Dr Marcel Petiot

A 49-year-old physician and member of the resistance who wascharged with murdering twenty-seven people at his Paris house.

Attention was drawn to the doctor’s activities in March 1944 by the foul-smellingsmoke emitted from the chimney at 21 rue Lesueur. In the basement of the house policefound a furnace fuelled with the dismembered remains of twenty-seven bodies.

Dr Petiot had fled, but the police caught up with him nine months later. He freelyadmitted to killing sixty-three persons, alleging that they were traitorous Nazicollaborators.

Twenty-one rue Lesueur, was a death-house which, in addition to the basement furnace,contained a sound-proofed room with a spyhole. The purpose of this, claimed theprosecution at Petiot’s trial, was to obtain money. It was alleged that he promisedto arrange escape routes out of German-occupied France for wealthy Jews. Among theexhibits in court were forty-seven suitcases which contained over 1,500 items of clothing- most with identification marks removed.

The doctor’s attitude in court was to bluster. His extraordinary career andbackground were brought out by the prosecution. Against this shady past, however, had tobe set his achievements in setting up a wealthy Paris medical practice and of becoming asmall-town mayor.

Petiot’s profits from his wartime escape route were estimated at over a millionpounds, but the doctor insisted that he had only killed members of the Gestapo. The jury,bearing in mind the facilities in the death house at rue Lesueur and the ominous contentsof the forty-seven suitcases, did not believe him. He was found guilty, and sentenced todeath. Flippant to the last, he is said to have asked to relieve himself before executionand when refused, added that when one w