Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris by David King

Author:David King
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780307452917
Publisher: Crown Publishers
Published: 2011-09-20T10:00:00+00:00

AFTER this unofficial interrogation, Captain Simonin handed Petiot over to the Police Judiciaire. The following day, Simonin would himself be brought before an official purge tribunal that examined cases of suspected collaboration. It was a five-minute hearing. Receiving a guilty verdict, Simonin was ousted from his position in intelligence. He disappeared. Years later, when he reemerged, he was convinced that his punishment had emanated from a certain faction that sought revenge for his arrest of Marcel Petiot.

Petiot, in the meantime, was met at the Police Judiciaire by Lucien Pinault, Commissaire Massu’s successor, and Ferdinand Gollety, the juge d’instruction, the examining magistrate, who, in French law, conducts pretrial questioning, summons the witnesses, and compiles the dossier. Then, if he finds sufficient reason, the juge d’instruction forwards the evidence to the public prosecutor to draw up the indictment. Gollety, a short man from Boulogne-sur-Mer, on the northern coast, was regarded as a rational, no-nonsense magistrate with a scrupulous regard for detail. He was also a thirty-two-year-old official in his first posting.

The defendant was, at this point, required only to declare his identity, not make a statement. Petiot made one anyway:

My conscience does not reproach me in the least. I am proud of what I did as a patriot. If I have not obeyed all civil laws, I have obeyed the laws of war. Otherwise, the occupation imposed certain precautions on me. Among my comrades in combat, fifty knew my true identity. It required only one of fifty to denounce me, and one did.

Petiot also retained as his legal counsel a rising star in the world of criminal defense, the forty-one-year-old Sorbonne-trained Maître René Edmond Floriot. “A demon for detail,” Floriot had already defended Petiot in the two narcotics cases of 1942. Petiot had first seen Floriot’s talents firsthand in 1937, when the attorney successfully defended one of his patients, Magda Fontages, for attempted murder of the French ambassador to Italy, Count Charles de Chambrun. Fontages was also known for seducing many powerful men, including Benito Mussolini, who at the height of passion liked to rip off her black silk scarf and pretend to strangle her.

Pretrial questioning would be an elaborate process that would ultimately last fourteen months. It would not begin for another thirty-six hours, however, as it was already late in the evening of the 31st and November 1 was a public holiday. Petiot was taken to cell 7 of Sector 7 of Prison de la Santé, a large gray building constructed in 1867 in the 14th arrondissement. Petiot would join many suspected collaborators, Gestapo agents, black market profiteers, and other people who were accused of benefiting from the German Occupation. Petiot’s sector was reserved for prisoners on death row.

“I have been a member of the Resistance since the Germans first arrived in Paris,” Petiot said in his first official interrogation on November 2, 1944. He would repeat many of the claims he had made to Captain Simonin, but also add a few details. He had issued false certificates of disability

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