Henri Désiré Landru

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Henri Landru (police photo, 1909)

Henri Désiré Landru (born April 12, 1869 in Paris , † February 25, 1922 in Versailles ) was a French serial killer . He killed allegedly eleven people, including ten women during the First World War . In the press he received the name of the bluebeard of gambais (le Barbe Bleue de Gambais).

Life

Henri Désiré Landru was born in Paris on April 12, 1869, the son of a metalworker and a seamstress . He attended a Catholic school, where he was inconspicuous and became a choirboy and altar boy . He should only have been noticed by eagerness to learn.

After graduating from school, he took technical training courses (especially drawing) to such an extent that he was able to get a job in an architecture office . On October 7, 1893, he married his cousin Marie-Charlotte Rémy, who had already had an illegitimate child from him; three more children followed. At the age of 20 he went to the military, where he made it to the non-commissioned officer .

After his military service, he did not have a regular job, but kept himself afloat with minor frauds. Outwardly, he was a furniture dealer and garage owner. He has been convicted seven times of fraud in courts in Lille and Paris. In 1908 he committed a marriage fraud . After serving a three-year sentence and being released from prison on October 18, 1912, he committed another fraud. When he had to reckon with a further conviction, he looked for new accommodation in Paris on April 23, 1914 under a false name. In August of that year he was sentenced to deportation in absentia. Subsequently, he used different names, including Diard, Petit, Frémyet, Dupont, Guillet, Barzieux and Tarempion, and changed his place of residence and residence. In Paris he finally turned to the marriage fraud.

He placed or replied to marriage announcements and became acquainted with women, with a preference for middle-aged singles. Landru was not an impressive figure, but through small gifts and a certain talent in writing love letters, he was able to achieve an enormous effect on these women. In total, he came into contact with 283 women in this way.

Personally, Landru had no need, he neither smoked nor drank alcohol. He was prone to pedantry , he kept files with love letters to the women he came into contact with and kept notebooks in which he noted all the more important events, including the dates of his murders.

In all this he kept in constant contact with his family and, as far as it was possible for someone in hiding, fulfilled his duties as a husband and father of a family.

The murders

Henri Désiré Landru's victims were mainly women whom he had met through marriage announcements. With these he met and pretended to be a well-off gentleman - a civil servant, a small factory owner, etc. After a while he invited them to houses in the country that he had rented there; initially in a house in Vernouillet , later in one in Gambais . As his notebook showed, he always got a one-way trip for his victim and a round-trip for himself. The women were never seen again. After that, Landru liquidated their apartments and sold their furniture, closed their bank accounts and sold insurance policies for his victims. To do this, he falsified powers of attorney and acquired cover identities and addresses. He stored valuables and personal items, in some cases also personal papers. With his first victim from this series, her son also disappeared.

In order to cover up his actions, he sent out postcards that allegedly came from his victims.

Exposure of the deeds

As a result of the chaos of the war, Landru's deeds remained undiscovered for a long time, and in some cases he was lucky. The French police had their own missing person department, but this was overloaded. It was only through the initiative of relatives of his victims and after a victim's sister recognized him in Paris that the investigation got on the right track. After that, the police authorities investigated some of his pseudonyms , but an inspector found a slip of paper under a pile of papers that said "Landru". He then consulted the criminal files, which contained a description of Landru, revealing his identity.

Searches in Gambais and Vernouillet initially yielded no particular results - in Gambais only the carcasses of the dogs of one of the victims were found, in Vernouillet at least women's stockings, corset parts and remnants of women's shoes. Only a new search revealed charred remains of bones, namely parts of three human skulls, five feet and three hands. The victims' personal belongings were finally found in a storage room in Clichy .

The process

Between November 7th and 30th, 1921, the main hearing against Henri Désiré Landru took place in Versailles. 150 witnesses were heard, among others.

The problem with the prosecution was that there was essentially only circumstantial evidence against him. All the women listed in Landru's notebook and his love letter files could be identified; he was only charged with the ten women who were missing. They had all been seen in the Gambais or Vernouillet area. How he killed his victims could not be determined. Some of the notebooks were encrypted, so a victim from Argentina was called "Brasil". In his files he also sometimes used special abbreviations, the meaning of which had to be deduced by guesswork.

Landru essentially defended himself by denying the acts; he claimed that he did not know where the ten women had gone. He was a gentleman and for that reason alone would not comment on the ladies. In so far as he was held against the sale of the victims' furniture, the objects found in Clichy and the closing of the bank accounts, he claimed that he had been commissioned by the women to do this. He is a furniture dealer. He also tried to use this to explain catchy notes in his notebook. The charred bones found are said to be animal bones.

His defense lawyer Vincent de Moro-Giafferi emphasized that the criminal police had simply not found the ten women, this does not mean that they must have been murdered. The later search of the houses in Landru was only carried out after they had already been viewed by curious people, and evidence found there (the remains of bones) could therefore not be used.

The jury still assumed murder. The court sentenced Landru to death , the judge's name was Gilbert. Landru also protested his innocence afterwards. Landru's appeal against the judgment was rejected by the Court of Cassation in Paris.

On 25 February 1922, shortly after six in the morning Henri Désiré Landru was the executioner Anatole Deibler on the guillotine executed . He was buried in the Versailles cemetery.

Aftermath of the fall

The case aroused considerable attention and media interest at the time. In addition to the deeds and the circumstances, the fact that the French press was prevented by the censorship from addressing domestic political issues contributed to this. The big foreign policy issue, the peace negotiations , was rather uninteresting for the media due to the stalled negotiations. A criminal case like the one involving Landru was therefore able to plug the news hole. The audience was also very inclined to be distracted by the economic problems caused by the war.

Conspiracy theory

The clown Grock claimed in his memoir Nit m-ö-ö-ö-glich (1956) that he met Landru in Buenos Aires in 1926 . The police chief there told him that the murders had been faked by the French government in order to divert attention from political problems. Landru lived in Argentina on a pension from the French state, on condition that he never returned to France. This theory was taken up and developed further in 1998 by Jürgen Alberts in his semi-documentary novel Landru .

Landru in literature

Hugo Bettauer's Der Frauenmörder appeared as early as 1922, satirizing the Landru case and relocating it to Berlin.

The semi-documentary detective novel Landru by Jürgen Alberts , who received the SYNDIKAT S Prize for the best German-language detective novel in 1988, is also worth mentioning for the German-speaking area .

It can be assumed that Robert Bloch used it as a template at least for his novel The Scarf (German: 'The Scarf'), or was inspired by it. He is also mentioned in this book.

Landru in the film

The Austrian film Landru, The Bluebeard of Paris was shot under the direction of Hans Otto Löwenstein as early as 1923 . With the decision of the Berlin Film Inspectorate on June 4, 1923, the showing of this film for the German Reich was prohibited; on June 9, 1923 the Oberprüfstelle confirmed this decision.

Charlie Chaplin's masterpiece Monsieur Verdoux - The Woman Killer of Paris (1947) goes back to the Landru case. The idea for this film came from Orson Welles , who brought Chaplin's attention to the Landru case. Chaplin's screenplay was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 1948 . The black comedy The Woman Murderer of Paris , directed by Claude Chabrol in 1962, also attracted attention , in which he portrays Landru as a furniture dealer who kills and inherits wealthy women in order to be able to support his family. Both Chaplin's film and Chabrol's film criticize social double standards - the condemnation of Landru's murders is offset by the socially accepted murders on the fronts of the First World War .

In 2005, the director Pierre Boutron shot the French film Désiré Landru .

Landru is mentioned several times by the protagonist in the psychological thriller H6 - Diary of a Serial Killer (Spain, 2007).

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Le procès de Landru. In: Series "les grands procès de l'histoire" publication n ° 6. Le ministère de la Justice, August 13, 2012, accessed on July 14, 2020 (Fri-FR).
  2. ^ Agence Rol Agence photographique: Procès Landru, plaidoirie [cour d'assises de Versailles du 7 on 30 November 1921]: [photographie de presse] / [Agence Rol]. 1921, Retrieved July 14, 2020 .
  3. ^ Agence de presse Meurisse Agence photographique: Mr Gilbert, President de la Cour d'Assises lors de l'affaire Landru: [photographie de presse] / Agence Meurisse. 1921, Retrieved July 14, 2020 .
  4. ↑ Agence de presse Meurisse, Agence de presse Meurisse: La tombe de Landru au cimetière de Versailles: [photographie de presse]. 1923, Retrieved July 14, 2020 .
  5. ↑ Gisela Friedrichsen, "This is my luggage" - The trial against Henri Désiré Landru in: Uwe Schultz (Ed.), Great Trials - Law and Justice in History , Verlag CH Beck, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-406-40522- 3 , p. 300 (306).
  6. ^ Marie Sagenschneider, Der Blaubart von Gambais , in: Processes - 50 Classics , Gerstenberg Verlag 2nd edition, Hildesheim 2005, ISBN 3-8067-2531-4 , p. 165.
personal data
SURNAME Landru, Henri Désiré
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French serial killer
DATE OF BIRTH April 12, 1869
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH February 25, 1922
Place of death Versailles