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That's $50 off with code LISTEN at BlueNile.com. Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and episode 145. I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Roseland Weyborg Thule.
I must apologize to you, my dear loyal listeners. This episode is one week late and should have been released on the 26th of April. However, a bereavement in my family had to take precedent, and I hope you can understand that.
To make it up to you, I will be releasing two episodes in the two next consecutive weeks, this being the first of two.
Last episode, the first in this saga, detailed how Marcel Pétillon, close friend René Nézondé, fended off unpleasant rumors from local townspeople about Marcel following Marcel's lover Louisette's disappearance.
As we found out, what was most probably her remains was found dismembered in a suitcase very close to the town Marcel lived in. After putting up a good show about how distraught he was over Louisette's disappearance, Marcel quite suddenly perked up and stated he wanted to get involved in politics.
In this episode, we will look more into how this turned out for Dr. Petillon, and of course, I will present you with some morsels of depravity as well. Enjoy. As always, I want to publicly thank my elite TSK Producers Club. Recently, the club has grown, and all new members are most welcome.
There are now thirty-three dignified members of exquisite taste, and their names are Anne, Anthony, Brenda, Brian, Cassandra, Christy, Cody, Colleen, Corbyn, Ella, Fawn, Gilly, James, Jennifer, Juliet,
You are the backbone of the Serial Killer podcast, and without you, there would be no show. You have my deepest gratitude. Thank you.
I am forever grateful for my elite TSK Producers Club, and I want to show you that your patronage is not given in vain.
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Imagine if you will, dear listener, a typical French countryside village café. A bottle of wine on the table. The air thick with cigarette smoke. Perhaps some nice cheese and excellent bread laid out for sharing. Two men are chatting away.
One of them, René, is telling the other, Marcel, that he must be joking, that surely he is not actually considering becoming involved in the dirtiest of all dirty games, namely politics. But to René's surprise, Marcel is deadly serious. Friends, citizens, I confess.
"'I confess that I am guilty of a serious crime. I stand accused of loving the people too much. I confess it is true.' Thus rang the opening of one of Dr. Pétillon's many speeches for his bid as the socialist candidate for mayor of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne.
The campaign was long, hard, and not always scrupulously honest. At his best, Pétillon was an excellent speaker and actor who knew how to amuse, cajole, and seduce an audience that was already largely indebted to him for his medical services. As the campaign neared its close, the tireless doctor seemed to be everywhere.
Dr. Pétion was also utterly without scruples, and when the opportunity to cheat presented itself, he grabbed it with both hands. On the evening of a major electoral debate at the town hall, Pétion furnished a supporter with a length of copper cable and a set of detailed instructions.
Petillon spoke first, and had timed his speech to the minute. At 9.45 p.m., as his opponent stepped to the podium, Petillon's aide short-circuited the main power supply of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. The town and hall were blacked out. A few small fires were started, and the opponent's speech came to a swift end.
As it were, his opponent didn't stand a chance from the start. And on the 25th of July 1926, Dr. Marcel Pétillon won the election in a landslide victory. As mayor of the town, Pétillon's petty offenses took on greater breadth. City funds were reported stolen from the town's clerk's desk.
As it happened, the freshly appointed town clerk was none other than Pétion's close friend, Nézondé. Rumour accused the mayor. Naturally, the funds were never accounted for, and no charges were filed.
An ultra-patriotic band whose music and political orientation were distasteful to the socialist and anti-nationalist Pétillon and his friends discovered one day that their bass drum had been stolen. A few days later, Pétillon founded another band with a style more to his liking and donated a similar freshly painted drum.
At the entrance to the town cemetery, there was a large stone cross, 2.4 meters high and weighing around 550 kilos. Petio thought it was ugly and claimed publicly the cross obstructed the hearses. One Christmas Eve, he warned the local police that the cross just might vanish that night. The police laughed.
The next morning the cross was gone. When Pétillon was questioned, he laughed back, saying, and I quote, I don't believe I have it on me. Besides, what on earth would I ever do with it? End quote. Once again, no charges were filed.
Dr. Pétillant liked the money that followed his new position, but he truly loved the power that it afforded him. He had quickly made sure that in Villeneuve his word was law. According to a local newspaper critical of Pétillant, he had made himself, in addition to mayor, municipal council, street commissioner.
Commissioner of everything else, Director of Public Works, Municipal Court, and Representative for the Canton. The people actually filling those roles were all hand-picked by Pétillon and served only as yes-men to all his decrees. Now a true pillar of the community, Marcel Pétillon thought it proper that he should take a wife.
On the 4th of June, 1927, he married Georgette Valentine Lablaix, 23 years old. She was the beautiful daughter of a wealthy landowner from the nearby town of Saguenay. Her father, Monsieur Lablaix, who initially opposed the marriage, was commonly known as Longarm because of his powerful connections.
From 1918 to 1936, he owned one of the most expensive restaurants in Paris. It was located on the Rue de Bourgogne, right next to the Champs-Gaudet Deputés, and amidst half of the ministries in France. Many of France's most influential politicians were his steady customers and friends.
Local gossip held that Pétillan, known for not in any way being a romantic, had been partly attracted to Georgette by the possibility of using her father's influence to his own benefit, especially since his own political ambitions did not seem limited to a small town.
At first, though, the couple led a quiet existence, and their household was augmented by the birth of Gerhardt George's Claude-Félix Pétillon on the 19th of April 1928. Pétillon never did use the influence apparently at his disposal, or perhaps he never had the opportunity. At 8 p.m. on the 11th of March 1930,
An incident erupted that was to trouble Villeneuve for many years. Armand de Boeuf, the director of the local dairy cooperative, returned home that evening to find his house on fire. He raised an alarm and smashed into the kitchen, where he stumbled over the body of his wife, Henriette.
She was carried outside and artificial respiration was begun before someone noticed that one side of her head had been completely smashed by blows with a heavy instrument. As firemen extinguished the blaze and police examined the grounds, Marcel and Georgette Petillon drove by. They stopped for a few moments,
But to the great indignation of spectators, who believed the mayor and the doctor's place was at the scene of the tragedy, the couple continued on to a movie theatre in nearby Sands. There, other patrons noted Petiot's unusually nervous and distracted air. The great depth of the wounds and the area over which blood had spattered
testified to the viciousness of the assault on Madame de Boeuf. The killer had poured gasoline around the house and set it alight in a poor attempt to conceal the crime. Recent footprints led from the dairy across marshy fields, along the river, and towards the town of Villeneuve, confirming the suspicion that the killer was someone from that town.
Only someone who knew the terrain well could have negotiated the path in the dark. It was obvious, too, that the criminal knew that Armand de Boeuf went to a café every evening and did not return home until 7.30 or 7.45 p.m. The heat of the fire had stopped the kitchen clock at 7.13 p.m.
The murderer also seemed to know that on the second Wednesday of every month, the de Boves made payment for the milk they had collected from neighboring regions. That day would have been the 12th of March, meaning that on the evening of the crime, an entire month's take, 235,000 French francs, would be in the house.
This was a huge amount of money at the time, comparable to 518,440 US dollars in today's value. The murderer had not found the money, which was hidden under a kitchen counter. Instead, he had tried to force open a safe in the bedroom with an engraving tool taken from the daily tool shed.
Police found the tool buried in the folds of an eiderdown kilt, where the killer apparently laid it while he searched a closet. He took 20,000 French francs from the closet, comparable to about 21,000 US dollars today. The killer left three distinct bloody fingerprints on a cardboard box during his search.
the only other objects missing were a hammer and a wallet containing several hundred french francs the hammer which perfectly fit madame de boves skull wounds was subsequently found in a small stream the killer had crossed in his flight
By the time it was discovered, the hammer was so covered with rust and slime that it was impossible to lift any fingerprints or detect traces of blood.
A series of newspaper articles in Le Petit Regional commented on the inefficiency of the police, cast aspersions on the character of Madame de Boeuf, described in intimate detail the nature of the wounds made by each blow, and concluded with the observation that the crime would doubtless remain unsolved.
as they had the fleurie theft and arson, several other burglaries, and the disappearance of Louisette Delavaux. Some weeks after the crime, Monsieur Fisco, who had himself been a suspect, was heard to say that he had seen Dr. Pétillot near the Deboeuf house at the time the murder was committed.
He intended to speak with the Brigade Mobile of Dijon, which had taken charge of the investigation. There were already vague rumors that the 45-year-old Madame de Beauve had been young Dr. Pétillot's mistress. Fisco suffered from rheumatism.
One afternoon he met Dr. Pétion, who sympathized with the man's misery, and said he had just received a miraculous new drug from Paris that did wonders for just that ailment. Fisco let himself be led to Pétion's office, where the doctor gave him an injection. Three hours later, Fisco was dead.
This struck some as an odd coincidence, but it was established that Fisco had died of an aneurysm. By another odd coincidence, the doctor who determined the cause of death, signed the certificate, and authorized the burial, was also none other than Dr. Marcel Petillon.
It is important, dear listener, to remember that this was in the late 1920s and early 1930s France. The idea of equal treatment under the law was certainly publicly talked warmly about, but in reality, privilege bred privilege.
People in power was almost immune to police scrutiny, and the general police officers, who belonged to a different economic and social class than Petillon, actively avoided confronting the good doctor. While the more serious of Dr. Petillon's crimes may have been poorly investigated, it was a slightly different matter when it came to his illicit activities as mayor.
He blatantly embezzled the town, was extremely incompetent at basic functions, such as forwarding 138 alien registration papers to appropriate authorities.
stole gasoline, committed fraud, and major public works projects had been undertaken without necessary approvals or supervision, and the large quantities of money for them frequently passed from hand to hand in a dizzying fashion that seemed to very often lead straight back to the mayor.
Faced with this growing mountain of irregularities and potential criminal indictments, Dr. Pétillon chose to resign rather than face the music. He wrote a letter to the prefect who had led the growing public investigation into his various irregular actions as mayor. The letter read as follows, and I quote,
monsieur le prfet i can no longer resist the pleasure of handing you my resignation i am not well known at the prefecture and you obviously take me for a man against whom one can do anything with impunity
you will see by the present letter that the reality is nothing of the sort. When things go too far, I too know how to protest. French elections are held in two rounds one week apart.
The dates for the 1931 mayoral election to replace Pétillant were set for the 15th and 22nd of November. One of the prime candidates was Henri Gautin, who wished to remain in office after the dissolution of the provisional delegation and undo the evil he felt Pétillant had wrought on the community.
The main issue in his platform seems to have been a strong personal attack on Dr. Pétillon. Among other charges, he pointed out that a search of Pétillon's secretary's house had uncovered a duplicating machine stolen from the city hall.
Gautin was joined eagerly by much of the press, which raked up mountains of scandal about Pétillon and insisted that, contrary to the ex-mayor's claims, prefects do not go about impeaching small-town mayors on mere whim.
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Visit betterhelp.com slash serialkiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash serialkiller. The other chief candidate for mayor was none other than Dr. Marcel Petillon.
The fact that he had been thrown out of office in no way prevented him from running for the same post a mere two months later. The electoral campaign was all the more heated for its brevity. People who had never previously taken an interest in politics were drawn into the impassioned battle, and the town found itself sharply divided.
Once again, Pétillant overwhelmed Villeneuve with his speeches, and he was more seductive than ever as he enumerated the great improvements he had made in the town. Slowly he convinced many voters that he was, in reality, the victim of a vicious campaign. He was a socialist, and his efficiency embarrassed corrupt politicians.
it is testimony to petillon's extraordinary personality that he could persuade people of his innocence in the face of repeated and almost irrefutable proof against him
And so it was that in the 15th of November preliminary election, Gautin was defeated, leaving the field to Petillon, five of his sympathizers, and a single member of the opposition. The campaign grew even more feverish in the week before the second round, which would determine the winner.
On the 22nd of November, in an abrupt voting reversal, Dr. Eugene Duran, Petillon's medical and political competitor, ended up winning a resounding victory. Petillon may have been disappointed, but he did not act like a defeated candidate. Being mayor was not his only ambition, nor was it the only office for which he had run.
A month earlier, on the 18th of October 1931, he had been elected the youngest of the 34 general councillors serving the entire aeon. This position was comparable to that of congressmen in the United States. He had received 1,054 votes to his opponents, 810 disqualified.
and out of the eight communes voting he had lost by a small margin in only one and that was in the one farthest from villeneuve if his new position did not show the same irregularities as the old petillon had in no way totally reformed soon after his election he was accused of stealing electricity
After a lengthy investigation, in large part led privately by his arch-nemesis, Dr. Pétillant ended up in court facing criminal charges. Pétillant fought the case for all he was worth. He protested and denied all charges. He acted indignantly to the prosecution's claims against him.
He refused to answer critical questions levied at him. He painted himself as a victim, portrayed himself as the object of a vicious, suspicious and scurrilous political attack, and he qualified as idiotic the testimony of expert witnesses. After the hearing, while the case was under deliberation, he did not hesitate to approach the magistrate who was sitting in judgment. The court
finally was not to see. The evidence was overwhelming. The judge found Pétillant's explanations quote-unquote pure fantasy, and his two defense witnesses vague, uneasy, and suspicious. On the 19th of July, 1933, Pétillant was sentenced to 15 days in prison and a 300 French franc fine.
Petillon appealed to the Corps d'Appel de Paris, the highest appeal court in the country, where the case lingered for more than a year. On the 26th of July 1934, the earlier conviction was upheld, though the jail sentence was suspended and the fine reduced to 100 French francs.
Petillon publicly stated that while he had been convicted, that did not prove his guilt. A strange thing to say, considering a guilty verdict in a criminal case pretty much is the definition of how anyone is proved guilty. As a result of his conviction, Petillon temporarily lost his right to vote.
and since according to French law a person without voting rights is not entitled to hold an elected post, Pétillan was officially removed from office as General Counselor on the 17th of October 1934. In fact, Pétillan had not fulfilled his duties for some time.
In January 1933, he and his family had moved to Paris, and he had not attended any assemblies for an entire year. The Petillon family had moved into an apartment at 66 Rue Coumartin in the Saint-Lazare district of Paris, located next to the Printemps and Galerie Lafayette department stalls.
The neighborhood was a busy commercial district during the day, while at night it was deserted except for the busy café life around the Gare Saint-Lazare. The doctor passed several months without working while he rallied a new clientele.
The tract he printed and personally placed in every mailbox in the courtier was far more extravagant than the one he had circulated at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. He offered painless childbirths and drug cure, mysterious non-anesthetic pain relief that helped scasia, rheumatism, neuralgia, ulcers and cancer pains.
With X-rays, ultraviolet rays, infrared rays, electro-therapy, ionization therapy, diathermy, aerotherapy, surgery, artificial fevers, and a host of other techniques, he claimed he could remove, relieve, and generally cure fungi, red spots, goiter, tattoos, scars, tumors either benign or malignant,
arteriosclerosis, anemia, obesity, diabetes, cardiac and renal deficiencies, arthritis, nervous depression, senility, colds, pneumonia, emphysema, asthma, tuberculosis, appendicitis, ulcers, syphilis, bone diseases, ailments of the heart, liver and stomach, and even plain fatigue.
However preposterous his claims may have been, Petio once again attracted, retained, and pleased a huge clientele and gained a reputation for selfless devotion. He would ride his bicycle fifteen miles in the night to treat a poor patient in the suburbs, and his wife claimed that if she hadn't done his accounting for him, he would never have billed anyone at all.
All, no doubt, a part of Dr. Pétillon's masterful marketing plan. Rumor had it that Pétillon performed abortions, and that under guise of furnishing drug cures, he was actually supplying drugs to addicts.
In 1935, Madame Anne Coquille lodged a complaint with the police about the mysterious death of her daughter, Raimonde Hans, age 30, who had gone to Petiot the previous year to have an abscess in her mouth lanced. She had not regained consciousness after the anaesthetic was administered.
Dr. Pétillant had driven her unconscious body home, where she died several hours later. Madame Coquille requested an autopsy. The coroner found the circumstances suspicious and refused to authorize burial until a thorough investigation had been made. But although significant quantities of morphine were found in the body, the case was dismissed.
Again, forensic methodology and police detective investigation was extremely primitive almost a hundred years ago compared to today's cutting-edge police investigative sciences.
Madame Coquille tried to reopen it in 1942, but France was in the middle of a world war at the time, and that combined with the case being many years old, the court was unwilling to hear witnesses and upheld the earlier ruling. Pétillon's ambition and drive was in no way hindered by his various setbacks.
In 1936, he was able to apply successfully for the position of Médecin d'État, civil, for the 9th arrondissement of Paris, which gave him certain minor administrative duties, a degree of prestige, and entitled him to sign death certificates, the latter probably being the main reason he chose to apply for the position.
In 1936, Pétillan ran into more serious difficulties. At 12.30 p.m. on the 4th of April, a store detective at the Joseph Guibert bookstore on the Boulevard Saint-Michel noticed a man pick up a book from the outside racks, slip it under his arm, and stroll off.
The detective accosted the man, who produced papers in the name of Dr. Marcel Pétillon, feigned surprise at finding the book under his arm, and insisted he must have taken it in a moment of absent-mindedness. He offered to pay for the book, an elementary text on electricity and mechanics, worth only 25 francs, and hoped the store could forget the whole thing.
The store detective, René Cotteret, said he preferred they take a little stroll to the nearest police station, and he firmly held the doctor's arm. At that point, Pétillon threatened to quote-unquote bash his face in, grabbed Cotteret by the necktie and throat, and began to strangle him. As the store detective was on his heels and on the defensive,
Petillon, suddenly let go, ran away for three blocks, where he disappeared into the Odeon metro station. Cotterin lodged a complaint for theft and assault at the commissariat, the police. The commissaire telephoned the Rue Camartin apartment, designated on the papers Petillon had produced.
and a man's voice told him Dr. Petiot was not there and had been out of town for several weeks. The commissariat in Petiot's quarter was asked to make inquiries, and Dr. Petiot himself opened the door when two policemen arrived and requested him to appear at the commissariat on the 6th of April at 4 p.m. On that day, Petiot, claiming he was too upset and confused to answer questions lucidly,
arrived bearing a letter he said would explain everything. Sobbing, he begged the commissaire not to tell his wife, and mentioned that he had suffered from depression, and spent time in mental hospitals. He said he was disgusted with life, and would rather commit suicide than spend more time in an asylum.
The letter he produced was a rambling note, detailing how Pétillan claimed to be an inventor who was deeply engrossed in inventing a perpetual motion machine. The book he had tried to steal had important details on the mechanisms required to build such a machine, and he had taken it in a fit of professional delirium.
He denied any wrongdoing, aside from absentmindedness, vehemently denied assaulting anyone, and emphasized being a respectable family man. A few days after presenting the strange letter, he was questioned in person at home.
He repeated the same story, showed police inspectors his army discharge papers to prove his mental abnormality, and added that he had been suffering from migraine on the day of the alleged theft. The commissaire found Petillon's behavior peculiar. For a medical doctor responsible for people's health and even lives, even dangerous.
Thus, he ordered a psychiatric examination before deciding what legal course to pursue. The appointed psychiatrist, Dr. Selyer, found Petiot agitated, anxious, depressed, weeping, sobbing, and constitutionally unbalanced. Dr. Selyer and his colleagues found their subject dangerous to himself and to others.
and since Pétion refused to enter a hospital of his own free will, he recommended forcible internment in a psychiatric institution. Consequently, René Cotteret dropped the assault charge, and Pétion was found not guilty of shoplifting by reason of insanity. Dr. Pétion's wily ruse had not gone the way he had probably hoped.
Petiot had previously managed to get out of trouble scot-free by simply claiming insanity, but he had not considered the possibility of being forcefully committed to an insane asylum. This time, the doctor would not be able to walk free. However, his loyal wife, Georgette Petiot,
arranged to have her husband interned not at a regular state mental hospital, the usual procedure in such cases, but at the Masson de Santé d'Ivry. This was a private sanatorium on the grounds of an old estate just outside Paris, run by the kindly and overbearing Dr. Achille Delmarre.
Petiot thought Delmas would be an easy dupe, and he was correct. The court acquiesced in the choice of treatment, but insisted that state-appointed doctors from outside the clinic must periodically examine the patient and evaluate his progress.
As soon as Pétillan was officially interned on the 1st of August 1936, and the police charges had been dropped, he demanded his release and persuaded Dr. Delmas that if he had ever been suffering from a disorder, it was temporary, and had now disappeared. Dr. Delmas was convinced.
He had initially diagnosed Pétion as a cyclothemic, an old term for someone suffering from a mild form of manic depressive psychosis. But rest and daily hydrotherapy seemed to have banished his few abnormalities. So Delmar petitioned the court for Pétion's release.
On the 18th of August, only two weeks after Petillon's admission to the hospital, the court psychiatrist, Dr. Rogues de Foursac, found the patient calm, lucid, and free from delirium. On the 2nd of September, he stated that though Petillon was chronically unbalanced,
He was not presently delirious, depressed, overly excited, or conspicuously abnormal in any way, and recommended his release. However, for some reason, several months passed, and Dr. Petiot was not released. He was furious of this turn of events, and he soon began to fire a barrage of letters at a judge, the Procureur de la République,
and even the President of France, complaining of his unjust and inhumane treatment. The court appointed three well-known psychiatrists, Drs. Claude, Lignel Lavastine, and Janil Perrin, to examine the patient. They were instructed to recommend either further hospitalization or immediate release.
The psychiatrists took their task seriously and thoroughly examined Dr. Petillon. What they found abhorred them. It was clear that he completely lacked any semblance of conscience and was through and through a man only interested in the benefit of himself and a man who found pleasure in inflicting suffering in others.
In today's terminology, they view Dr. Pétion as a classic psychopath. However, their assignment was not to review whether Pétion was a likable man or not. The doctors wrote in their report the following, and I quote,
At present, we are simply presented with a hospitalized subject, and we are required to evaluate his current state to determine whether he exhibits mental disorders necessitating the continuation of his internment. As did Dr. Roeg de Versailles, we found that he does not.
Petillon is free from delirium, hallucinations, mental confusion, intellectual disability, and pathological excitation or depression. In consequence, he does not fall within the limits of the law of 1938 and should be released." Dr. Petillon, they knew, was far from insane.
They knew he had used a transparent ruse to elude justice. It was too late to do anything about his acquittal now, but the psychiatrists took the unusual step of adding a warning in hopes of preventing such a thing from happening again. In their report, they further wrote the following, and I quote...
It is in the public interest that we draw attention to his very peculiar situation, and point out that in the event of a future criminal indictment, the present internment should not weigh excessively in the deliberations of whatever panel of experts may be assigned to evaluate him.
Such panel should go back to the beginning and examine in detail the question of Pétillon's criminal responsibility. Perhaps Pétillon was told of this warning, which was placed in his permanent police dossier, for he never used the same tactic again.
For the moment, it did not matter much. And on the 20th of February 1937, after seven months in the insane asylum, Dr. Pétillon was again a free man.
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And with that, we come to the end of part two of the saga of Dr. Marcel Pétillon. Next episode, number 146 in number, will continue his saga. So as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. Finally, I wish to thank you, dear listener, for listening.
If you like this podcast, you can support it by donating on patreon.com slash theserialkillerpodcast, by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, facebook.com slash theskpodcast, or by posting on the subreddit theskpodcast. Thank you. Good night and good luck.
