A stone’s throw from Avenue des Champs-Elysées and just around the corner from the Arc de Triomphe runs Rue Le Sueur. It is not a very long street and it is quite narrow. Unless one lives on the street there is perhaps no reason to walk along it. But – it is the Paris street with the darkest past.

Rue Le Sueur in Paris's 16th district.The Eiffel Tower is visible at one end of the street

In the early evening of Saturday, March 11, 1944, police were summoned to the street. One Jacques Marçais from the apartment building at Number 22 had called the cops because five days previously the chimney of an uninhabited townhouse had started to spew a pestilential smoke and all the street’s residents were feeling sick. Two cops turned up on their bikes – it was wartime and France, thus Paris, was occupied by Hitler’s Nazi Germany and because of gasoline (petrol) rationing the bike had become the major means of transport. After a while of standing around they asked their station house to send some fire fighters to what had once been the most elegant property on the street but which had become dilapidated, it  having stood uninhabited for a few years.

The firemen, having broken into the bolted house, found that someone or perhaps a group of people – they had the Gestapo whose security and intelligence service (the Sicherheitsdienst) was just around the corner on Avenue Foch in mind – was getting rid of a large number of bodies by burning them in the furnace of an old rusty water boiler in the house’s basement.

Here on Ave Foch, in these buildings, the Gestapo tortured people to death

The police would also that night come across a pit in another part of the basement where quicklime (lime) was destroying even more bodies.

The townhouse was at Number 21, just across the street from where Jacques Marçais and his wife lived. It belonged to a Dr Marcel Petiot who lived in another arrondissement (district) of Paris with his wife and teenage son.

Petiot aged 26 and at the time of his first murder.

The doctor, 47, a good looking man, was known as a kind family doctor and loving husband, father, son and brother.

Only half of that was true.

He was a loving husband, father and brother, yes, and his patients adored him, yes, because he was never in a hurry and listened to them and empathized with them by prescribing all the sleeping pills they asked him for, and he did not charge those who were most needy.

But there was another side to him. He was a thief, braggart, a know-it-all, argumentative, an abortionist (an angle maker as the French call abortionists), drug pusher – and a killer.

His dark secret having been discovered, he stood trial in Paris’s Palais de Justice for the murder – no slaughter – of 27 people, and was found guilty of the murder of 26.  Police and pathologists had however thought that, judging by the amount of human remains which they had found at his townhouse, he had slaughtered at least 200 people – men, women and a seven-year-old boy. The police officer in charge of the case had said about the number of victims: “To be on the safe side I will settle for 150.” His victims were mainly Jews to whom he had sold an escape route to Argentina. The seven-year-old was also Jewish: his parents had had him baptized with the hope that the Germans, believing him a Christian, would not kill him.

Paris's Palais de Justice: Petiot was sentenced to death here.

Petiot in Court

Petiot’s escape route had gone no further than the basement of his property where he had let the bodies lie, almost like trophies, but having disembowel them, knowing, because of his medical knowledge, that the intestines were the first to decompose and smell.

He was guillotined in Paris in the courtyard of La Santé Prison close to the Luxembourg Gardens on the Left Bank at dawn on the morning of Saturday, May 25, 1946, the war over and France yet again a free and independent country.

He went to the guillotine claiming his innocence as he had done throughout his trial.

The judge having asked Petiot whether he had anything he wished to say, he had replied: “No, I am one traveler who is taking all his luggage with him.”

He referred to the suitcases and possessions his victims had left at his property.

We therefore do not know how Petiot had killed his victims.

The town house was demolished in the 1950s and a building of offices and a top-floor apartment replaced it. The basement however has remained.

No 21 - The Murder House

Guillotine's blade: There were never any survivors.

Henry Vignault, France’s top medium, described to me what he had experienced when a French TV network had taken him, blindfolded, down into that basement without having told him that they were taking him into Petiot’s house.

From what Henry had told me: Number 21 is a haunted house. (I’ve seen the video of Henry down in the basement.)

My book Die in Paris is a narrative account of Dr Marcel Petiot’s life and crimes.  It is a story that will make your hair stand on end.

Auxerre: a beautiful town on the Yonne River

He was born a poor boy in Auxerre, and as he claimed, an unwanted and thus unloved one. He volunteered for the Army at the outbreak of the First World War, spent most of his active service in mental asylums recovering from shell shock, but at the end of the war he returned to Auxerre claiming he had been studying medicine in Paris. He set up a practice in the pretty village of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne of which he had become Mayor. It was there in the village that he killed his first victim – his lover – and dumped her headless body in the Yonne River. In 1933 he moved his young family to Paris where his bad side got the upper hand …

Petiot lived on this street in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, and it was in that house where he committed his first murder. (I do not want to point out the house in order to protect those who live there today.)

If you are a true crime buff or just love history and you would like to go on a Petiot tour of Paris, get in touch with me on this site. I am not a tour guide, but I will take you – and I won’t charge you.  I would, in fact, love to share my knowledge of this man, who remains France’s most prolific killer, with you. I believe that I know him better than anyone else. (There is in fact a connection between Petiot and me, but I do not want to talk about it.)

The House in Auxerre where Petiot was born.

You can also of course buy my book the details of which you will also find on this site.  Or you can click on the title above.

The street was named in 1864 after the artist Eustache Le Sueur (1616-1655).

Police HQ in Paris. They brought Petiot here for interrogation.