Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris

Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris
by David King
Crown Publishers

Historian David King specialises in grand and gripping non-fiction thrillers with a twist of chaos. His latest book, Death in the City of Light, delves into the exploits of a notorious serial killer whose reign of terror in Nazi-occupied Paris prompted a crime-of-the-century mass murder trial.

In August 1942, as human body parts surfaced in the Seine, murder squad boss Georges-Victor Massu took on the job of finding the madman responsible. Massu hunted the killer through a shadowy maze peopled by the Gestapo, gangsters, resistance fighters, pimps, prostitutes and spies, among other Parisian underworld figures.

The chief suspect: Parisian doctor Marcel Petiot. The son of two postal workers, Petiot started out as a delinquent repeatedly expelled from school. Drafted into the French infantry during the first world war, he dealt drugs and was plagued by mental illness.

After the war, Petiot did a crash course in medicine then began practising it with an emphasis on dispensing dubious drugs and performing abortions. He also found time to enter provincial politics: from 1928 until 1931, he was mayor of the Burgundy town of Villeneuve, before resigning amid rumours of theft and worse.

Chaos mounted and to escape Petiot moved to Paris and, from his stylish rue Le Sueur practice-cum-laboratory, sold drugs to addicts. In 1942, a narcotics charge was brought against him. Handily, however, the two people due to testify against the doctor vanished and were later found dead.

Petiot's luck ran out in March 1944 when neighbours complained about the stench and smoke coming from his practice. In the basement, a woman's hand hung from a burning coal stove; body parts littered the floor.