AMAZING CAREER OF “THE FRENCH BLUEBEARD”

Taranaki Daily News, 23 February 1935, Page 15 (Supplement)

AMAZING CAREER OF “THE FRENCH BLUEBEARD”

EjjiE NRI DESIRE § LANDRU, “ The French B 1 ue - A beard,” was the £ most amazing § criminal of this § or any other cenSI tury. He encompassed the ruin of scores of women and the death of many, and died the greatest professional lover of all time. Highly attractive matrimonial advertisements drew women to him; with his perfect manners and his hypnotic eyes he attained a mastery over them; with business skill he parted them from their savings and their property; and then, generally with poison, he killed them. How many he killed no one knows. “The Bluebeard” came of poor but honest parents—his father a stoker and his mother a seamstress. Later he pretended that his father was a wealthy manufacturer, but that was nothing more than a pretence. As a boy he bore a character that was exemplary. He was studious at school and active at play, liked by his schoolmates and praised by his elders. He became an office boy with a firm of architects, and was for sometime a sub-deacon in a church. In his military life as a conscript' he rose to the rank of sergeant and had an unblemished service record. When he returned to civil life and married he had four children, and was considered by his neighbours to be a pattern for all husbands and fathers. No one was more highly spoken of round his district than this well-built and well-groomed traveller and dealer, known to everyone, if only by his bushy beard and his bald dome. Elegant And Plausible. But he became poor and when he became poor he became bad. At first he was just a plain thief and then he became an embezzler. By his elegant manner i and plausible tongue he swindled victims all over France. He specialised in the bogus sale of motor-cars. He owned a garage, at which he learned how use an oxy-acetylene welding plant, with what terrible results was only to be seen later. He read books on poisons and their antidotes, and it is said that he had a wonderful library of volumes dealing with the great crimes of the past. Because of the nature of his occupation, which he always represented to be that of a dealer in cars and furniture, he was able to be away from his home frequently and for long periods without exciting the slightest suspicion. He had simply to say that a big deal called him to another part of the country and he could go away for a fortnight. As he generally returned with more money than he had when he left, the tale sounded all the more probable. But actually he was making his living from swindling and murdering impressionable women. Not very far from his home he had a flat in which he entertained and swindled the. women who responded to his invitations to matrimony in the newspapers.

In nearly all cases his procedure was the same. Considering himself a business man he advertised. The following is a fair sample of his simple but effective “sales talk”: “Widower, with comfortable income, aged 43, affectionate, serious, moving in good society, desires to meet woman of similar status, view matrimony.”

Then he met by appointment women who answered his advertisement. Behaving with the perfect manners which even his most persistent detractors admitted he had, he would charm them and flatter them, till it was not long before they believed they loved him, which, quite possibly, they really did. Certainly it seems that before long they would do almost anything he asked for the sake of the deep admiration and affection which he pretended toward them. Much has been said about the magnetic eyes of this monster, but his real draw was always marriage. He pretended to be honest and sincere in his devotion to his women and to desire nothing better than that they should marry as soon as it could be arranged. He knew that all the suspicion of the ordinary woman would vanish as soon as he promised marriage. His acting was clever. He assumed an interest in flowers and in birds, because he knew that most women like flowers and like to see kindness toward dumb things, as toward children, in men. At the little luncheon parties he had at his flat flowers were always profuse, and one of his first acts on taking a woman there was to feed the canaries, with which he would play and converse in “tweets” for several minutes.Landru used to take each new woman to his flat. There she would be soon infatuated' with the violence of the love he made to her. Kindnesses and flattery would ]be showered upon her. Her every wish was gratified. She would • be taken to theatres and to cabarets and for motor drives. Constantly flowers and presents would be brought her and if he were absent for any length of time daily letters with affection in every line would be delivered to her. “Sweet'’ Love Letters. “The Bluebeard” was thorough in every thing he did. He had a number of love letters culled from romances and these he copied and despatched to his victims, so that woman after woman received exactly the same letters. Those who survived spoke of his “sweet and wonderful letters.” “I love you, my darling—l love only you” was one of his stock phrases. The “Death Houses.” Henri Landru had two country houses at different times, both houses of tragedy. It was when his plans were coming to fruition and it was time for his victim to die that he took her to one of these places. One was “The Lodge” in a little town in the Valley of the Seine not far from Nantes and the other was “The Homestead” at Gambrais. There there would be more lavish entertainment and more building of castles in the air—and there, also, would be death before long. “The Bluebeard” had a good knowledge of poisons, and he had a friend who was a medical student and a drug addict. He had, in short, the knowledge to use poisons and a source of poisons. And nearly always his murders were by poisoning. In h's lonely but lavishly appointed and magnificently maintained country house he would entertain his victim, after sending his one serving woman away for a holiday. There would be a fine meal, with rich drink and ripe fruit, but almost invariably the drink or the fruit would be poisoned, and perhaps both. Once, purely as a scientific experiment, this human monster used a new poison, bringing about the death of

his victim by smearing it on the soup spoon she used at the meal. Chatting gaily and joking merrily he would watch the poor woman drink and eat, and, still acting the perfect host, watch till she suddenly paled, gasped and died. Henri Landru hated women. For him they existed only as a means of making money. He had no conscience whatever about killing them. And when the latest one died he simply “cashed in” on the powers of attorney given him before the murder. The furniture would be sold to a dealer who gave a good price and asked no questions, the jewellery traded in similarly and the savings in the bank put in his name, if that had not already been done. Widows His Prey. From 1914 to 1919 he Jived by loving and robbing and often killing women. No one knows how many he killed. But it is established that he “had dealings” with at least 200. It

is asserted that he murdered at least a score. Widows he made his speciality. In war-time, of course, there were widows in numbers, especially in France. If he were merciless in his murder he was absolutely fiendish in his method of disposing of the bodies. One he burned with a blow-lamp, working all night on- the horrible task, others he threw into the big furnaces of a factory where the fires were always kept in but where there were no workmen between a late hour at night and early the next morning, and some he chopped to pieces and threw into the sea, after using acid to make the face unrecognisable and to take prints off the fingers, the last in case the woman concerned had ever been in the hands of the police. Only one woman, it seems, ever went to one of his houses of death and came away again. She was a young and pretty woman who worked in a furrier’s shop and it seems that toward her the arch-seducer entertained something approaching real affection, though it is certain that while he was actually making assid-

uous love to her he was corresponding with several other women who subsequently disappeared. • She testified later that she had lived very happily with him. She never knew that his absences from the cosy flat in which he had established her were due to his courtships of other women or brief visits to his wife. He spent money lavishly upon her and entertained her' continuously. When Paris was being shelled and air raids were frequent he took her, for safety, to “The Homestead.” Remarkably and significantly, he bought two return tickets on the train. This was unprecedented in this remarkable man’s procedure. Always before he had bought only one return ticket and one single ticket —and his companion never returned. “The Black Book.” His famous “black book” gave the record of this, and also details of the names of his lovers. Against

each one he entered with care the expenditure he had made on her—a sort of balance-sheet, by which he could check up his expenses and his returns, so that he knew whether each murder had shown a profit. Verily, killing with him was a business. It must have been, for he killed for so little. Often he murdered women whose whole estate did not yield him more than £4O or £5O, and it is said that the property of one fetched only £27. “The Bluebeard” was careful with money and it is said that the greatest blow his pride ever suffered was when one of his underworld friends picked his pocket and decamped with £5O! Trapped At Last. He had few friends and no accomplices. He believed that partners were dangerous. And the only real friend he appeared to have among his women folk was the little furrier’s assistant. She was completely captivated by him and never believed the enormities which were proved against him. He was caught because of relatives of women he had killed. Early in his

career the sister of one of his victims reported to the police the mysterious disappearance of her relative and gave a description of “The Bluebeard.” He was questioned but lied and laughed his way out of it. The woman, he said, had been his friend, but she had left him and he had never seen her again. She had said she was going to England. Then the son of another of his captures was dying and the police were asked to trace his mother. They traced her to the man with the big beard and the bald head and were struck with the similarity between the two reports. She also had “left” him and he “had never seen her again” either. “Bluebeard” was arrested, on suspicion. He was like a marble statue, after first pretending great anger at being so treated. He would answer no questions and told the little furrier’s assistant, who implored him to reveal to her what was wrong, only that there had been “a very great mistake.” But his arrest set the whole world aflame. Relatives of victims came forward, and many women whom he had loved and robbed but not killed, and identified him. His wife and family had known nothing whatever about his mode of life till then! For two years he was kept in prison and questioned frequently. But he would admit nothing. “You say it is so” or “You prove it, m’sieur” were his replies as he fenced with his interrogators. But at last, by breaking up the flooring of one of his “houses of death” —“love nests,” he called them —the police found remains which were identified as charred bones from at least three human beings. Mercy For Murderer! “The Bluebeard” was charged with murder and stood his trial in the Versailles Court. The bearded prisoner was smiling and jolly for the first few days but as the trial dragged on he became more strained and nervous. For three weeks the trial lasted, with an absolute procession of witnesses, numerous exhibits, of property of the missing women, and the production of several thousand documents. The jury found him guilty—and then recommended a man who was the most audacious and callous murderer of his time, to mercy. The Judge disregarded it and sentenced him to death. An appeal to the Court of Cassation and a petition to the President of France were heard but refused, while the arch-criminal protested his innocence daily in his cell. “The Great Lover” maintained his acting to the end, even asking that his beard be particularly carefully trimmed. When the warders came to fetch him for the last time so that the hair on his neck could be shaved away he asked that his beard be not cut! He refused to take either rum or a cigarette, usually offered condemned men in France. “I do need those to die well,” he declared. Dressed in grey trousers and white shirt he bore himself confidently and steadily _ as he marched out into the grey light of early morning. He embraced a cross held to him by a priest. As he stepped forward, with a man holding each arm, to place his neck where the knife would fall, he said, “I will be brave.” The guillotine crashed. He died as he had murdered—with indifference toward approaching death. It was said of him afterward that the finest thing about him was his death. Bald, bearded and ugly he had attracted scores of women and robbed nearly all of them. His murders were placed at “a score or more.” '