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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how. Episode 146. I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Roseland Weyborg Thug.
As promised, this is the second episode released in two weeks, as compensation to my dear listeners, since I had to skip a scheduled episode due to a loss in the family. Last episode, the second in this saga, detailed how Marcel Pétillon was sentenced to spend time in an insane asylum before being released after just seven months.
Tonight, join me as we delve into the very pit of depravity, figuratively and literally. Our journey still takes us to France and its capital Paris, but now we can finally set our feet in the Rue Lesseur and witness the horrors revealed there. Enjoy. As always, I want to publicly thank my elite TSK Producers Club.
There are now thirty-two dignified members of exquisite taste, and their names are
Ann, Brenda, Cassandra, Christy, Cody, Colleen, Corbin, Fawn, Gilly, James, Jennifer, Juliet, Caitlin, Kathy, Kylie, Libby, Lisa, Lisbeth, Madeline, Meow, Mickey, Monica, Nicole, Russell, Sabina, Samira, Scott, Skortnia, Shauna, Tony, Trent, Val,
Vaughn, and Zosia. 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.
As mentioned in the last episode, going forward, all TSK episodes will be available 100% ad-free to my TSK Producers Club on patreon.com slash theserialkillerpodcast. No generic ads, no ad reads, no jingles. I promise.
And of course, if you wish to donate $15 a month, that's only $7.50 per episode, you are more than welcome to join the ranks of the TSK Producers Club too. So don't miss out and join now. Imagine if you will, they are listening. France on the 25th of June, 1941.
Nine months earlier, France had on the 3rd of September 1939 declared war on Germany. The French government did this following the German invasion of Poland. Following this, the Germans invaded Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands on the 10th of May 1940.
and German forces completely defeated the Allies in France on the date in question, the 25th of June. France was conquered. Perhaps you had seen Hitler's cortege of huge Mercedes limos driving up the Champs-Élysées on a few days earlier, on the 14th of June, as Paris fell into German hands.
"'Next to you is standing a striking-looking middle-aged man. "'He has a dark beard and dark features, "'dressed in expensive but somewhat filthy clothes. "'He too looks on as the Nazi stormtroopers march triumphantly passing you, "'but instead of a look of terror and defeat in his face, "'you see gleaming eyes and what might have been a smile.'
On the 6th of March, 1944, thick, greasy, foul-smelling smoke began pouring from the chimney of an elegant private house at 21 Rue Lesseur in Paris. It was a three-story, 19th-century building with stables and courtyard located in the wealthy 16th arrondissement.
The building was the former residence of Princess Maria Colorado de Mansfeld, who had moved out in 1930 and allowed dust and dilapidation to take over. Since its purchase in 1941 by a Dr. Marcel Petillon, the building had remained uninhabited, though neighbors noticed several curious events.
Almost every day, a man on a bicycle, dressed like a workman, arrived towing a wagon. Two trucks had come during the previous year. One of them unloaded 47 suitcases, and the other unloaded 30 or 40 heavy sacks inside the double coach door. Otherwise, no one entered or left the building.
Neighbors would later tell police that a horse-drawn cart had stopped in the street at 11.30 every night for the previous six months. They believed it had stopped at number 21, and some even reported hearing the doors open and close. However, since it was wartime and the city was blacked out at that hour for fear of Allied bombings, nothing was actually seen.
The smoke increased in volume over the next few days, and on Saturday, the 11th of March, a contrary breeze kept a suffocating stench in the Rue Lesseur, hovering at the level of Madame Andrée Marseille's fifth-floor apartment across the street. When her husband returned from work that evening, she insisted that he do something about it.
Jacques Marseille knocked at No. 21 several times before noticing the worn paper fastened to the door. It read, and I quote, Away for one month. Forward mail to 18 Rue des Lombards in Auxerre. At 6.25 p.m., Monsieur Marseille telephoned the police.
Two uniformed, bicycle-mounted policemen, Constables Joseph Tessier and Emile Fillon, tried the door and shuttered windows, then made inquiries at the neighboring houses. The concierge next door told them No. 21 was owned by Dr. Marcel Petillon, who lived just about one kilometer across Paris at 66 Rue Comartin.
She even had his telephone number. Pigalle, 7711. Constable Tessier ran to the Cocodile, a café on the corner, and phoned the doctor's home. A woman, who identified herself as Madame Pétion, answered and passed a receiver to her husband. The man asked the constable if he had entered the building. When he was told, the police had not, even though they suspected there being a fire,
He asked Tessier to not take any action. The doctor said he would be down within fifteen minutes with a key. Half an hour later, no one had arrived. The smoke grew worse, and the firemen were eventually caught. Fire chief Avila Boudringin climbed to a second-floor window, pried open the shutters, smashed a windowpane, and entered with a few men.
After searching the upper floors, they followed the stench to the basement. When they emerged from the coach door, several minutes later, one of the young firemen leaned against the doorway and vomited. A pale and shaken Baudringin stepped up to the two policemen and said, and I quote, "'Gentlemen, I think you have some work ahead of you.'" End quote.
Three men entered the ill-smelling building together, Constable Tessier, Constable Fillon, and a civil defense officer who chanced to be passing by, walked down into the basement. Down there, in the darkness, only barely lit by one roaring coal-burning stove, they found what must have appeared like hell on earth incarnate.
the second stove on the left was cold but the smaller one to the right was roaring with intense fire a human hand slender and by all appearances female dangled from the open door flames licking it like tattered fabric
as they turned from the light of the fire the three officers discerned a pile of coal and the bottom steps of the staircase they had walked down had something lying on its bottom steps as they looked closer
They saw the steps were littered by a decapitated head, several skulls, decapitated arms, two nearly complete skeletons, shattered rib cages, sawn off feet, sawn off hands, sawn off jaw bones, large chunks of unrecognizable flesh, and a quantity of small bones.
The men didn't say much, as they were stunned by the sheer horror of the human abattoir. Hurriedly they left, and Tessier again ran to the Café Cocodile, this time to call his superiors. As Constable Tessier was returning after calling his superiors, a hatless man in a grey overcoat rode up on a green bicycle and dismounted in front of No. 21.
He was in his early to mid-forties, with piercing eyes of such dark brown as to look black. He seemed surprised to find the doors to the building ajar, but with an air of confidence and authority, approached Constable Fillon and identified himself as the brother of the building's owner. The two constables led the man into the building.
There, he began climbing the steps toward the main floor, but they quickly motioned him downstairs into the basement instead. Gazing calmly at a litter of human remains in the basement, the man said, and I quote, "'This is serious. My head may be at stake.'"
The policemen were scarcely surprised. They accompanied the man back to the street to escape the smell of decayed and burning flesh. The man turned to them, asked if they were loyal Frenchmen. Constable Tessier indignantly asked the reason for this strange and offensive question. The man, who naturally was none other than Dr. Marcel Pétillon himself, said, and again I quote,
The bodies you have seen are those of Germans and traitors to our country. I assume you have already notified your superiors, and that the Germans will soon learn of your discovery. I am the head of our resistance group, and I have three hundred files at my home which must be destroyed before the enemy finds them."
By March 1944, Paris had already suffered nearly four years under the occupation and German military rule. There were two Gestapo officers in the neighborhood of the Rue Lesseur, and a brothel reserved for German officers was just around the corner. The man spoke with conviction,
and it seemed obvious to the French policemen that the carnage was the result of systematic executions by an organized group. Constable Tessier tipped his cap to what he now thought was a fellow patriot, and advised him to flee, promising not to mention the visit when his superiors arrived. Thus,
Dr. Marcel Pétillon climbed back on his bicycle and rode off into the night. Once again, his cunning intellect and calculating calm mind had managed to do justice official. Brigadier Henri Chanel soon arrived with three men from the local police station and, after briefly inspecting the still-burning stove, ordered the firemen back to their station.
He called the police commissaire for the quarter of Porte Dauphin and the appropriate judicial authorities. The commissaire arrived 15 minutes later and promptly called back the firemen to extinguish the stove and remove some of the remains. He then examined the rest of the building.
Upon first entering the double front door of 21 Rue Lesseur, one came to a short, vaulted passageway. Steps to the right of the passage led into the ground floor of the house. But if one continued straight along the corridor for about 10 meters, one arrived in a flagstone-covered courtyard surrounded by the building on three sides and a four-story wall on the other.
The yard was thus totally concealed from the neighbor's view. The house was large and had once been elegant, with six bedrooms, a spacious dining room and basement kitchen, half a dozen salons, another large room, and a library. It was presently in a state of filthy disrepair.
And it was obvious no one had lived there for many years. A thick coat of dust covered everything, and most of the rooms were crammed with an incredible assortment of furniture, art objects, chandeliers, and gadgets stored in chaotic piles.
The outbuildings, located on the opposite side of the court from the main body of the house, and connected on two floors by a narrow passage, had originally housed the stables and the servants' quarters. A second library was there now, as well as the only clean and orderly spot in the place, a doctor's consultation room.
The commissaire found it odd that with dozens of large rooms in the house from which to choose, the owner had decided to repair a cramped L-shaped passageway. It was only circa two meters wide and situated between a staircase, a storeroom, and the stable.
The room had been neatly furnished, with a cabinet full of medical supplies and knick-knacks, a tidy desk, a small round table and two comfortable armchairs.
Whoa, easy there. Yeah.
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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. In the garage next to the consultation room, the commissaire discovered a pile of quicklime. The pile was circa four meters long, three meters wide, and one meter in height at its peak.
Interspersed throughout the pile were fragments of flesh and bone, among which he recognized a jawbone and a detached human scalp. In the adjacent stable, he found a former manure pit. A block and tackle was rigged above it and a wooden ladder propped inside.
Leaning over, the commissaire discovered it was half filled with several more cubic meters of lime than human remains. On a landing of the staircase leading from the courtyard down to the basement, he found a canvas sack containing a headless human body. It had been sliced neatly in half lengthwise.
complete but for the foot and internal organs. At the bottom of the stairs, next to the mound of coal and corpses, was a hatchet, covered with rust-colored stains, and a short distance away, a shovel.
On this evening, in 1944, Commissaire Georges Massou was awakened to investigate what he was later to call, and I quote, the greatest criminal affair of the century, end quote.
Thirty minutes later, Massou arrived at the Rue Le Serre with his son Bernard, a seventeen-year-old law student who worked as a part-time inspector under his father whenever there was a case more interesting than his studies.
Masu stared at the piles of remains. He took off his overcoat and climbed into the pit. The bones crunched sickeningly under his shoes, and his trousers became covered with lime. In the basement kitchen, he noticed that the large double sink was just long enough for an outstretched body.
and that its sloping bottom was steep enough for blood to flow down without coagulating before reaching the drain. Meanwhile, the other investigators had found, joined to the consultation room by a small corridor, a triangular chamber. It was roughly two meters on the short side, three meters on the longest, and completely empty.
that is, except for eight heavy iron rings, fixed in one wall and a naked light bulb attached to the ceiling. Opposite the entrance was a double wooden door, and beside it an electric doorbell. Given the layout of the building, the doors presumably led to a street in the rear, but when Masu forced them open, he found that they were attached to a solid wall.
The wires of the bell led nowhere. A zealous policeman began to remove the room's wallpaper and was rewarded by the discovery of the wide end of a spyglass, such as those placed in apartment doors to identify visitors. The eyepiece was just over two meters off the ground in the stable on the other side of the wall.
Next to it were two light switches, one for the stable itself, the other for the triangular room. As an experiment, Bernard Massu positioned himself between the eight iron rings in the room as though lashed to them. Through the viewer on the stable, the commissaire saw his son's enlarged face perfectly framed in the field of vision.
On his way to the stable, Georges Massou noticed that the door to the triangular room had no knob on the inside. As yet, there was no indication of who the victims might be, nor why they had been killed. Perhaps Petillon had lashed his victims to the ruins, then watched their death agonies from the stable.
The room seemed arranged especially for this purpose, though the viewer was placed inconveniently high. The white plaster wall of the stable was unblemished by dirt from the face and hands of appearing observer, and most puzzling of all, the wallpaper had obviously been placed over the lens many years ago.
There were no marks indicating a captive trying to escape the triangular room, nor any signs of struggle in it or elsewhere. There were no poisons or drugs in the consultation room, no needles, no gas, nothing of use to a murderer, to Massoud and everyone else involved. This would remain the most puzzling aspect of the Pétillant affair.
and no one would ever discover how the victims were killed or what purpose was served by the triangular rule. The latter, which the press found the most sinister and horrifying aspect of the case, and around which they spun the most gruesome hypotheses.
Personally, I do not like to speculate too much, as my dear constant listeners are apt to know by now. But this case is so intriguing that I feel I would be doing my listeners a disservice if I did not at least present a few hypotheses of my own regarding the triangular room.
The eight rings in the room were obviously placed in order to chain a human being firmly upright to the wall, even if the victim became unconscious. A major problem with the police investigation into the case was that it was undertaken in the midst of World War II, and thus resources were tight.
Forensic science was, as I mentioned earlier, extremely rudimentary compared to what police have at their disposal today. For example, it was never determined whether the iron rings had blood spatter on them, or if the wall they were attached to had trace evidence of blood. Knowing what we know about Petillon's lifelong deviant behavior,
I hypothesize that Pétillant had used the room for a very long time. Eventually he grew tired of its use and lay new wallpaper over the peephole, but left the room alone otherwise. When the room was in use, I think it reasonable to suggest that Pétillant forcibly fastened his victims to the rings in the wall himself. Perhaps he had drugged his victim first, so that he could easily secure them.
When the victim woke up, the first thing they would see was Pétillon's enlarged face grinning at them from the peephole. Since the door to the room lacked a way to open from the inside, it might also be the case that Pétillon would release his victims from their bondage to the wall from time to time, perhaps to prolong their suffering. As they lay naked in the cramped room,
Petiot's dark face occasionally glaring down at them from the peephole, they would scream for help, but the room was virtually soundproof. The fact that there were no traces of claw marks at the door from the inside suggests that the victims were either bound behind their backs or had been told that they would be hurt if they tried to force the door.
Petillon was in no way a man who cared about cleanliness. Except for the fake consulting room, the place was unbelievably filthy. If Petillon had butchered his victims inside the triangular room, it would have been covered in bloodstains. It wasn't.
Thus I surmise that the room was either used as a psychological torture place or used to kill people by simply locking up victims and watching them die of thirst. The latter takes about three days and is one of the most painful ways to die imaginable. Dying of hunger is also very unpleasant
But dying of thirst is far more immediate and physically painful. As dehydration begins, there is an extreme thirst, dry mouth and thick saliva.
The patient becomes dizzy, faint, and unable to stand or sit, has severe cramping in the arms and legs as the sodium and potassium concentrations in the body goes up as fluids go down. In misery, the patient-slash-victim tries to cry, but there are no tears.
The victim experiences severe abdominal cramps, nausea and dry heaving as the stomach and intestines dry out. By now the skin and lips are cracking and the tongue is swollen. The nose may bleed as the mucous membranes dry out and break down. The skin loses elasticity, thins and wrinkles.
The hands and feet become cold as the remaining fluids in the circulatory system are shunted to the vital organs in an attempt to stay alive. The person stops urinating and has severe headaches as their brain shrinks from lack of fluids. The patient becomes anxious but then gets progressively more lethargic.
Some patients have hallucinations and seizures as their body chemistry becomes even more imbalanced. This proceeds to coma before death occurs. The final event, as the blood pressure becomes almost undetectable, is a major heart arrhythmia that stops the heart from pumping blood.
By 1.30 a.m., Massoud had learned all he could at the scene and was about to leave with two inspectors for Pétillon's apartment at 66 Rue Comartin when a telegram arrived from police headquarters. It read, and I quote, Order from German authorities. Arrest Pétillon. Dangerous lunatic. End quote.
Word had filtered up through the hierarchy, and the Gestapo had communicated this enigmatic order to the director of the police judiciaire. Massoud hesitated. At the time of the occupation, the French police had been faced with the choice of abandoning their posts or remaining at them under German rule.
The first alternative would have compelled the enemy to use its own soldiers as policemen. The latter, the police reasoned, kept civil disputes among Frenchmen and, incidentally, left room for sabotage. The Germans, however, did not adhere strictly to their agreement to leave domestic crimes to the French police.
Thus, the French police found themselves forced to chase so-called criminals and terrorists whose only crime was allegiance to France, i.e., members of the Résistance.
The unofficial policy of the French police was due to all this to display considerable oversight, slowness and error when investigating cases the Gestapo showed particular interest in. The next morning, the police deliberately wanted to waste several hours on irrelevant details of the case.
They seemed in no hurry to capture Pétillon, who they still thought was an agent of the resistance. As they knew 21 Rue Le Cerf had previously belonged to the Princess Colorado de Mansfeld, they went to find the princess.
Her house on the Rue de la Fessanderie had been requisitioned by the Secretary of the Navy, and it was some time before they tracked down the 67-year-old princess on the Avenue de Friedland. She informed them that she had lived at the Rue Le Seur from 1924 to 1930. Subsequently, some of her friends had lived there.
The actress Cécile Sorel had also used it to store her costumes. The princess told them she had sold the building to Dr. Petillon via the Simon Agency in 1941 and had not seen him since signing the agreement of sale. An express letter had been found at 21 Rue Lesseur addressed to Camille, asking him to come fetch his delivery cart.
Inspectors soon persuaded themselves that they believed Pétillon had sublet his luxurious house to a deliveryman. They spent two hours tracking down the sender of the letter, Raymond Lyon, and the intended recipient, Camille Van Der Heijden, who worked with him at the Maison Lepesmeh.
Lyon, not knowing his fellow employee's exact address, had randomly written 21, whereas van der Heyden actually lived in a small apartment at 20 Rue Lesseur.
There the man was nursing a head cold when the police made their dramatic, almost comedic entrance. Camille had never even heard of Petillon, and it took the police some time to make him understand why they were there. They did not tell him they were there only to waste time, but they were.
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And with that, we come to the end of part three of this serialized expose of Dr. Marcel Petillon. Next episode, number 147 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 theserialkillarpodcast, 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.