On April 11, 1919, Laure Bonhoure, who knew the family of a missing widow named Célestine Buisson, recognized a man shopping on the rue de Rivoli in Paris with a young woman on his arm. He had the purchase sent to Lucien Guillet, engineer, 76 rue de Rochechouart, near the Gare du Nord. The next day, his fiftieth birthday, Inspector Jules Belin of the Paris mobile brigade and two officers went to that address at about noon and found him in the apartment he shared with his twenty-four-year-old mistress, Fernande Segret. He refused to go with them, and Belin put him into a taxi by force; he is said to have sung Fernande an aria from Massenet's Manon as he was led away. In the apartment the police found a patent registered under his real name, Henri Désiré Landru. In his jacket they found a small black notebook bound in waxed moleskin, and on one of its pages a list: Cuchet, J. idem, Brésil, Crozatier, Havre, Buisson, Collomb, Babelay, Jaume, Pascal, Marchadier. Confronted with what they had, he said that yes, he was Landru, and that he refused to make any other statement. He kept to that, in substance, for the rest of his life.
The arrest was the work of two families more than of the police. Célestine Buisson, a widowed housekeeper of forty-seven, had told her son and her sister, Marie Lacoste, that she meant to marry a man named Frémyet. Marie had stayed with the couple for a while at his country house at Gambais, on the edge of the forest of Rambouillet, and had advised against the marriage. When Célestine's son was hurt in an accident and could not reach his mother, and the months went by without a letter, Marie wrote to the mayor of Gambais. He answered that her sister appeared nowhere in the village registers and that the villa she described was rented not by a Frémyet but by a man named Dupont. Her letter reminded him of another he had received, from Victorine Pellat, who was looking for her sister, Anna Collomb, and whose trail also ended at Gambais. He put the two women in touch. Comparing the suitors they had met under different names, they realized that both sisters had been engaged to the same man and last seen at the same house. They filed complaints, the mobile brigade took the case, and on April 10, 1919, the public prosecutor at Mantes opened a murder inquiry against X, known as Frémyet, known as Dupont. Two days later Belin had him in custody.
There were no bodies, then or later. The case against Landru was built out of paper: the notebook, the matrimonial advertisements, the bank withdrawals, the furniture sold, the letters from families asking where their daughters and sisters had gone. Out of that paper the prosecution assembled eleven victims, ten women and a boy, and a jury at Versailles sent him to the guillotine for killing them.
He was born in Paris on April 12, 1869, to Julien Landru, a furnace stoker who rose to factory manager, and Flore Henriquel, a seamstress who worked at home, a modest and devout family living on the rue du Cloître-Notre-Dame, beside the cathedral. He went to the Brothers' school on the rue de Bretonvilliers on the Île Saint-Louis, served as an altar boy at Saint-Louis-en-l'Île and in 1888 sometimes acted as subdeacon, and found a first job as an architect's clerk. He did his military service with the 87th Infantry Regiment at Saint-Quentin and rose to deputy quartermaster. By then he was involved with his cousin, Marie-Catherine Rémy, whose mother ran a laundry on the island; their daughter, Marie-Angèle, was born on June 24, 1891, and on October 7, 1893, he married Marie-Catherine and legitimized the child. Three more children followed, Maurice in 1894, Suzanne in 1896 and Charles in 1900. The family moved again and again, through Paris and its suburbs, while he tried accounting, building contracting and the manufacture of bicycles, and in 1898 designed a motorcycle he called the Landru.
His first fraud, in 1900, set the pattern for everything that followed. Calling himself a civil engineer, he rented a shop on the boulevard Péreire, an office on the rue Drouot and an empty building at Tournay, near Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse, which he passed off as an automobile factory. He advertised jobs in Le Matin and the Petites Affiches that required a cash deposit as security, collected the deposits and disappeared. The Seine tribunal sentenced him in his absence on February 24, 1902, to three years. Under the name Natier he refined the scheme, having recruits lodge their deposits with a bank so that he could withdraw them later on forged signatures, and he was arrested at the counter in the middle of a withdrawal. Searching his lodgings, the police found a notebook in which he had listed, with care, the names and addresses of everyone he had cheated or tried to cheat. On July 21, 1904, the Paris court gave him two years. A psychiatrist, Charles Vallon, examined him and found him on the borderline of madness but responsible for what he did.
Prison did not change him. Released in 1906, he went back to the same work as Maddau, Rémy, Chatelle and Dupont until one of his victims recognized him in the street, and two more sentences followed. In 1909, as Paul Morel, he placed a marriage proposal in the Écho du Nord. A woman in Lille answered, met him, introduced him to her mother, accepted him, and handed over her securities so that a notary could draw up the marriage contract. Morel vanished with them. It was the first known time he used a lonely woman's hopes as the bait, and he was caught when he tried to put her stolen securities into another swindle. Three sentences followed in 1910, the heaviest three years. He now stood one conviction away from relégation, the permanent exile of repeat offenders to a penal colony.
Both his parents died while he was inside. They had retired to Agen in 1910; his mother died that year, his father returned to Paris, and in 1912 Julien Landru hanged himself in the Bois de Boulogne, on August 28 according to the historian Marc Renneville's account of the case, in April according to others. Released at the end of 1913, the son opened a small engineering workshop at Malakoff, lived off it for a few months, then ran the deposit swindle once more in Le Journal, Le Matin and the Écho du Nord, robbing fifteen people of some 35,600 francs by one count. He disappeared on April 23, 1914. On July 20 he was convicted in his absence and sentenced to four years, a fine of 1,000 francs and relégation, which Renneville places in French Guiana and other accounts in New Caledonia. He never served a day of it. Within weeks France was at war, and the man the courts meant to send away for life dropped out of sight under a string of names, among them Diard, Dupont, Frémyet and Guillet.
The war gave him his opportunity. France by 1915 was losing men in enormous numbers, and the matrimonial columns of the Paris papers filled with notices from widows and single women looking for companions. Landru placed advertisements of his own in papers such as Le Journal, presenting himself as a widower of some means with a comfortable income, and answered others, sorting the replies into categories such as no money, probably has assets, and reserve, further investigation required. Police later traced his correspondence with 283 women.
The first was Jeanne Cuchet, a lingerie seamstress widowed in 1909, thirty-nine, and her son, André, sixteen or seventeen by different accounts, who was hoping to join the army early. Landru courted her as Raymond Diard; her sister and brother-in-law found papers showing who he really was, and she broke with her family rather than with him. In December 1914 mother and son moved into the Villa Ermitage he had rented at Vernouillet, west of Paris. They were last seen in early 1915; neighbors complained of thick, acrid smoke from the chimney, and the police accepted his word that he was burning rubbish. Thérèse Laborde-Line, forty-six or forty-seven, a South American-born widow and former hotelier, usually said to have come from Argentina, sold her furniture to move to her future husband's house and vanished after June 26, 1915. Marie-Angélique Guillin, fifty-one, a retired housekeeper who had inherited 22,000 francs and believed he was about to become consul-general in Australia, moved to Vernouillet on August 2 and disappeared about two days later; he withdrew 12,000 francs from her account posing as her brother-in-law. That December he rented the Villa Tric at Gambais, three hundred meters from the nearest house, and bought a large stove and a quantity of coal. On December 8, 1915, he bought two tickets to Gambais, a return for himself and a single for Berthe Héon, fifty-five, a cleaner from Le Havre who had lost her husband, her son in the war and her daughter, and she was not seen again.
The women who went to Gambais came from the ordinary working life of wartime Paris. Anna Collomb, forty-four, a widow who worked as a typist in an insurance office, had her sister to visit at Gambais on December 14, 1916, and disappeared after December 27. Andrée Babelay, nineteen, a domestic servant, had run away from home after a quarrel with her mother and was crying on a Métro platform when Landru met her; a game warden saw her learning to ride a bicycle at Gambais, and she disappeared after April 12, 1917, the youngest of the women. Célestine Buisson went to Gambais on August 19, 1917, and disappeared after September 1, and Landru emptied her apartment with a forged letter saying she was running a canteen for American troops in the south. Louise Jaume, thirty-eight, a devout, recently divorced shop assistant, vanished around November 26, 1917, and Anne-Marie Pascal, a divorced dressmaker, thirty-six by most accounts, on April 5, 1918, days after writing to her aunt that she did not know who he was but was scared of him. The last was Marie-Thérèse Marchadier, thirty-seven, from Bordeaux, who ran a small boarding house on the rue Saint-Jacques and was known for her two Belgian griffon dogs. She went to Gambais on January 13, 1919. Three days later neighbors reported foul smoke pouring from the villa's chimney.
Each time the pattern was the same. Landru took the woman to the house, and she was not seen again. Then he went back to Paris, emptied her apartment, sold her furniture and belongings, and drew what he could from her accounts. The notebook recorded it in his own hand, down to the small costs of each courtship. The prosecution later drew the jury's attention to the entries for train tickets to Gambais: a return for Landru and, on the days the women disappeared, a single for them.
His silence after the arrest did not stop the paper from talking. In a garage he had rented as Frémyet, detectives found furniture, clothes, identity papers and letters belonging to the women on the notebook list, and the list itself turned out to be a code: Brésil stood for Laborde-Line and her South American origins, Crozatier for the street where Madame Guillin had lived, Havre for Berthe Héon. Loose diary sheets recorded his spending from June 6, 1918, to March 31, 1919, alongside stock transactions in the names of Buisson, Jaume and a third woman, Paulet. Landru said Anna Collomb must be in Nice and Célestine Buisson somewhere in the south. In April 1919 a Paris examining magistrate opened proceedings for murder, theft and receiving stolen goods, and the decoding of the notebooks produced the list of 283 correspondents. Relatives of the victims identified him under one false name after another.
When the police searched the villa at Gambais on April 29, 1919, they found in the ashes under a shed and inside the kitchen stove burned bone debris with scraps of cloth and buttons, 295 human bone fragments and 47 teeth or pieces of teeth among them. The early forensic report, by Dr. Charles Paul, put the debris at 4.176 kilograms and said it came from at least three people of undetermined sex; at the trial, Raoul Anthony of the Paris School of Anthropology described roughly a kilogram of fragments from which he had partly reconstructed three skulls, five feet and six hands, three bodies, probably women's. Investigators tested the stove. Half a sheep's head burned away in under half an hour; a leg of mutton of more than two kilograms took an hour and ten minutes. The stove could plainly have consumed a dismembered body, except perhaps the trunk, and Landru had bought a number of saws. Digging in the garden turned up only the skeletons of two dogs, which he said were Marchadier's and which he had killed at her request. Neighbors told of nights when the chimney gave off a stench that a local butcher identified as burning flesh. No one could say whose remains the fragments were.
His wife and his eldest son, Maurice, were arrested in December 1919 on suspicion of sharing in the thefts. Marie-Catherine admitted forging signatures on Buisson's and Jaume's accounts, and Maurice had been given Jeanne Cuchet's jewelry. Both were released without charge in July 1920, and the youngest son, Charles, who had helped move the women's furniture, was never arrested. Landru himself never confessed and never explained what had become of a single woman on the list.
The trial opened before the assize court of Seine-et-Oise at Versailles on Monday, November 7, 1921, and it became a public spectacle in a country trying to put the war behind it. Trainloads of spectators came out from Paris, and the audience over three weeks included Mistinguett, Maurice Chevalier, Sacha Guitry and Rudyard Kipling; in the 1919 elections some four thousand voters had written his name on their ballots. Colette covered the first day for Le Matin. She found a thin, bald, bearded man who looked respectable enough to be a department-store floorwalker, and an eye she could only compare to a bird's. She closed her report with the admission that "I believe we will never understand anything about Landru."
He set out to run his own defense from the dock, sharp on details and evasive on everything that mattered. His matrimonial advertisements, he said, were "a perfectly innocent little commercial ruse," a way of meeting people with furniture to sell; he had never meant to marry anyone. A love letter read out to the court was "only a draft, a writer's fancy." When the prosecution asked why, if he never meant to marry, he had noted against one correspondent's name "dirty interior, hoarse voice, unbearable white fox terrier," he answered beside the point. The jewelry and identity papers the women had left with him were "a sacred trust," their relations with him a private matter, and his memory, he said, was very poor. On November 12 he told the advocate general, "I am sorry, but I have only one head to offer you." Three psychiatrists, Vallon, Rogues de Fursac and Roubinovitch, testified that he was entirely sane and remarked on the extreme charm of his conversation. Landru replied that crimes like the ones he was charged with could only be the work of a madman, and he was not one. Several journalists noted that an insanity plea was probably the only thing that could have saved his neck.
The families came to the stand one after another. When Jeanne Cuchet's sister accused him, he asked whether she had any proof that he had killed her sister; she answered that her sister was a woman of heart who would never have let a man she loved so much be condemned. Writing in Le Figaro on November 15, Georges Claretie described the mothers and sisters in tears at each sitting and the accused alone unmoved, consulting his notes while he was called a murderer and, when asked if he had anything to say, replying, "No, nothing at all! Absolutely nothing, Monsieur le président!"
The weakness of the prosecution was the one Landru kept pointing to: too many victims and too few bodies. When Anthony gave his evidence on November 25, Vincent de Moro-Giafferi, the most celebrated defense advocate in France, objected that the villa had not been sealed on the first visit and the fragments could not be relied on. No one could say how the women had died, whether by poison, strangling or something else; a medical expert told the court that burners of corpses never confess. What remained was the circumstantial case: the women's belongings in his hands, their money in his accounts, and the testimony of relatives and neighbors.
The last three days, November 28 to 30, were given to the speeches. The advocate general, Robert Godefroy, told the jury that the joking Landru of the cafés and the newspapers, a kind of Charlie Chaplin of crime who made Paris laugh while his ridiculed victims faded from view, had been an invention, and asked for his head. Moro-Giafferi, who is said to have privately believed his client guilty, built his plea on the civil code's treatment of missing persons: an heir could take provisional possession of a missing person's estate only after four years, and permanent possession only after thirty, because until then disappearance did not prove death. The best-known story of the trial, repeated in nearly every account, has him announcing that the missing women had been found and were about to walk in, and then, when every head turned to the door, telling the jurors they had just shown their own doubt.
The jury retired at seven in the evening on November 30, 1921, and returned at twenty past nine, by the timing in Renneville's account; other reports speak of much longer deliberations. The verdict, guilty on all eleven counts of premeditated murder, was by a majority, given as nine to three, and he was sentenced to death. "I have only one thing to say," Landru told the court. "The court has made a mistake. I am not guilty of murder. Let that be my last protest!"
In cell number 5 at the Saint-Pierre prison in Versailles he grew silent, reread his trial notes and complained that he had been given his file only six weeks before the trial. The Court of Cassation rejected his appeal on February 3, 1922; the justice minister, Louis Barthou, refused a review on February 16; and on February 24 President Alexandre Millerand refused clemency. At dawn the next day, Saturday, February 25, the executioner Anatole Deibler guillotined him outside the prison gates. He had refused the last rites, telling the priest to look after his own soul, and he made no final revelation. Moro-Giafferi later told the press that at the foot of the scaffold he had asked his client for the secret of his life, and that Landru had answered that he was taking his secret with him: "It is all my baggage." The story rests on the lawyer's word alone. Landru was buried in the Cimetière des Gonards, later in an unmarked grave.
His belongings were auctioned on January 27, 1923, in the assize courtroom where he had been tried, in an atmosphere the papers described as festive. The prize lot was the stove. A fairground showman named Anglade bought it for 4,200 francs, and it was soon resold to an Italian showman for 40,000 lire; the police in Turin banned his first attempt to exhibit it.
The eleven were only the women and the boy whom the police could account for. The official position was that investigators had traced every one of the 283 women in the correspondence and that only the ten on the list, with André Cuchet, remained missing. A police report that surfaced years later acknowledged that the identities of seventy-two had never been established. The notebook itself disappeared after the execution, apparently kept by one of the detectives, who reproduced much of it in an unreliable memoir in 1933. The true number of Landru's victims is not known. In 1933 a skeleton that appeared to be a young woman's was found under the kitchen floor of a house in Saint-Denis next to one he had lived in, and in 1958 digging at Gambais uncovered partial skeletons of two people, speculated to be the Cuchets. In 1963 newspapers published what was said to be a confession written on the back of a drawing he had given a lawyer, and its wording differed from paper to paper. None of it was ever tied to him in court.
Godefroy had asked the jury to bury the comic Landru along with the real one, and he got only half of what he asked for. In 1947 Charlie Chaplin himself put the character on screen, out of his tramp costume, in Monsieur Verdoux, and in 1963 Claude Chabrol made Landru, with a screenplay by Françoise Sagan. Fernande Segret, who had lived with him to the end and survived, sued over Chabrol's film and won damages; she took her own life in 1968. The women who did not survive him left no graves. Their names lasted in the eleven words on a notebook page, written in the hand of the man who had sold their furniture.