True Crime Campfire - The People's Monster: Serial Killer in the City of Light Pt 1

Episode Date: August 9, 2024

There aren’t many darker places to be than in a city occupied by an enemy during a brutal war, living without freedom, in constant fear, and with little or no recourse to justice. For a crime to be able to shock even people living under those conditions, it has to be something truly terrifying, and that is what the people in Paris during World War II experienced when a series of gruesome murders were uncovered. Join us for part 1 of the disturbing story of serial killer Dr. Marcel Petiot. Sources:Death In the City of Light by David KingFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers, grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. There aren't many darker places to be than in a city occupied by an enemy during a brutal war, living without freedom, in constant fear, and with little or no recourse to justice. For a crime to be able to shock even people living under those conditions, it has to be something truly terrifying. And that is what the people in Paris during World War II experienced when a series

of gruesome murders were uncovered. This is the people's monster, a serial killer in the city of light. So, campers, for this one, we're in Paris, France, March 11th, 1944, during the German occupation in World War II. Jacques and Andrea Marquay were not happy. Thick, dark, stinky smoke was seeping into their fifth-floor apartment on the Rue Lester from a chimney on the townhouse across the street. The chimney had been smoking for days now, even though the weather was unusually warm. After work, Jacques went across the street to have a word. The shutters and curtains on the townhouse were closed.

Nobody answered the doorbell or his knocks on the door. He found a little note fixed to the doors. It said the occupant was away for a month, and that mail should be forwarded to an address in Ozare, a small city about 100 miles southeast of Paris. Rue Lissert was a narrow street with unbroken lines of townhouses on both sides. A house fire would be a calamity and a smoking chimney in a an unoccupied house was a serious worry. He called the police. Two officers arrived on bicycles

shortly after and got the property owner's name and phone number from a neighbor. It was Dr. Marcel Pedio, a family physician who lived not far away. The police called the doctor from a nearby grocery store and told him about the smoking fire. Have you entered the building? Dr. Petio asked. No. Don't touch anything. I will bring keys immediately, 15 minutes at the most. So, the officers waited for 15 minutes, and then 10 minutes more, but there was no sign of the doctor. After a half hour, the cops had had enough and called the fire department, who broke into the house through a second floor balcony. The sun had set by then, and it was pitch dark inside. They had to find their way through with flashlights.

Many of the buildings on the street had been converted to apartments, but this one was still one property, a three-story mansion house. It stank in there. Some of the firefighters thought it smelled like burned rubber, others like burned meat. The smell led them to a basement room with two coal stoves, one of which was burning intensely. A fireman opened the iron door of the burning stove. Half in and half out of the flames was a charred, blackened, severed human hand. The horrified firefighters looked around the basement room. A ribcage, skull, and other bones were piled together on a stair-car.

case. Two more skulls were on the floor, along with a torso and several arms and legs. The fireman fled. Their chief called down for the police officers to come take a look, and after they did, they called headquarters right away. Unless you were German, or collaborated with the Germans, there wasn't much in the way of entertainment in occupied Paris. A crowd had gathered to watch the fire, and got even bigger when word got around about the gruesome discovery inside. A slim, pale man in an overcoat and fedora pushed his bicycle through the crowd. When he got to the officers at the door,

he said he was the brother of the building's owner and demanded to be let inside. They wouldn't let him in. Are you good Frenchmen? he asked. Then went on to explain that he was a senior figure in the French resistance, and that all those dead people inside were Germans or traitors. And now he had to go home,

because he had papers identifying hundreds of resistance members that he had to destroy. The officers at the door were indeed good Frenchmen, sympathetic to the resistance, and also pretty frigging gullible. They let the man hurry off on his bike. Later, when they saw pictures of Marcel Petio, they saw right away that he was the man they'd spoken to. The basement was a chamber of horrors, and it wasn't even the weirdest or the worst thing the police would find in there. The interior of the mansion was strange. The place was packed with art and furniture, some of it start.

heartlingly valuable, some of it literally falling apart. Everything was dusty and cobwebby and gross, and the wallpaper was torn. Investigators would later learn that Marcel Petio was a regular at auction houses, compulsively buying whatever caught his eye, but not bothering to take care of anything he added to the hoard. Only one room at the back of the house was neat. It looked like a doctor's office, with a desk and chairs, a closet with medical supplies, a bookshelf with medical texts, Close by that was another room, sealed with a padlock and chain. The room was small and triangular with thick concrete walls and empty except for a simple cot and two bare light bulbs. There was no handle on the inside of the door. In the corners, iron hooks were fixed high on the walls.

A pair of fancy gold-trimmed double doors filled most of one wall, but when police tried to open them, the door handles just spun loosely. They tried to force the doors open with a crowbar. and discovered that the doors led nowhere. They'd just been glued to the concrete wall. Oh, it's weird as hell. Gives me the hebes. Yeah. One wall was covered with beige wallpaper that looked new.

When police tore it off, they found a viewing lens embedded in the wall. Someone standing on the other side would be able to look inside. Oh, no. The lens magnified the view. The police thought if someone was hanging from the pair of hooks on the wall, the lens would focus right on their faces. Oh my God. Was this bizarre room where the victims had died?

In an old long unused table just off the mansion's courtyard, behind a pile of scrap metal, police found a metal cover that sat over a deep, pitch-dark pit. A pulley with rope and a hook sat over the pit, and a wooden ladder led down. When they pulled the cover off of it, a vial stench came burping out of the hole. Oh, gross. The lead investigator climbed down the ladder, and when he stepped off it at the bottom, bones crunched under his feet. He was standing on top of a 10-foot pile of mixed quicklime and decomposing body parts. It was impossible to guess how many victims were down there, certainly more than in the basement, a lot more.

He climbed out and told his officers to start pulling the body parts out so they could be examined, but they straight up refused to go down. into the awful pit. Don't blame him. The police would have to hire grave diggers from the nearby Plessy Cemetery to transport the remains to the coroner's office. The coroner's office had a nearly impossible task. There were two mostly complete skeletons, but everything else was a mix of bones and body parts, often broken into pieces. Forensic scientist Dr. Albert Paul said, it's not an autopsy, it's a puzzle. But his team were able to identify a few common features. features. Almost all of the bodies had been disemboweled, their internal organs removed. Where the flesh had been cut away from the bone, it had been done so neatly and with precision. One of Paul's

assistants noted that the killer removed the faces with one skilled cut. In case you've ever wondered where that scene in silence of the lambs comes from. They were convinced the bodies had been dismembered by a doctor, and Dr. Paul was convinced he'd seen this particular doctor's work before. It's exactly like two years ago, he said. On May 7, 1942, a trunk tied with rope had been pulled out of the scent. Inside was the body of a middle-aged man whose head, hands, and feet had been skillfully removed with a sharp knife. Other than those, there were no evident injuries on the body, which was never identified. Over the next year, many more body parts were found, either similarly tossed into the river in trunks or left in paper parcels around the city.

There were arms, legs, and torsos, and other even more gruesome finds, skinned hands, scalps, faces, male genitals. On the heads and faces, hair and eyebrows had been shaved off. On the hands, fingerprints had been filed off, or the skin removed completely. All done very neatly and well, as if by a doctor. And of course, a doctor was right at the top of the list of people police desperately wanted to get their hands on, Marcel Pedio. Marcel Peddeo was born in 1897 in Oseer, the son of two postal workers. He was a smart kid, but strange and moody, and he didn't have very many friends, which is not a big surprise. One time little Marcel made one of his friends stand up against a wooden wall so Marcel could throw knives at him, like a circus performer.

Fun! And he got into some weird trouble. One time he brought porn to elementary school to show the other boys. He often brought a gun to school. and eventually got expelled for shooting it into the ceiling during class. One of his high school teachers described him as, quote, intelligent but not enjoying all his mental faculties. In a word, he was a bizarre character.

That quote, by the way, is from Death in the City of Light by David King, our main source for this case and a great book with a lot more than we can fit into this episode if you want to know more. So this kid was clearly heading for a run-in with the law, and when he was 17, Marcel was arrested for a crime which humiliated his mailman dad. Stealing mail using a fishing pole with a weight and sticky putty on the end of the line. He took what cash and money orders he found, but mainly he wanted to read people's personal mail for juicy gossip, which, okay, obviously this is dead wrong, but this is the one thing in

the story where I'm like, I kind of get it because I do love me some other people's drama. And like compared to his other like incidents as a child, this one is whimsical. Like, it straight up feels like an episode of Dennis the Menace. Yeah, exactly. Dennis the Menace would totally do this. A couple more expulsions meant Marcel had to be homeschooled by his math teacher uncle, but he did end up getting his diploma at the age of 18, and shortly after that he was in the army and fighting in the First World War. He saw six months of terrifying warfare,

fighting in trenches plagued by rats and dysentery, before he hurt his foot and had to be transported to a hospital in Orleans. The injury was almost served. certainly self-inflicted, and the doctors at Orleans were more concerned about Marcel's head than his toes. He was suffering from shell shock, which today would probably be diagnosed as PTSD. He couldn't sleep, he had terrible headaches, he would tremble or cry at sudden noises. But the First World War was brutal, and before long, Petio was right back on the front lines as a machine gunner, which seems like a less than ideal employment for somebody who's sensitive to

loud noises. He started having panic attacks. and was institutionalized. After the war, he was given a disability pension and spent some more time in institutions, but still managed to win a medical degree from the University of Paris. His dad held a lavish celebratory dinner, borrowing silver cutlery from his neighbors.

Marcel was coldly formal throughout the whole dinner, barely saying a word to anybody, and before dessert, he said he had another appointment and just walked out. He'd always felt he was set for bigger things than his family and didn't have much time for them anymore, except for his little brother Maurice,

who was 10 years younger and thought the son shown out of Marcel's butt. Marcel started his medical career in the beautiful old town of Villanue So-Yan between Ozir and Paris because it currently had only two doctors, both of whom were elderly. These old doctors did not take to Marcel

and not only because he was competition. Not only did Marcel advertise, which was considered an incredibly gauche thing for a medical professional to do, His advertisements were clearly aimed at them. Dr. Pedio is young, and only a young doctor can remain up to date on the latest methods born of progress, which marches with giant strides. Yeah, I imagine that pissed him off good. The young Dr. Petio was quickly popular.

He was energetic and seemed kind and, like so many killers with a high body count, very charming. He worked at the weekend so people who couldn't get time off work could see him and would cycle around the country. countryside to visit people too sick to come into town. Poor or elderly patients usually got a heavy discount or had their fees waived altogether. Now this all sounds like a picture of a popular but not necessarily wealthy doctor, but soon Marcel traded in his bicycle for a zippy yellow sports car. See, he was signing up as many of his patients as he could for government assistance without their knowledge and then just pocketing the money that came in. If he waived a fee, he'd still get paid. If he didn't wave it, he'd get paid twice. Oh, so he can seem like the nice guy, like, oh, no, don't worry about

it. You don't have to pay me anything. He's getting paid anyway. Yeah. That's horrifying. Like his fellow doctors, the pharmacists weren't too sure about Dr. Petio either. He always prescribed incredibly strong doses of medicine. One guy described them as horse cures. One pharmacist refused to fill a prescription Petio had written for a young kid. This is strong enough to kill a full-grown adult, the guy said. Pedio just shrugged. He said, isn't it better to do away with this kid who does nothing but annoy his mother? Oh, wow. He's got jokes. Hilarious. Early in his medical career, Marcel met René Nizonday, a clerk who would remain his closest friend all the way up to the dark days of the German occupation. It was at a dinner with Renee in 1926 when Marcel, completely out of the blue,

said, I think I'll get involved in politics. Sure enough, the next year he ran for mayor. This was a small town, barely 4,000 people. A lot of them knew Peddeo personally, and everyone knew his reputation as the people's doctor. He won by a landslide. By that time, he was already a murderer. Oh, my God. In 1924, Dr. Petio had dinner at a patient's house. The meal was served by the patient's housekeeper, a 24-year-old brunette named Louisette de laveau. She caught Marcel's eye, and he asked her out to dinner. She soon moved in with him, although for the sake of propriety, they both pretended that she was just his live-in-maid and cook.

But Marcel Pedio was not easy to live with. Behind closed doors, the kind doctor was a jumpy, obsessive insomniac, who was already starting his lifelong habit of hoarding crap he found at auctions. Their relationship was already twanging in like a guitar strut. when Marcel started an affair with one of his married patients. Then, Louisette found out she was pregnant. She told a friend that Marcel would take care of it, meaning give her an abortion. And then, in May 1926, Louisette just disappeared.

Marcel told people they'd had a tumultuous argument that ended with Louisette storming out of the house and leaving town. She hadn't said goodbye to her friends, and she hadn't packed anything. No one would ever hear from her again. The police investigated her disappearance for a few months, but not with a whole lot of urgency. Even more so than now, it was hard to get the cops to take an adult missing person's case seriously. Without any electronic trail to follow, it was almost impossible to find someone who decided to leave town without affording address. That was partly why H.H. Holmes got away with so much. Oh, yeah. It was because it was, you know, in not the same time, but like, you know, early 1900s, right?

And it just, I mean, people would just leave town and you'd never hear from him again, you know. And it wasn't always because something bad had happened to him. But it enabled people like this to just get away with literally murder again and again. This case reminds me so much of H.H. Holmes. Oh, definitely. Oh, my God. Like the house of horrors, the, you know. Yeah.

He's French homes. Absolutely. French homes, yep. Shortly after her disappearance, someone in town saw Dr. Petio loading a large, heavy wicker basket into the trunk of his sports car. A few days later, a basket just like that was found outside of Dijon, a hundred miles away. Inside was the body of a young woman, decapitated, dismembered, and with the internal organs carefully removed. The body was never identified, and no one made any connection with Marcel Pettio until the Paris murders were discovered. Being romantically involved with Marcel Pettio was turning out to be a dangerous business.

He was having an affair with Henriette de Beau, whose husband Armand owned a decent. dairy outside of town. In March of 1930, Armand was having an evening drink in a cafe when somebody rushed in and told him his house was on fire. He hauled ass home to find his house burning and firefighters already there. They told him his wife was inside, dead on the kitchen floor with blood all around her head. What? That didn't make any sense. Once the flames had died down, police quickly determined that the fire had been started deliberately and that Henriette had been murdered, struck several times in the head with a heavy object, probably a hammer. Had burglary been the motive? This was the second Tuesday of the month. The next day, Armand would have

to pay farmers in the surrounding countryside for their milk in cash, so he'd withdrawn a large amount from the bank. And his safe had indeed been forced open, but Armand was paranoid, and he'd hidden the cash under a kitchen cabinet instead, where it hadn't been found. The police investigation concentrated on dairy workers and went nowhere. In fact, an anonymous journalist freelancing for the local paper made more headway than they did, finding the hammer used to kill Henriette in a stream close to the dairy, where it had presumably been dumped to destroy fingerprint evidence. It wasn't until 1945 that this freelance journalist was revealed to be Marcel Petio. When later investigators looked back at this case, they discovered that the whole police file was

missing, leading to some brief speculation that Petio had used his powers as mayor to remove and destroy it. But in fact, the wafer thin police file was actually there. It was just that some local cop had filed it under M for murder rather than D for DeBove. I know. That's got to be like the best detail in the whole story. It's so wonderful. I just, it's just, bless his heart. God, so cute. Like, does he think that all crimes are? Like, how do you, how do you define, like, how would you find a burglary file under B? What do you mean? It is both infuriating and adorable at the same time.

It's so cute. I know that this was like a fresh-faced rookie, didn't know anything. Like, I can't even be mad about it. It's just too cute. And here's the thing, it's awful, right, that they couldn't find this file. It's horrible. But, like, it's funny. I'm sorry.

It's something I feel like I would do, you know, like early in my career. Or maybe, like, you know, maybe he's sleep deprived, like, wasn't thinking straight. He was like, oh, M for murder. Like, just M. Murder, right. Mertre. Murder. Murder.

So, some suspicion did fall on Dr. Petio. Local bistro owner, Leon Friscoe, was telling people he'd seen Petio at the dairy shortly before the fire. But no one heard any more than that because a couple weeks later, he went to Petio complaining of a painful rheumatism. Petio suggested he tried a powerful new drug he'd. just gotten from Paris. It wouldn't only relieve Fresco's symptoms, it might cure him altogether. And because he was an old friend, the people's doctor would give him the treatment for free. Two hours later, and Leon Fresco was dead. The official coroner's report found nothing suspicious in his death. Frusco had suffered an aneurysm during his simple medical procedure.

But then, Villanue of So-Yan was too small to have a full-time coroner, and the position was filled, and the death report filed by local Dr. Marcel Pettio. Cambers, is it a good idea to have a murder suspect act as coroner in the death of a witness? Because I'm leaning towards no, but what do I know? By the time Henriette de Beau was murdered, Marcel Pettio was married to Georgette Leblay, whose father was an influential man thanks to owning a restaurant right next to the parliament. And if there's anything more French than a man having serious clout because his restaurant is close to government, I can't think of it. Georgette wasn't like Marcel's other women. For one thing, he didn't kill her. In fact, from their

wedding on, Georgette was pretty much ride or die for her new hubs. Not that there seemed much chance of trouble in Marcel's life during the early years of their marriage. Marcel was a popular and successful doctor who had just made a dramatic splash into government, and he talked openly about his ambitions for higher office. Seemed like the sky was the limit. But as with many political prodigies who have stars in their eyes, the problem was that Marcel's charming doctor front covered up more weirdness than the human norm. In particular, there was the fact that he liked to steal. Always had. When he'd been in the army, a fellow soldier had come back to the barracks to find Petio reading one of his books by the light of one of his candles, both of which Petio

had found while rummaging through the other soldier's kit. When the soldier asked him what the hell he was doing, Petio, with no embarrassment at all, said, what's yours is mine? Now, this sounds like a pretty good way to get your ass kicked, but the thing is, Petio was popular because he was also happy to turn it around to what's mine is yours. He'd go out on his frequent nighttime walks and come back with stolen wine, cheese, and sausage, which he was happy to share with the unit. Now, that's also extremely French. Is it, though? Winning the hearts of your comrades by playing them with cheese and wine. I just, like, I just, I know they were saying, ooh la la, you know, just.

Oh, la la. Yeah, very French. When he was the mayor of Villeneuve, Syriand, people soon noticed things going missing from City Hall. Nothing valuable, spoons, ashtrays, little things that might provide a compulsive thief with a fun little thrill if he slipped them into a pocket when nobody was looking.

Everyone in town soon knew of this habit of his, and for the most part accepted it as a foible rather than something malicious. It's just like Jay Smith from the mainline murder case season one of our show, another highly respected guy who everybody, thought was just kind of eccentric. More often than not, when Petio went to get his zippy little sports car fixed, he'd come home

with a small wrench or a key in his pocket. The garage owner would just send over a worker to Petio's house, and the mayor would soon laugh and hand back whatever he'd stolen. Opinions of Mayor Petio were deeply divided. If you look at the bare bones outline of his time in an office, you might think this was a man who was flying high. He improved the sewers, schools, and trash collection, and added a playground and more railway stops. He made his point that the town needed those extra railway stops by throwing himself out of a moving train. Like, see? This is what people have to do. On the other side were people who thought correctly that if Petio stole spoons and keys,

he'd probably steal other more valuable things too. He stole oil and gasoline, and an audit showed he just hadn't bothered to forward the fees immigrants had submitted for their registration applications. In 1931, the town council voted to suspend him. Mayor Petio resigned the day before the suspension went into action, but he did so with the intention of immediately running for the now vacated office. He ran an energetic campaign, claiming to represent the working man, while his opponent focused on Petio's corruption.

Poster said, drain Petio out of his graft-built sewers, which I have to assume sounds a lot snappier in the original French. Like, please, tell me it does. I hope so. Petio could see the writing on the wall. Even before the mayoral election took place, he had started campaigning to be a general counselor,

the approximate equivalent of a U.S. member of Congress. He lost the mayor's race, but won the other one and took his first steps into national politics. But our boy just couldn't stop stealing. He and Georgette were well off financially, but that didn't matter. He wasn't stealing for money. He was stealing for fun or to make himself feel clever.

At one point, he rewired the meters in his house so he could get free electricity. Petio blamed the whole thing on his enemies. They must have broken into his house and did a little nefarious home repair without him noticing. Oh, yeah, like you do. I wish my enemies would break in and fix things in my house. Well, and also, like, yeah, if the only consequence of the crime is that you benefit, I doubt your enemies would do that. they would have set you up much different.

Like if they could sneak into your house and rewire your meters, I think they could probably rewire your sports car. Like I think that's something they could do. It's a creative story. We'll call it creative. That's from the English teacher over here. It's creative. Yeah, people didn't buy it.

A tribunal found him guilty, find him, and sentenced him to 15 days in prison, which was waived on appeal. But by French law at the time, the verdict meant he was temporarily ineligible to hold office. Again, Marcel decided to jump before he was pushed and resigned. It was 1933.

Marcel was 36, and his political career had just crashed back down to Earth like a cannonball. Hi, I'm Darren Marler. Host of the Weird Darkness podcast. I want to talk about the most important tool in my podcast belt. Spreaker is the all-in-one platform that makes it easy to record, host, and distribute your show everywhere from Apple Podcasts to Spotify. But the real game changer for me was Spreeker's monetization.

Spreaker offers dynamic ad insertion. That means you can automatically insert ads into your episodes. No editing required. And with Spreker's programmatic ads, they'll bring the ads to you, and you get paid for every download. This turned my podcasting hobby into a full-time career. Spreaker also has a premium subscription model where you're most dedicated listeners can pay for bonus content or early access, adding another revenue stream

to what you're already doing. And the best part, Spreaker grows with you. Whether you're just starting out or running a full-blown podcast network, Sprinker's powerful tools scale effortlessly as your show grows. So if you're ready to podcast like a pro and get paid while doing it, check out Spreaker.com. That's S-P-R-E-K-E-R.com. So the petios decided they needed a change of scene. So they moved to Paris, where Marcel soon had a healthy medical practice. And because he had an insatiable urge for risk-taking, he supplemented his family practice with illicit work for drug addicts and sex workers.

As before, this wasn't because he needed more money. He and Georgette were doing well. It was because it excited him. More often than not, anyway, the sex workers would pay him with tricks rather than cash. They didn't enjoy it, and among the ladies of the Parisian night, Marcel soon had a reputation as someone who enjoyed painfully biting and pinching his partners. And he kept stealing. In 1936, Marcel was looking through the books displayed outside a Parisian bookstore,

then casually turned and walked away with a science textbook under his arm. An employee caught up with him on the street and stopped him. Marcel was astonished. Oh, I didn't realize I had this under my arm. I'm Dr. Petio. Let me pay for it now. But the bookstore worker wasn't having it. He took hold of Marcel's arm and said they needed to go straight to a nearby police station.

Dr. Petio lost his shit. Grabbed the guy's throat and started strangling him, yelling and scream that he was going to bash his face in. Then he ran away. When a police officer telephoned his apartment later that day, the man who answered said that Dr. Petio wasn't there. and had in fact been out of town for weeks. But when officers visited, what do you know?

Marcel calmly answered the door and accepted their summons for him to appear at the police station in two days. He showed up looking confused and like he'd been crying. He handed over a letter, which explained that he'd been wearing himself out working on a new invention, a pump that would massage the intestines to cure chronic constipation. That sounds... In addition to this pump, which sounds absolutely terrifying, he'd been working on a perpetual motion machine and had pretty much perfected it.

His head had been so full of these inventions that he hadn't even realized he had the book under his arm. He had no reason to steal the book anyway. He already knew it by heart. This was peculiar, and coupled with Marcel's assault in the street, the detective ordered a psychiatric examination. The psychiatrist thought Marcel was depressed and unstable. He was often incoherent and had trouble answering even basic questions and only really came to life when he was talking about his inventions, which of course were entirely imaginary. Given that Marcel was a doctor, he was deemed a potential danger to others as well as himself. The psychiatrist recommended that Marcel be committed to a mental hospital and not be held

responsible for his crimes. Rather than send him to a state-run asylum, Georgette arranged for Marcel to stay in a private hospital with a reputation for comfort and leniency. One of his fellow patients was James Joyce's daughter Lucia, then recently diagnosed with schizophrenia. A later theme in Marcel Pettio's life would be whether or not he was able to manipulate mental health professionals with the goal of avoiding criminal consequences. Almost as soon as he arrived at the hospital, he started petitioning to be released, but it wouldn't be until seven months later that a panel of psychiatrists declared him to be free from delirium, hallucinations,

mental confusion, intellectual disability, and pathological excitation or depression. Although they did note that he appeared amoral and unstable. Freed from the mental hospital, Marcel and Georgette picked up their lives as if they hadn't been interrupted at all. And it was an enviable life. They were both charming and talkative and in-demand at dinner parties. They played bridge and went to the theater and the cinema. Paris in the 30s was an incredible place that really earned the nickname City of Light. But of course, here in the future, we know that there was a jackbooted cloud on the horizon. When Germany invaded Poland in September of 1939, France and the UK declared war.

Everyone was optimistic about the outcome. The wealthy of Paris started fleeing, mainly for Switzerland and the U.S. For most people, picking up and leaving wasn't an option, but when Nazi Germany quickly overran Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, and then bombed two major car factories in Paris, panic set in. The Germans overran the French army and were soon racing towards Paris from northeast and west. Trains leaving the capital were packed beyond capacity. The roads were crammed with citizens lucky enough to own a car or a horse-drawn cart that they could shove their possessions into.

Others fit as much as they could into baby strollers or wheelbarrows and left on foot. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry would go on to write the little prince, but at the time he was a pilot in the French Air Force. From high above, he thought the lands around Paris looked like a boot had scattered an ant-hill. He described the refugees as moving without panic, without hope, without despair. on the march as if in duty bound. Wow. Yeah. Before the war, around 3 million people lived in Paris.

That number dropped to 800,000. The government fled. By the middle of June, Nazi soldiers were goose-stepping down the Champs de Liszt, in the first of what would be near daily parades. Except for them, the street was almost empty. Germany had to surrender on humiliating terms after the First World War. and now they wanted revenge. France had to pay the Germans for the privilege of being occupied by them.

For the four years of the occupation, 60% of France's national income went straight to Germany. In Paris, the Nazis set up their headquarters and fancy hotels and lived the high life with champagne and caviar. There was a strict curfew, but the nightclubs and brothels the Nazis liked had exemptions. If you wore a German uniform, you could fool yourself into thinking that Paris was still the city of light.

But for the remaining citizens of Paris, both food and fuel were in short supply. On average, their caloric intake dropped by more than half during the occupation. They made tea from appleskins and coffee from roasted acorns. Rooftops, windowsills, and public parks were given over to growing carrots and beans. People kept hens on their balconies. The Gestapo and SS established a heavy presence to keep the citizens in line. Of course, the jackboot stepped on some people a lot more heavily than that. and others. Before the war, there were 200,000 Jews in France. By the end of 1940, they were barred

from working in government, education, publishing film, and the military. If they were foreign-born, the Germans were free to force them into special camps. At the start of 1941, the employment restrictions were expanded to exclude Jews from working in banking, insurance, and real estate, then shortly afterwards from the law and medicine. Jewish-owned shops were seized by the state and sold or given to others. The objective was to completely bar French Jews from participating in the national economy. And then of course things got worse. In May 1941, the Nazis conducted their first round-up, arresting and imprisoning nearly 4,000 Jewish men. The start of 1942 saw the first of the overcrowded special trains headed from Paris to Auschwitz. 84 more of them would follow. Nearly 76,000

French Jews would be deported from France to the camps. Less than 3,000 would survive. This was a terrifying time to be Jewish in Paris. Many tried to flee the city, which was highly illegal and dangerous. Iokim Gushkenoff was a 42-year-old Polish-born Jew who had recently had his fur and leather store taken from him by the Germans and sold to a new owner. His store, as it happened, had been right across the street from the apartment home of his doctor, Marcel Pedio. In 1941, after the Gestapo organized riots that destroyed seven synagogues, Joachim decided the risk of staying was higher than the risk of trying to get out. When he discussed this with his doctor, Petio said he knew of a way to get out of the city.

He had connections with an underground escape organization. They could smuggle him, either to unoccupied Marseille or over the border to Spain and then on to Argentina. Petio's organization would give Joachim a false identity and, false papers, but it wouldn't be cheap. He'd have to pay over 25,000 francs. Yorim was supposed to consider this offer in absolute secrecy, but he had told one of his friends so that he could have help preparing. Petio gave him strict instructions. He wasn't to carry any pictures or identification. Whatever cash he was bringing, he should sew into the lining of his jacket. For Yorim, this was two $500 bills, each worth about $10 grand in today's money. He hid

another in a secret compartment inside one of the two suitcases he was allowed to bring. He filled the cases with valuables and family heirlooms, gold, silver, jewels, and padded them all with fur coats to help open a new store when he reached Buenos Aires. On the day of Jochim's departure, Petyo would give him some necessary injections, vaccinations for his journey to South America. Joachim was traveling alone. His wife Renee was supposed to follow later. On the night of his departure, January 2nd, 1942, they had dinner together, strolled around the Arc de Triomph and kissed goodbye, with Joachim heading off to his appointment on the Rue Lissur. As far as later investigations could determine, this was the only time Marcel Pedio would provide his address in advance to one of the people he was helping flee Paris.

He got more careful later on. Renee would never see her husband again. After two months, she hadn't heard anything at all from him. and went to see Dr. Pedio. Jochim was fine, Marcel said. He'd left from Marseille to Casablanca and from Buenos Aires. In fact, Petio had just received a postcard

from Joachim, which he hadn't yet had time to pass on to her. It read, I've arrived. I got sick during the crossing, but I'm completely healed. You can come. That, at least, was what Petio told her, the postcard said.

The whole thing was written in code. Two more coded postcards arrived in the spring. Joachim was thriving and Renee should join him as soon as she could. In the second, he was insistent. If she didn't come right away, he would cut off all communication. Petio also encouraged Renee to make preparations, telling her to sell everything she owned and carry as much money as she possibly could.

But due to ill health and a lack of funds, Renee didn't follow. If she had, she'd have certainly died. There were indeed underground networks to help people flee Paris, and several did go through doctors, but Dr. Peddeo wasn't part of any of them. The vaccination he gave to Joachim was an injection of poison, probably cyanide. Marcel kept all of Joachim's valuables, which was a fortune.

We don't know when or how Marcel disposed of the body, but there's every chance that it was Joachim's body, with head, hands, and feet removed that was pulled from the sin in a waterlogged trunk in May of the same year. Was he the first person that Marcel killed in this incredibly heartless way? promising an escape from terror and then killing him to rob him of everything he had, it was certainly not a spur of the moment crime. Marcel had bought the property on Rue Lassur in August of 1941,

and within six weeks had started his strange renovations, the triangular room with the thick concrete walls, the high walls around the courtyard that would shield whatever went on inside from the neighbors, the old stable manure pit that he had opened up. The work was completed in October. Two months later, Joaquin was dead. Lots of people disappeared during the Paris occupation, and there's no way to know if any of them were earlier victims of Marcel Pedio.

Just like there was no way to know whether he killed anyone before Louisette de Laveau. I think so. Just because dismembering, disemboweling, and beheading a victim in a way that you get away with it seems like a really sophisticated thing for a starter crime, you know. But on the other hand, of course, he was a doctor. so cutting up a body might not have the same level of like yeah that you'd have to you know get past that it would for most people because he'd already done that in medical school obviously yeah and it just seems like it's a very like established routine like it doesn't seem like

it's something that would just like sprout up one day but you know what do we know exactly I have my suspicions I guess I think I totally agree actually I think he probably for sure did it did it before But in the other direction, there's no question of further victims after Joachim Gushinov. There were lots of them, lots and lots and lots. But as you've probably guessed by now, you're going to have to wait till next week to hear more about them because the weird life and crimes of Marcel Peddeo take up far too much space to fit into one episode. Yeah, it's going to get so much we're going to get so much we're going to leave it there for part one, campers,

but don't worry, we'll have part two for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay. safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Margo, Chelsea, Geneva, Ariana, Spetsy, Jen,

and Leah. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back. And if you're not yet a patron, you're missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode, add free, at least a day early, sometimes even two, plus tons of extra content, like patrons-only episodes and hilarious post-show discussions. And once you

hit the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff. A free sticker at $5 or rad enamel pin or fridge magnet while supplies last at 10 virtual events with Katie and me, and we're always looking for new stuff to do for you. So if you can, come join us at patreon.com slash true crime campfire. If you want some great TCCC merch, visit the Truecrime Campfire store at spreadshirt.com. Check out our website at truecrimecampfirepod.com And leave us a nice review if you like what we're doing. Thank you.