True Crime Campfire - The People's Monster: Serial Killer in the City of Light Pt 2

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

In Part One last week, we introduced you to the strange world of Marcel Petiot, doctor, failed politician, and serial killer in wartime Paris. The horrific discovery of dismembered bodies at Dr. Petiot’s mansion had triggered a massive manhunt, and we’re going to pick up the police investigation now in Part Two of “The People’s Monster.” Note: Katie was sick this week, so Whitney had to take this one solo! Katie will be back next episode. 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. In part one last week, we introduced you to the strange world of Marcel Pettio, doctor, failed politician and serial killer in wartime. Paris. The horrific discovery of dismembered bodies at Dr. Petio's mansion had triggered a massive manhunt, and we're going to pick up the police investigation now in part two of the

People's Monster, a serial killer in the city of light. A quick note, Katie is sick today, so I'm going to be tackling this one all by myself. I'm or we'll all miss her. So the lead investigator of the petio case was commissaire Georges Victor Massou, a stocky mustache dude who would often bring his 20-year-old son Bernard with him on investigations, which already sounds like the setup for one of those cozy BBC mystery series like Inspector Morse. I love those shows, oh my God. But Masu probably regretted bringing the kid along when he got to the horror scene in the basement

of the property on Rueh-la-sur, which he would later describe as something from Dante's Inferno. We described the bizarre horrors of Dr. Petio's mansion last week, and keeping that in mind, it might surprise you to hear that Missou did not immediately send officers over to Petio's apartment to try and nab him before he could skip town. He did have his reasons for the delay, though. As it happens, Rueherser connects with the Avenue Foch, which is where the occupying Germans had a ton of their offices.

In particular, right around the corner from the Petio Mansion were offices for the Gestapo and the SS. The Germans had taken over one of the buildings right across the street from Petio, and a swastika flag flew over it. The mansion was right at the heart of Nazi Paris, and Massou had made the not unreasonable assumption that the grisly scene he'd just come upon was the work of the Gestapo. The French police in occupied Paris were in an uncomfortable position. They had no authority over the occupying Germans and were required to assist them against the, quote, attacks of the communist, terrorist, agents of the enemy and saboteurs, as well as those who support them, Jews, Bolsheviks, Anglo-Americans. The French police, by and large, went along because they thought even this severely compromised

situation would be better for the people than being policed directly by the German military and their French fascist allies. For the police, poking around in Gestapo affairs was potentially dangerous and largely pointless because they had zero authority over the Germans. But by the morning, Su was beginning to doubt his original assumption. Usually, the Gestapo warned the police away from their activities, and would certainly have intervened once the discovery had been made, but Massieu heard nothing from the Germans. The police did hear from Petio's neighbors, none of whom knew him much at all.

But he was a familiar sight, bicycling in and out of his courtyard with a cart fixed to his bike. There were frequently pieces of art and furniture in the cart, but its contents were often covered by a tarp. Neighbors in the apartments next door claim to have sometimes heard shouts, screams, and laughter from the mansion during the nighttime, although investigators didn't know how seriously to take these reports. None had been previously made, and the patio case was an immediate media sensation, which is the type of case that tends to attract a lot of weird and dubious witness statements. There were plenty of other weird discoveries in the mansion, besides the gruesome body parts. In the doctor's office, investigators found a gas mask, which for the moment they assumed pedio used to protect himself from the smell of the bodies as he carried them to the basement furnace. They found a suitcase holding 11 pairs of women's shoes and a low-cut black satin dress decorated with two swallows stitched in gold.

And that could be a useful clue because it had a label for the dressmaker, Sylvie Rosa, in Marseille. There were two men's shirts and a pair of underwear, all with the initials K-K stitched onto them in red thread. Dr. Petio had apparently made a half-assed attempt to remove these initials. In a basement closet, investigators found a collection of the small things people might take with them on a journey and wouldn't just leave behind unless their lives had been interrupted. 22 toothbrushes and combs, bottles of perfume, lipstick cases, makeup, glasses, glasses, cigarette holders, Things people might keep in their pockets if they were expecting to go on a long trip and weren't sure their suitcases would be easily at hand.

And you probably weren't taking an extra toothbrush with you when you were fleeing the Nazis. 22 toothbrushes probably meant 22 lives ended, at the very least. And there was certainly no dignity after death for Petio's victims. They were cut up and tossed into the quicklime pit out in the stables, which would dehydrate the body parts and make them easier to burn. at least most parts were thrown into the lime pit but not quite all investigators found two jars filled with formaldehyde in which floated two severed penises german officials visited the mansion and put out an order over telegram arrest petio dangerous madman which like yeah i mean he is obviously but like y'all aren't familiar with the concept of irony are you Also, if the Nazis are calling you a dangerous madman, you have taken a couple wrong turns.

When officers went to the Petio's second floor apartment on Rue Comartin, they found the doors were unlocked. Apparently, Marcel Petio thought that a determined burglar would always find a way in, so he never locked his doors. He didn't want to have to fix him if they got kicked in, which I don't even want to start on how much there is wrong with that. This guy's brain just ain't right. Unlike the dusty mansion on Rue Lassur, the Petio's apartment, was neat and tidy and well-stocked with things that were incredibly difficult and expensive to get hold of in wartime Paris. Imported liquor, chocolate, coffee. They also found startling amounts of both peyote and morphine. Now, peyote, apparently, was a popular party drug in Parisian nightclubs

at the time, and although Native Americans have medicinal uses for it, I don't think the medicinal benefits of peyote buttons ever made it into the medical textbooks in Paris. This stash was for dealing, and the same was true of most of the morphine. Now, obviously, there are plenty of good reasons for doctors to prescribe morphine, but there was no good reason to keep this massive stockpile of it at home. As for Marcel and Georgette, the building concierge's told police they'd both left the previous night and hadn't come back. Petio was selling drugs both legally and illegally.

He supposedly ran a detox program at Rue Comartan, where in theory, he'd wean patients off morphine and heroin, by prescribing progressively smaller doses. But in reality, there was no weaning, and this side of Petio's practice was soon his busiest and most profitable. He was just a drug dealer. It also came close to landing him in serious trouble. Back in 1942, two of his detox patients,

Jean-Marc von Beaver and Jeanette Gaul, were a couple. They were arrested for getting drugs illegally in addition to their prescriptions, and investigators soon learned that Jean-Marc didn't use heroin at all. He just pretended to so he could get extra doses for Jeanette. He told them that Dr. Petio was perfectly aware of this and went along with the ruse and prescribed Jeanette far more than he was supposed to. All three of them were indicted. If Petio was found guilty, the best he could hope for was to lose his practice. He might get jail time, too.

But what do you know? A couple months before trial, Jean-Marc Van Beaver vanished from the face of the earth and was no longer available to testify against Marcel Pett. Pettio. He'd left a cafe one evening to talk to a tall, clean-sven man in his mid-40s and was never seen again. He was heard from, though. He wrote a letter to his girlfriend, Jeanette, explaining why he'd made up all those terrible fake stories about Dr. Pettio. He signed this letter to the love of his life with his full name, Jean-Marc Van Beaver. Now, I know letter writing is a dying art and everything, but, like, can you imagine signing a message to your significant other with your, like, full legal name? Come on. Like,

Hey, babe, want to get Chipotle tonight? We could watch the new episode of Love Island, too, if you want. Sincerely, Jonathan Michael Robinson III. We told you last week that in 1942, the Parisian authorities fished any number of body parts out of the seine, cut up in the same way as those later found in Dr. Petio's mansion. More than likely, some of those body parts belong to Jean-Marc Van Beaver. And right after Van Beaver, Petio was involved with the law again.

He gave one of his patients, a young woman called Regine Baudet, a prescription for sonarol, a barbiturate sleeping pill. Regine swung for the fences, and before taking the script to the pharmacy, she painted over where it said sonaril and wrote 14 vials of heroin. Wow, aim high, sis. You can't fault a gal for trying, I guess. The pharmacist, shockingly, was not fooled by this, and after he told the police, Regine was arrested. This wasn't her first drug offense, and she was potentially looking at some serious time. Police talked to Petio, but he wasn't implicated in the crime or in trouble. Nevertheless, though, he bizarrely pushed himself into the middle of the case,

convincing Regine's mother, Martha Kate, to pretend she was an addict herself and tell the police that Regine was just trying to help her. According to Petio, this would help her daughter avoid a long prison sentence. To make the story convincing, he offered to make a dozen harmless injections in her thigh so she'd have needle marks. Oh wow, no thank you. For some reason, Martha Kate initially agreed to this, but when she told her son and husband, they talked her out of it and told her she should report Dr. Petio to the police. Yeah. On March 25th, she left her apartment to have a quick word with Petio and then her daughter's lawyer. She was only intending to be gone a few

minutes. She didn't take any ID and left a pot of water boiling on the stove. She was never seen again. and in the morning her husband got a letter apparently from her in which she said she'd fled for the free zone to avoid interrogation. Just like with Van Beaver, she'd signed this letter to her husband with her full legal name. The investigation was about as half-hearted as you might expect for an adult missing person with a drug connection, particularly when she'd apparently sent a letter explaining her absence. Police searched Petio's apartment where they found nothing overtly suspicious, but they did come across a drawer full of gems and jewelry. Petio said these were gifts from clients,

and police had no reason to doubt him. As they left, one of the officers apologetically told him, rest assured, no one is accusing you of burning her in your stove or anything ridiculous like that. Of course, three years later, and that was definitely one of the potential fates of Madame Kate's body. As you might remember from the start of last week's episode, what kicked off the discovery at Petio's mansion

was a note on his door saying he was away at an address in O'Zare. Now, investigators from Paris hurried down to O'Zare to see what they could find there. If they were lucky, maybe they could even catch Marcel Pedio. Well, they found A Pedio, Marcel's younger brother Maurice, who lived in O'Zare with his family, as well as Marcel and Georgette's 15-year-old son Gerard, who went to school down there. As sometimes happens with siblings, Maurice looked like a version 2.0 of his old. older brother, taller and better looking, but also without Dr. Politician Marcel's success. Maurice had struggled with money throughout adulthood and had declared bankruptcy a few years

previously. He and his family lived in an apartment over his electronics shop and were finally doing well, well enough to own several properties in the area, including the address that had been fixed to the door of Marcel's Paris Mansion House. A mainstay of Maurice's electronics business was selling radios, which were hugely popular during the business. A mainstay of Maurice's electronics business was selling radios, which were hugely popular during the war so that people could listen to the BBC and get information that wasn't censored by the Germans. Maurice's shop was doing well. But well enough to support him buying multiple properties, that'd take a lot of radios. Investigator's suspicions about where the money for these properties came from spiked even higher when they got

a look at Marcel's forwarding address, a fancy chateau close to the river that would have cost a fortune. Inside, it reminded them of the Paris mansion. Dusty and poorly kept, crammed with art and furniture. But of Marcel and Georgette Pettio, there was no sign, and Maurice and his family claimed to have not heard from them in a while, certainly not since the awful discoveries in the mansion house. The investigators asked the local police to keep their eyes peeled and headed back to Paris. On March 14th, two and a half days after those grim discoveries, one of the sharp-eyed Osir officers noticed a woman in a black skirt and coat waiting for a train at the station. She matched the description and picture he'd been shown, so he approached and asked her if she was

Georgette Petio. She said she was, and then, I have done nothing wrong and fainted on the platform. I mean, maybe she fainted. God knows she must have been stressed out and everything, but Georgette was apparently part fainting goat. She tended to just hit the deck whenever things got tough or questions got tough or she was painted into a corner officers carried her out to the car and soon both she and maurice were headed to paris for questioning georgette claimed to not know anything about what had gone on at the mansion on the rue la sur or indeed much of anything at all about what her husband did when he was out of the house that was her one complaint in an otherwise happy marriage that marcel would spend so much time out of the house without telling her where he was going or what he

was doing which for god's sake georgette girl stand up for yourself I'd kick his ass. Going out all hours and never telling me where or why or who was, screw that, but apparently she was all right with it. Georgette said that on March 11th, the day of the discoveries, their dinner had been interrupted by a call from the police to warn Marcel about the fire at his property across town, and he'd left. And according to her, that was the last time she'd seen him. She waited up all night, and in the morning, when news broke of what had been found at the mansion, she panicked and tried to get a train to O'Zare to be with their son.

But there were no trains till the next day. She spent the night in a stairwell, then got the train down to O'Zare, and at this point in the interview, she fainted again. Marcel's younger brother Maurice also claimed ignorance about the Rue Lissur house. He said, I have never known which street this private mansion was on, and I've never been there. But Maurice was kind of a soft touch in the interview room,

and I guess he was just too macho to try and pull the fainting trick, like Georgette. Okay, okay, he said. He'd been there one time last year to treat some of the furniture Marcella had gotten at auction for bedbugs. And maybe again in December to turn off the water before a cold snap. And one more time in January to look for leaks after a neighbor complained, but that was it. That was definitely it.

Except when detectives mentioned they'd already spoken to a particular truck driver, Maurice came clean. Okay, look, I had 400. kilos of quick lime delivered to the house in February, he said. Marcel was going to use it to whitewash the place. Maurice said he had no idea where his brother was now, but by this point the police didn't trust him as far as they could toss him. They locked him up. Marcel was pretty handy himself, but he'd hired professionals for his alterations to the

murder house. He told his contractors he needed those thick walls in his strange triangular room as a shield from radiation. He was going to open up a clinic after the war, and he'd keep his x-ray and electrotherapy equipment in there. It was much too small a space for the 1940s versions of that equipment, but you can't really blame the contractors for not knowing that. And he told them he needed the viewing lens embedded in the wall to keep an eye on the machines for some reason. As for the hooks on the walls, he had nothing.

If the contractors wondered what the hell those were for, they never got an answer. There was a full-blown media mania over the pediope. case, and apparently every outlet was trying to push its own nickname for the killer. He was the butcher and the werewolf of Paris, the modern bluebeard, the demonic ogre, Dr. Satan, and either the scalper, the monster, or the vampire of Ruehler. Damn, those are all pretty metal. The French media are good at this. Petio was the biggest story in Paris, and police were bombarded with sightings and theories and

reports from self-proclaimed psychics, and yet, despite his face now being one of the most commonly displayed in the country, police still couldn't find him. Rumors, of course, abounded. Petio was dead, killed by his underworld drug connections. He was disguised as a woman. He was being shielded by the Freemasons or the resistance. Or he'd never existed at all, and the whole thing was a distraction made up by the Germans. In fact, Marcel was living in Paris, in the apartment of a friend.

Marcel had convinced his friend that he was a resistance fighter on the run from the Gestapo, who had made up all those terrible life. lies about murder to flush him out. He stayed inside during the day, doing crosswords and reading detective novels, and only went out at night once he'd grown a beard as a makeshift disguise. For detectives, the case would only move forward when the Gestapo handed over the sizable file they had on Marcel Petio. They had suspected him of running a group that helped Jews and allied pilots who'd been shot down to get out of Paris, a business he operated with the former patient, hairdresser and wig maker named Raoul Fourier. Prospective clients would be sent to Raoul, who, if he was sent to,

convinced they were on the up and up would bring in his boss, Dr. Eugene. This, of course, was Marcel Petio, who even in his aliases couldn't give up that medical degree. In fact, the Gestapo had gone as far as arresting Marcel the previous year, and had imprisoned and interrogated him for eight months. What was weird about that was that the Germans had released him at all. People they suspected of aiding the resistance had a habit of, you know, disappearing. For Marcel, it seems to have been a combination of two things. For one, the Gestapo thought he was so crazy he couldn't possibly be leading a successful clandestine operation, and two, in addition to its greater sins, the Nazi regime was incredibly corrupt. A senior Gestapo officer called up Maurice Petio, Marcel's brother,

and said, hey, give me a hundred thousand francs, and I'll let your brother go. Brother Maurice paid up, and Marcel walked free. He'd convinced the Germans he was just a minor player in the escape organization, a flunky for the real leader, a shadowy figure he knew only as Martineti, a character who came straight from Marcel Petio's imagination. It's like Kaiser Soze. It was right after the Gestapo file arrived on his desk that a man walked into Commissaire Massoud's office and told him about the relationship between Marcel Petio and his friend Joachim Guscinov, who we told you about at the end of last week's episode. Joachim had been a Jewish businessman who two years before had attempted

to flee Paris with the help of Marcel Pedio and had never been seen again. When Masu interviewed Marcel's accomplice Raoul, he heard more similar stories. Raoul, by the way, seems to have genuinely believed he was helping people escape from the Nazis. He had no idea that Marcel was actually killing these people and stealing everything they had on them. He told Massu first about Joe the boxer, a gangster who'd worked for the infamous Henri Lefant, an SS-affiliated crime lord who was a terror. of occupied Paris. Joe had broken the rules, dressing up in a Gestapo uniform to rob people, and he needed to get out of town before LaFont took him out.

Joe the Boxer showed up with a friend who was also eager to run away to South America, a pimp named Francois the Corsican, and they brought their girlfriends along, Lola Shamu and Annette Little Bedbug Bassett. My God, Lola, babe, you got to catch up in the nickname game, your friends are showing you up. The travelers carried as much wealth on their persons as possible. The ladies were dripping with jewelry, and Joe the Boxer had over a million francs sewn into his suit, as well as heavy rings, a gold watch,

and gold hidden in a secret compartment in the heel of his shoe. They planned to set up a brothel together in Buenos Aires, but after they walked into the night to meet Dr. Eugene, they were never seen again. A few weeks later, Raoul saw Joe the Boxer's flashy gold watch on Marcel's wrist. It was a gift, Marcel told him. Joe the boxer wasn't discreet, and it told several underworld buddies what he was doing. The next escape group was a carb and copy of the previous one, two gangsters and their girlfriends,

loaded with valuables, hoping to start a brothel in Buenos Aires. Was Buenos Aires short on brothels in the four days? Damn! One of the girlfriends was a beautiful young sex worker named Josephine Gripé, and Commiser Maseau knew that name. Remember the black satin dress investigators had found in Pettio's mansion? Well, detectives had called up the dressmaker, Sylvie Rosa, in Marseilles. The dress was memorable. Sylvie was able to tell them exactly who she'd sold it to,

a lovely young woman from a brothel near the dressmaker, Josephine Grippe. She'd come to Paris a year before when her gangster boyfriend had had to flee to Marseille after fleecing Nazi officers at the brothel he ran for them, and now that two of them had apparently tried to get out of the country together. So now Commer Sousseau had a solid link between Raoul Fourier's testimony and physical evidence found at the scene. He would get even more when he interviewed Marcel's old friend René Nizondé. Renée told him he'd met with Maurice Petio for a business dinner at the end of 1943, when Marcel was still being held by the Gestapo.

Maurice showed up an hour late, pale and nervous. I've just come from my brother's house, Maurice told him. There's enough there to have us all shot. The journeys to South America begin and end at the Rue Lissur. Maurice had found the pit full of body parts and quicklime, along with a book that carefully listed the victim's names and the dates they'd been killed. Unluckily for investigators, this book would never be found,

which sucks, what a fantastic piece of evidence. When Masu asked Renee if Georgette Pettio also knew about Maurice's discovery, Renee said, absolutely, he told her himself. So, yeah, why, if you knew, Georgette had fainted three times during the conversation, but would later say she just thought Renee was lying. Well, then why'd you faint three times, Georgette? And you can kind of see why, because Renee then told her she should divorce Marcel immediately, and to make that easier, she should have an affair. Like with Renee, for example, you know, like right now. What do you say, baby? God. After this conversation, Renee said he avoided the

Pettios like the plague, despite Marcel's repeated invitations that he'd come over for dinner. On their first trip down to Ozair, investigators had only taken a brief look at the chateau by the river that Maurice Pettio owned, the one crammed with dusty furniture and art. They should have looked more closely. Now, detectives looked in the attic and found 49 pieces of luggage, ranging from small suitcases up to heavy trunks. They varied hugely in quality, too, and clearly came from many different people. Inside were clothes, underwear, sheets, towels, pillowcases, everything you could cram in if you were forced to start a new life in a new country and could only take what you could carry. It was impossible to tell if anything had been taken from the cases. The petio's old maid told police that the doctor often gave Georgette fancy presents, jewels, rings, precious stones, a pearl necklace. Most of the people trying to flee occupied Paris were Jews. They were almost to.

universally quieter and more careful than the gangsters Marcel dealt with, so they left fewer traces. We don't know the identities of most of Marcel's victims. A lot of Jews just disappeared from Paris during the occupation, but we do know some. 60-year-old Rachel Wolf, her son Moses and his wife, Lena, had first fled Germany and then Amsterdam as the Nazis tightened their grip. In Paris, they moved constantly to stay ahead of the Gestapo. In December of 1942, they packed up as much of their possessions as they could, with Moses hiding diamonds inside the lining of his suit, and went to their meeting with Dr. Eugene for passage to South America. And then they vanished. Within two weeks, another Jewish family had a series of appointments with Dr. Eugene. He didn't

like to send more than two or at most three people on their way at once, because it increased the risk of capture. Gilbert and Marianne Bosch went first, then Marianne's parents, Hyam and Francisco Shankar. Last were Marie-Anne's sister Ludwika Arnsberg and her husband Ludwig. Three couples visiting Rulisar at night with the promise of freedom from terror. Three couples who just vanished from the world.

All their names would be found in suitcases hidden in the attic in Ozair. There was soon bigger news in France than Marcel Pettio. In June of 1944, American, British, and Canadian troops landed in Normandy, Dede. And somewhere in Germany, Adolf Hitler started constantly shitting his pants. Okay, we don't have that on record specifically, but, you know, it's probably true.

By August, the Allies were close to Paris, and Hitler demanded that the city be destroyed, pull down the Eiffel Tower, blow up the Ark de Triumph, reduce the whole city to rubble. The generals in Paris said they'd get right on that, and then didn't do anything at all. On August 24th, the Free French Army rolled into the city, and after some vicious street fighting alongside the resistance soon forced the Germans to surrender. Church bells rang out, the swastika was pulled down from the Eiffel Tower and Paris was free. There was, as you can imagine, one hell of a party. But the search for Marcel Petio continued.

To try and lure him out, police got in touch with journalist and resistance fighter Jacques Yen, who published an article titled Petio, Soldier of the Reich, which painted Marcel as a willing accomplice. of the Gestapo. Sure enough, a few days later, the paper got a furious eight-page letter in handwriting that matched the doctors. He berated Yonet's sick imagination in repeating clumsy kraut lies and said that he, Petio, had been in the resistance since the beginning. Yes, he'd killed people, but they'd all been Germans or collaborators. The letter was postmarked from Paris. The effort to find Petio ramped up even higher.

Among those helping track him down was Henri Valéry, a captain in the resistance who specialized in counter-espionage, a smart man whose quick wits had led to rapid promotion. One morning in October, Valerie stepped on to the platform of a Paris railway station. A man he didn't know approached him and asked the time, and when Valerie looked at his watch, the stranger kicked him in the balls as hard as he could. As Valeri crumpled, three more men rushed forward and threw him down. They handcuffed him, tied his feet together, blindfolded and gagged him, and then they carried him out of the station.

Henri Valerie didn't exist. They'd just arrested Marcel Pedio. In typical risk-taking style, he'd assumed a fake identity and positioned himself right in the middle of the group pursuing his own arrest. He has like a fetish for doing that. If you remember from part one, he was the anonymous journalist who found the murder weapon in the river and like brought it to the police's attention. I mean, it was him.

got a fetish for sticking himself in the middle of the investigation, despite the incredible risk of doing that. I think that's really interesting. It's very narcissistic. On him, they found a loaded gun, a bunch of cash, several fake identities, and a blank search and arrest warrant. There was also paperwork for one of his aliases to transfer to Saigon in just two days' time. He'd almost flown the coop. In custody, Marcel Petio wouldn't stop talking. He'd been in the resistant since 1941, he said, and had been trained by a British infiltrator whose name, or even codename conveniently, he'd never known. Petio had been part of a group called fly talks after a popular insecticide spray that found and killed Gestapo informers. He refused to name

other members of this group for their own safety. He'd killed 63 people, he said, all Germans or traitors, mostly using a secret weapon he'd invented. This was some kind of gun that was both perfectly silent and perfectly accurate up to a hundred feet. The bodies had been dumped in forests outside of Paris. Then, Fly Talk started helping people flee occupied Paris. It was only after his imprisonment, and then released by the Gestapo that he went back to Rue Lissur and found, oh my God, this place is full of dead bodies. So his story was, yeah, I've killed dozens of people, just not these specific dozens of people about whom I know nothing. He refused to provide any more details about his deadly secret weapon

other than to claim that one truckload could have freed all of France. But he was going to keep it to himself in case the Germans got hold of the details and invaded again. And also, the people asking him questions were too dumb to understand his weapon anyway. He assumed the bodies had been planted

at Rue Lisser by the Gestapo to frame him. They could turn up at any minute to arrest him. That was why he'd started the grim task of cutting them up into pieces and burning them in his basement stove. This was, of course, a whole herds' worth of bullshit. The secret weapon was one of Marcel's imaginary inventions. The Gestapo didn't need excuses to arrest anybody,

and most damagingly, no one in the resistance had ever heard of Marcel Petio. Even so, resistance members Jacques Yené interviewed Petio to see if there was any grain of truth in what he was saying. Lots of resistance cells were isolated from others, for security reasons after all. Petio told him all kinds of fancy, stories about assassinations and blowing up trains with plastic explosives and said his code number in the resistance was 46. This was lower than any such number you'd ever heard of. He asked Petio who'd given him that number, but Petio said he couldn't remember. This was a mistake. Real

resistance members were trained to give a specific response to that question. They were supposed to say, a guy who did nothing but that. In pretrial interviews with a committee of psychiatrists to determine if he was competent to stand trial, Petio was asked how he'd become so wealthy. He owned multiple properties and was worth what would be millions of dollars in today's money. The real answer was that he'd preyed on people

carrying as much of their wealth as they could possibly carry. Petio's answer was that his medical practice did really well, and he and Georgette were frugal, and also he made a fortune selling antiques he found at auction. Uh-huh. Just like the last time Marcel Petio had stood

before a committee of psychiatrists, found him to be amoral but not legally insane. He was certainly competent to stand trial. Jacques Yenay also submitted a report in which he said Marcel Pettio clearly had nothing to do with the resistance. In March of 1946, Marcel Pettio's trial began for the murder of 27 identified people. Petio still claimed he'd killed 63 people, all Germans and traitors. Forensic scientist Albert Paul, who conducted the autopsies on the many body parts recovered, estimated there might have been as many as 150 victims. Wow.

Marcel was the only person charged. Now, I'm not going to claim any expertise on the French judicial system of the 40s, but it's an inquisitorial system rather than the adversarial system we've got here in the U.S. So lots of people got to ask Petio questions during the trial, and he got to show off his wit. It was a circus that often threatened to careen out of control, with lots of the people watching either laughing or applauding when they thought Petio scored a hit. He firmly stuck to his story of being a patriotic resistance fighter, and I guess it's kind of a human constant that some people will believe the most ridiculous lies

as long as they're delivered with enough panache. But Petio stumbled badly after a long story about blowing up trains with plastic explosives. One of the attorneys, who also happened to have been in the resistance, asked him a simple question, What are plastic explosives? Petio blushed and stammered. He clearly didn't know. How do you carry prime and detonate plastic explosives?

Uh, Petio didn't know that either. The attorney kept at him until Petio burst out, You defender of Jews and traitors! Booze and hisses replaced the laughter and applause. On April 4th, the jury found Marcel Petio guilty of 26 counts. of murder. There was only one conceivable sentence. Death by guillotine. This is France after all. As he was led out of the courtroom by guards, Petio whirled around and yelled at no one in particular. I must be avenged. Good luck with that. On May 25th, Petio was led to the guillotine for a private

execution. Asked if he had any last confession he wanted to get off his chest, he said, no, I am a traveler who is taking all his baggage with him. It's kind of an ironic thing for him to say. A few minutes later, his head rolled into a wicker basket. Very little of the fortunes Marcel Pettio stole was ever recovered, although we do have a pretty good idea of where part of it spent some time. In February 1944, a month before the discoveries at Rue Lissur, Marcel drove down to Ozair for the funeral of his cousin, Celine. He volunteered to stand vigil all night with the casket

and brought two heavy suitcases in with him. The pallbearers couldn't help but know. noticed that the coffin holding Celine, a very slight woman, was surprisingly heavy. After Marcel's crimes hit the news, one of the people who'd been at the funeral thought what I'm pretty sure all y'all are thinking. He buried some of the loot with the body. One night, this enterprising chap took a shovel and a pickaxe to the graveyard in hopes of striking it rich. But after he dug down to the coffin, he found it was empty. As in completely empty. No buried treasure and no body either. This particular

grave had already been robbed. Petio never explained how exactly he killed his victims. It seems likely he injected them with either peyote or morphine to make them pliable, probably under the guise of vaccinations, and then moved them into the triangular room where he either tied or chained them to the hooks in the wall so they couldn't break free. And then either another lethal injection, or maybe the release of poison gas, which would explain why he'd installed a viewer to let him sea into the sealed room. It showed him a close-up image of his victim's face, so he could tell when they were dead. And given the effort he put into constructing this chamber, you have to believe he got pleasure from watching them die, too. Marcel Petio is a hard killer to pin down. He

profited hugely from the majority of his crimes, and others were mainly to remove an inconvenience or difficulty in his life. But was that all it was, just cold, completely amoral self-interest? I mean, this guy was about as far from a robotic killer as you can get. He was emotional, temperamental, he enjoyed taking risks. He wasn't the kind of person to commit so much of his life to any activity at all unless he got something out of it emotionally, unless he enjoyed it. I can't think of many people we've covered that better represent what Sir Terry Pratchett wrote in one of his books.

He called it the first and most fundamental crime, treating people as things. What a walk-in nightmare. So that was a wild one, right campers? You know, we'll have another one 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. Everybody wish Katie a speedy recovery so she can come back next week. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Sadie, Jill, Brianna, Anna, Tabitha, Shells, S.J., Kimberly, Christy, and Wyatt.

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