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$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes each detail. Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were. What they did and. Episode 147. I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Roseland Weiborg-Thur.
Last episode ended with the wartime French police deliberately stalling for time, believing Dr. Pétillan to be a courageous member of the Résistance, and thus was to be protected from prosecution.
Tonight, we learn how it dawned on investigators that Dr. Pétillon was no resistance fighter, and that, for once, the Gestapo had gotten it right. He was indeed a dangerous killer, and now the hunt was afoot. Enjoy. As always, I want to publicly thank my elite TSK Producers Club.
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After spending a great deal of time interviewing people who were, at best, peripherally connected to the case, the police thought they had given Dr. Petillon enough of a head start and decided to seek him out at his home.
It was late in the morning when Chief Inspector Marius Batou of the police judiciaire arrived at Pétillon's residence in the Rue Comartin with two other detectives. They stopped at the concierge booth to ask whether the doctor was in. The concierge was out, but her twelve-year-old daughter, Alice Denis,
told the police officers she had seen the doctor and Madame Petillon at 9.30 the previous evening and believed they were still at home. The officers thanked the young girl and proceeded to the doctor's door and knocked. After several knocks, they still got no reply, so Batou decided to try the door. It was open.
which he interpreted as a sign the couple had left in a hurry. In fact, Petillon always kept his door open. His logic was that he would rather any burglars did not destroy his expensive door, and any burglar worth his salt would be able to pry open his door anyway. The apartment was empty, the beds made up, and there were no signs of a hasty escape.
as it would later turn out, the doctor and his wife had left only thirty minutes before the arrival of the police. The police did not spend the rest of the day searching train stations and circulating photographs of Dr. Pétillant, as one would expect. Instead, they went to the Simon Real Estate Agency.
There, they learned that Monsieur Simon was a Jew and had fled France when the Germans dissolved his business. A further search turned up a former employee of the agency and the notary who had handled the sale of the Rue Le Seur house. Dr. Pétillant had purchased the building in his son Gerard's name on the 11th of August 1941.
The cost of the house was French francs 495,000, which in today's money equals about 7 million US dollars.
Naturally, he did not have that sort of money on hand, so the balance payable in annual installments was 17,500 French francs, which equals about 200,000 US dollars, or 17,000 US dollars per month in today's money. This was quite a large sum of money, even for a medical doctor.
and a typical sign of how he profited large sums of money from illicit activity such as drug dealing, illegal abortions, fraud, and theft. Investigators then located the construction firm that had built the triangular room, installed the iron rings, and erected the wall that sheltered the courtyard from the eyes of curious neighbors.
Two masons and several workers had done the job in October 1941 at a cost of 14,458 French francs. They had seen Pétillant frequently at the time, and the doctor had said he intended to install a clinic in the house after the war.
The wall was to prevent neighbors from bothering his patients, and also, Petillon claimed, to keep children from throwing peach pits into the yard. He intended to set up an electrotherapy apparatus in the triangular room and monitor its functioning through a viewer in the wall. The workers had found Dr. Petillon quite an amiable fellow.
What I find exceedingly interesting about the fact he mentions an electrotherapy apparatus is that this blatant lie might hide a morsel of truth. Since pathologists had a very hard time finding a cause of death from the victims, a very plausible cause is electrocution.
It would be a simple thing for Petiot to attach wires to the iron rings holding his victims bound to the wall, then run electricity through them at varying charges in order to torture and kill his victims. This would leave little trace evidence on his victims' bodies, especially if the bodies were covered in lime that would chemically burn away the skins.
The police found these details of mild interest, but such information did little in helping to capture the criminal, nor was it intended to at first, as headquarters soon came to realize. Superiors learned that the agents Tessier and Fillon had let a prime suspect escape, and the two fled France for fear of reprisals.
They did not return until after the liberation in 1945. The Gestapo now told Commissaire Massoud they were astonished that Dr. Pétillon had not yet been caught. Massoud replied that he was surprised by their astonishment, since the files showed that the Germans had once actually held Pétillon in prison and had voluntarily released him.
The impasse lasted only briefly, after which it became all too evident that Pétillan's crimes, far from being committed in the name of France, were gruesomely personal. By then, however, the authorities had lost valuable time, and Pétillan had vanished completely. During the German occupation of France, there were no freedom of the press.
The Nazi authorities had complete control over what were published or not. However, the Nazi office of censorship and propaganda, the Propagandastaffel, had no wish to censor the Petillon affair. They may even have welcomed it as harmless diversion for a subjugated populace, diverting attention away from atrocities committed by the German occupying forces.
Circulations shot up as every newspaper in France exaggerated the discovery at Rue Lesseur in an orgy of sordid detail and carried banner headlines about the new Landru. Estimates ranged as high as sixty victims, and most reporters assumed all of them were women.
Dr. Pétillon, in the speculating press, became a drug addict and abortionist, a sadist and a lunatic who had a dozen means, each more outlandish than the last, of murdering helpless, lovely ladies in his triangular chamber of death.
More than one paper carried rumours that the lower part of the bodies in the pit had been more severely damaged than the upper, indicating that the victims had been forced to stand in the caustic lime and dissolve alive. Dear listener, I highly doubt Petion did this.
If he had left victims standing waist-deep in caustic lime, being chemically burned alive, they would have been screaming. Even if they had been gagged, the screams would have been so loud as to be heard through the gag, even though the victims would have been unable to articulate the word help. Petillon was exceedingly careful about not being discovered.
and he was clever about it. For him to risk random passers-by on the street outside to hear loud moans and screams from inside the mansion is highly unlikely. However, even for people oppressed by years of war, the bizarre imagined cruelty of the crimes soon became a favorite topic of conversation.
By now, the police had started to investigate the case properly and combed the location at Rue Lesseur with precision. In various closets, corners, and in the basement, inspectors found the following collection of items, and I quote, 22 used toothbrushes, 15 women's combs, 7 pockets combs, 9 fingernail files,
24 tubes and boxes of pharmaceutical products, 3 shaving brushes, 5 gas masks, 5 cigarette holders, 1 pair of women's trousers, 1 three-piece suit, 7 pairs of eyeglasses, 2 umbrellas, and 1 cane. End quote.
They also found a black satin evening gown with golden swallows embroidered on the bosom, wearing the manufacturer's label Silvia Rosa, Marseille, a jaunty woman's hat made by Suzanne Talbot in Paris.
a man's white shirt from which the initials K.K. had been removed, and a photograph of an unidentified man, which the newspapers published at the request of the police. The largest human remains had been taken to the morgue on Sunday. Policemen refused to touch the piles of quicklime.
and four gravediggers from the Passy Cemetery were hired to sift through them with a sieve and pack the human elements in plain wooden coffins. The examination was headed by the celebrated forensic expert Dr. Albert Paul, who had directed every major coroner's inquest in the Department of the Seine since the Landru case in 1920.
Dr. Paul, Dr. Léon d'Arubert, Dr. René-Pierre Lièvre, and two professors from the Museum of Natural History, specialists in skeletal assembly and the reconstruction of fossil remains, spent several months measuring and categorizing 34 specimens, ranging in size from a single connected shoulder blade
and breastbone to the eviscerated half-corpse found on the basement stairs. Their final voluminous report, with 150 pages of photographs and reams of description, was sadly disappointing. Not even the number of victims could be accurately determined. Their empirical conclusions were as follows, and I quote, "'Unpaired bones,'
10 vertebrae subjects, 7 sternus subjects, 6 coccyxes subjects, peared bones, 10 collarbone subjects, 8 shoulder blade subjects, and 5 pelvis subjects. From these remains, the experts concluded that there were at least 10 victims. 5 men, 5 women.
But considering the 15 kilograms of badly charred bones, 11 kilograms of unchared fragments, three garbage cans full of pieces too small to identify, and the fact that there were 5 kilograms of hair, including more than 10 entire human scalps,
Dr. Paul could only say that, and I quote, the number 10 is vastly inferior to the real one, end quote. The youngest of the 10 victims, the experts determined, was a 25-year-old woman, the eldest a 50-year-old man. There were no old bone injuries that could be used for identification.
The existing teeth were almost all in poor condition, though one had a porcelain cap. One woman had very small hands and feet, and the forearm of a five-foot-ten male victim was abnormally short. One man had a particularly voluminous skull, as did one woman, whose head was also round and flattened at the back.
another woman had a protruding lower jaw which would have given her a distinctly simian appearance in life radiological examinations showed no traces of bullet or knife wounds nor any similar marks of violence on bones
Some of the long bones of the legs and arms had been broken after death, apparently either to conceal tell-tale deformities or to make them easier to fit into the stove for burning. The brakes were so crude that Dr. Paul theorized the bones had been wedged between a door and its jam and yanked. Photographs and full-scale drawings were made of each piece,
Any remaining flesh was removed, and insect larvae were lifted and placed in numbered test tubes. Then each piece was cleaned, measured, photographed, and drawn again. Someone with an intimate knowledge of anatomy had dissected the bodies in a professional manner.
Dr. Paul noted, however, that whereas a doctor would sever an arm at shoulder, in this case the ribcage had been cut at the center, and a whole arm, shoulder blade, and collar bone removed as a single piece, precisely, he pointed out, as one might carve a chicken. A disturbing pattern thus emerged.
The dismemberment technique was identical to that used on a dozen batches of human remains, including nine severed heads that were fished out of the Seine in 1942 and 1943.
this stream of cadavers had ended when the culprit narrowly escaped detection after throwing a human hand off a bridge just as a barge passed underneath identification of these bodies too had been impossible
due both to decomposition and the fact that someone had stripped away the fingerprints and expertly removed the faces and sculpts in a single piece. The most powerful designer drugs are the digital ones we use daily. And we get high off them. One touch, tap, like, scroll at a time. You know, just like tech creators want us to.
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at the time dr paul had been concerned by scalpel marks in the fleshy parts of four thighs that floated ashore at la muette on the twenty ninth of october nineteen forty two
he knew first-hand that unlike a surgeon a coroner switching to another instrument does not lay down his scalpel but instead uses the cadaver's thigh as a convenient pin cushion
The bodies found at the Rue Laisseur bore identical marks on the thighs, and though a definite link was never proved, at least one forensic expert was convinced that the same person was responsible for the Seine and Rue Laisseur murders. This assumption did raise disturbing questions.
This figment was understandable when the bodies were to be thrown into a public waterway, but at the Rue Lesseur, when they were to be burned, there were no apparent need for such delicate care. It became evident that Dr. Pétillon might not have dissected his victims out of practical need, but to satisfy his own sadistic cravings.
Professor Henri Griffon, director of the police toxicology laboratory, was given five jars of viscera and a kilogram of lime to examine for toxic substances. He noted that no blood was present in any specimen.
the viscera were shapeless thick with quicklime in an advanced state of mummification and exuded to quote the professor a piquant and extremely disagreeable odor his vague estimate placed the time of death at least several months to a year before the discovery
But the effects of the lime were so uncertain that Griffon would not later repeat this opinion in court. Chemical analysis could rule out poisoning by toxic metals such as lead, bismuth, barium, zinc, mercury, antimony, and arsenic.
This did not satisfy many, as it left innumerable other poisons, as well as strangulation, electrocution, and a host of other murder techniques, whose marks would not show or could be concealed.
Organic poisons that doctors normally use, such as ubane, scopolamine, chloroform, strychnine, and digitalis, were eventually found at Pétillant's Rue Comartin apartment, along with 50 times the amount of a doctor's normal stock of morphine and heroin.
However, no such substances were found at the Rue Lesseur, and no trace of them would be expected to be found in his victims' corpses that were all in a severe state of decay. When Dr. Paul gave his conservative estimate of ten bodies at the Rue Lesseur, he also said the numbers could go as high as thirty.
There were from nine to a dozen more in the sign. No one could guess how many more were never found, or, at a time when bodies were common and too often meant trouble with the Germans, were found and never reported. Petillon himself later referred to 63 deaths, a plausible number. It was also
a number which would place dr petillon as the premier serial killer in all of europe since the bloody reign of herchebeth bathory several hundred years earlier the first two tentative identifications of victims were made with embarrassing ease
The police checked department files to see whether Pétillon had a record, and thus the bodies began to assume names. Two names came up immediately, Jean-Marc Van Beaver and Martha Kite. These two murders, apparently among the first in the series, had been simple practical affairs, different from the rest.
to pétillan the ease in which he managed to execute the murders and get away with it had started him in his new diabolical vocation at a time when they occurred no murder charges had been brought
The police simply noted it as strange that two people connected with Petillon conveniently disappeared just before they were due to testify in court on two separate narcotics charges against Dr. Petillon. By now, they knew better. And so it was that on a Monday, the 13th of March, 1944,
The search for Dr. Marcel Petillon began in earnest. Chief Inspector Marius Batu and a subordinate requisitioned a car and some gasoline, which was rationed even for the police, and set out for Petillon's native province, the Yon. There, they thought he and his wife might be hiding with former friends and associates.
They remembered the sign on the door of 21 Rue Lesseur, giving an address in Auxerre, where Pétillan's brother Maurice lived. Closer examination of the worn paper revealed that someone had originally written 56 Rue Dupont, and that this had been erased and changed in a different hand to 18 Rue des Lombards.
The former was Maurice Petillon's home. The latter was a building that had been purchased by their father, Félix Petillon, and passed on upon his death in August 1942 to Maurice. Number 18, Rue des Lombards, proved to be a curious house.
built on a hill riddled with ancient Roman catacombs, and constructed, someone suggested, by an architect in the throes of delirium tremens. So torturously was it built around its steeply sloping foundation. It was empty, except for piles of furniture and bric-a-brac reminiscence of the disordered collection found at the Rue Lesseur,
In one neat room was a rumpled bed. Inspector Batut eventually found Maurice working in his radio store as though it were a perfectly ordinary day, disturbed only by the flood of newspaper reporters who had arrived even before the police. Maurice Pétillon was thirty-seven, ten years younger than Marcel.
and in some ways it later appeared a pale copy of his sibling the two looked similar but maurice was taller and thinner more timid his face hollow and angular and he lacked his brother's dynamic presence and intelligence
Maurice told Inspector Batut he had not seen or heard from his brother since late February, and was utterly puzzled by what he had heard on the radio and read in the papers about a Rue Le Seur discovery. He was obviously upset. His eyes were red and feverish from lack of sleep. He had not shaved in days, and his hands and shoulders twitched as he spoke in a hushed voice.
It turned out he did know that his brother owned a building in the 16th arrondissement, but he had never been there, and had learned the exact address only from the stories in that morning's papers. As for the recent occupant of the bed at the Rue des Lombards house, Maurice claimed it had certainly not been his brother or sister-in-law in flight,
Instead, he set a friend from nearby Courson-le-Cariere, Albert Neuhausen, a radio distributor, and repairman like himself had slept there. He often stopped in Auxerre when returning from Paris too late to make his connection home by train. Batut drove the ten miles to Courson.
Albert Neuhausen, he discovered, had slept at home the previous night. It was the first lie and contradiction in a case that soon became littered with them. At Massoud's request, several local policemen went to stake out the Auxerre train station the next morning.
They arrived when the train for Paris was less than a mile from the station, and the policeman recognized Dr. Pétillon's wife, Georgette, waiting on the platform. Both she and Maurice were arrested and held at the Auxerre police station, and Massoud himself drove out to bring them back to Paris.
Maurice's wife, Monique, came to say goodbye, bringing Georgette and Marcel's fifteen-year-old son, Gerard, who had been staying in Auxerre for some weeks past. As Massoud's car drove off, Georgette cried that she had done nothing wrong and told her son to behave himself, study hard and obey his aunt until she returned.
Madame Pétillon was taken to Police Judiciaire, headquarters on the Quai des Auvergnes. At thirty-nine she was a beautiful woman, but now the simple elegance of her black skirt, white blouse, and astrakhan coat was in stark contrast to the dishevelled curls hanging around her exhausted and tear-stained face.
She could barely hold up a hand to shield herself from the photographers, and two inspectors almost had to carry her through the door. Seated in Massoud's office, Georgette Pétillon claimed total ignorance of the whole affair. Massoud and several inspectors accompanied Madame Pétillon to the Rue Comactin apartment for a more proper search of the place.
A thousand people mobbed the sidewalk outside, and photographers pressed in as the terrified woman tried to shield her face. As reporters followed them up the stairs, shouting questions, she turned to scream, and I quote, "'You are assassins! You're making fun of my misery! You know that I only went to the Aeon to see my son!'
In addition to huge quantities of morphine and heroin, the search uncovered three sets of male and female human genitalia preserved in alcohol. These were in all likelihood not taken from victims, but stolen anatomical specimens from Pétillant's medical school.
They also found a diabolical wood sculpture, done by the doctor himself, of a beast, half animal, half devil, with an exceptionally large phallus. On the 15th of March, Massu was contacted by the German commissaire Robert Jodkum, who was willing to furnish details of Pétillon's earlier arrest by the Germans.
Jotkum was the interpreter and secretary of, successively, SS-Hauptsturmführer Theo Dannecker and SS-Ubersturmführer Heinz Röttke.
The latter directed Gestapo subsector IVB-4 on the Rue des Enseins, the Jewish Affair Division, responsible for scheduling raids and determining which Jews should be sent to camps or deported. As such, Jodkum attended or conducted interrogations, occasionally participated in arrests and gathered information.
Early 1943, a French informer had told him of an escape organization that obtained false passports and smuggled Jews and downed Allied pilots to Spain and South America.
The headquarters of this network were in a barbershop at 25 Rue de Matoguin, a street that intersects the Rue Comartin a few dozen meters from number 66.
The barber, Raoul Fourier, and his friend, Edmund Pintard, were active members of the organization, but the leader was a mysterious and elusive figure, known only as Dr. Eugène. The Gestapo had arrested Fourier and Pintard on the 21st of May, 1943.
After threatening them and beating Dr. Eugene's real name out of the barber, Gestapo officers had gone to the Rue Comartin apartment and arrested Dr. Petillon, along with René Nesonday, who happened by to deliver theatre tickets for a musical comedy. Nesonday appeared totally innocent and was released two weeks later.
Fourier, Pintard, and Pétillon were held in the Fresni prison for eight months, until January 1944. Massoud's vision of the crimes abruptly took on a more horrifying dimension. He envisioned a new murder scenario, posing as the head of an escape organization,
Dr. Pétillon had lured desperate people into his home under some pretense and murdered them, even though Germans had been fooled.
Whoa, easy there. Yeah.
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Shop your coffee fuel needs at Walmart. And with that, we come to the end of part four of this serialized expose of Dr. Marcel Petillon. Next episode, number 148 in number, will feature his capture and even more details of his diabolical deeds. 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.
