Гамбайдың көк сақалды қатқасышы: Анри Ландрю ісі

French serial killer

Henri Désiré Landru (12 April 1869 – 25 February 1922) (ɑ̃ʁi deziʁe lɑ̃dʁy) was a French serial killer, nicknamed the Bluebeard of Gambais. He murdered at least seven women in the village of Gambais between December 1915 and January 1919. Landru also killed at least three other women and a young man in the house he rented from December 1914 to August 1915 in the town of Vernouillet, a town northwest of Paris. The true number of Landru's victims is suspected to be higher. Landru was arrested on 12 April 1919 at an apartment near Paris's Gare du Nord, which he shared with his 24 year old mistress Fernande Segret. The police eventually concluded that Landru had met or been in romantic correspondence with 283 women during the First World War. Seventy two were never traced. In December 1919, Landru's wife Marie Catherine, 51, and his eldest son Maurice, 25, were arrested on suspicion of complicity in Landru's thefts from his victims. Both denied any knowledge of Landru's criminal activities. Marie Catherine was released without charge in July 1920 due to health reasons. Maurice was released on the same day because the authorities could not establish his guilt. Landru continued to protest his innocence during the yearlong investigation. He was charged with the murders at Vernouillet and Gambais. This included the murders of ten women and his first victim's teenage son. Landru's trial in November 1921 at Versailles was attended by leading French celebrities, including the novelist Colette, and the actor and singer Maurice Chevalier. On 30 November, Landru was found guilty by a majority verdict of all eleven murders and sentenced to death. He was executed by guillotine on 25 February 1922.

Henri Landru was born in Paris, the son of a furnace stoker and a laundress, who were both ardent Catholics. He was educated by monks at a Catholic school on the Île Saint Louis, serving as an altar boy at the adjacent church, where his parents and elder sister worshipped. By his late teens, Landru had graduated to sub deacon, a secular post that involved lighting candles and helping a priest with his vestments. According to his future wife Marie Catherine, she first set eyes on the young Landru at Mass one Sunday in 1887. "We got talking as we were leaving the church and so my love story began." Landru and Marie Catherine's first child, Marie, was born illegitimately in 1891, shortly after Landru began three years' obligatory military service in the northern French town of Saint Quentin, rising from private to the position of deputy quartermaster. In the autumn of 1893, he returned to Paris and married Marie Catherine, who was already pregnant with their second child, Maurice. The couple had two more children: Suzanne, born in 1896, and Charles, born in 1900. During the 1890s while his wife worked as a laundress, Landru drifted from one job to the next. He was employed for short periods in Paris as a plumber's accountant, a furniture salesman and an assistant to a toy maker. In a later newspaper interview, Marie Catherine described Landru as a "model husband" and father in the early years of their marriage, even though she also told police that he was a "skirt chaser" from the very beginning.

Landru's drift into crime and possible insanity seems to have been associated with his ambition to become a famous inventor. In 1898 he designed a primitive motorbike, which he called "The Landru", and then deceived several potential investors into giving him money to build a factory to manufacture it. Having pocketed the money, Landru vanished. Other projects that Landru began in the late 1890s and early 1900s included a plan for a new suburban railway line west of Paris and an automated children's toy. Meanwhile, he was constantly on the run from the police, seeing little of his family and lying low for a year in Le Havre. In 1904 Landru was finally arrested in Paris after falling in the street, as he was running away from a bank he had tried to defraud. He was remanded in custody at the Santé prison where he made what appears to have been a fake suicide attempt, slipping his head through a noose made from his bed sheet just as a guard was entering his cell. Landru was examined by Dr Charles Vallon, one of France's leading criminal psychiatrists, who concluded that Landru was "on the frontiers of madness" but was not yet insane and was still responsible for his actions. Vallon's diagnosis was confirmed by two other psychiatrists. Yet Vallon was sufficiently concerned by Landru's behaviour that he warned Marie Catherine to be on guard in the future. While he was in jail, his widowed father committed suicide in April 1912 by hanging himself from a tree in the Bois de Boulogne. Landru's wife subsequently claimed that her father in law had killed himself partly in despair at her husband's criminal career. She also said that in the autumn of 1912, as soon as he was released from prison, Landru stole around 12,000 francs (approximately $40,000 in modern money) that his father had pointedly left for her and the four children, rather than him. In the winter of 1913–14, Landru executed easily the most successful swindle of his career, duping more than a dozen individuals into giving him a total of 35,600 francs to "invest" in building a fictitious automobile factory. He went on the run in April 1914 with all this money, plus most of his father's inheritance, just before the police came to arrest him. In late July 1914, he was tried and convicted in absentia for the fraud. Taking his previous convictions into account, the court sentenced Landru to four years of hard labour followed by exile for life on the French Pacific island of New Caledonia.

Landru had escaped to a village near the town of Chantilly, north of Paris, in the company of Jeanne Cuchet, a pretty, 39 year old Parisian seamstress who had been widowed in 1909. She knew him at this stage as "Raymond Diard", an industrialist from northern France, who had promised to marry her and had persuaded her to give up her job making lingerie for a dress shop in Paris. Cuchet appears to have hoped that Landru, alias Diard, would provide a respectable home for her and her only son André, 17, who was illegitimate. The balance of Cuchet's relationship with Landru changed completely in early August 1914 when Germany declared war on France. Landru failed to make a rendezvous with Cuchet, who had returned to Paris to be with André, still living in her old apartment. In despair, Cuchet went back to the house near Chantilly, accompanied by André and her brother in law, hoping to find the man she still knew as "Diard". The house was empty, but she found Landru's identity papers inside a chest, along with various fake documents. The next day, Cuchet visited Landru's abandoned apartment in southern Paris where she discovered that he was a criminal on the run who should have been deported to New Caledonia. Cuchet insisted to her sister and brother in law that her engagement with Landru was over, but when he reappeared in late August 1914 she resumed their relationship. Meanwhile, she kept a close watch on her patriotic son André, who was desperate to join the army and fight the Germans, even though he was too young to volunteer. In late November 1914, Cuchet suddenly pulled André out of his job at an automobile factory in northwest Paris. At the start of December, Cuchet, Landru (posing as "Monsieur Cuchet") and André moved to a house in Vernouillet, a small town by the Seine, 35 km northwest of Paris. Over Christmas, Cuchet wrote to a woman friend in Paris, explaining that it would not be convenient to visit her in Vernouillet because of the poor weather: "at the moment the place is rather muddy". In mid January, André learned to his joy that his scheduled recruitment to the army had been brought forward two years to the summer of 1915. He wrote to a friend in the army on 20 January, reporting his good news, and another to an uncle a week later. Then Cuchet and André disappeared without a trace. No one ever saw them again.

She was a widowed, retired housekeeper, living near Paris's Gare de Lyon, who had inherited a substantial sum from her last employer. Guillin answered Landru's 1 May 1915 lonely hearts advertisement and believed his story about being the next Consul General to Australia, in need of a wife to host diplomatic receptions.

Originally from Le Havre, Berthe Héon scraped a living as a cleaning woman and had suffered multiple bereavements, losing in turn her husband, her long term lover, her two legitimate children and her beloved illegitimate daughter in childbirth. She met Landru in the summer of 1915, probably via a second lonely hearts advertisement he placed in Le Journal. Posing as a businessman, Landru pretended he was in search of a wife to join him in the "pretty colony" of Tunisia.

Anna Collomb was a clever, attractive widow who worked as a typist at an insurance company in Paris and had had a string of lovers since the death of her alcoholic, bankrupt husband a decade earlier. Her motive for answering Landru's 1 May 1915 lonely hearts advertisement was probably that she wanted a stepfather for her illegitimate young daughter, whom she had reportedly placed in the care of nuns in Italy. The little girl was never traced by the police.

Chatty and vivacious, Andrée Babelay was a nanny and possible casual prostitute whom Landru picked up one evening while riding on the Paris metro. Babelay spent the next ten days living with Landru (whom she called 'Lulu') in a room he rented near Paris's Gare du Nord, and then a further fortnight at his rented house near Gambais, where she was seen by a local game warden learning to ride a bicycle.

Homely, trusting and semi literate, Célestine Buisson was yet another woman who answered Landru's 1 May 1915 lonely hearts advertisement in Le Journal. Born in southwest France, Buisson was a widow who worked as a housekeeper and was lonely after the mobilization of her only son, who was illegitimate. Landru, alias Georges Frémyet, became "engaged" to Buisson immediately, but then put off their marriage for more than two years, pleading lost identity documents and long "business trips" abroad.

She was a devout Catholic, working as a dress shop assistant, who answered a lonely hearts advertisement Landru placed in a conservative newspaper after deciding to divorce her estranged husband. Jaume initially refused to sleep with Landru, alias "Lucien Guillet", a refugee from the German occupied Ardennes region. He broke her resistance and then took her to Gambais on a one way train ticket after celebrating Mass with her at the basilica of Sacré Cœur in Paris.

On account of her wide brimmed hats, Annette Pascal was nicknamed "Mme Sombrero" by her neighbours on the street near the Père Lachaise cemetery where she lived and worked, making dresses for a Paris fashion house. Pascal was divorced and childless, following the death of her only son in infancy, and was looking for a so called "vieux monsieur" ("sugar daddy") in September 1916 when she spotted Landru's lonely hearts advertisement in the Paris evening daily, La Presse.

Born in Bordeaux, Marie Thérèse Marchadier was a career prostitute and a familiar sight on the street outside her apartment on Paris's Rue Saint Jacques, where she liked to walk her two beloved Belgian griffon dogs. At Landru's trial, the prosecution claimed that he first met the heavily indebted Marchadier in October 1918 after she advertised to sell her furniture. Circumstantial evidence suggests that he may have encountered her several years earlier in the port of Le Havre or the provincial town of Beauvais.

Landru was able to avoid capture during the war for three principal reasons. One was the war itself, which denuded France's civilian police force, as officers of military age were mobilized and sent to the front. In Vernouillet, where Landru rented his first house from December 1914 to August 1915, there was just one constable for the whole town. In Gambais, where Landru rented his second house from December 1915 until his arrest, there was one constable in his early seventies, stationed in the village, and a single mounted gendarme in the market town of Houdan, four miles (6.4 km) away. Secondly, Landru's wife and four children knew his whereabouts throughout the war but shielded him from the police. Landru's youngest son Charles, born in 1900, worked as his self styled "apprentice", helping Landru remove furniture and other possessions from at least five of his known victims' apartments and latterly acting as his father's chauffeur. His eldest son Maurice, born in 1894, was mobilized in the summer of 1915 and arrested soon afterwards for various frauds and thefts, including the receipt and sale of valuables from Landru that had belonged to his first known victim, Jeanne Cuchet. Following his release from prison, Maurice helped Landru concoct a cover story to explain the disappearance of his sixth known victim, Anna Collomb, to one of Anna's friends. Meanwhile, Landru's wife lived for most of the war in the northwestern Paris suburb of Clichy under the false name "Frémyet" (one of Landru's aliases) in an apartment where he was seen coming and going at regular intervals. Landru's wife forged the signature of his eighth known victim, Célestine Buisson, so he could gain access to Célestine's bank account, and impersonated his ninth known victim, Louise Jaume, for the same purpose. Lastly, Landru benefited from the indifference of police officers and village officials to the fate of the women, at a time when hundreds of thousands of young men were losing their lives at the front. Indeed, it is arguable that Landru might never have been arrested without the persistence of another woman who forced the authorities to investigate the suspicious man who rented the Villa Tric outside Gambais: Marie Lacoste.

Marie Lacoste, the younger half sister of Célestine Buisson, was an unmarried housemaid who disliked Landru, alias George Frémyet, from the moment she first met him at Buisson's apartment in the summer of 1915. Over the next two years, Lacoste began to suspect that Buisson's fiancé was a marriage swindler, out to get his hands on the naive Buisson's savings. Lacoste's suspicion was confirmed during a visit with Buisson to the Villa Tric in August 1917, when Buisson admitted that "Frémyet" had taken charge of her investments. Buisson refused to take Lacoste's advice to end her engagement to "Frémyet" and the two siblings were scarcely on speaking terms when they returned to Paris. A day later, Landru took Buisson back to Gambais, travelling on a one way train ticket. She was never seen again. During the autumn of 1917, Landru became increasingly worried that Lacoste might suspect him of Buisson's murder. He tried to reassure Lacoste that her half sister was still alive by sending her two fake postcards from Gambais, purportedly signed by "Célestine". Lacoste instantly realized the signatures were forgeries, but having concluded that Landru was just a con man, did not take any other action. Still worried, Landru turned up alone on several occasions at Lacoste's workplace to invite her to dinner with Buisson at Buisson's apartment in Paris. Landru knew the apartment was empty and almost certainly intended to kill Lacoste there. Each time, Lacoste refused, eventually telling Landru to get lost and not to come back. The mayor denied any knowledge of Célestine Buisson or a man called Frémyet living at the Maison (or Villa) Tric. This claim was well short of the truth because the mayor recognized the man described accurately by Lacoste as another of Landru's aliases: "Raoul Dupont". The mayor did, however, put Lacoste in touch with Victorine Pellat, the younger sister of Landru's sixth known victim Anna Collomb, who had made an identical inquiry about Collomb in 1917. Lacoste contacted Pellat and after conferring about their separate investigations, they filed two missing person complaints with the prosecutor's office in the department of Seine et Oise, where Gambais was located. By a desultory route, the cases finally wound their way back to Inspector Jules Belin of the Paris flying squad (brigade mobile). Belin interviewed Pellat and Lacoste and then plagiarized most of the latter's research for an internal police report in which he falsely took the credit for Landru's arrest. In reality, Landru's capture was entirely due to a chance sighting of him on 11 April 1919 by Lacoste's friend Laure Bonhoure as he was shopping with his mistress Fernande Segret in a crockery shop on Rue de Rivoli. Bonhoure tried to follow Landru after he left the shop, but fearing he had recognized her, she ran home to tell Lacoste, who phoned Belin with the news. Belin retrieved the business card that Landru, alias "Lucien Guillet", had given to a shop assistant and visited the address indicated: 76 Rue de Rochechouart, near the Gare du Nord. However, Belin only had an arrest warrant for a man called "Frémyet", so decided to go home for the night. On 12 April, at around midday, Belin returned with two fellow officers and a newly drafted warrant and arrested Landru, who had just returned from accosting a woman on the metro.

From the moment of his arrest, when he refused to confirm his identity, Landru was a formidably obdurate suspect. During multiple interrogations in 1919 and 1920, he repeatedly protested his innocence, demanding to know why he would have killed the women when they were his "friends". The investigating magistrate Gabriel Bonin was initially confident that he could wrap up the case in a matter of days, following the discovery on 29 April 1919 of some tiny fragments of charred human bone debris beneath a pile of leaves in Landru's back garden at Gambais. However, this material was more problematic than it first appeared. Gradually, Bonin's inquiry was enmeshed in a series of interlocking, seemingly insoluble puzzles.

In the weeks after Landru's arrest, the police gathered overwhelming proof that Landru had stolen the financial assets and possessions of the 10 missing women on the list in his carnet. Landru had kept the booty he had not sold at a garage in Clichy and various storage depots around Paris, along with files on dozens of women he had contacted during the war via lonely hearts advertisements and matrimonial agencies. What the police lacked was direct evidence of murder, apart from the charred bone debris discovered at Gambais; and under the microscope, these fragments turned out to be "a veritable puzzle", according to Dr Charles Paul, the director of the Paris police laboratory. Paul and his colleagues were only able to establish that the debris had come from three or more skeletons. They did not know if the skeletons were female, because there were no pelvic bones; nor could the forensic scientists confirm that the fragments came from three or more of the women who were known to have vanished at Gambais. Although Paul avoided speculation in his report on the debris, it was possible that the fragments came from the burnt skeletons of other unknown victims whom Landru had killed at the Villa Tric. This possibility was reinforced by the evidence of one witness in particular, an army doctor who had seen Landru dumping a heavy package in a pond near Gambais in the late spring or early summer of 1916. The doctor did not testify at Landru's trial, pleading illness, but the prosecution acknowledged that his sighting did not fit the timeline of the known disappearances; about six months after the presumed murder of Landru's fifth known fiancée and six months before the death of the next victim on the charge sheet.

To varying degrees, Landru's wife and four children were all complicit in shielding him from the police during the war and in abetting his thefts from the missing women. The unanswered question is whether any, some or all of them were also complicit in his murders. His youngest son Charles, acted as his self styled "apprentice" from 1914 to 1919, helping Landru to clear five of the women's apartments after they vanished. Two days after Landru's arrest, Charles also admitted assisting his father with unexplained "gardening work" at Landru's house in Vernouillet in early 1915, around the time that Jeanne and André Cuchet disappeared. Landru's eldest son Maurice (born in 1894) was arrested for swindling and thefts in the autumn of 1915, shortly after his mobilization, and tried by court martial. Among the valuables in Maurice's possession was jewellery belonging to Jeanne Cuchet which Landru had given him. The complicity of Landru's two daughters, Marie (born 1891) and Suzanne (born 1896), was less certain. Marie disclaimed any knowledge of his activities during the war, even though in August 1917 she had bid unsuccessfully at a property auction in Gambais on Landru's behalf for a house in which he was interested. Suzanne moved out of the family's apartment in 1916 when she became engaged, but still saw Landru at intervals on her visits back home. In December 1919 the investigating magistrate Bonin ordered the arrest of Landru's wife and Maurice Landru on suspicion of complicity in Landru's thefts and frauds. However, Bonin never formally charged them and in July 1920 they were released from custody – in Marie Catherine's case on medical grounds (she had a bad back) and in Maurice's case because according to Bonin, his continuing detention was not helpful to the investigation. It appears more likely that Bonin decided a jury would struggle to believe that Marie Catherine and Maurice had known nothing about the murders, given their clear involvement in Landru's thefts. This is also the most plausible explanation for why Bonin never arrested Landru's youngest son and "apprentice" Charles.

Landru was eventually brought to trial in Versailles in November 1921, after exhausting his appeals against previous convictions. The location was a compromise between the authorities in the department of Seine et Oise (now Yvelines), where Landru had allegedly committed the murders, and the judiciary in Paris, where his victims had lived. Versailles was chosen as the venue as the largest town in Seine et Oise, while the presiding judge, Maurice Gilbert, was from the Paris judiciary. Gilbert allowed photographers to take pictures during each session, a decision which helped to stoke the sensational atmosphere surrounding the long awaited trial of the "Bluebeard of Gambais". Every day, the newspapers gave saturation coverage of the proceedings and as the trial progressed, and the possibility of Landru's acquittal on the murder charges seemed to increase, the proceedings attracted trainloads of spectators from Paris. Celebrities who came to watch Landru included the reigning queen of French musical theatre, Mistinguett, the actors Maurice Chevalier and Sacha Guitry, the writer Rudyard Kipling (in Paris to receive an honorary degree) and the novelist Colette (who covered the first session for the newspaper Le Matin). By the end of the trial, Gilbert had lost all control of the audience, with as many as 500 spectators crammed inside, double the courtroom's capacity.

Landru's 43 year old defence attorney Vincent de Moro Giafferri, widely regarded as the most famous trial lawyer in France, privately despised his client and thought he was insane. However, Moro was also a passionate opponent of the death penalty and did not believe that the prosecution could remotely prove that Landru had certainly killed the 10 women and one young man on the murder charge sheet. Moro therefore proposed to offer the jury a bargain. The defence would not contest the multiple charges of theft and fraud (even though Landru denied them), which would be enough to send Landru for the rest of his life into exile with hard labour in French Guiana – an ordeal which would probably kill him before long, given Landru's poor physical health. The chief prosecuting attorney Robert Godefroy, a plodding government barrister, struggled from the start of the trial to make any headway with Landru or prevent Moro from undermining the credibility of the police and forensic witnesses. Gilbert, the judge, effectively took over the examination of Landru, as he was entitled to do under the French judicial system. Yet while Gilbert scored some palpable hits against Landru – in particular, regarding the records in his notebook – the consensus among reporters covering the trial was that the outcome would depend on the closing speeches by Godefroy and Moro. Godefroy was suffering from flu, forcing him to break off his marathon address on the first day and complete it the following afternoon. He itemized eight "proofs" which in his view demonstrated Landru's guilt beyond all doubt, from the one way train tickets Landru had bought the women on their last known journey to Gambais to the killer's tell tale noting of the hour they disappeared – "the hour of the execution". In a brilliant tour de force, Moro set about demolishing every shred of supposed certainty in the case. Yet even Moro could not explain away the sinister fact that none of the women had surfaced following Landru's arrest. Instead, Moro fell back on a lurid scenario where Landru had been a pimp who had dispatched the women abroad into the "white slave trade". To support his argument, Moro claimed that all the women had been in some sense estranged from their families, an allegation that was demonstrably untrue in several cases, and arguable in several others. Moro also tried to demonstrate that there was no certainty that the women were actually dead. During his pleading, he affirmed that victims had been found and were going to come and appear before the court. The public and the jurors turned their heads towards the door that Moro had then designated, and after letting the suspense hang, he underlined the fact that all those who had turned their heads towards the exit had thus demonstrated their lack of certainty concerning the reality of the assassinations attributed to his client, highlighting the absence of formal evidence against Landru, since no corpse had been found. The attorney general retorted straight away that Landru had not turned his head towards the door.

The jury's verdict, delivered on the evening of 30 November 1921 after three hours deliberation, was not straightforward. By a majority of nine to three, they found Landru guilty of all 11 murders on the charge sheet. Separately, the jury unanimously convicted Landru of all the counts of theft and fraud, apart from those concerning a teenage girl who had been destitute. In the mayhem that followed the verdict, Moro instantly added to the confusion by persuading all twelve jurors to sign Landru's pre drafted appeal for clemency. If the appeal was successful, the sentence would be commuted to transportation with hard labour. However, Landru refused to sign the document on the grounds that he was entirely innocent. "The tribunal has made a mistake", he told the court before being led back to his cell. "I have never killed anyone. This is my final protest."

Landru was eventually persuaded by Moro to sign his clemency appeal, which was rejected by President Alexandre Millerand. Just before his execution, his final request was for a foot bath. He was executed by guillotine just before dawn on 25 February 1922 outside the gates of the Prison Saint Pierre in Versailles. The whole procedure from Landru walking out of prison to his beheading took approximately 20 seconds. Landru's corpse was then buried in a marked grave in the nearby Cimetière des Gonards. Five years later his remains were disinterred and reburied in an unmarked grave in the same cemetery when his family declined to renew the lease on the burial site. In the 1930s Landru's house at Gambais was converted into a restaurant which traded on his notoriety. The house still stands and in 2017 was put up for sale. Landru's notorious oven, in which he allegedly burnt the remains of his victims, was sold at auction in 1923 to a businessman who wanted to put it on display in the Italian city of Turin, beyond French jurisdiction. The Turin authorities banned the exhibition and the oven disappeared from public view, possibly acquired by another private collector.

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