Read Online The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot by Thomas Maeder - Free Book Online

evidence and hush up the matter; Nézondet claimed he had refused to do this and had threatened to go to the police at the end of the war.
    Nézondet was now confronted with Madame Turpault, and he said that she, too, was inventing fabulous stories, even though much of her tale closely resembled Porchon’s testimony. Madame Turpault stubbornly stuck to her earlier statement, and added that Maurice Petiot had asked Nézondet to help him build a wall to conceal the cadavers. On March 22, Nézondet, unable to hold out any longer, announced that Porchon and Turpault were telling the truth and that he would now tell the whole story. His version, which Judge Berry’s clerk copied down and added to the rest, was as follows.
    In November or December 1943, while Petiot was still in prison at Fresnes, Nézondet met Maurice at the Hôtel Alicot, the same hotel where Georgette later stopped while in flight to Auxerre. Maurice was pale and trembling. He told Nézondet: “I have just come from my brother’s house. There’s enough there to have us all shot.”
    â€œEnough what?” Nézondet asked. “An arms cache? A secret transmitter?”
    â€œI wish that’s all it was,” Maurice replied. “The journeys to South America begin and end at the rue Le Sueur. There are bodies piled in a pit, with their hair and eyebrows shaved off. I found a book where he [Marcel] wrote down the names of his victims; there must have been fifty or sixty of them.” Maurice described to Nézondet the method of killing. A syringe filled with poison was somehow arranged so that it could be operated from a distance, though Nézondet did not recall the formula of the poison Maurice allegedly described, and his own descriptions of the syringe, which in some of his varying statements he claimed Maurice said had been mounted in the false doorbell in the triangular room, were incomprehensible. No mounting of any kind was found in the doorbell. Nézondet added that Maurice had also mentioned finding large quantities of clothing at the rue Le Sueur, both civilian apparel of all kinds and German army uniforms. Maurice had packed everything into crates and taken the stuff away in a five-ton truck.
    A few weeks after Maurice recounted this horror story, Nézondet continued, Georgette Petiot and her son Gérard came to Nézondet’s apartment for dinner. Sometime during the evening she mentioned that the accusations the Germans leveled against her husband were really not very serious, and she expected his release shortly. Nézondet drew her away from Gérard. Without mentioning Maurice’s name, he informed her of the bodies at the rue Le Sueur. She fainted three times and threatened to commit suicide. Nézondet, with a peculiar notion of assuagement and tact, advised her to get a divorce and find a lover. When Georgette pulled herself together she went to Maurice, who was in Paris on business, and recounted Nézondet’s incredible story. Nézondet was summoned by them the next day to explain himself. Maurice now feigned ignorance of the whole matter, according to Nézondet, and so he remained silent. He assumed Maurice’s attitude must mean he wished to protect his sister-in-law from knowledge that might endanger her sanity. When Judge Berry questioned Aimée Lesage, who had been present at the dinner, she supported everything her lover had said about the evening’s events. She suspected Madame Petiot had contrived her fainting spells and was really neither so surprised nor horrified as she seemed.
    Georgette Petiot told Judge Berry that this 1943 incident really had happened, but that when Nézondet refused to repeat his extraordinary claims in front of Maurice she had concluded that he was lying. When he had suggested she take a lover she thought he was offering himself for the role, and she surmised that his slanders against her husband were only a weird means of