The Murder Network (2022) is a gripping crime thriller that dives deep into the dark world of organized murder conspiracies, hidden connections, and a deadly web of secrets where nothing is as it seems.
The story follows a chilling investigation into a series of connected killings that reveal a powerful underground network operating in the shadows. As law enforcement closes in, the case turns into a high-stakes race against time, uncovering betrayal, corruption, and a sinister system built on silence and fear. Every clue leads deeper into a dangerous conspiracy where trust becomes a liability and survival depends on uncovering the truth before becoming the next target.
Packed with suspense, psychological tension, intense crime investigation elements, and unexpected twists, The Murder Network (2022) delivers a modern thriller experience for fans of dark mystery storytelling and crime drama cinema.
Movie Information
🎬 Title: The Murder Network (2022)
🎭 Starring: (Cast details vary / ensemble crime thriller cast)
🎥 Director: Unknown / Not widely credited
🎞 Genre: Crime, Thriller, Mystery, Drama, Psychological Thriller
🌍 Country: International Production
📅 Release Year: 2022
Why Watch The Murder Network (2022)?
✔ Dark and intense crime thriller storyline
✔ Investigative mystery with suspenseful twists
✔ Focus on serial crime network conspiracy
✔ Psychological tension and gripping storytelling
✔ Perfect for fans of modern crime dramas
✔ Fast-paced narrative with shocking revelations
If you enjoy crime investigation movies, serial killer thrillers, dark mystery films, psychological crime dramas, and suspense-filled storytelling, The Murder Network (2022) is a must-watch.
#TheMurderNetwork #CrimeThriller #MysteryMovie #FullMovie #ThrillerMovie #CrimeDrama #PsychologicalThriller #2022Movies #SuspenseFilm #InvestigationMovie #DarkMystery #CrimeStory #FullLengthMovie #MovieNight #ThrillerFans
The story follows a chilling investigation into a series of connected killings that reveal a powerful underground network operating in the shadows. As law enforcement closes in, the case turns into a high-stakes race against time, uncovering betrayal, corruption, and a sinister system built on silence and fear. Every clue leads deeper into a dangerous conspiracy where trust becomes a liability and survival depends on uncovering the truth before becoming the next target.
Packed with suspense, psychological tension, intense crime investigation elements, and unexpected twists, The Murder Network (2022) delivers a modern thriller experience for fans of dark mystery storytelling and crime drama cinema.
Movie Information
🎬 Title: The Murder Network (2022)
🎭 Starring: (Cast details vary / ensemble crime thriller cast)
🎥 Director: Unknown / Not widely credited
🎞 Genre: Crime, Thriller, Mystery, Drama, Psychological Thriller
🌍 Country: International Production
📅 Release Year: 2022
Why Watch The Murder Network (2022)?
✔ Dark and intense crime thriller storyline
✔ Investigative mystery with suspenseful twists
✔ Focus on serial crime network conspiracy
✔ Psychological tension and gripping storytelling
✔ Perfect for fans of modern crime dramas
✔ Fast-paced narrative with shocking revelations
If you enjoy crime investigation movies, serial killer thrillers, dark mystery films, psychological crime dramas, and suspense-filled storytelling, The Murder Network (2022) is a must-watch.
#TheMurderNetwork #CrimeThriller #MysteryMovie #FullMovie #ThrillerMovie #CrimeDrama #PsychologicalThriller #2022Movies #SuspenseFilm #InvestigationMovie #DarkMystery #CrimeStory #FullLengthMovie #MovieNight #ThrillerFans
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00:15At the dawn of the 1940s, Paris is a city of glamour, style and culture.
00:00:21Yet as war breaks out across Europe, Nazi forces overpower the French defences,
00:00:25and Parisians soon find their city overrun by the enemy.
00:00:29When the Germans invade France and defeat the French army so quickly,
00:00:34they've got all of France at their feet.
00:00:36A lot of people were very worried when the Germans arrived.
00:00:41People were scared. People didn't know exactly what was going to happen.
00:00:45And while the occupants of Paris struggle to adapt to this hostile environment,
00:00:49a serial killer uses the chaos to his own advantage.
00:00:53Posing as an undercover ally, he preys on those most desperate to flee persecution under the Nazi regime.
00:01:00It was a very cleverly, cunningly put together plan.
00:01:05He shamelessly, ruthlessly took advantage of the situation for his own gain.
00:01:12People disappeared. And their relatives never heard from them again.
00:01:18And they wouldn't go to the police. Because going to the police is going to the Germans.
00:01:28This was a splendid opportunity. To murder these people, nobody would look for them.
00:01:35This film uncovers the shocking crimes of Dr. Marcel Petiot, the psychopath who believes he has devised the perfect murder,
00:01:44and the race against time to bring him to justice.
00:02:00France, 1940.
00:02:02Only 20 years since it had been the central battleground of the First World War,
00:02:06the nation is under threat once again.
00:02:09Following Germany's invasion of Poland, Hitler's Nazi forces have stormed through Denmark, Norway and Belgium,
00:02:16and now begin their offensive against France itself.
00:02:20And although the nation has bolstered its military and strengthened its defences since the last conflict,
00:02:26the ferocity of the Nazi's assault on the country's northern border is relentless.
00:02:32It came as a huge surprise. Within five weeks, the French army was completely obliterated.
00:02:38France was in a state of panic and chaos.
00:02:43You had 10 million people fleeing from the north to the south.
00:02:48This was the largest number of people moving in one go since the Bible.
00:02:52There was no communication. You couldn't phone anybody. You couldn't send letters.
00:02:56So France was really, really on its knees.
00:03:00With whole towns and villages devastated by the onslaught, the nation's government quickly falls apart.
00:03:06And this chaos provides an opportunity for an aging icon of France's past, Marshal Philippe Pétain.
00:03:14The Prime Minister resigned and was replaced by Marshal Pétain,
00:03:17who was this huge war leader from the First World War, a total hero of France.
00:03:24And Pétain and the people around him were all in favor of an armistice with Germany.
00:03:30They wanted the fighting to end.
00:03:32The military elites, the leading generals in 1940,
00:03:37they're very much supporters of French right-wing politics.
00:03:40For people like Marshal Pétain, the great hero of World War I, who is going to step up as the
00:03:46new premier
00:03:47and then cut this deal with the Germans, they see this as being possibly a positive development.
00:03:54That the Germans are importing this very disciplined Nazi system,
00:03:59and France will adopt its own version of the Nazi system, join its place in what Hitler is calling the
00:04:05New Order,
00:04:06and then France will be rebuilt under German tutelage.
00:04:10And Pétain sees this as a positive thing.
00:04:12And although this feeling is not widely shared among the French people themselves,
00:04:17on June 22nd, Pétain and France's military leaders meet with Hitler and formally surrender.
00:04:22As the Nazi occupation begins, the nation is immediately divided in two,
00:04:28with the German military controlling the north of the country
00:04:30and a free zone established in the south, known as Vichy, France, left under the command of Marshal Pétain.
00:04:38Here, he instantly falls into step with Hitler's master plan
00:04:42and establishes the French state, an authoritarian regime operating out of the small spa town of Vichy.
00:04:50The country's capital, Paris, however, is under the Nazi's command,
00:04:54and within days of the invasion, its landscape is radically transformed.
00:04:59The Tricolor, the French national flag, was banned and replaced by the swastika.
00:05:04Paris was moved on to German time.
00:05:07You had Germans everywhere, German soldiers, but also auxiliary staff,
00:05:12particularly in the centre and particularly around tourist sites.
00:05:15You had black and white signposts to help the Germans find their way around Paris.
00:05:22The Germans were everywhere. It was utter humiliation to the French.
00:05:26The French were very proud people, and to suddenly have your country taken over
00:05:29and be powerless in your own land and have despots revelling in the joys of your city
00:05:36was absolutely, you know, horrifying to the French people.
00:05:40And Parisians are quickly cast into an uncertain, paranoid world,
00:05:45no longer able to distinguish between allies and enemies.
00:05:48French society is just utterly divided.
00:05:52There's no freedom of the press. There's no freedom of speech.
00:05:54Everything's very heavily censored. People have to be very careful what they say.
00:05:58Because remember, not only are the Germans there in control,
00:06:01but they enlist this huge apparatus of collaborationists, as distinct from collaborators.
00:06:07Collaborators were just people that said, I'm going to go along to get along.
00:06:11The collaborationists were people who said, I'm going to make my future with the Germans.
00:06:15I'm going to hitch my wagon to the Nazi wagon.
00:06:18So you're not only just dodging Germans, you're dodging a lot of French bureaucrats
00:06:23and policemen employed by the Germans who are as keen as the Germans to get you.
00:06:28But some remain defiant.
00:06:31Despite the risks, French patriots form the Resistance,
00:06:35an underground army that fights from the shadows to subvert German rule
00:06:40and aid the Allied war effort.
00:06:42Resistance is small at first, and people are uncertain what resistance is going to be.
00:06:47So lots of early resistors don't necessarily regard violence as part of what they're going to do.
00:06:52There is a resistance in Paris, and there are lots of different kinds of resistance.
00:06:58So you have a resistance revolving around intelligence,
00:07:01a resistance revolving around escape networks,
00:07:03a resistance revolving around provision of information and publication.
00:07:07Resistance was something few people gravitated towards early on.
00:07:12But of course, as the occupation went on,
00:07:15as people were able to see the kind of conditions that were affecting everyday life,
00:07:19more and more people decided to take a stand.
00:07:24As the resistance expands, the Nazis and the French state tighten their grip on the nation,
00:07:30imprisoning or executing anyone with links to this underground army.
00:07:34And while this further intensifies the climate of fear and distrust,
00:07:39in Paris, the hostile environment creates the perfect hunting ground for a ruthless serial killer.
00:07:46And his presence goes undetected by the authorities until 1944,
00:07:50when a shocking discovery is made at the home of Dr. Marcel Petiot.
00:07:56In early March 1944, dirty, foul-smelling, greasy smoke was coming out of the chimney of a house
00:08:03on the Rue Le Seuers and the 16th arrondissement in Paris.
00:08:07And it continued for a couple of days, and on March 11th,
00:08:10the weather conditions were such that the smoke was bottled into the street
00:08:14and was really annoying all of the neighbors.
00:08:16After five days, this one couple couldn't take the stink anymore.
00:08:21She was vomiting, they were ill, so he called the police.
00:08:32They found a note on the house's door about forwarding mail to Osser,
00:08:38giving their address in Osser.
00:08:41They asked next door, and another neighbor said,
00:08:45oh, well, the property was owned by Dr. Marcel Petiot, who lived two miles away in Paris.
00:08:50They called Petiot's number.
00:08:53He answered and he said, have you gone in yet?
00:08:55And they said, no.
00:08:55And he said, well, wait right there, I'll be there in 15 minutes.
00:08:58They waited about a half an hour, and when nobody had arrived,
00:09:01they climbed up to a second floor window, broke in,
00:09:04and traced the source of the smoke to the basement.
00:09:11They let their noses lead them to the basement,
00:09:16where they found bodies burning in the furnace of a water boiler.
00:09:23From the furnace stuck an arm, a human arm, with the fingers still on the arm.
00:09:31Inside the boiler, they could see a human head.
00:09:37On the floor surrounding the furnace are assorted rib cages, jaw bones,
00:09:42and large chunks of charred flesh from at least ten victims.
00:09:47As the police inspect the building further, they discover a pit of quicklime,
00:09:52and within it, the remains of yet more bodies.
00:09:55Initially, they believe they have stumbled upon a secret Gestapo base.
00:09:59The corpses murdered resistance operatives.
00:10:02Yet, as they cordon off the crime scene, a mysterious stranger appears.
00:10:08A man on a green bicycle rode up and identified himself as the brother of the owner of the house.
00:10:14The police escorted him inside, took him down to the basement,
00:10:16and he said, my god, my head might be at stake.
00:10:19And they weren't at all surprised by that.
00:10:21But he identified himself as a member of the resistance.
00:10:23He said, I'm sure that you've notified the German authorities of this discovery,
00:10:27and I have hundreds of resistance files back at my house
00:10:31that I have to destroy before the Germans can get their hands on it.
00:10:34There was a Gestapo office not far away,
00:10:37and the first thought that the police had was that these were dead Germans and collaborators,
00:10:43and that this mysterious person on the green bicycle was, in fact, a resistant.
00:10:48So they let him go.
00:10:50For these French police officers on duty that night,
00:10:54it probably would have made a lot of sense for them, given the situation in Paris at that time,
00:11:00to encourage him to abscond.
00:11:03Their loyalty lay with the French, with the French police.
00:11:07They didn't want to be dealing with the Germans.
00:11:09But as the police continue to search the house,
00:11:12they discover photos of the building's owner,
00:11:14and realize that the mysterious stranger was, in fact, Dr. Marcel Petiot himself.
00:11:20As they prepare a warrant for his arrest,
00:11:22Commissaire Georges Massou arrives at the crime scene to lead the investigation.
00:11:28Commissaire Massou was a 37-year veteran of the police judiciaire.
00:11:32He had well over 3,000 arrests to his name. He was very prominent.
00:11:36He was one of the models for Georges Simenon's character, Inspector Maigret.
00:11:41He was a senior-most investigator and immediately took charge of the patio investigation.
00:11:47As Massou investigates the large urban mansion, he is struck by its state of total disrepair.
00:11:54Room after room is filled with discarded furniture,
00:11:57while ornate valuables and expensive artworks are left neglected, strewn about the floor.
00:12:03As he makes his way down to study the carnage in the basement,
00:12:07an officer arrives with a simple message from the Gestapo.
00:12:11Arrest Petiot, dangerous lunatic.
00:12:14But Massou considers this further evidence that the doctor may well be a member of the resistance,
00:12:19and he ignores the Germans' order.
00:12:22There was always a very, very uneasy relationship between the French police and the Gestapo.
00:12:27When the Germans invaded France, the French police had the option of leaving their posts,
00:12:31but they were fearful of doing that because the German military police would have taken over.
00:12:35So they wanted to still administer justice,
00:12:38and certainly there were still crimes that needed to be punished by the police,
00:12:40but they were always in the very awkward position that they might inadvertently arrest resistance,
00:12:46or they might be accused of collaboration.
00:12:48But it was a very, very difficult thing.
00:12:50The French police did their best to subvert any of the investigations that they thought were involved in resistance operations,
00:12:57but they had to do so very cautiously.
00:12:59Although cautious of colluding with the Gestapo's operation,
00:13:03that night Massoud does issue an arrest warrant for Marcel Petiot.
00:13:07But when police arrive at the doctor's other Paris property,
00:13:10they find that both Petiot and his wife have already packed and fled.
00:13:14As a manhunt begins to find the pair, the human remains from the basement are taken to the police laboratory
00:13:20for analysis.
00:13:21Upon inspection, however, they offer very little in the way of evidence.
00:13:25With both the fingertips and faces expertly removed from the corpses,
00:13:29and with hundreds of bones to sift through, the forensic experts have their work cut out.
00:13:35There was a very well-known and flamboyant medical examiner, Dr. Albert Paul,
00:13:39who loved the press, and the press loved him because he made outrageous statements.
00:13:43He said that in the quick line they had found three garbage cans full of small bones.
00:13:49But there was no way to determine how any of the people had died.
00:13:51They were too badly decomposed or consumed by the Lyme.
00:13:55One thing that did concern him was that the thighs of some of the legs had stab wounds in them,
00:14:00and they were very similar to some bodies that had been found floating in the Seine a year or so
00:14:05earlier,
00:14:06which also had stab wounds in the thighs.
00:14:08And the thing that particularly concerned Dr. Paul about that was, as a coroner,
00:14:12he said, sometime when you're doing an autopsy, when you're picking up another instrument,
00:14:16you don't put your scalpel down, you use the thigh as a pincushion.
00:14:20Dr. Paul's discovery suggests that the killer had medical training,
00:14:24further indicating Dr. Petiot's involvement in the murders.
00:14:27And Massou immediately turns his attention to the bodies found in the River Seine between 1942 and 1943,
00:14:35suspecting that they may be victims of the same killer.
00:14:38He finds that the dissected limbs of nine torsos had washed up on the shore, including those of an eight
00:14:44-year-old boy.
00:14:46As a full investigation begins in earnest, the papers across Paris and Auxerre report the macabre details of the Rue
00:14:53Le Sueur discovery,
00:14:54and the manhunt for both Marcel Petiot and his wife, Georgette.
00:14:58For the citizens of occupied France, this horrific affair proves an engrossing distraction.
00:15:05People were intrigued. It was so gruesome. The press were able to sensationalize that.
00:15:13It raised a lot of questions. It raised questions about, who did this? Was this really Petiot or was it
00:15:20somebody else? Why did he do this?
00:15:23I think the fact that he was a doctor was an important factor in that period.
00:15:28The doctor has a very high status. Pillar of society, a man you can trust.
00:15:34And the very notion of a doctor is somebody who looks after us, who looks after people, cares for people,
00:15:40makes them well.
00:15:41And so this is a complete negation of what we traditionally think of as a doctor.
00:15:50And just as Massoud's investigation has unearthed a link between Petiot and the River Seine bodies,
00:15:56a telegram from the Gestapo arrives that complicates matters.
00:16:00It reveals that the Nazis had arrested and interrogated Petiot a year earlier,
00:16:05suspecting him of being a prominent member of the French Resistance.
00:16:09This again suggests that the doctor is an underground operative.
00:16:13Yet a witness soon emerges to paint a far more disturbing picture of Petiot's resistance activities.
00:16:21A couple of days after the discovery of the bodies on the Rue Le Sueur,
00:16:24the business partner of a Jewish furrier named Jochum Gushnov came to Commissaire Massoud
00:16:30and told him about the disappearance of Gushnov.
00:16:33Back in 1941, when the Germans were beginning to crack down more on Jews in Paris,
00:16:39Gushnov, who was treated by Petiot as a physician, decided that he needed to escape from the country.
00:16:45So Petiot told him that he could help him with that.
00:16:48He had an escape network. He was involved in the resistance organization.
00:16:52Petiot told Gushnov that he would have to be vaccinated.
00:16:57He would do the vaccination.
00:17:00And then he would be taken across France to the Spanish border into Spain, which was neutral.
00:17:09And then to a port in Africa to sail to Argentina.
00:17:17So Gushnov took one and a half million dollars worth of cash and silver and gold and diamonds
00:17:23and went with Petiot and was never seen again.
00:17:29So the business partner, when he had heard about the discovery of the Rue Le Sueur,
00:17:33went to Commissaire Massoud and told him this story.
00:17:35And all of a sudden it began to seem that, in fact, the bodies might be something even more sinister
00:17:41than they had originally expected and that there might have been this escape network
00:17:45that, in fact, did not go to South America but ended at the Rue Le Sueur.
00:17:50Checking the facts of this testimony, Massoud discovers that the secret rendezvous
00:17:55where Petiot met Gushnov was on the Rue Pergoles, a street that intersects the Rue Le Sueur.
00:18:01In the coming days, the investigation uncovers more and more details about Petiot's escape network.
00:18:07And it becomes apparent that Gushnov was not the only desperate Parisian to look to the doctor
00:18:13for safe passage out of occupied France.
00:18:17People came, they phoned, they said,
00:18:19so-and-so had left a friend of mine.
00:18:23She was going to go to a doctor to help her escape.
00:18:27I think it could be Dr. Petiot.
00:18:30So they had a list of people who they knew had been in contact with Petiot and who had disappeared.
00:18:39As the investigation identifies countless potential victims, Massoud realises that he is dealing with a devious, ruthless serial killer.
00:18:48And his hunt for Marcel Petiot now intensifies.
00:18:53Using the forwarding address found at the Rue Le Sueur house as a guide, Massoud sends his men to Auxerre,
00:19:00a town a hundred miles south of Paris, where Petiot grew up.
00:19:04Speaking with the locals, the officers pieced together a disturbing picture of the doctor's early life.
00:19:11His parents were postal workers, whose busy schedule forced them to send the young Marcel to live with his elderly
00:19:17aunt and her maid periodically from the age of two.
00:19:21With his father often absent from his life, and with few friends as he grew up, Petiot was a lonely,
00:19:27unstable child.
00:19:28I think we can certainly see signs of a troubled mind from very early on.
00:19:35He shows signs of being very clever, but also signs of all the origins that one might expect in someone
00:19:47who is going to become a full-blown psychopath in later life.
00:19:54A psychopath is somebody who doesn't have the same emotional responses to situations that most of us would.
00:20:00A psychopath is often described as lacking remorse, lacking empathy, and usually this fits with something that we call an
00:20:08instrumental use of other people.
00:20:10So a psychopath is willing to use other people to get what they want, and not show any guilt, remorse
00:20:15or empathy with the people that they're using.
00:20:17People for them become a means to an end.
00:20:19And we know that those kind of traits, usually exhibited in terms of cruelty to other people, cruelty to animals,
00:20:27delinquent behaviour, bullying, can be seen in kids as young as seven or nine years old.
00:20:32He impaled birds and insects on knitting needles.
00:20:38He stuck pins into the eyes of the little birds.
00:20:42He locked them into boxes, shoe boxes, and he didn't feed them.
00:20:48So he could sit watching them die of hunger.
00:20:51As he is enrolled into the school system, despite being a brilliant pupil, Petiot's behaviour becomes increasingly disruptive and dangerous.
00:21:01He behaved very badly in class.
00:21:04One day he went into the classroom with a gun, which he had taken from his father, and he fired
00:21:10bullets into the ceiling.
00:21:13His father thought it was rather funny, and he told his father that he did so because he wanted to
00:21:21brighten up a dull lesson.
00:21:24Marcel Petiot is certainly a psychopath.
00:21:27He fulfils probably the majority of the criteria on the psychopathy checklist.
00:21:31When we think about why people become psychopaths, usually we think of it as an interaction between people's genetic heritage,
00:21:38the sort of traits and the genotype that they've grown up with, and also the kind of environment that they
00:21:43exhibit those in.
00:21:44So I think in Petiot's case, he has quite an invalidating early environment.
00:21:49His parents palm him off with two local spinsters when he's quite young.
00:21:54He seems to struggle to engage with his father.
00:21:57However, I think because there's evidence of cruelty to animals at quite a young age, because of the bullying, the
00:22:02difficulties in school,
00:22:03I think it's probably fair to say that there's a mix of both genetic and environmental inferences in the mix,
00:22:09that somebody else going through those same experiences that Petiot did wouldn't necessarily have developed into a psychopath in the
00:22:16same way
00:22:17and become what is, I think by most modern definitions, quite a sort of high-level psychopath in Petiot's case.
00:22:25But outside of his disciplinary record, Petiot is a highly gifted pupil, and he develops a genuine interest in medicine.
00:22:34Within a year of his graduation, the First World War erupts, with France its central battleground, he enlists in the
00:22:41hope of becoming a medic.
00:22:44His stay on the front line is short-lived, however, transferred to a psychiatric unit following a nervous breakdown.
00:22:51Here, doctors decide that he should be kept under constant observation.
00:22:56Military psychiatrists examined him, and they found him insane.
00:23:02I have absolutely no confidence that that wasn't a full-blown act, so that he could get back from the
00:23:10front and be nannied and nursed.
00:23:13Psychopaths can be so very, very convincing, and know exactly what to say and do to obtain their objectives.
00:23:22For somebody like Petiot, with quite psychopathic tendencies, this chance to see other people suffering and to understand a little
00:23:30bit about what suffering was, where it came from, and how to mimic it, is really critical to our understanding
00:23:35of, I think, the rest of his development.
00:23:38Because psychopaths don't necessarily understand or appreciate or respond to human emotions in the same way.
00:23:45So what they do instead is something that we call pseudo-mentalising.
00:23:49They think that they understand what emotions are and how other people experience them, and they learn to sort of
00:23:54do a kind of copycat of that.
00:23:57He was discharged as 40%, mentally disabled, and he was put on a pension.
00:24:05And he received that disability pension until the day he died.
00:24:11This diagnosis doesn't put an end to Petiot's ambitions.
00:24:16Still determined to pursue a career in medicine, upon leaving the army, he takes advantage of a new government initiative
00:24:22and enrolls at the University of Paris to become a doctor.
00:24:27At the end of the First World War, there was a program in France to accelerate the medical education of
00:24:31former soldiers, where you could take eight months of classes and do two years of an internship.
00:24:36And after the First World War, with all the people who had been killed, they really needed to replenish the
00:24:41supply of physicians.
00:24:42So this accelerated program tried to get new doctors helping patients as quickly as possible.
00:24:47It was never established that he really was a doctor, that he really had a medical diploma.
00:24:54He was intelligent. He had spent many years in mental asylums.
00:24:59He learned a lot about illnesses, about diagnoses, and that's what it was. He was not a doctor.
00:25:11In 1922, following his rapid graduation, the newly qualified doctor Marcel Petiot travels to the small rural town of Villeneuve
00:25:21-sur-Yonne and establishes a medical practice.
00:25:24And apparently overcoming both his troubled childhood and his mental health issues, here he seems to turn a corner and
00:25:31emerges a new man.
00:25:33He was a charming person. He was devoted to his patients. He worked long hours. He treated poor people for
00:25:40free.
00:25:41He would stay open nights and open on Sundays if people couldn't come at any other time.
00:25:45He listened patiently to people. Some people said that they discovered after they left that they had spent more time
00:25:51talking about their lives with him listening attentively than they had spent talking about their complaints.
00:25:56His patients absolutely adored him.
00:25:57Of course a psychopath would be drawn to that sort of profession, simply because it gives him unique access to
00:26:06power.
00:26:07He was revered by many of his patients as the man who would go the extra mile, the man who
00:26:14would open surgeries on Saturdays and Sundays and all that.
00:26:19Pure superficial charm to gain access and to see what he could manipulate for his own gain.
00:26:27And his popularity enables Petiot to quickly become a prominent figure in the local community.
00:26:34Ambitious, intelligent and committed, the young doctor is the talk of the town.
00:26:39And in 1926, he falls in love for the first time with a mysterious woman of far lower social standing.
00:26:47Her name was Louise, but the townspeople called her Louisette.
00:26:52One evening, he went to have dinner. Louise was the maid. She was 26. She didn't have a boyfriend. Nobody
00:27:02knew where she came from.
00:27:04Very soon, she was his lover. She went to live with him. But a doctor could not have a mistress
00:27:15who was a domestic.
00:27:17So they pretended she was his maid. All the people knew that she was not his maid.
00:27:26Yet this relationship soon exposes Marcel Petiot's darkest instincts.
00:27:32Within months of moving in with him, Louisette confesses to her friends that she is pregnant.
00:27:38And then, overnight, she vanishes without a trace.
00:27:43Petiot complains that his young lover has walked out on him.
00:27:46But days later, a discovery in the Yon River suggests a far more disturbing version of events.
00:27:53One Sunday, a bad smell rose from the river.
00:27:57The townspeople went to see what it was and they found a trunk caught in bushes beside the river.
00:28:05And they opened it and they looked inside and they found the headless body of a young woman.
00:28:14People immediately said it was Louisette.
00:28:17It's important to understand what this act means.
00:28:20Again, if we understand that Petiot is a psychopath.
00:28:23Psychopath relationships with other people are characterized by what we call multiple marital type relationships.
00:28:28So these are relationships where the psychopath will go into a relationship.
00:28:31They will probably seek to get what they can out of it.
00:28:35That could be sex. It could be money. It could be some sort of sense of intimacy.
00:28:39And I think in Petiot's case, intimacy has been something that he's been largely denied.
00:28:43But then a point will come where something becomes stuck.
00:28:47And I think in this case, Louisette becomes pregnant.
00:28:50Petiot is unable to reconcile this with his visions for himself.
00:28:53Perhaps he doesn't want to be a father.
00:28:55Perhaps he just panics.
00:28:56Realizes he needs to get out of the relationship.
00:28:59And I think calculates that the best way to do that is simply to kill Louisette de Laveau.
00:29:04Despite some locals raising concerns over Petiot's role in the murder,
00:29:09due to its mutilated state, the body in the river cannot be identified and the case runs cold.
00:29:15The doctor, meanwhile, has ambitious designs on an even more prominent role within the town.
00:29:21And only weeks after the discovery of the corpse, begins a campaign to become mayor of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne.
00:29:29His election was a little bit funny.
00:29:30It occurred soon after the disappearance of Louisette de Laveau.
00:29:34And one dramatic moment was he dragged himself painfully up to the stage and said,
00:29:38I must confess that I am guilty of a very serious crime.
00:29:42And everybody gasped.
00:29:44And after a dramatic pause, he said, I stand accused of loving the people too much.
00:29:50He was elected with a landslide of 80%.
00:29:55He promised the people he would reform the town.
00:30:01Because after the Great War, France was almost destroyed.
00:30:06He said he will rebuild the town.
00:30:09And the people loved that.
00:30:11That's what the people wanted to hear.
00:30:15Having now risen to the very top of the local community, in 1927, Petiot meets a new partner,
00:30:21Georgette, the daughter of a wealthy and influential landowner, and the couple marry soon after.
00:30:27Yet in his new role as mayor, Petiot quickly begins to abuse his power, and over time his kindly reputation
00:30:35unravels.
00:30:36There were still people in the town who supported him, who still thought he was wonderful, but not from the
00:30:45people who worked with him.
00:30:47He was dictatorial, and they suspected that he was stealing from the coffers.
00:30:54They called in an auditor.
00:30:58The auditor found that he had signed contracts with contractors who nobody had ever heard of.
00:31:07He paid a huge amount of the town hall's money over to them for work which had never been done,
00:31:14for equipment the town hall had never received.
00:31:18In 1930, however, a far more serious crime is discovered on a cold winter evening, when firemen are called to
00:31:28the local dairy.
00:31:29Smoke was pouring from the dairy complex.
00:31:33They found the dairy owner's house was on fire.
00:31:39On the kitchen floor lay the dairy owner's wife.
00:31:44Her head was bashed in.
00:31:48She had obviously been murdered.
00:31:52Upon investigation, the police discover that the property has been burgled, and rumours quickly circulate that the new mayor has
00:31:59been having an affair with Henriette de Beauve, the murdered woman.
00:32:03And Petiot had, in fact, been present on the night of the discovery.
00:32:07When the firemen were putting out the fire, Dr. and Mrs. Petiot drove by in their car, they slowed down
00:32:13and looked, and then continued on to go to a movie.
00:32:16A lot of the people in the town thought that it was really the place of not only the mayor
00:32:19of the town, but also of a physician to be at the site of this disaster, rather than going to
00:32:25a movie theater.
00:32:26There was one townsman, a Monsieur Fisco, I believe, who said that he thought he had seen Petiot near the
00:32:32dairy at the time of the crime.
00:32:34Unfortunately, Mr. Fisco had rheumatism, and he went to his doctor, Dr. Petiot, who said that he had a wonderful
00:32:40new treatment for rheumatism and gave him an injection.
00:32:44Three hours later, Mr. Fisco was dead.
00:32:47With no other witnesses to tie him to the murder, Petiot once again avoids arrest.
00:32:53Yet when, soon after, he is found guilty of fraud and embezzlement, he is thrown out of office, his reputation
00:33:00in ruins.
00:33:02His career in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne had just come to an end. He had lost his position as mayor, he
00:33:06had been dismissed as a councillor, public opinion was turning against him.
00:33:10He was a suspect despite the lack of evidence in the murder, in two murders. So it was a good
00:33:16time to get out of town.
00:33:17And I think also he just had larger ambitions than a small town in the provinces. So the obvious thing
00:33:22was to move to Paris.
00:33:28In Paris, joined by his wife and infant son, Petiot sets himself up with a small urban medical practice and
00:33:35looks to quickly revive his career and attract new clients.
00:33:39In Paris, he had a leaflet printed which he delivered himself and he left it with pharmacists, in nightclubs, in
00:33:50bars and in brothels.
00:33:52He claimed he could cure gonorrhea, he claimed he had a method of painless childbirth and he claimed he could
00:34:02cure cancer.
00:34:03So the patients poured in.
00:34:07Despite his outlandish claims, over the next seven years, Petiot remains on his best behaviour, determined to make an impression
00:34:14in Parisian society.
00:34:16But in May 1940, everything changes. Hitler's war machine storms into France and overwhelms the Allied forces and the French
00:34:25government quickly flees Paris.
00:34:26A mass exodus follows, the residents of the city desperate to avoid the enemy and their gates.
00:34:33When Nazi battalions march down the streets of Paris in June, they enter a ghost town, its inhabitants scattered across
00:34:40the countryside.
00:34:42Yet, ever defiant, Petiot himself remains in his apartment with his wife and their young son.
00:34:48The Parisians fled Paris.
00:34:52Petiot stood at his window and he was appalled at their behaviour.
00:34:59And he told his family, they will not flee.
00:35:02And he also said they will not suffer because of the war. He will provide for them.
00:35:12As the doctor begins formulating plans to prosper in this new, uncertain world, the German authorities themselves look to contain
00:35:20the chaos in the city.
00:35:21The German military had a very clear view of what they wanted. They didn't want any trouble.
00:35:27They worked very hard to give the impression that nothing had really changed.
00:35:32And that's to reassure the Parisians who were there and to encourage people to return.
00:35:40And over time, a sense of normality is restored, with returning Parisians slowly growing accustomed to life under Nazi occupation.
00:35:49Yet the joint authoritarian rule of the Germans in the north and the Vichy government in the south soon makes
00:35:56life unbearable for one group in particular, France's Jewish community.
00:36:01Even before the occupation, there was a deep-rooted anti-Semitism within certain quarters of the nation's population,
00:36:08fuelled by figures on the French far right.
00:36:10Now many of these figures have assumed power in Vichy, and emboldened by their alignment with the Nazis, the persecution
00:36:18begins.
00:36:19There were a lot of people on the far right in 1930s France who wanted to reduce the role of
00:36:26Jews and the role that Jews were playing in France.
00:36:29And Vichy offered them an opportunity to put some of these anti-Semitic ideas into practice.
00:36:36There was a great deal of anti-Semitism, a feeling that Jews ran the media, Jews ran the department stores
00:36:43that put smaller shops and artisans out of business.
00:36:47And so they are happy to begin kind of sidetracking Jews, kicking them out of government jobs, removing them from
00:36:54the police, removing them from the military.
00:36:56The Germans ordered all Jews in Paris to register at police stations.
00:37:04Peyton, for his part, issued a directive that Jews could no longer be in the higher echelons of the civil
00:37:11service, the army, and that all Jewish teachers, university and school teachers, had to resign by the end of the
00:37:18year.
00:37:19And then as the occupation progresses, the measures against the Jews increase.
00:37:26Many in Paris's Jewish community begin to look for ways out of the country.
00:37:30But this is strictly outlawed by both the German and French authorities.
00:37:35And to successfully escape, those fleeing would first have to cross over from the occupied zone into Vichy France itself.
00:37:43Their only hope lies with the resistance, the underground network of patriots operating in the shadows.
00:37:49These two zones on the French territory were split by what was called a demarcation line, a heavily guarded border
00:37:57which divided the, physically divided the French territory, cut it down the middle, and was extremely difficult to cross.
00:38:05In France, what came about was the creation of so-called escape networks.
00:38:09These were originally set up by people working with the Allies.
00:38:14It was very important to get servicemen or airmen who might have been shot down in Nazi-occupied France.
00:38:21These people needed to find their way back to the UK, back to London, via a neutral country, and Spain
00:38:29and Switzerland would have been the obvious choices.
00:38:32The escape routes were part of the resistance activities from the very start.
00:38:37There was an escape route which ran through Brittany and across the Channel.
00:38:41Others down to points on the Pyrenees, getting people into Spain, and then if necessary down to Gibraltar or to
00:38:48Lisbon.
00:38:50And to get across the demarcation line you needed the help of someone called a passeur.
00:38:55It was someone who helped you pass through, get over the demarcation line.
00:38:59And it wasn't always easy and they weren't always reliable.
00:39:03And this increasingly hostile environment provides Dr Marcel Petiot with an opportunity to exploit those most in fear for their
00:39:11lives.
00:39:12Following the invasion, the Nazis have plundered France of its resources and manpower.
00:39:17And with produce scarce, many Parisians have fallen on hard times.
00:39:22Yet since the start of the occupation, the doctor has thrived, enhancing his earnings by offering illegal abortions and selling
00:39:30narcotics to drug addicts.
00:39:32Enriched by these criminal activities, he is soon able to buy an enormous second home at 21 Rue Le Sueur.
00:39:40And this property offers him the chance to devise a more brutal, cold-blooded scheme.
00:39:46In late 1941, he visits local barber Raoul Fourier, a man with connections in the Parisian underworld.
00:39:54Here, Petiot concocts an elaborate story and puts his new plan into action.
00:39:59Petiot told Fourier that he's a resistance.
00:40:05He is the head of a resistance cell named Flytox.
00:40:11And Flytox had an escape network.
00:40:14So if they knew of anybody who wanted to flee from France and the Nazis, especially Jews, Flytox could help
00:40:24them.
00:40:26He said his undercover name was Dr Eugène.
00:40:31Taken in by this tall tale, Fourier doesn't notice Petiot's simple methods in concocting the story.
00:40:38Flytox is the name of a popular insecticide and Eugène, a French brand of hair product, both of which sit
00:40:45directly in the doctor's eye line on the shelves of the barber shop itself.
00:40:49Instead, Fourier is fascinated by the deal Petiot is offering.
00:40:53For a minimum of 25,000 francs, he will provide false papers and vaccinations and take the escapees to a
00:41:00safe house where they will be met by a people smuggler.
00:41:03This individual will then take them into Spain and from here they will travel to Sanctuary in Argentina.
00:41:10He also told Fourier that their potential escapees should bring their most valuable possessions along.
00:41:20Watches, jewelry, cash, gold bullion.
00:41:26Petiot offers Fourier a share of Flytox's fee if he can spread the word and help identify potential escapees.
00:41:34Fourier agrees and enlists his friend Edmund Pantard, a stage actor with similarly shady underworld connections, to aid in the
00:41:42search for customers.
00:41:44Within weeks, the pair provide Petiot with his first set of exiles, a gang of French criminals who have fallen
00:41:51foul of the Nazis.
00:41:53These include thief and pimp, Jo Le Boxeur, his mistress Claudia Chamoux, prostitute Josephine Grippe, and hardened criminal Adrian Le
00:42:02Basque.
00:42:03Between the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942, eight of this criminal gang are met by Petiot and
00:42:11taken to his house on the Rue Le Sueur.
00:42:13Here they receive their vaccinations and afterwards none of them are ever seen alive again.
00:42:20It was possible for him to really invite his victims to package themselves perfectly as victims.
00:42:26You had people who were desperate to escape. You asked them to take everything they owned and convert it into
00:42:31gold, jewels, and liquid cash.
00:42:34To bring few possessions because you're going to be traveling light.
00:42:37Not tell anybody where you're going. Don't bring any identification papers. Remove all the marking from your clothes.
00:42:42They made themselves into perfect untraceable victims for him.
00:42:46In an occupied city in which the Nazis were already imprisoning and executing Jews, criminals and partisans,
00:42:53those apparently departing to Argentina through Petiot are never reported missing.
00:42:59Through his elaborate scheme, the doctor believes he has devised the perfect crime, one that will be endlessly repeatable.
00:43:06He's a very successful, charismatic con man and he convinces a lot of people.
00:43:12And he tells people what they want to hear, which is always what a good con man will do.
00:43:16He'll find out what you want to hear and then tell you.
00:43:18And they're not just anybody that he's fooling. I mean, some of the people who he's fooling were tough gangsters.
00:43:24Joe the Boxer, Adrian the Bass. And if you're fooling people like that, that's pretty skilful.
00:43:29One of the things that people maybe misunderstand a bit about psychopaths is how easily grifting comes to them,
00:43:35how easily they can find scams that people will be taken in by.
00:43:39If you really don't care in your heart of hearts what other people think of you,
00:43:44if you don't care about the possibility of being caught out of the line or being found out for saying
00:43:48something that you're not,
00:43:49then what's the incentive for you to tell the truth at any point to anyone?
00:43:54So psychopaths are excellent grifters because their stories can seem very, very complete, well fleshed out.
00:44:00The scam in Petio's case, you know, there's clear, there's need for what he's providing.
00:44:05He's identified the victims very carefully. He's identified a cover.
00:44:10He's got accomplices who can help provide the victims to him.
00:44:13People who come to a psychopathic doctor seeking something that only he can provide
00:44:18and they're desperate and emotional and grateful, that probably marks them out as quite weak in his eyes
00:44:24and therefore makes the ease of him to justify disposing of them in such a sort of callous and horrific
00:44:30way.
00:44:32And just as Petio's murder network is set in motion, the Nazis' own war crimes intensify on a far larger
00:44:39scale.
00:44:40At the Vonsi conference in January 1942, the final solution is formally announced.
00:44:47A programme to systematically exterminate Europe's Jewish population.
00:44:52As the Germans begin the construction of death camps in the east,
00:44:55they look to the Vichy government for help in deporting Jews out of France.
00:44:59On the condition that their power in the southern zone remains absolute,
00:45:05Pétain's government agrees to arrest and detain foreign Jews,
00:45:08transfer them to a Paris concentration camp, Trancy, and then send them to their deaths in Auschwitz.
00:45:15The first major round-up takes place in Paris on June 16th, 1942,
00:45:21in which thousands of Jews are detained at the winter velodrome.
00:45:26These men, women, and children are captured not by Nazi soldiers, but by the French police.
00:45:32The Vichyites are enlisted in removing the Jews of France,
00:45:37and to this day it's a source of great controversy.
00:45:40The relative ease with which the Vichyites surrendered the Jews of France to the gas chambers.
00:45:46Times had changed for Jews in France, for foreign Jews,
00:45:50people who had fled from their old countries, from Germany, from Poland, from wherever,
00:45:56thinking that France, the land of the Enlightenment, would protect them.
00:46:01And suddenly they're seeing that it wasn't going to protect them.
00:46:0613,152 Jewish people were taken in one fell swoop.
00:46:14So it didn't take long, therefore, given how many thousands of policemen were in Paris on the 16th of July,
00:46:22knocking on doors. The fact that there was so much chaos,
00:46:25the fact that busloads of Jewish families were being transported to the Veldiv stadium.
00:46:30Parisians knew what was going on, they saw, they heard.
00:46:33The concierges knew what had happened to the families in their building.
00:46:39Any Jew who hadn't been taken at that point was terrified that they would be next.
00:46:47And this leads many Jews, with the necessary contacts and financial means,
00:46:51to frantically attempt to evacuate Paris.
00:46:54And one family who do have the money to flee are the Knellers,
00:46:58a German couple with a young son.
00:47:01Kurt and Margaret Kneller were German Jews who had left Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power.
00:47:07On the first day of the roundup at the Velodrome d'Iver,
00:47:11the Gestapo came to the Knellers' apartment.
00:47:13Fortunately, they weren't at home at the time.
00:47:16Unfortunately, they decided to escape using Dr. Paccio's escape network.
00:47:21The Knellers were German Jews, Kurt, Greta, and little René.
00:47:26On that day of the roundup, they went to a friend who was not Jewish.
00:47:33They went to hide with her.
00:47:35They then told her that a very kind doctor, a saint of a man, is going to help them to
00:47:43escape France.
00:47:46They were never seen again. However, a couple of weeks later, parts of bodies were found floating in the Seine,
00:47:53which included a man's head, parts of a woman's body, and the vertically sectioned body of an eight-year-old
00:47:58boy.
00:48:00The Knellers' bodies are the first of nine dissected cadavers the police discover in the River Seine over the coming
00:48:06months.
00:48:07Throughout 1942, more and more desperate Jews come to the doctor for help through his unwitting accomplices,
00:48:14the barber Raoul Fourier and the actor Edmund Pantar.
00:48:18And they all meet a similar end.
00:48:20These include Lena Wolf, her husband Maurice and sister-in-law Rachel,
00:48:25Dr. Paul Braunberger, and Gilbert Bash and five members of his extended family.
00:48:31As Petiot murders, dissects and dispatches victim after victim,
00:48:35the press will later claim that this killing spree is motivated by a vicious bloodlust.
00:48:40For the doctor, however, these horrific murders are simply a means to an end.
00:48:47There is a common misconception that psychopaths are necessarily sadists as well, but it's not the case at all.
00:48:53However, there does, I think with anyone who commits violent acts,
00:48:57there always has to be something driving that.
00:48:59It could be survival, it could be sadism, it could be a paraphilia, for example.
00:49:04And I think it's actually quite hard for us to conceive of somebody who simply kills
00:49:10because it's an efficient way of getting money or because it's carrying out the end of a scam.
00:49:14And I think Petiot then becomes a sort of slightly odd character because the killings are very, very efficient.
00:49:19They're painless, they use cyanide, which I think is probably one of the more expensive and potent ways of killing
00:49:24people at that point.
00:49:26He knows how he's going to dispose of the bodies.
00:49:28Because it's almost, it's funny, it has sort of echoes of Nazi Germany and the way in which this sort
00:49:33of very psychopathic organisation
00:49:34simply destroys human life in order to advance a particular ideal.
00:49:40Petiot has maybe a sort of slightly earthier human drive that he seems to want money, although it's not clear
00:49:45what he ever does with that.
00:49:46So I don't think there's any evidence that Petiot is a sadist at all.
00:49:50In fact, the clinical nature of his killing is quite striking and maybe one of the more disturbing aspects of
00:49:57the case, actually.
00:49:59But in April 1943, just as Petiot is lining up more victims to invite to his slaughterhouse, convinced that his
00:50:06scheme is undetectable,
00:50:08the escape network is discovered by the authorities.
00:50:12Yet not by the French police officers investigating the body parts washing up on the banks of the Seine, but
00:50:18by the Gestapo.
00:50:20And the Nazis are not hunting a murderer, but instead take Petiot's cover story at face value.
00:50:26An informant told the Germans that there was an escape organisation out of the barbershop,
00:50:31and there was a mysterious doctor who they hadn't been able to identify who was really responsible for it.
00:50:36So the Gestapo went to the barbershop, they arrested Fourier and Pantard.
00:50:40They tortured these two.
00:50:42They very quickly gave Dr. Eugene's real name, his address, and even his telephone number.
00:50:51And like that, the murder network is shut down.
00:50:55Petiot is dragged into Freyne prison and subjected to a brutal interrogation by Gestapo commissaire Robert Jotkem.
00:51:02Yet rather than come clean and explain his criminal scheme, in which he had been murdering the same people the
00:51:08Nazis themselves were hunting,
00:51:09the doctor sticks to his cover story, and suffers for months at the hands of his captors.
00:51:15They tortured him for eight months, they beat him, they filed his teeth, they compressed his head in iron bands,
00:51:21trying to find out more about the escape network.
00:51:24Genuine resistance who were in prison with him said that he was the bravest person they had ever seen,
00:51:29that he taunted the Germans, he ridiculed them, he laughed at them.
00:51:32They were in awe of his courage and dedication and they believed that he was genuinely a resistant and fearless.
00:51:40It's interesting why when he's captured by the Gestapo that Petiot holds to the line that he's a resistance fighter
00:51:46and that he has a network that he's pursuing.
00:51:49Even when doing so would likely have saved him from torture by the Gestapo.
00:51:53You know, he's risking quite a severe end if the Gestapo think that he is really a resistance fighter.
00:51:58But I think the Gestapo would take the wrong angle here, not that they would necessarily have known that by
00:52:02torturing him,
00:52:03because you can't really punish a psychopath for their behaviour, it doesn't really work like that.
00:52:07So torturing isn't going to encourage Petiot to do anything different, because psychopaths don't respond to punishment,
00:52:14it's not something that they really have the capacity to do in their brains.
00:52:16Despite his refusal to cooperate, in January 1944, the Gestapo surprisingly releases Marcel Petiot,
00:52:25planning to monitor the doctor further on the outside.
00:52:28Yet fearful that his actual crimes will be discovered by the Germans,
00:52:32and with decomposing bodies still littering the floor of his Rue Le Sueur basement,
00:52:37Petiot returns to dispose of the evidence.
00:52:40He calls his brother, Maurice, in Auxerre, and has him deliver 400 kilos of quicklime,
00:52:46then fires up his furnace and begins incinerating the remains.
00:52:51Yet rather than oversee the entire process, he leaves the property, the flesh still burning in the basement.
00:52:58He let the furnace burn. Why? Why did he do that?
00:53:03He seemed to have planned everything else so well. Why was he so stupid doing that?
00:53:09It really feels like, and this is actually quite typical of a psychopath, he's sort of lost interest in that
00:53:16part of it.
00:53:16He's left with these corpses, what does he do with them?
00:53:19So he creates this sort of quasi-industrial place where he can burn them and then dissolve the bodies in
00:53:24quicklime,
00:53:25as quickly as possible, but it sounds like it's messier and less straightforward than he bargained for.
00:53:31And I think this is sort of the roots of his eventual capture, because he can't stop the filthy smoke
00:53:37coming out,
00:53:37he can't stop the smells of decomposition.
00:53:39So eventually, suspicions are raised and he's found out.
00:53:44On March 11th 1944, the police are called to 21 Rue Le Sueur and the fateful discovery is made.
00:53:51With Petiot and his wife nowhere to be found, Commissaire Georges Massou's manhunt gets underway.
00:53:57The note left on the door of the property leads them directly to the house of the doctor's brother, Maurice,
00:54:03in Auxerre.
00:54:04And within three days, they track him down and arrest him.
00:54:08They also discover Petiot's wife, Georgette, at the Auxerre train station, and she too is brought in for questioning.
00:54:15But the doctor himself proves more elusive, and the police's search is soon disrupted as the Second World War enters
00:54:22a decisive new stage.
00:54:24On June 6th, D-Day occurs, when the Allies invade the beaches of Normandy and France is transformed into a
00:54:32battleground once again.
00:54:34And with the tables now turning, the resistance suddenly gains an influx of volunteers looking to join their ranks.
00:54:41There's lots of reasons why people after D-Day decided to join the resistance.
00:54:47Some people just felt a sudden urge to want to do something, not anything, to kind of release themselves.
00:54:55But at the same time, some people really thought,
00:54:59I have not had a very good record for the last four years.
00:55:03Some of my actions have actually been quite shady.
00:55:06I better join the resistance now so that there's a good place for me in the new France.
00:55:12Once Vichy and the occupation ends, my resistance record is going to protect me.
00:55:19And although the motivations of these new recruits may be ambiguous,
00:55:23as the Allies fight their way across France, within rural towns and in cities countrywide,
00:55:29this expanded resistance joins the campaign.
00:55:33The D-Day invasion was at the beginning of June 1944,
00:55:37and it took about two months for the Allies to make their way across Normandy to Paris.
00:55:44As soon as the Allies landed, the resistance everywhere started blowing up bridges, blowing up trains,
00:55:50doing everything they could to make sure that the Germans couldn't send reinforcements.
00:55:53And in Paris, the resistance put up barriers in the street and began attacking the Germans
00:55:57and creating as much chaos as they possibly could.
00:56:05The liberation of Paris is accomplished by the Americans, British and Canadians advancing from the Normandy beaches.
00:56:13The French resistance, though, is important in securing the city from within.
00:56:17The existence of large and growing numbers of resistors,
00:56:21who now are emboldened to become resistors by the turning of the tide,
00:56:24leads to the rapid pacification of Paris and its preservation as one of the jewels of civilization.
00:56:33The Parisians were out on the streets.
00:56:38They were kissing the GIs and giving them flowers and roses.
00:56:44It was their liberation.
00:56:47Paris was free.
00:56:49The occupation was over.
00:56:51With victory comes an immediate regime change.
00:56:55The Vichy government of collaborationists is toppled and power passes to General Charles de Gaulle.
00:57:01And his central aim is to unify the people of this fractured nation.
00:57:06At the liberation of France, it was really important for de Gaulle and for others at the top
00:57:12to make sure that France spoke with a single voice.
00:57:14And one of the ways that we tried to do this was to say we were a nation of resistors.
00:57:22A handful, a minuscule number of people in France collaborated.
00:57:27But the rest of you, the rest of France, even if we weren't acting as resistors,
00:57:33we believed in the resistance.
00:57:35So this myth of the resistance, something which was created at the liberation by de Gaulle,
00:57:40this was very powerful.
00:57:43While celebrations break out across the city, there are some who are far less jubilant.
00:57:48For those who aided the Germans, there are brutal repercussions,
00:57:52as angry Parisians set up people's courts and begin serving out harsh street justice.
00:57:58To bring order to the city, the resistance transforms into the French forces of the interior, the FFI,
00:58:04and they help police the liberated streets.
00:58:08But again, with motivations to join often dubious, this voluntary army becomes the perfect hiding place for fugitives looking to
00:58:16escape their past.
00:58:17Everybody who just wanted to help and be patriotic joined the FFI.
00:58:23And collaborators went join the FFI to hide.
00:58:30Petiot joined the FFI and they made him a captain.
00:58:37Remarkably undeterred by the extensive police operation that has been hunting him for months,
00:58:42Marcel Petiot has never left Paris at all.
00:58:46Assuming a false identity, Captain Henri Valéry, the doctor has remained one step ahead of the investigators pursuing him.
00:58:53And proving a master of disguise, even played a role in the liberation of Paris itself.
00:58:59Yet Commissaire Massoud, the detective in charge of the manhunt, sees an opportunity in newly liberated France.
00:59:07With the press free once again, he leaks a phony news story to a reporter,
00:59:12one that falsely exposes Petiot as a Nazi collaborator.
00:59:17Massoud clearly knew that with somebody like Petiot, and he knew enough about him by then, that this was going
00:59:22to make him very angry.
00:59:23Which indeed it did. Within a few days, a letter from Marcel Petiot reached the newspaper boasting of how he
00:59:29had been a resistance,
00:59:30how he had never collaborated and so on.
00:59:32The police looked at the handwriting on the letter and they knew from some of the internal information that,
00:59:37one, it suggested that Petiot was still in Paris, and two, that he was probably serving in the French forces
00:59:43of the interior.
00:59:43So they sent samples of the handwriting around to officers in the French forces of the interior,
00:59:50and asked them to compare them to the handwriting of all of the officers in the FFI stationed in Paris.
00:59:55The trap works. And within weeks, Petiot is arrested at a Paris metro station and pulled in for interrogation.
01:00:04Heavily bearded and significantly more gaunt, on his person are several false documents,
01:00:09including the altered ration card of eight-year-old René Kneller.
01:00:14Protesting his innocence, and claiming the murders of which he was accused were legitimate resistance executions,
01:00:20he is immediately jailed pending a trial.
01:00:23Here he waits for more than a year, the story disappearing from the headlines amidst the more substantial cases of
01:00:30high-level collaborators and Vichyites.
01:00:33Yet when he finally does go before a judge, the doctor comes to the forefront once again, pushing even the
01:00:40Nuremberg trials from the front pages.
01:00:43Exuding intelligence, passion and charisma, he maintains his innocence like a master showman.
01:00:50It was a sensational case. I mean, people had been following this in the newspapers for two years by then.
01:00:56And Petiot had been so defiant and announced ahead of time that he was going to have fun, that this
01:01:01was going to be an entertaining trial.
01:01:03So nobody knew what was going to happen with it. It really, as one person said, was the theatrical event
01:01:08of the year.
01:01:09Suddenly he was famous. Infamous, yes. But to him, he was famous. And he wasn't guilty. Oh, no.
01:01:20I think there was probably a very real danger that Petiot could have walked free from that trial.
01:01:25I think it was, I'm not going to say it was poorly conducted because I just, I don't think that
01:01:29the justice system had ever seen anybody quite like Petiot at that time.
01:01:34And certainly not in the context of, you know, a country just coming out of occupation.
01:01:40Most psychopaths usually have IQs probably in the region of around about 90, so significantly below the norm.
01:01:46It is quite rare to see somebody who's quite so articulate, quite so, you know, professionally capable as Petiot is.
01:01:53And to have somebody like that, who's also got the psychopathic features of being very charming, very glib, up to
01:01:59a point, it ceases to become a bad whether he's found guilty or not.
01:02:02He wants it to be the Marcel Petiot show and he wants to make sure that his voice is heard
01:02:06and his identity as a patriot is affirmed by the people in the courtroom.
01:02:10The prosecution has substantial material evidence to link the doctor to his alleged victims.
01:02:16At Petiot's Rue Le Sueur home, the police have recovered a wealth of personal clothing.
01:02:21Dresses, hats, shoes and fur coats belonging to Josephine Grippet, Joe Le Boxeur, Kurt and Margaret Kneller and many others.
01:02:31Interrogation of the doctor's brother, Maurice Petiot, has also led to the discovery of 49 suitcases in a large attic
01:02:38in Oserre, all of which are sat piled high in the courtroom as evidence of this murder network.
01:02:45But Petiot himself does not dispute this evidence and instead incorporates it into his own defence.
01:02:52Outside of the courtroom, although Petiot is back on the front pages, the French public is no longer so certain
01:02:59of his guilt.
01:03:01The backstory puts him on the map.
01:03:03People now go, let's sort of look at him. What does he look like?
01:03:06People are looking for an answer and they get an answer, but it's an answer that is full of ambiguities.
01:03:12It isn't like Petiot is on trial and then they decide he's insane and not fit to stand trial.
01:03:17No, we have a man standing up and putting forward a very elaborate story to defend himself.
01:03:26Petiot was accused of 27 murders. He claimed that he had killed 63 people.
01:03:32But he said his were all justifiable homicides.
01:03:35For people like Gushenov, he said, I got him out of France. He's in South America. South America is a
01:03:41big place. Go find him.
01:03:42For Joe the Boxer and the pimps and collaborators, he said, yes, I killed him and I'm very proud of
01:03:47it.
01:03:47I should get a medal rather than being prosecuted. Why are you persecuting me this way?
01:03:52The ambiguity of Petiot's defense. There is an echo with the ambiguity of the moment, if you like.
01:04:04There are going to be people in any situation where there's a change of regime, particularly where the regime is
01:04:10being replaced, is one that's involved collaboration with a foreign power.
01:04:14There's going to be a moment when people will say, actually, I'm going to pretend I was something else.
01:04:21I'm going to pretend I did things I didn't do and I'm going to deny I did things that other
01:04:25people say I did do.
01:04:26Now, you're going to have that on a mass scale. People are going to tell themselves stories about what they
01:04:30did or didn't do.
01:04:31You're people who say they were in the resistance. Where's the evidence? In order to try and adapt to the
01:04:37new society.
01:04:39And Petiot is living that out publicly in a very extreme form, I think.
01:04:46And Petiot latches on to these ambiguities to his own advantage, knowing that his claims of being a persecuted resistance
01:04:53hero will play well to his audience.
01:04:56A psychopath is particularly well poised to exploit those kind of things because of a trait that we call pathological
01:05:02lying.
01:05:03A pathological liar doesn't have really a sort of ground truth to what they're saying.
01:05:07There isn't really, I think, in Petiot's mind, a ground truth about whether or not he is a resistance fighter,
01:05:13whether or not he has been gassing the Gestapo collaborators, whether or not he is doing this for fighting against
01:05:19or not.
01:05:20It's all very murky, and because of that, he can simply emphasise the parts of which he wants to believe
01:05:25at any given time to any given responder.
01:05:28Which means that you can't really catch a pathological liar out of a lie because they can always find another
01:05:33way around it.
01:05:34It simply is left to the beholder to try and find a point, which I think in Petiot's trial they
01:05:39do find,
01:05:40where simply the lie just isn't convincing anymore because the weight of evidence goes against it.
01:05:45No matter how engrossing his performance, nor how inconclusive the case against him,
01:05:50as the trial draws to a close, the jury swiftly delivers a verdict of guilty.
01:05:55While his wife, brother and unwitting accomplices, Fourier and Pantard, are exonerated,
01:06:00Petiot is sentenced to death, still maintaining that he was acting only on orders as a genuine member of the
01:06:06resistance.
01:06:07On May 25th 1946, he is brought into the courtyard of Sante prison and awaits his execution.
01:06:14As he stands beside the guillotine, he addresses the witnesses and tells them,
01:06:18look away, this won't be pretty.
01:06:21After the blade comes down, a court official looks at his severed head and later reports that Petiot was smiling.
01:06:27You only have to see, right at the last, when he's facing the guillotine, and good riddance too, I might
01:06:35add,
01:06:36even that's a smiling affair.
01:06:39Turn away, this won't be pretty.
01:06:42It's psychopathic.
01:06:45With the war now over, and with the treacherous masterminds of the Vichy regime brought to justice,
01:06:50the years of occupation become an era many survivors choose to forget.
01:06:55And the unbelievable case of Dr Marcel Petiot is also confined to that same dark chapter in France's history.
01:07:03One of the nation's most prolific and cold-hearted serial killers,
01:07:06who may never have become so infamous were it not for the war itself.
01:07:13In a time of sort of tragedy and death, this was almost a footnote of tragedy and death, which is
01:07:18the funny thing.
01:07:19I think Petiot will probably remain a unique case because it just required such a precise set of circumstances
01:07:27for somebody who was quite psychopathic, yes, but also quite prone to violence.
01:07:32And had this very callous attitude to his fellow men and women that they were simply chaff under the wheels
01:07:38for him to advance his career and his financial standings.
01:07:41And I don't think that if that was to happen today there would be anything like the space for him
01:07:47to get away with that for so long.
01:07:49It is totally grotesque what he did.
01:07:52He shamelessly, ruthlessly took advantage of the situation for his own gain.
01:07:59And it is marvellous that finally justice came to him.
01:08:04Would he have become a serial killer if the war had never happened?
01:08:09I don't think so.
01:08:12The war gave him a fantastic opportunity to enrich himself.
01:08:17And to enrich himself, he had to kill.
01:08:21He enjoyed showing that he was better than everyone else.
01:08:24He could make other people believe anything.
01:08:26He could make people love him and adore him and respect him.
01:08:30He could take their things, he could take their lives.
01:08:32Everybody else was at his disposal.
01:08:34He was the one who was in supreme control of everything.
01:08:37My question is, why wasn't he resistant?
01:08:39He was brave, he was intelligent, he was absolutely courageous and defiant of the Germans when they had him in
01:08:45a prison.
01:08:46If he had wanted money, Germans and collaborators probably had more money than some of the poor refugees that he
01:08:51in fact killed.
01:08:52If he just liked killing people, there were plenty of Germans and collaborators to kill.
01:08:56He would have genuinely been admired by people, so why did he not do that?
01:09:02And the only explanation that I can come up with is that he only would have been fooling half the
01:09:07people.
01:09:08Whereas this way, he was fooling everybody.
01:09:10And the only explanation that he was supposed to kill was he and his people for the dead.
01:09:26Not too bad, but he wasn't a man.
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