A Human Beast

Paris, the 19th — There has ended, before the assize court in Paris, one of the strangest cases in criminal history: the case of Dr. Marcel Petiot, accused of killing 63 persons between 1941 and 1944.

This human beast, 49 years of age, has known both the prison and the madhouse: he was once imprisoned on a charge of theft, and he spent a portion of his youth among the insane, being subject to violent fits of nervous collapse.

Dr. Marcel Petiot always exercised over his patients a powerful, almost magnetic influence, and his was a sweeping, crushing personality. Shortly before the late war his fame spread as a brilliant physician, and he managed as well to reach the office of mayor in the town where he practiced his profession with great success.

When he was arrested in October 1944 he was a member of the underground resistance movement, going under the assumed name of "Captain Valéry." When the soldiers stormed his house in the rue Le Sueur, near the Bois de Boulogne, he looked at them with his piercing eyes and cried out to them: You are arresting a great patriot!

But the men of the police knew that this "great patriot" was nothing but a bloody criminal whose like history has never seen. The search of his dwelling led to the discovery of the remains of 27 burned human corpses; and in the house of one of his friends were found dozens of articles of clothing belonging to his victims — among them women's garments, coats, shoes, and handbags. The names of these victims were found on most of these objects, as though bearing witness against this savage killer and pointing to an atrocity that shakes hearts to their very depths.

Dr. Petiot attempted to justify his fearful crimes by saying that he had "liquidated" these poor wretches because they were Germans, or traitors collaborating with them, and that he was the leader of one of the bodies of the underground resistance working for patriotic ends. And he confessed that the sum of his victims came to 63 men and women.

The defense of this criminal without parallel was undertaken by Maître Floriot. He was sentenced to death.