The Bluebeard of Gambais

The case

On 12 April 1919, his fiftieth birthday, police arrested a bald, bearded man in a flat on the rue de Rochechouart, near the Gare du Nord. He said his name was Lucien Guillet. In his pocket was a small notebook, kept with a bookkeeper's care: bus fares, train tickets, sacks of coal, and a list of eleven names. Ten were women. One was a teenage boy. Nobody had seen any of them for months, some for years.

The man was Henri Désiré Landru, born in Paris in 1869. He had been an altar boy, a soldier and a clerk, then a dealer in furniture and a promoter of inventions that never existed. From 1904 he was in and out of prison for fraud. In July 1914 a court convicted him in his absence and sentenced him to four years followed by transportation for life to a penal colony. He was a fugitive, and a husband and father of four, when the war began.

The war gave him his method. With men at the front or dead, Paris newspapers filled with matrimonial advertisements. Landru placed his own, presenting himself as a widower of comfortable means, and filed the replies in his notebooks according to what each writer appeared to own. He used dozens of false names and claimed to come from the occupied north, which made his papers impossible to check. Police later identified 283 women who had been in contact with him. Most were traced alive.

In December 1914 he rented a villa at Vernouillet, north-west of Paris. Jeanne Cuchet, a widowed seamstress, moved in with her son André; both were last seen around the start of February 1915. Thérèse Laborde-Line vanished from the same house in June, and Marie-Angélique Guillin in August. Each time, Landru afterwards sold the missing woman's securities and furniture.

In December 1915 he took a more isolated house, the Villa Tric at Gambais, a village west of Paris, set some way from its nearest neighbours.Over the next three years Berthe Héon, Anna Collomb, Andrée Babelay, Célestine Buisson, Louise Jaume, Anne-Marie Pascal and Marie-Thérèse Marchadier travelled there with him. His accounts recorded the fares: a return ticket for himself, a single for his companion. Neighbours noticed thick, foul-smelling smoke from the chimney.

Two families brought him down. Victorine Pellat wrote to the mayor of Gambais asking after Anna Collomb, who had settled there with a 'Monsieur Dupont'. Marie Lacoste wrote asking after her sister Célestine Buisson and a 'Monsieur Frémyet'. The mayor put the two women in touch, and they realised they were describing the same man. Their complaint reached Inspector Jules Belin, but the trail went cold until April 1919, when an acquaintance of Lacoste recognised the suspect leaving a china shop on the rue de Rivoli with a young woman. The shop had taken his address for a delivery.

No body was ever found. Searches at Gambais turned up burnt bone fragments and teeth in ashes and in the kitchen range, too damaged to identify. Landru admitted the aliases and the frauds but would not say where the women had gone: that, he told investigators, was his own affair. His trial opened at the assize court in Versailles on 7 November 1921 and drew crowds from Paris, among them the writer Colette, then covering courts. Landru was polite and quick-witted from the dock. His counsel, Vincent de Moro-Giafferi, argued that without bodies there could be no proof of murder.

On 30 November 1921 the jury found him guilty of all eleven killings, and he was sentenced to death. President Alexandre Millerand refused clemency. Landru was guillotined at dawn on 25 February 1922 outside the prison in Versailles, still denying that he had killed anyone.