Marcel Andre Petiot was born in Auxerre on January 17, 1897. He was invalided out of the First World War with a psychiatric discharge, qualified in medicine on an accelerated programme for veterans in 1921, and built a large practice at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne and later in Paris, where he was popular for prescribing generously and charging little. He was elected mayor of Villeneuve while under investigation for theft. A number of people around him died or disappeared through the 1920s and 1930s without anything being proved.
Under the occupation he set up what he presented as an escape line. Through intermediaries he let it be known that a network called Fly-Tox could move people out of France to Argentina by way of Portugal, for twenty-five thousand francs a head. The clients were Jews trying to get out, resistance members, and criminals wanting to disappear. They were told to bring their valuables and to tell nobody.
They were taken to 21 rue Le Sueur, told they needed an inoculation for South America, and injected. He watched them die through a viewing device set into the wall of a triangular room, and disposed of the bodies in quicklime and then in a stove.
On March 11, 1944, neighbours complained of foul black smoke and police forced the house. They found a furnace full of human remains and a pit of quicklime containing more. Petiot told the officer at the door that the bodies were Germans and collaborators and that he was in the resistance, and was allowed to leave. He hid for seven months, joined the Free French forces under a false name, and was recognised and arrested in Paris in October 1944.
He was charged with twenty-seven murders and claimed sixty-three, all of them, he said, enemies of France. He was tried in March 1946 in a trial he treated as a performance, convicted of twenty-six, and guillotined on May 25, 1946. The money and valuables of the dead were never recovered.