What had actually been going on at 21 Le Sueur was a crime that could only have been committed under Nazi occupation. (In the confused days after the August liberation of the city, Petiot managed to join the police under an alias and spent some time investigating his own crimes.) Meanwhile, French police authorities assumed they had stumbled into a Gestapo torture chamber. The patriotic officer let Petiot go, and the killer escaped arrest for over seven months. 21 was a Resistance safe house and the victims collaborators. When the owner, physician Marcel Petiot, showed up, he asked one of the cops waiting for higher-ups if he were “a true Frenchman.” When the officer replied yes, Petiot told him No. When police entered it was into a charnel house nightmare: a basement lime pit full of dozens of decomposing bodies and, in the furiously burning furnace, a smoking hand. In March 1944, it took five days of warm weather and open windows before neighbours complained of the noxious smoke pouring from the chimney of supposedly empty 21 rue Le Sueur. For years, thousands of people had simply disappeared, some to safety but far more to concentration camps, and no one asked questions of the authorities. There, life under Nazi dictatorship made for a perfect ecological niche for a serial killer. It would seem axiomatic that a city under brutal foreign military rule would at least be an orderly one, with crime as repressed as every other aspect of life.
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