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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how.
Tonight, I have a special treat for you, dear listener. We will depart from both Down Under and Victorian-era London, but we will stay in the early years of the 20th century.
This time, however, we travel across the English Channel and make landfall in France, just a few kilometers from Paris, just before and during the First World War, up until his arrest in 1919. Henri Desiree Landreau made his murderous mark on history,
And tonight, I will interview none other than the author of the very excellent book Landru's Secret, Richard Tomlinson. Mr. Tomlinson, welcome to the show. I am so pleased to have you on. How are you? I'm fine, thank you. Excellent. And can you please tell me and my listeners a little bit about yourself and your background?
Well, I'm by background a historian and I specialising in modern French history, which is how I came across the Landry case a long time ago, doing some research in the French National Library in Paris. And more recently, I've been a journalist, international journalist, and I've written other books about the British monarchy and a book about a famous English cricketer called W.G. Grace. So that's my broad background.
All right. And as I said in my introduction, you are the eminent author of a true crime book detailing the murders of Henri Desiree Landreau. And you mentioned now that you came across his case during your studies. Can you tell me about that a bit more?
Sure. I was doing a PhD in modern French history and somebody suggested to me that I should have a look at the Landrieu case because I was looking at a particular area which was attitudes to women in the early 20th century in France. And I came across the first of the murders on the murder sheet in the Landrieu case. It's a seamstress, a dressmaker in Paris just before the First World War called Jeanne Couchet.
And I read about it in the coverage of the trial of Landrieu in 1921. He was arrested in 1919. And it just seemed to me that the case didn't fit, that the
prosecution was saying that this seamstress, who was living in a fairly down market part of Paris, single mother with a teenage son, that she was worth in modern money, say, about 300,000 euros. And that was why Landru had seduced her and then killed her.
And it didn't fit as far as I was concerned. And so that was really the beginning of a lifetime of digging around, trying to find out more about the case. And so decades later, here I am. You mentioned that your studies focused on attitudes towards women in the early 20th century. And I assume you make a case for Landru being the classical misogynist. Is that correct?
Well, yes, I do. And I think in the end, if one's trying to find a pattern in this case, and it's an extraordinary case where here you have a man who's a swindler in Paris before the First World War. He's got a wife and he's got four children. And he's
He goes on the run just before the First World War breaks out because he's been convicted of a swindling offence, which is going to get him deported to New Caledonia to a penal settlement in the French Pacific with hard labour. And he goes on the run with his mistress at the time, Jeanne Couchet, this seamstress I was talking about. And the police...
eventually calculated that this rather unprepossessing, short, old man with a wife and four children had killed 10 fiancées, the first of which was Jeanne Couchet, the woman I've just talked about, during the First World War and immediately afterwards, that he had stolen their assets and that his sole motive was money and financial gain. And then he had killed them to stop them going to the police.
They also managed to calculate that on the basis of a notebook he kept, plus records of his correspondence with women, which he kept in a garage mostly in a suburb of Paris, that he had planted Lonely Hearts adverts in newspapers and registered under false names at matrimonial agencies.
They reckoned that in total, including the 10 fiancés who disappeared, he had been in contact romantically with 283 women during the war in Paris.
Well, that figure is wrong. It's actually much higher and you can prove it really from going through the case archives in the Paris police archives and another archive near Paris. It was many, many more than that because he was opportunistic and there is much testimony that one can come across which demonstrates beyond any doubt that it was probably double the number I'd say would be a safe assumption.
So what's the pattern here? And the pattern is not the one that the police and the prosecution eventually came up with. I'm sure of that because there were too many of these women really had no money at all. Some did, but not enough to make it sort of the single motive that he had. And I think it was that he really was the ultimate misogynist. And he was there were some terrible examples where I think he was actually out to punish these women for
perceived offences against him as a man. There's one poor woman who makes the mistake of answering one of his Lonely Hearts adverts, and she lies about her age and claims to be 10 years younger than she really is. And I'm sure that's the reason he decided to kill her. She had no money at all. So it's a terrible story. And it's also, though, a story of great courage as well, because
In the end, this is not a story which has a great French detective. The police were absolutely hopeless. Here was a country at war, millions of men under arm in uniform, hundreds of thousands of young men at the front being killed. And women were just not treated as a sort of a serious problem. If they disappeared, they disappeared.
And the police were just not interested in this case. And in the end, really, the reason Landry was arrested was because the two best detectives in the case were a French housemaid who was the sister of one of the missing women and another sister of one of the missing women who joined forces and pretty much shamed the police into cornering Landry in the end and arresting him.
And you then get to this extraordinary trial two years later, where I felt in the end that the testimony of the women who came to send Landry to the guillotine, really, that's what they were out to do because there was so little evidence in the case. It was this incredibly emotional testimony that moved the jury in the end by a majority to convict Landry. Fascinating. That's a lot of information. And I think we need to unravel it a bit.
And in order to do so, let us begin with his nickname. Landru is nicknamed the Bluebeard of Gambai. If I pronounce that place name very wrong, I think. But anyway, I suspect many people today no longer knows who the infamous legendary Landru
figure of Bluebeard was. Can you tell our dear listeners who Bluebeard was? And please do elaborate if you know any juicy details. Well, it's a myth. It's a myth in France about a medieval aristocrat, a baron who tricks and slaughters, murders various wives. And
This is one of these kind of childhood horror stories, which is very famous in France. Actually, I discovered doing the research for this, it's not so well known outside France. I mean, the name Bluebeard is, but people don't really know very much about the myth. When Landry was arrested, he acquired this nickname very rapidly because he too had a very long beard. He was completely bald, but he was very, very proud of his beard. I think perhaps in compensation for his baldness.
And Gambay was this village, as you said, it's about 50 kilometers west, southwest of Paris. And this is where seven of the women who were known to have, who were on the murder charge sheet, had disappeared at Gambay. And so the press latched onto this and they called him the Bluebeard of Gambay because it was a nice way really to sell newspapers and newspapers.
The interesting thing here for me is that he was pretty much condemned by the press within days of his arrest. The problem was that they had to then find the evidence to convict him, which proved an almost insurmountable problem. But the name itself stuck. Right. Excellent. This all happened in France, in Gambay. Can you tell us a bit about that area? How does it look like today and how did it look like back then?
Well, I'd preface it by saying that he rented two houses outside Paris consecutively during the war where he took women. And nobody, whatever the police said, nobody really knows how many women he took to these two places. The first place he rented between 1914 and 15 in a little town called Vernouillet, which is about 15 kilometers, maybe 20 kilometers west of Paris, just by the Seine, the River Seine.
And it's still there. The street name has changed, but it was a very kind of cramped setting with houses either side. And the best guess is that he decided to move from there because there wasn't enough privacy and the neighbors were starting to get suspicious of him.
foul-smelling smoke coming out of the chimney and nasty bonfires he was burning in the garden. So at the end of 1915 in December, he rented a house about a kilometre and a half outside this village, Gambe. Now Gambe is a pretty typical French village, not very big, probably about
thousand people living there, fewer during the First World War because, of course, all the men were away. And the thing that Landrieu clearly thought was that this house, which is also still there,
was a very private place to be because it was right out in open countryside. It had a wall and it had a hedge and it had large ground and outhouses. The house itself is surprisingly small, but it's got sheds and hangers and all sorts of buildings in this very, very large back garden.
And I think he thought that this was a place where he could just do what he really was out to do, which is to bring women there, have sex, lots of it, and then kill them. Now, the miscalculation he made, I think, was that because he was a Parisian and he was used to cities, he didn't realize that when you go to the countryside, of course, it's full of nomads.
Nosy parkers people who are going to notice you whenever you're coming into the village to buy provisions Whenever you come down on the train from Paris with one of these women and by the way in the end with all the women Who were known to have disappeared at Gamba? He does this rather sinister thing which is he buys a return ticket for himself and a one-way ticket for them because they're not going to come back and
But there were a lot of people who noticed him coming and going with women during the war, but they didn't do anything. And I think the reason for that was partly what I was saying, which is that it was the war who really cared about women. It was the men, it was the young men who were losing their lives that people were concerned about. And I think there was also just this very strong feeling that a private, a man's private life was his own business. And so it's this extraordinary situation where you have a lot of
witnesses to what Landru is doing. And there's quite a lot of quite sinister behavior, but nobody is actually reporting it to the authorities. Right. That's a very good elaboration on his hometown. And let us look a bit backwards in time regarding Landru. And do you know what his background was, his familial upbringing, his childhood, etc.?
Yeah, he was born in Paris, right in the center of Paris in 1869, literally across the street from the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
And he's his father was a furnace stoker. So quite a skilled working class artisan, I think you'd call him. And his mother was I think she took in laundry, but they were definitely not lower working class. They were he got a proper education at the church school where they worshipped. And that is where he indeed lived.
Later on, when he was a sub-deacon in the same church, that's where he met his wife because she also worshipped with her family at this church. So he himself has an elder sister who's quite a lot older than him. And the history with him of his early life is that he goes off to do military service. He has a
an illegitimate child by his wife, Marie-Catherine, whom he eventually marries. He comes back from military service and he takes a series of jobs and it's a bit of a sort of downward spiral because he starts off as an architect's clerk
And that doesn't work out. And then he works in a series of jobs which he never lasts in for very long. And all the while, his own behavior is getting more and more strange until in the end, he's picked up and actually charged with various swindles in 1904 in Paris.
He's in the Sante prison in central Paris waiting for trial, and he sort of fakes a suicide attempt. And prison governor is not very convinced by this, but he calls in a very eminent psychiatrist.
who concludes that Landru is not mad, but he's on the frontiers of madness and might cross those frontiers later on. And this psychiatrist actually warns his wife, Landru's wife, about his future behavior. So the pattern really before the First World War continues, which is he's in and out of jail as a not very competent swindler and he's
He never really sort of gets on a sort of a level footing in terms of either being a successful criminal or actually when he's out doing anything else but getting caught by the police. And in the end, it all catches up with him in about 1910 when he is sentenced to three years in jail for a marriage swindle that goes wrong with some poor woman, a widow in the northern city of Lille.
And so that is his sort of career background is really very much a sort of a petty criminal with certain fantasies about being an inventor. One of the curiosities about Landru is that he is actually featured in a in a history of French motorbikes because he invented a very basic motorcycle at the turn of the century, which being Landru, he called after himself La Landru.
But he's not successful and he's constantly getting caught. And that is the sort of position he's in when he finally meets up just before the First World War with the woman I was talking about at the beginning, this seamstress, Jeanne Couchet. Right. You mentioned briefly in the beginning that when he was caught, Henri was bald with a large beard. How else would you describe his physical characteristics?
He was short. I mean, even by the standards of the day, you can see that in the few photographs that were taken of him. There's one, actually, which is the main one, which is with his then mistress towards the end of the war, not one he killed. She's called Fernand Segrès, and he takes her out to the theater one evening, and he's photographed, I think, for a souvenir photograph. It's in my book.
in a dinner jacket and bow tie with her. And he's obviously shorter than her. So that would be the first thing I'd say. I think the other thing that is interesting about him, he's short, he's bald, he's got this big bushy beard, which gets longer after he's arrested. He really cultivates it when he's in prison.
What happens, though, and this is why people really can't believe when he appears on trial that this man could actually have been, as the police said, in romantic contact with all these women, hundreds of women.
is that he becomes in prison. He stops eating. He ages very radically. And it's clear to me anyway, although he was declared mentally fit to stand trial, it's pretty clear that he's lost his mind by the time the trial begins. And so he looks not at all really like the man who was at large in Paris during the First World War. He ages a lot and he's...
To my eye, anyway, he looks older than his age, a lot older by the time he comes to trial. And there are a lot of pictures of him during the trial because the judge let the photographers into the courtroom. So that's his appearance, really. I mean, it changes quite a lot, I think, in the last sort of after his arrest. Hey, it's Sharon. And here's where it gets interesting. Raise your hand if you want salon perfect nails for just two dollars a manicure.
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Being both bold and very short, he might have had some severe issues with that that manifested themselves in his violent behavior. Well, yes, you could. I mean, there's been a lot of effort, a lot of studies, people trying at the time and since trying to fathom his mentality.
I mean, my own feeling about that is that it's very, very difficult if you don't have, as it were, the patient in the room, him in the room with you, to be able to make some sort of diagnosis about his precise psychological condition. But what I think you can do is look at the pattern of his behaviour. And to me, his behaviour, if you take the view that he's a crook,
He's obviously got an extraordinarily powerful sex drive and he is on the run from the police.
his behavior up to the point where the first woman disappears this is jean couche who i think is the most important case of them all and the one that the police neglected in terms of trying to figure out what was really going on up until that point i think you can say that his behavior looks rational in terms of the kind of actions that he took i mean he
He wanted to sleep with her. He wanted to stay away from the police because he would have been deported. And you can see a rational pattern to me. And I talk about this at the end of the book, his behavior after he murders her.
is completely different. It's like he doesn't really follow the logic of a marriage swindler. So he pursues women first who don't have any money at all. There are some who he could have pursued sooner, who he puts to one side, and his behavior just gets odder and odder during the war. So I suppose my sort of answer to your question is that I think to try and theorize too much about
sticking a label on him, if you like, is very difficult. But I think if you look at the pattern of his behavior, it becomes madder and madder. And the point for me where he does, using the expression of the psychiatrist, he does cross the frontiers of madness, is after the first woman disappears. That sounds very wise indeed. And we know that he killed at least 11 people.
You mentioned that the police's estimate of him meeting over 200 women is far too low. But how many do you think he killed? And how did he go about actually killing these innocent people?
Okay, well that's quite a big question to answer in a short space of time. The first thing I'd say is that the problem they had, which might not be true today with modern DNA evidence, is they simply didn't have any forensic evidence that they could connect to the women who had disappeared. All they had to go on was some charred bone debris, very, very small fragments which were found beneath a pile of leaves in his garden at Gombe, which
which was certainly proof of foul play, but one couldn't necessarily connect them with the women.
Do you then have this second issue, which is why 11? And could it have been more? Well, the 11 were the, which included the son of the first woman who he killed. There was a list that was found in his notebook where he'd written out very carefully the names or easily decipherable code names of these women. And I think that the police,
it made life easy for them. They were understaffed. They just wanted to send Landry to the guillotine. And they assumed from that, that that must have been the only 11 who were killed. But the problem with that is that there's some very, very strong witness testimony that suggests that he must have killed more women than that. So that's the first point, that there are people who see him, one in particular, a doctor, who sees him depositing
what is almost certainly the corpse or part of the corpse of a woman in a pond in a forest near Gambe. And the problem the police have is that the time this happens doesn't fit the disappearances of the 11 people on the list in his notebook.
We haven't got enough time to go into other witness testimony, but it's in my book. And I think you can prove beyond doubt, beyond reasonable doubt, that he must have killed others. Now, the second reason why I feel that very strongly is there are huge chronological gaps in the record, which the police never owned up to.
where they really didn't know from one month to the next what Landry was doing. And the pretense that was made at his trial was that the carne, the notebook, was a complete record of his movements during the war. And it just isn't true because he didn't buy it until a full year into the war. He didn't start making detailed notes in it until 1916. And even then you can prove from witnesses who pop up
who are not mentioned in the carne. There's no way that you can sort of find them in the carne in his own notes, the notebook. There must have been others. And I think what I would say is that the last reason why he must have killed more, and if you're asking me for a figure, I would say it's at least double the number, given his opportunity, is buried in the Paris police archives is a document that was
has been there for the last century, but I've never seen sighted anywhere else and it didn't come up at his trial, which is an internal police report owning up to the fact that they failed to trace 72 women whom he was known to have made "romantic contact with." The facade was that they identified all-- the pretense was that they'd identified all 283 women
which included the 10 who were on the murder charge sheet who had disappeared. The reality is that there were 72. They never managed to trace because they'd used false names. They couldn't find the right address. And in the end, they just gave up. Now, that doesn't mean he killed all 72 of them, but there were huge gaps in the record. And I guess, Thomas, the last thing I would say is the assumption was always that he'd only killed women at these two houses. And
And that, again, I think there's some circumstantial evidence I talk about in my book where I think it's quite possible he was killing other women in Paris at the same time. Very fascinating indeed. And I think we're going to extend the interview just a little bit because I must know about this Marie Lacoste.
Is that your name, the woman that cornered Landru? Is. And I talked about her a little in passing at the beginning, but she is, to me, the most impressive character in the whole book, really, the whole story. And she's a very humble housemaid working in Paris with a much older sister called Celestine, who's a widow.
And Celestine is, she answers a Lonely Hearts advert placed by Landru in 1915. And when Marie, her sister, meets Landru, who's under an alias, obviously, he's calling himself Monsieur Frémillet.
She's instantly suspicious and thinks that he's probably a marriage swindler. And she gets to know him really quite well because Landry does not go after Celestine for quite a long time, like two years. But he still kind of keeps her on a string. And now Celestine has actually got a bit of money in savings.
And step by step, Marie sort of checks him out and thinks he's very, very suspicious. And there comes a point in August 1917 where he invites both Celestine and Marie down to his country house near Gambay. Marie has got the servant, the maid. She has got her week's annual leave. I'm fairly sure that he was planning to kill her as well because he was very suspicious of her.
And I think in the end he got second thoughts. But he goes away while they're down there and she does some snooping, Marie, and she finds nearly the evidence, I think, of other murders at this house because she tries to see what is going on in a locked shed at the bottom of the garden. And she can just make out some dark shapes which look like bundles or packages, but she can't open the door.
To cut a long story short, she falls out with Celestine because she discovers that Landru has been raiding Celestine's bank account. The two sisters are not on speaking terms really when they come back to Paris. Celestine then next day goes back on a one-way ticket to Gambay and disappears. She's murdered.
And that is the start of a long pursuit by Marie of Landru. It's a kind of on-off pursuit. He is also pursuing her because he wants to kill her. He's so worried about her going to the police. And he tries to lure her to an apartment in Paris, which is her sister's apartment, which he knows is empty. And she declines several invitations to dinner.
In the end, sometime later, she does go to the apartment and discovers it's empty. She assembles a dossier. This is just a housemaid, semi-literate, and she assembles this very, very detailed dossier, goes to the Paris police. The Paris police say, you've got to go down to Gambay. She writes this really very moving letter to the mayor of
gambay saying here's all this information you can you go and check out what's going on at the house i think my sister's possibly been killed she doesn't quite say that but she comes close enough and he writes back and says i can't help you because the name she's given is in fact not the name that he knows this man as living under at the house because laundry's alias in gambay was dupont
But again, to compress things a little, he does give her the address of this other sister who's made a similar inquiry with him and they join forces. And it's really because of them, but principally because of the maid, that he is arrested. And even the arrest is not because of the police. It's because a friend who works in the same house as Marie, the maid, she's another little housemaid,
And she spots Landry by chance in a crockery shop on the Rue de Rivoli. And she's seen him before coming to the house where they work to try and get Marie to go to dinner. And she doesn't like him. And she pursues him, fears that he has spotted her, goes back, tells Marie. Marie calls the police. And that is why Landry is eventually arrested. It has absolutely nothing to do with good police work and absolutely everything to do with this incident.
housemaid who's a very very intrepid detective a very fascinating case and a very early tale of a female heroine refreshing in a field usually dominated by male detectives
Right. So, before we round off, we simply must go brief into Landru's eventual arrest and trial and execution. You mention in your book that his defense attorney was very diligent in his job. Can you elaborate?
Well, his defense attorney was a Corsican. He was called Vincent de Moreau Giaferi. Everybody called him Moreau, so I will as well. And he's really the most famous lawyer in France. He is also a passionate opponent of the death penalty. And that is the reason he takes Landry's case, because he is convinced that there is not sufficient evidence to send Landry to the guillotine
And he also feels that he can construct a defense where he makes it easy for the jury because Landrieu is under, there are so many charges of theft and fraud against him, including from before the First World War and also his thefts from the women.
who disappear. What Moro says is that you can acquit him of the murder charges and he will still be sent to a brutal penal colony. In fact, in the French Caribbean, where Dreyfus, Captain Dreyfus was sent. And he's really saying to the jury, look, he's going to be killed anyway by this regime, but don't send him to the guillotine.
And Morrow's defense nearly works because he has such a powerful case in the sense that the direct evidence, the clear, direct evidence of murder is just not there. Even the prosecuting attorney confesses to the jury in his closing speech that he has no idea how Landry killed these women. No idea.
how he disposed of their bodies. All he has, this is the prosecuting attorney, all he has is hypotheses. And the main one is that Landru burnt the remains in this little kitchen oven that he had and possibly disposed of some of their remains in the fields and forests around Gambe.
I think that last bit is probably true, but that's about as far as they got in terms of direct evidence. What they have is a huge amount of circumstantial evidence that he's killed them in the form of all the possessions that he's kept, which he stashes in this garage in Clichy, this suburb.
But Landrieu is absolutely adamant he's innocent. I mean, I think by the end, he really does believe he's innocent because he's so mad. And the verdict, it's tremendously close, really, because the verdict is only a majority verdict at nine to three. That doesn't sound very close, but.
It's quite clear that the jury were really in two minds about some of the things that were said after the trial. But in the end, the appeal for clemency fails and Landru is executed in this really extraordinary, well, all executions, I suppose you could say are extraordinary, but he's guillotined outside the prison in Versailles, just next to the court, courtroom in Versailles, where he was tried on the street.
But it doesn't quite go according to plan because what they had forgotten about, I shouldn't really laugh about these things, but it was so incompetently organized that they had forgotten that the local tram company would be running a tram with workers going to the morning shift.
that morning and they had to pause and let the tram go past the guillotine before they could let Landru out to be executed. And the other rather macabre thing, which is quite difficult to sort of reconstruct exactly what happened, but there was definitely a pause after the assistant executioners withdrew and there's Landru basically waiting to have his head chopped off.
And the executioner, France's official executioner, a man called Daibler, he waits. And there are journalists who can't quite see what's going on because they've been put behind the barricade. But he either waits because something goes wrong with the mechanics of the guillotine or possibly because he's just relishing the moment. And one journalist who may have been exaggerating said seven seconds before the blade dropped. Others said four seconds. But that's quite a long time.
if you're waiting to be executed. So it's a pretty desperate end as well. A very brutal end, and luckily we don't have the death penalty in Europe anymore.
So that's this tale of the French blue beard. And let's move on to more cheery topics before we round off. I ask all my guests this. Have you listened to my podcast? I have. I've listened to one on Jack the Ripper. Ah, what did you think about it?
Very good. I think the mystery of who Jack the Ripper was is still out there for somebody to discover. But it's I mean, Landru is is I have to come back to Landru because he's always seen in France as being their their equivalent of Jack the Ripper. I mean, he has the same kind of mythic status in France. But of course, the difference is that people still don't know who Jack the Ripper was. I mean, there are lots of theories, but they never really got to the bottom of it.
They never did, and probably never will. But we do know who Landru is, and perhaps I will do a more extensive...
special episode on Landru later in 2019 because this has been a very fascinating interview and my interest has been very much piqued and I also plan on reading your very very excellent book Landru's Secret in full and I recommend all my listeners do as well where can they purchase your excellent book
Well, it's published in England by Pen and Sword, and you'll find me on Pen and Sword's website. So that's Landru's Secret by Richard Tomlinson on Pen and Sword. It's also available on Amazon, Amazon in Europe and in America. So you just have to tap in Landru's Secret and it will come up with my name, Richard Tomlinson.
That's great. And do you have any upcoming projects similar to the Landru case? Not at the moment. It's been a pretty exhausting project. So I'm just actually seeing through the publication and then I'll have another think. Fantastic. Well, Richard, it has been a thorough pleasure talking to you. And I thank you for coming on the show, even though I put you on a bit longer than we originally thought.
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