On March 11, 1944, neighbors in the rue Le Sueur, in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris, complained about thick, foul smoke that had been pouring from the chimney of number 21 for days. Firemen forced their way in and found a furnace full of human remains and, in the basement, a pit of quicklime holding more. The house belonged to Dr. Marcel Petiot. He arrived while the police were there, told the officer at the door that the bodies were Germans and collaborators and that he belonged to the resistance, and was allowed to leave. Investigators went on to find a small triangular room fitted with double doors and a spyhole in the wall.
Marcel André Henri Félix Petiot was born in Auxerre on January 17, 1897, the son of Félix Petiot and Marthe Bourdon. He was invalided out of the First World War with a psychiatric discharge, qualified in medicine on an accelerated program for veterans, and practiced at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne from 1921, where he was elected mayor while under investigation for theft and faced accusations of drug trafficking. He married Georgette Lablais in 1927 and in 1933 moved his practice to the rue Caumartin in Paris, where he was popular and prosperous. A number of people around him died or disappeared in those years without anything being proved.
Under the occupation he let it be known through intermediaries that a man calling himself Dr. Eugène could get people wanted by the Gestapo out of France to South America by way of Portugal, for a large fee. The clients were Jews trying to escape, resistance members, and criminals who wanted to disappear. They were told to bring their valuables and to tell nobody. At the rue Le Sueur he told them they needed an inoculation before the journey and injected them with poison, then watched them die through the spyhole. The bodies were burned or dissolved in quicklime.
He went into hiding for seven months after the discovery. Under the name Captain Valery he joined the Free French forces, and he was recognized and arrested in Paris on October 31, 1944. Among his belongings investigators found the pajamas of a missing seven-year-old boy, which he could not explain.
His trial opened before the Seine Assize Court on March 18, 1946, and Le Figaro called it one of the greatest trials in the history of crime. He was defended by René Floriot, one of the leading criminal lawyers of the day. He was tried for twenty-seven murders, and before it the newspaper L'Aube announced that he would answer for sixty-three; he claimed sixty-three killings himself, all of them, he said, enemies of France, and alternately described himself as a resistance fighter. On April 4, 1946, after three hours of deliberation on 135 questions, the jury convicted him of the premeditated murder and robbery of twenty-four of the twenty-seven, and he was sentenced to death. He never confessed.
He was guillotined in the courtyard of La Santé prison at about five in the morning on May 25, 1946. Asked whether he had anything to say, he answered that he was a traveler taking his baggage with him; to Floriot he said, by one account, that he had told him the truth and that he was a resistance fighter. The money and valuables taken from his victims were never found. Estimates of how many people he killed run from about thirty to sixty and, in some accounts, far higher.