 26, 1946.