Henri Desire Landru was born in Paris on April 12, 1869, the son of a stoker at an ironworks. He served in the army, married, had four children, and spent twenty years as a small-time swindler with a string of convictions for fraud, most of them involving advertisements and non-existent goods.
The war gave him his opportunity. France by 1915 had hundreds of thousands of widows, many of them with a little money, no family left and no prospect of remarriage, and the matrimonial columns of the Paris papers were full. Landru answered them and placed his own, presenting himself as a widower of comfortable means looking for a companion, under a rotation of names.
The eleven were Jeanne-Marie Cuchet, thirty-nine, and her sixteen-year-old son Andre; Therese Laborde-Line, forty-seven; Marie Angelique Guillin, fifty-one; Berthe Anna Heon, fifty-five; Anne Collomb, forty-four; Andree-Anne Babelay, nineteen; Celestine Buisson; Louise-Josephine Jaume, thirty-eight; Anne-Marie Pascal, thirty-three; and Marie-Therese Marchadier, thirty-seven. The French press called him the Bluebeard of Gambais, after the village.
He courted them, took them to a rented villa, first at Vernouillet and then at Gambais outside Paris, and they were never seen again. He sold their furniture, drew on their bank accounts, and moved to the next. He killed ten women this way between 1915 and 1919 and also Andre Cuchet, the seventeen-year-old son of the first of them.
There were no bodies. The neighbours at Gambais complained about the greasy black smoke from the kitchen stove, and the stove was what the prosecution had, along with bone fragments in the garden. What convicted him was paperwork: a small notebook, kept in his own hand, recording the names of two hundred and eighty-three women he had corresponded with, the expenses of each courtship, and, for the eleven, a note of the one-way rather than return railway ticket he had bought.
The sisters of one victim wrote to the mayor of Gambais asking after her; another family had written the same letter about another woman, and the mayor put them in touch. Landru was arrested in Paris on April 12, 1919. He was tried at Versailles in November 1921, denied everything with considerable wit, and told the court that if they had the bodies they should produce them. He was convicted of eleven murders and guillotined on February 25, 1922.