The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot Read Online Free PDF Page B

Pierre Véron—an ironic detail since, four years later, Véron would be the prosecution’s most potent weapon at the Petiot murder trial. Madame Khaït took nothing with her and left a pot of water boiling on the stove for her laundry. Her husband expected her back very shortly. Perhaps she went to get money from Petiot. Perhaps, as Véron later suggested, she was planning to tell him about Petiot’s false injections but, before doing so, the honest and trusting woman wished to inform the doctor that she was no longer willing to follow his plan. Wherever she went, she was never seen again.
    The next morning, David Khaït found two letters under the door. One was to him, one to his stepson Fernand; both notes seemed to be in Marthe Khaït’s handwriting and announced her intention to flee to the unoccupied zone of France until Raymonde’s trial was over. In the letter to her husband Madame Khaït also said that, without his knowledge, she really had been taking drugs for several years. The front gate of the Khaït house was difficult to open unless one knew the trick, and their dog, which barked ferociously at strangers, had not made a sound, so Monsieur Khaït was certain his wife had delivered the letters herself. He recalled that in the past few days she had told him she thought that her disappearance during the trial would help Raymonde’s case—a notion he had strongly opposed—so though he was puzzled, he was not altogether surprised.
    At 10:00 the same morning, an envelope was handed to Pierre Véron’s maid containing F300 toward the lawyer’s fee and letters to Raymonde Baudet and Véron. At one later point Maître Véron would say his maid had formally recognized Madame Khaït; at another, that it had been a strange young man who delivered the envelope. Both letters again announced Madame Khaït’s intention to flee to the free zone, and Véron also remembered her mentioning this idea during their previous meeting. Police handwriting experts compared all the letters and determined that they were indeed by Marthe Khaït but that she had written them under great stress, perhaps following someone else’s dictation; the syntax was atypical, and she used none of the nicknames by which she always addressed her family.
    David Khaït went to see Petiot, who claimed that Madame Khaït had spoken with him, too, about her escape plans, and who said he had given her the names of René Nézondet and some of his other friends in the free zone who could help her if and when she arrived there. Petiot hastily wrote a postcard, which he asked Monsieur Khaït to mail. It was addressed to “Gaston,” at Plagne, near Loupiac in southwestern France, and Khaït thought the cryptic message was an inquiry about his wife. A few weeks later Petiot told Khaït that his friends had written saying they had seen no one fitting Madame Khaït’s description.
    David Khaït maintained to the end that his wife had left of her own volition, but on May 7, 1942, Fernand Lavie and Raymonde Baudet notified the police of their mother’s disappearance. The case was assigned to juge d’instruction Achille Olmi and the investigation to Police Inspector Roger Gignoux. If Madame Khaït had been abducted, it seemed strange that her captor would have let her go home to deliver mail. Olmi sat about for hours wondering about this point and thinking how strangely the case resembled the Van Bever disappearance.
    Inspector Gignoux searched throughout France for Madame Khaït, as he had for Van Bever. Raymonde Baudet had told him her mother might be using her maiden name, Fortin, or the pseudonyms Hait, Lavic, Laric, Piot, Fiot, or Lepic. At Lyon, in what seems to have been nothing more than coincidence, Gignoux found a young drug addict named Piot who chanced to be not only a friend of Raymonde Baudet, but a former client of Petiot’s, but she