It was one hundred years ago when Henri Désiré Landru went on trial in Paris where his story captivated all of France and made headlines around the world.
Princesses, actors, and famous authors contended for spots in the crammed spectator gallery. About a fourth of the seats were taken by women who were desperate to get a glimpse of the accused lady killer. He was short, thin, and bald with a long unruly, pointed beard and vacant dark eyes. He was accused of murdering women, hacking up their bodies, then burning the pieces in a kitchen stove.
Regardless of his nefarious reputation, Landru was an object of much desire.
“Landru has an uncanny power over women. It is said he fascinates them. They become powerless,” the Daily News reported in July 1921.
Newspapers dubbed him the Bluebeard of Paris or Gambais, a nod to the French folktale about an aristocrat who made a hobby of killing wives. Gambais had a house 35 miles from Paris, called Villa Tric, it was there the majority of his murders were said to have taken place.
Widows and divorcees, middle-aged and lonely, were his preferred targets, although some were younger and poor. Landru lured the women with lonely-hearts ads, such as this announcement, published in 1915 in Le Journal:
“Monsieur, aged 45, single, with no family, savings of 4,000 francs, having own home, wishes to marry a lady of similar situation.”
In a series of ads, Landru wrote a fictitious profile about his name, work, background, and family.
Ten women are known to have succumbed to his charms and they paid for it with their lives. He also killed the teenage son of one of his victims, and the pets of two others.
Authorities apprehended him at his Paris apartment where he was living with a young pretty aspiring singer, Fernande Segret, 24.
On the way to the station, Landru tried to toss a diary detailing his dalliances with hundreds of women.
Of special interest to the police, was a shortlist on the inside cover of the notebook with the names of the two women mentioned in the letters to the mayor of Gambais. All the other women listed had also been reported missing.
Landru was in jail for about two years while police worked to gather evidence from Villa Tric and other places where he had lived during the war. Authorities discovered stacks of identification cards, clothes, petticoats, jewelry, and furniture belonging to the missing women. A pile of ash in the Villa Tric garden revealed charred human bone fragments and teeth.
Prosecutors had a mountain of circumstantial evidence — thousands of pages of clues to present when Landru went on trial for 11 counts of murder and 37 counts of theft and fraud, however, there was one major problem, there were no bodies.
“All they are able to show is that 11 persons I once knew have vanished. Does that prove I killed them?” Landru asked the court.
Prosecutors presented their evidence, including a scientist who had analyzed the bone fragments found at Villa Tric. Still, they acknowledged that they did not know how the accused killed his victims.
Landru’s defense attorney argued that it was impossible to prove beyond doubt the women were dead in the absence of a corpse. His explanation for no one hearing from any of the victims was that his client had sold them into white slavery.
The jury took less than three hours to find Landru guilty of the murders and he was sentenced to death by guillotine
After his Feb. 25, 1922 execution, Landru lived on in popular culture, often in odd ways.
A couple purchased the Villa Tric and turned it into a restaurant they named The Kitchen Grill. They advertised the restaurant as a place where you could have your meals prepared in the same spot that a monster sliced, diced, and burned women, wrote Richard Tomlinson in “Landru’s Secret,” a book about the case published in 2018.
In 1947, film giants Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles released “Monsieur Verdoux,” a comedy about a bank teller turned serial killer. French filmmakers later released another Landru film in 1963.
Perhaps the most chilling memorial is an exhibit at the Museum of Death in Hollywood which opened in 1995, a severed head covered in leathery red skin, which is alleged to be the guillotined remains of the Bluebeard of Paris.
