On the morning of July 29, 1976, Bernard Pesquet, a house painter of fifty-four, called at the apartment of a retired couple in Neuilly-sur-Seine, on the western edge of Paris. Emile and Alice Bergaud had hired him to repaint. He was in debt again. He shot them both with a 7.65 mm gun, and their servant, Alfeia Borgioni, and walked out with cash and valuables. Nobody stopped him. When Commissioner Claude Cancès of the Paris criminal police reached the scene, the investigators found that Alice Bergaud had received a letter from Pesquet announcing that he was coming.
The next day officers went to his house at Pierrelaye, in the Val-d'Oise, to take a statement. They learned that he had already served twenty years for murder, and took him into custody on the spot. Jewelry and gold bars belonging to the Bergauds were found in his home. He said nothing about Neuilly.
The investigators were also interested in a disappearance. Christiane Pesquet, his wife, nineteen years younger than he was (some accounts say twenty), had not been seen since November 1974. On August 11, 1976 they dug again at Pierrelaye and found her skeleton buried in the lower basement, and beside it the decomposing body of Henri Francqui, a real estate agent who had vanished that spring. Faced with them, Pesquet confessed to both killings. The press named him the Landru of the Val-d'Oise.
He had killed before, at nineteen. Born on March 18, 1922 at Heugleville-sur-Scie in Normandy, he was raised after his mother's death by a grandfather, trained as a radio electrician, and was known in his Rouen neighborhood as the little electrician. During the German occupation he was made to do repair work for the occupying forces. In 1941 he began an affair with a young man in his twenties, Julien Quibel (the name also appears as Quivel). At about eleven on the night of August 22, 1941, he beat Quibel to death with an iron bar and cut his veins with a razor. Arrested three days later, he confessed on the third day of custody, saying he had killed for Quibel's savings and because Quibel was a collaborator.
Because he was a minor, he escaped the guillotine. On November 8, 1941 he was sentenced to hard labor for life, a sentence that then carried no possibility of release. He survived the hunger of wartime prisons, retracted his confession, and had a request for review rejected in July 1945. When penal labor was abolished in 1960 his sentence became life with the possibility of parole, and as a model prisoner he was released on October 12, 1961, at thirty-nine, after twenty years. He said he was happy finally to be able to build a life, and he became a self-employed painter.
He met Christiane Ruaux in the mid-1960s and married her in December 1968. From the early 1970s she left home whenever they quarreled, and in 1974 she learned of his criminal record and of his relationships with men and told him she wanted to leave. On November 23, 1974 he ambushed her and shot her, left her to die, and buried her under three feet of earth in the basement. He told the neighbors she had run off again, and in January 1975 wrote to her parents that their daughter had turned out fickle, selfish and a spendthrift, and that he was sorry she had gone. A missing-person inquiry was opened because of a family loan she had not repaid, and was closed.
Henri Francqui came to Pierrelaye in April 1976 to try, not for the first time, to buy the house. The sources differ on the day, April 10 or April 30, and on his age, fifty-two or sixty-eight. Pesquet shot him, buried him in the basement beside Christiane, then used his checkbook to buy groceries and sold his car. The accounts also differ on how the bodies were hidden: the detailed French record places them in earth under the basement floor, while other summaries describe them as cemented into the staircase. They differ, too, on the Bergauds' ages, variously given as seventy-one and seventy-three or as seventy-three and sixty-three, and on Alfeia Borgioni's, fifty-five or sixty-three.
On August 14, 1976 he tried to escape and was overpowered by guards. Between 1977 and 1979 his lawyers argued insanity, pointing to paintings they said showed a mind disconnected from reality; the psychiatric experts concluded he was stalling to avoid the guillotine and was fully responsible. The death penalty was abolished in October 1981 before he came to trial.
The trial opened before the Val-d'Oise assize court at Pontoise in June 1982; the opening is dated June 14, June 18 and June 25 in different accounts. White-haired and frail, in a blue suit, he played the clown, and at times the courtroom laughed. He called his wife's death a crime of passion, then said the gun had gone off by itself after a fight, or that she had tripped on the doormat or a step, and died while he was out at the pharmacy getting something to treat her. He said he had buried her in the cellar to keep her near him. He admitted killing Francqui, whom he described as her lover and, alternatively, as a man who had annoyed him about the house. He denied Neuilly. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on June 25, 1982; the date of October 8, 1982 also appears in some listings.
The Court of Cassation quashed the verdict on a technicality on July 12, 1983. At the retrial before the Paris assize court on April 17, 1984, he was too ill with a prostate tumor to attend, and from the hospital still denied the Neuilly killings. He was sentenced to life again. Commissioner Cancès and the other investigators remained convinced that he had killed others in the fifteen years between his release and his arrest, but no further charge was brought.
He died at Fresnes Prison on May 10, 2009, aged eighty-seven, having spent fifty-three of his years in prison.