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(dramatic music)

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(sinister music)

[Narrator] At the dawn of the 1940s,

Paris is a city of glamor, style and culture.

Yet as war breaks out across Europe,

Nazi forces overpower the French defenses,

and Parisians soon find their city overrun by the enemy.

When the Germans invade France

and defeat the French Army so quickly,

they've got all of France at their feet.

A lot of people were very worried

when the Germans arrived, people were scared.

People didn't know exactly what was going to happen.

[Narrator] And while the occupants of Paris struggled

to adapt to this hostile environment,

a serial killer uses the chaos to his own advantage.

Posing as an undercover ally,

he preys on those most desperate to flee persecution

under the Nazi regime.

It was a very cleverly, cunningly put together plan.

He shamelessly, ruthlessly took advantage

of the situation for his own gain.

People disappeared

and their relatives never heard from them again.

And they wouldn't go to the police

because going to the police was going to the Germans.

This was a splendid opportunity to murder these people.

Nobody would look for them.

[Narrator] This film uncovers the shocking crimes

of Dr. Marcel Petiot,

the psychopath who believes

he has devised the perfect murder

and the race against time to bring him to justice.

(dramatic music)

(dramatic suspenseful music)

France, 1940.

Only 20 years since it had been the central battleground

of the First World War,

the nation is under threat once again.

Following Germany's invasion of Poland,

Hitler's Nazi forces have stormed

through Denmark, Norway, and Belgium,

and now begin their offensive against France itself.

And although the nation has bolstered its military

and strengthened its defenses since the last conflict,

the ferocity of the Nazis assault

on the country's northern border is relentless.

It came as a huge surprise.

Within five weeks,

the French Army was completely obliterated.

France was in a state of panic and chaos.

You had 10 million people fleeing

from the north to the south.

This was the largest number

of people moving in go since the Bible.

There was no communication.

You couldn't phone anybody. You couldn't send letters.

So France was really, really on its knees.

[Narrator] With whole towns

and villages devastated by the onslaught,

the nation's government quickly falls apart.

And this chaos provides an opportunity

for an aging icon of France's past,

Marshall Phillipe Petain.

The prime minister resigned

and was replaced by Marshall Petain,

who is this huge war leader from the First World War,

a total hero of France.

And Petain and the people around him

were all in favor of an armistice with Germany.

They wanted the fighting to end.

The military elites, the leading generals in 1940,

they're very much supporters of French right wing politics.

For people like Marshall Petain,

the great hero of World War I,

who is going to step up as the new premier,

and then cut this deal with the Germans,

they see this as being possibly a positive development

that the Germans are importing

this very disciplined Nazi system

and France will adopt its own version of the Nazi system,

and join its place in what Hitler's calling

and then France will be rebuilt under German tutelage.

And Petain sees this as a positive thing.

[Narrator] And although this feeling is not widely shared

among the French people themselves,

on June 22nd, Petain and France's military leaders meet

with Hitler and formally surrender.

As the Nazi occupation begins,

the nation is immediately divided in two,

with the German military controlling the north

of the country and a free zone established

in the south known as Vichy France,

left under the command of Marshall Petain.

Here he instantly falls into step with Hitler's master plan

and establishes the French State,

an authoritarian regime operating

out of the small spa town of Vichy.

The country's capital Paris, however,

is under the Nazi's command.

And within days of the invasion,

its landscape is radically transformed.

The Tricolore, the French national flag,

was banned and replaced by the swastika.

Paris was moved onto German time.

You had Germans everywhere, German soldiers,

but also auxiliary staff,

particularly in the center

and particularly around tourist sites,

you had black and white signposts

to help the Germans find their way around Paris.

The Germans were everywhere.

It was utter humiliation to the French.

The French were very proud people

and to suddenly have your country taken over

and be powerless in your own land

and have despots reveling in the joys of your city

was absolutely, you know, horrifying to the French people.

[Narrator] And Parisians are quickly cast

into an uncertain, paranoid world,

no longer able to distinguish between allies and enemies.

French society is just utterly divided.

There's no freedom of the press.

There's no freedom of speech.

Everything's very heavily censored.

People have to be very careful what they say,

because remember not only are the Germans there in control,

but they enlist this huge apparatus of collaborationists,

as distinct from collaborators.

Collaborators were just people that said,

"I'm gonna go along to get along".

The collaborationists were people who said,

"I'm going to make my future with the Germans.

I'm gonna hitch my wagon to the Nazi wagon".

So you're not only just dodging Germans.

You're dodging a lot of French bureaucrats

and policemen employed by the Germans

who are as keen as the Germans to get you.

[Narrator] But some remain defiant.

Despite the risks, French patriots form the Resistance,

an underground army that fights from the shadows

to subvert German rule and aid the Allied war effort.

Resistance is small at first, and people are uncertain

what resistance is going to be.

So lots of early Resistors don't necessarily regard violence

as part of what they're going to do.

There is a resistance in Paris

and there are lots of different kinds of resistance.

So you have a resistance revolving around intelligence,

a resistance revolving around escape networks,

a resistance revolving around provision

of information and publication.

Resistance was something

few people gravitated towards early on.

But of course, as the occupation went on,

as people were able to see the kind of conditions

that were affecting everyday life,

more and more people decided to take a stand.

[Narrator] As the Resistance expands,

the Nazis and the French state tighten their grip

on the nation, imprisoning or executing anyone

with links to this underground army.

And while this further intensifies the climate

of fear and distrust,

in Paris the hostile environment

creates the perfect hunting ground

for a ruthless serial killer.

And his presence goes undetected

by the authorities until 1944,

when a shocking discovery is made

at the home of Dr. Marcel Petiot.

In early March, 1944,

dirty foul smelling greasy smoke was coming out

of the chimney of a house

on the Rue Le Sueur in the 16th arrondissement in Paris.

And it continued for a couple of days.

And on March 11th, the weather conditions were such

that the smoke was bottled into the street

and was really annoying all of the neighbors.

After five days,

this one couple couldn't take the stink anymore.

She was vomiting, they were ill.

So he called the police.

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They found a note on the house's door

about forwarding mail to Auxerre,

giving the address in Auxerre.

They asked next door and another neighbor said,

"Oh, the property was owned by Dr. Marcel Petiot,

who lived two miles away in Paris."

They called Petiot's number.

He answered and he said, "Have you gone in yet?"

They said, "No."

And he said, "Well, wait right there,

I'll be there in 15 minutes."

They waited about a half an hour.

And when nobody had arrived,

they climbed up to a second floor window, broke in

and traced the source of the smoke to the basement.

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They let their noses lead them to the basement

where they found bodies burning

in the furnace of a water boiler.

From the furnace, stuck an arm,

a human arm with fingers still left on the arm.

Inside the boiler they could see a human head.

[Narrator] On the floor surrounding the furnace

are assorted rib cages, jaw bones,

and large chunks of charred flesh from at least 10 victims.

As the police inspect the building further,

they discover a pit of quicklime

and within it the remains of yet more bodies.

Initially, they believe they have stumbled

upon a secret Gestapo base.

The corpses, murdered resistance operatives.

Yet as they cordon off the crime scene,

a mysterious stranger appears.

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A man on a green bicycle rode up and identified himself

as the brother of the owner of the house.

The police escorted him inside,

took him down to the basement.

And he said, "My God, my head might be at stake."

And they weren't at all surprised by that.

But he identified himself as a member of the Resistance.

He said, "I'm sure that you've notified

The German authorities of this discovery.

And I have hundreds of Resistance files

that I have to destroy

before the Germans can get their hands on it."

There was a Gestapo office not far away.

And the first thought that the police had was

that these were dead Germans and collaborators,

and that this mysterious person

on the green bicycle was in fact a Resistant.

So they let him go.

For these French police officers on duty that night,

it probably would've made a lot of sense for them

given the situation in Paris at that time

to encourage him to abscond.

Their loyalties lay with the French,

with the French police.

They didn't want to be dealing with the Germans.

[Narrator] But as the police continue

to search the house, they discover photos

of the building's owner

and realize that the mysterious stranger was,

in fact, Dr. Marcel Petiot, himself.

As they prepare a warrant for his arrest,

Commissaire Georges Massu arrives at the crime scene

to lead the investigation.

Commissaire Massu was a 37-year veteran

of the police judiciaire.

He had well over 3,000 arrests to his name.

He was very prominent.

He was one of the models

for George Simenon's character Inspector Maigret.

He was senior most investigator and immediately took charge

of the Petiot investigation.

[Narrator] As Massu investigates the

he is struck by its state of total disrepair.

Room after room is filled with discarded furniture

while ornate valuables and expensive artworks

are left neglected, strewn about the floor.

As he makes his way down

to study the carnage in the basement.

An officer arrives with a simple message from the Gestapo.

"Arrest, Petiot. Dangerous lunatic".

But Massu considers this further evidence

that the doctor may well be a member of the Resistance

and he ignores the German's order.

There was always a very, very uneasy relationship

between the French police and the Gestapo.

When the Germans invaded France,

the French police had the option of leaving their posts,

but they were fearful of doing that

because the German military police would've taken over.

So they wanted to still administer justice.

And certainly there were still crimes

that needed to be punished by the police.

But they were always in the very awkward position

that they might inadvertently arrest Resistants,

or they might be accused of collaboration.

It was a very, very difficult thing.

The French police did their best

to subvert any of the investigations

that they thought were involved in Resistance operations,

but they had to do so very cautiously.

[Narrator] Although cautious of colluding

with the Gestapo's operation

that night Massu does issue an arrest for Marcel Petiot.

But when police arrive at the doctor's other Paris property,

they find that both Petiot and his wife

have already packed and fled.

As a manhunt begins to find the pair,

the human remains from the basement are taken

to the police laboratory for analysis.

Upon inspection, however,

they offer very little in the way of evidence.

With both the fingertips and faces expertly removed

from the corpses and with hundreds of

the forensic experts have their work cut out.

There was a very well known

and flamboyant medical examiner, Dr. Albert Paul,

who loved the press and the press loved him

because he made outrageous statements.

He said that in the quick lime

they had found three garbage cans full of small bones,

but there was no way to determine

how any of the people had died.

They were too badly decomposed or consumed by the lime.

One thing that did concern him was that the thighs

of some of the legs had stab wounds in them.

And they were very similar to some bodies

that had been found floating

in the Seine a year or so earlier,

which also had stab wounds in the thighs.

And the thing that particularly concerned Dr. Paul

about that was "As a coroner," he said,

"Sometime when you're doing an autopsy,

when you're picking up another instrument,

you don't put your scalpel down.

You use the thigh as a pin cushion."

[Narrator] Dr. Paul's discovery suggests

that the killer had medical training

further indicating Dr. Petiot's involvement in the murders.

And Massu immediately turns his attention

to the bodies found in the River Seine

between 1942 and 1943,

suspecting that they may be victims of the same killer.

He finds that the dissected limbs of nine torsos

had washed up on the shore,

including those of an 8-year-old boy.

As a full investigation begins in earnest,

the papers across Paris and Auxerre report

the macabre details of the Rue Le Sueur discovery

and the manhunt for both Marcel Petiot

and his wife, Georgette.

For the citizens of occupied France,

this horrific affair proves an engrossing distraction.

People were intrigued.

It was so gruesome.

The press were able to sensationalize that.

It raised a lot of questions.

It raised questions about who did this,

was this really Petiot or was it somebody else?

Why did he do this?

I think the fact that he was a doctor

was an important factor. In that period,

a doctor has a very high status,

a pillar of society, man you trust.

And the very notion of a doctor

is somebody who looks after us,

who looks after people, cares for people,

makes them well.

And so this is a complete negation

of what we traditionally think of as a doctor.

(sinister music)

And just as Mass's investigation has

between Petiot and the River Seine bodies,

a telegram from the Gestapo arrives

that complicates matters.

It reveals that the Nazis had arrested

and interrogated Petiot a year earlier,

suspecting him of being a prominent member

of the French Resistance.

This again, suggests that the doctor

is an underground operative.

Yet a witness soon emerges

to paint a far more disturbing picture

of Petiot's resistance activities.

A couple of days after the discovery

of the bodies on the Rue Le Sueur,

the business partner

of a Jewish furrier named Joachim Gushinov came

to Commissaire Massu and told him

about the disappearance of Gushinov. Back in 1941,

when the Germans were beginning

to crack down more on Jews in Paris,

Gushinov, who was treated by Petiot as a physician,

decided that he needed to escape from the country.

So Petiot told him that he could help him with that.

He had an escape network,

he was involved in a Resistance organization.

Petiot told Gushinov that he would have to be vaccinated.

He would do the vaccination,

and then he would be taken across France

to the Spanish border, into Spain, which was neutral.

And then to a port in Africa to sail to Argentina.

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So Gushinov took one and a half million dollars worth

of cash and silver and gold and diamonds,

and went with Petiot and was never seen again.

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So the business partner,

when he had heard about the discovery at the Rue Le Sueur,

went to Commissaire Massu and told him this story.

And all of a sudden it began to seem that, in fact,

the bodies might be something even more sinister

than they had originally expected.

And that there might have been this escape network

that, in fact, did not go to South America,

but ended at the Rue Le Sueur.

[Narrator] Checking the facts of this testimony,

Massu discovers that the secret rendezvous

where Petiot met Gushinov was on the Rue Pergolese,

a street that intersects the Rue Le Sueur.

In the coming days,

the investigation uncovers more and more details

about Petiot's escape network.

And it becomes apparent

that Gushinov was not the only desperate Parisian

to look to the doctor for safe passage

out of occupied France.

People came, they phoned,

they said so and so had left, a friend of mine.

She was going to go to a doctor to help her escape.

I think it could be Dr. Petiot.

So they had a list of people who they knew had been

in contact with Petiot and who had disappeared.

[Narrator] As the investing identifies

countless potential victims,

Massu realizes that he is dealing

with a devious ruthless, serial killer,

and his hunt for Marcel Petiot now intensifies.

Using the forwarding address,

found at the Rue Le Sueur house as a guide,

Massu sends his men to Auxerre,

a town 100 miles south of Paris, where Petiot grew up.

Speaking with the locals,

the officers pieced together a disturbing picture

of the doctor's early life.

His parents were postal workers

whose busy schedule forced them

to send the young Marcel to live with his elderly aunt

and her maid periodically from the age of two.

With his father often absent from his life,

and with few friends as he grew up,

Petiot was a lonely unstable child.

I think we can certainly see signs

of a trouble mind from very early on.

He shows signs of being very clever,

but also signs of all the origins

that one might expect in someone

who is going to become a full blown psychopath

in later life.

A psychopath is somebody

who doesn't have the same emotional responses

to situations that most of us would.

A psychopath is often described

as lacking remorse, lacking empathy.

And usually this fits with something

that we call an instrumental use of other people.

So a psychopath is willing to use other people

to get what they want and not show any guilt, remorse,

or empathy with the people that they're using.

People, for them, become a means to an end.

And we know that those kind of traits usually exhibit

in terms of cruelty to other people, cruelty to animals,

delinquent behavior, bullying can be seen in kids

as young as seven or nine years old.

He impaled birds and insects

on knitting needles.

He stuck pins into the eyes of the little birds.

He locked them into boxes, shoe boxes,

and he didn't feed them.

So he could sit watching them die of hunger.

[Narrator] As he is enrolled into the school system,

despite being a brilliant people,

Petiot's behavior becomes

increasingly disruptive and dangerous.

He behaved very badly in class.

One day, he went into the classroom with a gun,

which he had taken from his father

and he fired bullets into the ceiling.

His father thought it was rather funny.

And he told his father that he did so

because he wanted to brighten up a dull lesson.

Marcel Petiot is certainly a psychopath.

He fulfills probably the majority of the criteria

on the psychopathy checklist.

When we think about why people become psychopaths,

usually we think of it as an interaction

between people's genetic heritage,

the traits and the genotype that they've grown up with

and also the kind of environment that they exhibit those in.

So I think in Petiot's case,

he has quite an invalidating early environment.

His parents palm him off with two local spinsters

when he's quite young,

he seems to struggle to engage with his father.

However, I think because there's evidence

of cruelty to animals in quite a young age

because of the bullying, the difficulties in school,

I think it's probably fair to say

that there's a mix of both genetic

and environmental inferences in the mix

that somebody else going through those same experiences

that Petiot did wouldn't necessarily have developed

into a psychopath in the same way and become what is,

I think by most modern definitions,

quite a sort of a high level psychopath in Petiot's case.

(sinister music)

[Narrator] But outside of his disciplinary record,

Petiot is a highly gifted pupil

and he develops a genuine interest in medicine.

Within a year of his graduation,

the First World War erupts.

With France its central battleground,

he enlists in the hope of becoming a medic.

His stay on the front line is short lived, however,

transferred to a psychiatric unit,

following a nervous breakdown,

here doctors decide that he should be kept

under constant observation.

Military psychiatrists examined him

and they found him insane.

I have absolutely no confidence that

that wasn't a full blown act so that he could get back

from the front and be nannied and nursed.

Psychopaths can be so very, very convincing

and know exactly what to say and do

to obtain their objectives.

For somebody like Petiot

with quite psychopathic tendencies,

this chance to see other people suffering

and to understand a little bit about what suffering was,

where it came from and how to mimic it,

is really critical to our understanding of,

I think, the rest of his development.

Because psychopaths don't necessarily understand

or appreciate or respond to human emotions in the same way.

So what they do instead

is something that we call pseudo-mentalizing.

They think that they understand what emotions are

and how other people experience them.

And they learn to sort of do a kind of copycat of that.

He was discharged as 40% mentally disabled,

and he was put on a pension

and he received that disability pension until the day died.

[Narrator] This diagnosis doesn't put an end

to Petiot's ambitions.

Still determined to pursue a career in medicine,

upon leaving the army,

he takes advantage of a new government initiative

and enrolls at the University of Paris to become a doctor.

At the end of the First World War,

there was a program in France

to accelerate the medical education of former soldiers,

where you could take eight months of classes

and do two years of an internship.

And after the First World War

with all the people who had been killed,

they really needed to replenish the supply of physicians.

So this accelerated program tried

to get new doctors helping patients as quickly as possible.

It was never established that he really was a doctor,

that he really had a medical diploma.

He was intelligent.

He had spent many years in mental asylums.

He learned a lot about illnesses, about diagnosis,

and that's what it was.

He was not a doctor.

[Narrator] In 1922, following his rapid graduation,

the newly qualified doctor, Marcel Petiot,

travels to the small rural town of Villeneuve-Sur-Yonne

and establishes a medical practice.

And apparently overcoming both his troubled childhood

and his mental health issues,

here he seems to turn a corner and emerges a new man.

He was a charming person.

He was devoted to his patients.

He worked long hours. He treated poor people for free.

He would stay open nights and open on Sundays

if people couldn't come at any other time.

He listened patiently to people.

Some people said that they discovered after they left,

that they had spent more time talking

about their lives with him listening attentively

than they had spent talking about their complaints.

His patients absolutely adored him.

Of course, a psychopath would be drawn

to that sort of profession

simply because it gives him unique access to power.

He was revered by many of his patients

as the man who would go the extra mile,

the man who would open surgeries on Saturdays

and Sundays and all of that.

Pure superficial charm to gain access

and to see what he could manipulate for his own gain.

[Narrator] And his popularity enables Petiot

to quickly become a prominent figure in the local community.

Ambitious, intelligent, and committed,

the young doctor is the talk of the town.

And in 1926, he falls in love for the first time

with a mysterious woman of far lower social standing.

Her name was Louise,

but the townspeople called her Louisette.

One evening, he went to have dinner.

Louise was the maid.

She was 26.

She didn't have a boyfriend.

Nobody knew where she came from.

Very soon, she was his lover.

She went to live with him,

but a doctor could not have mistress

who was a domestic.

So they pretended she was his maid.

All the people knew that she was not his maid.

(dramatic music)

[Narrator] Yet this relationship

soon exposes Marcel Petiot's darkest instincts.

Within months of moving in with him,

Louisette confesses to her friends that she is pregnant.

And then, overnight, she vanishes without a trace.

Petiot complains that his young lover has walked out on him.

But days later, a discovery in the Yonne River

suggests a far more disturbing version of events.

One Sunday, a bad smell rose from the river.

The townspeople went to see what it was.

And they found a trunk caught in bushes beside the river,

and they opened it and they looked inside

and they found the headless body of a young woman.

People immediately said it was Louisette.

It's important to understand what this act means.

Again, if we understand that Petiot is a psychopath.

Psychopath's relationships

with other people are characterized

by what we call multiple marital-type relationships.

So these are relationships

where the psychopath will go into a relationship.

They will probably seek to get what they can out of it.

That could be sex. It could be money.

It could be some sort of sense of intimacy.

And I think in Petiot's case,

intimacy has been something that he's been largely denied.

But then the point will come where something becomes stuck.

And I think in this case, Louisette becomes pregnant.

Petiot is unable to reconcile this

with his visions for himself.

Perhaps he doesn't want be a father,

perhaps he just panicked,

realizes he needs to get out of the relationship.

And I think calculates that the best way

to do that is simply to kill Louisette Delaveaux.

[Narrator] Despite some locals raising concerns

over Petiot's role in the murder,

due to its mutilated state,

the body in the river cannot be identified

and the case runs cold.

The doctor, meanwhile, has ambitious designs

on an even more prominent role within the town.

And only weeks after the discovery of the corpse

begins a campaign to become mayor of Villeneuve-Sur-Yonne.

His election was a little bit funny.

It occurred soon after the disappearance

of Louisette Delaveaux.

And one dramatic moment was he dragged himself painfully

up to the stage and said,

"I must confess that I am guilty of a very serious crime."

And everybody gasped.

And after a dramatic pause, he said,

"I stand accused of loving the people too much."

He was elected with a landslide of 80%.

He promised the people he would reform the town

because after the Great War, France was almost destroyed.

He said he will rebuild the town.

And the people loved that.

That's what people wanted to hear.

[Narrator] Having now risen to the very top

of the local community, in 1927, Petiot meets a new partner.

Georgette, the daughter of a wealthy

and influential landowner.

And the couple married soon after.

Yet in his new role as mayor,

Petiot quickly begins to abuse his power.

And over time his kindly reputation unravels.

There were still people in the town who supported him,

who still thought he was wonderful,

but not from the people who worked with him.

He was dictatorial and they suspected

that he was stealing from the coffers.

They called in an auditor.

The auditor found that he had signed contracts

with contractors who nobody had ever heard of.

He paid huge amount of the town hall's money over to them

for work which had never been done,

for equipment the town hall had never received.

[Narrator] In 1930, however,

a far more serious crime is discovered

on a cold winter evening

when firemen are called to the local dairy.

Smoke was pouring from the dairy complex.

They found the dairy owner's house was on fire.

On the kitchen floor, lay the dairy owner's wife.

Her head was bashed in.

She had obviously been murdered.

[Narrator] Upon investigation,

the police discovered that the property has been burgled

and rumors quickly circulate

that the new mayor has been having an affair

with Henriette Debauve, the murdered woman.

And Petiot had in fact been present

on the night of the discovery.

When the firemen were putting out the fire,

Dr. and Mrs. Petiot drove by in their car.

They slowed down and looked,

and then continued on to go to a movie.

A lot of the people in the town thought

that it was really the place

of not only the mayor of the town,

but also of a physician to be at the site of this disaster,

rather than going to a movie theater.

There was one townsman, a Monsieur Fiscot, I believe,

who said that he thought he had seen Petiot

near the dairy at the time of the crime.

Unfortunately, Mr. Fiscot had rheumatism

and he went to his doctor, Dr. Petiot,

who said that he had a wonderful new treatment

for rheumatism and gave him an injection.

Three hours later, Mr. Fiscot was dead.

[Narrator] With no other witnesses

to tie him to the murder, Petiot, once

Yet when soon after he has found guilty

of fraud and embezzlement, he is thrown out of office.

His reputation in ruins.

His career in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne

had just come to an end.

He had lost his position as mayor.

He had been dismissed as a counselor,

public opinion was turning against him.

He was a suspect despite the lack of evidence

in the murder, in two murders.

So it was a good time to get out of town.

And I think also he just had larger ambitions

than a small town in the provinces.

So the obvious thing was to move to Paris.

(eerie music)

[Narrator] In Paris, joined by his wife and infant son,

Petiot sets himself up with a small urban medical practice

and looks to quickly revive his career

and attract new clients.

In Paris, he had a leaflet printed,

which he delivered himself and he left it with pharmacists

in nightclubs, in bars and in brothels.

He claimed he could cure gonorrhea.

He claimed he had a method of painless childbirth

and he claimed he could cure cancer.

So the patients poured in.

[Narrator] Despite his outlandish claims,

over the next seven years,

Petiot remains on his best behavior,

determined to make an impression in Parisian society.

But in May, 1940, everything changes.

Hitler's war machine storms into France

and overwhelms the Allied forces

and the French government quickly flees Paris.

A mass exodus follows,

the residents of the city desperate

to avoid the enemy at their gates.

When Nazi battalions march down the streets

of Paris in June, they enter a ghost town,

its inhabitants scattered across the countryside.

Yet ever defiant, Petiot himself remains in his apartment

with his wife and their young son.

The Parisians fled Paris.

Petiot stood at his window

and he was appalled at their behavior.

And he told his family, they will not flee.

And he also said they will not suffer because of the war.

He will provide for them.

[Narrator] As the doctor begins formulating plans

to prosper in this new uncertain world,

the German authorities themselves look

to contain the chaos in the city.

The German military had a very clear view

of what they wanted.

They didn't want any trouble.

They worked very hard to give the impression

that nothing had really changed

and that's to reassure the Parisians who are there

and to encourage people to return.

[Narrator] And over time,

a sense of normality is restored with returning Parisians

slowly growing accustomed to life under Nazi occupation.

Yet the joint authoritarian rule of the Germans in the north

and the Vichy government in the south

soon makes life unbearable for one group in particular,

France's Jewish community.

Even before the occupation,

there was a deep rooted antisemitism

of the nation's population,

fueled by figures on the French far right.

Now, many of these figures have assumed power in Vichy

and emboldened by their alignment with the Nazis,

the persecution begins.

There were a lot of people on the far right

in 1930s France who wanted to reduce the role

of Jews and the role that Jews were playing in France.

And Vichy offered them an opportunity

to put some of these antisemitic ideas into practice.

There was a great deal of antisemitism.

A feeling that Jews ran the media,

Jews ran the department stores

that put smaller shops and artisans out of business.

And so they are happy to begin kind of sidetracking Jews,

kicking them out of government jobs,

removing them from the police,

removing them from the military.

The Germans ordered all Jews in Paris

to register at police stations.

Petain, for his part,

issued a directive that Jews could no longer be

in the higher echelons of the civil service,

of the army and the all Jewish teachers,

university and school teachers had to resign

by the end of the year.

And then as the occupation progresses,

the measures against the Jews increase.

[Narrator] Many in Paris' Jewish community begin

to look for ways out of the country,

but this is strictly outlawed

by both the German and French authorities.

And to successfully escape,

those fleeing would first have to cross over

from the occupied zone into Vichy France itself.

Their only hope lies with the Resistance,

the underground network

of patriots operating in the shadows.

These two zones on the French territory were split

by what was called a demarcation line,

a heavily guarded border,

which physically divided the French territory,

cut it down the middle and was extremely difficult to cross.

What came about was the creation

of so-called escape networks.

These were originally set up

by people working with the Allies.

It was very important to get servicemen or airmen

who might have been shot down in Nazi occupied France.

These people needed to find their way back to the UK,

back to London via a neutral country

and Spain and Switzerland would've been the

The escape route were part of the Resistance activities.

From the very start, there was an escape route,

which ran through Brittany and across the Channel,

others down to points on the Pyrenees,

getting people into Spain and then if necessary

down to Gibraltar or to Lisbon.

And to get across the demarcation line,

you needed the help of someone called a "passeur",

who was someone who helped you pass through,

get over the demarcation line.

And it wasn't always easy and they weren't always reliable.

[Narrator] And this increasingly hostile environment

provides Dr. Marcel Petiot with an opportunity

to exploit those most in fear for their lives.

Following the invasion,

the Nazis have plundered France

of its resources and manpower.

And with produce scarce,

many Parisians have fallen on hard times.

Yet since the start of the occupation,

the doctor has thrived,

enhancing his earnings by offering illegal abortions

and selling narcotics to drug addicts.

Enriched by these criminal activities,

he is soon able to buy an enormous second home,

at 21 Rue Le Sueur.

And this property offers him the chance

to devise a more brutal cold-blooded scheme.

In late 1941, He visits local barber Raoul Fourrier,

a man with connections in the Parisian underworld.

Here, Petiot concocts an elaborate story

and puts his new plan into action.

Petiot told Fourrier that he's a Resistant.

He is the head of a Resistance cell named Fly-Tox

and Fly-Tox had an escape network.

So if he knew of anybody who wanted to flee

from France and the Nazis,

especially Jews, Fly-Tox could help them.

He said, he's undercover name was Dr. Eugene.

[Narrator] Taken in by this tall tale,

Fourrier doesn't notice Petiot's simple methods

in concocting the story.

Fly-Tox is the name of a popular insecticide

and Eugene a French brand of hair product.

Both of which sit directly in the doctor's eye line

on the shelves of the barber shop itself.

Instead Fourrier is fascinated

by the deal Petiot is offering.

For a minimum of 25,000 francs,

he will provide false papers and vaccinations

and take the escapees to a safe house

where they will be met by a people smuggler.

This individual will then take them into Spain.

And from here, they will travel to sanctuary in Argentina.

He also told Fourrier that their potential escapees

should bring their most valuable possessions along,

watches, jewellery, cash, gold bullion.

Petiot offers Fourrier a share of Fly-Tox's fee

if he can spread the word

and help identify potential escapees.

Fourrier agrees and enlists his friend Edmund Pintard,

a stage actor with similarly shady underworld connections

to aid in the search for customers.

Within weeks, the pair provide Petiot

with his first set of exiles,

a gang of French criminals

who have fallen foul of the Nazis.

These include thief and pimp Jo Le Boxeur,

his mistress Claudia Chamoux, prostitute Josephine Grippay

and hardened criminal, Adrien Le Basque.

Between the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942,

eight of this criminal gang are met by Petiot

and taken to his house on the Rue Le Sueur.

Here they receive their vaccinations

and afterwards, none of them are ever seen alive again.

It was possible for him to really invite his victims,

to package themselves perfectly as victims.

You had people who were desperate to escape.

You asked them to take everything they owned

and convert it into gold, jewels and liquid cash,

to bring few possessions,

because you're gonna be traveling light,

not tell anybody where you're going.

Don't bring any identification papers,

remove all the marking from your clothes.

They made themselves

into perfect untraceable victims for him.

[Narrator] In an occupied city,

in which the Nazis were already imprisoning

and executing Jews, criminals and partisans,

those apparently departing to Argentina

through Petiot are never reported missing.

Through his elaborate scheme,

the doctor believes he has devised the perfect crime,

one that will be endlessly repeatable.

He's a very successful charismatic con man.

And he convinces a lot of people

and he tells people what they want to hear,

which is always what a good con man will do.

They'll find out what you want to hear and then tell you.

And they're not just anybody that he's fooling.

I mean, some of the people who he's fooling

were tough gangsters. Jo le Boxeur. Adrien Le Basque.

And if you're fooling people like that,

that's pretty skillful.

One of the things that people maybe misunderstand a bit

about psychopaths is how easily grifting comes to them,

how easily they can find scams

that people will be taken in by.

If you really don't care in your heart of hearts,

what other people think of you,

if you don't care about the possibility

of being caught out for lying

or being found out for saying something that you are not,

then what's the incentive

for you to tell the truth at any point to anyone.

So psychopaths are excellent grifters

because their stories can seem very, very complete,

well fleshed out. The scam in Petiot's case, you know,

there's clear, there's need for what he's providing.

He's identified the victims very carefully.

He's identified a cover.

He's got accomplices

who can help provide the victims to him.

People who come to a psychopathic doctor

that only he can provide

and they're desperate and emotional and grateful,

that probably marks them out as quite weak in his eyes.

And therefore makes it easier

for him to justify disposing of them

in such a callous and horrific way.

[Narrator] And just as Petiot's murder network

is set in motion,

the Nazi's own war crimes intensify on a far larger scale.

At the Wannsee Conference in January, 1942,

The Final Solution is formally announced.

A program to systematically exterminate

Europe's Jewish population.

As the Germans begin the construction

of death camps in the east,

they look to the Vichy government

for help in deporting Jews out of France.

On the condition that their power

in the southern zone remains absolute,

Petain's government agrees to arrest

and detain foreign Jews,

transfer them to a Paris concentration camp, Drancy,

and then send them to their deaths in Auschwitz.

The first major roundup takes place in Paris

on June 16th, 1942,

in which thousands of Jews are detained

at the winter Velodrome.

These men, women and children are captured

not by Nazi soldiers, but by the French police.

The Vichyites are enlisted in removing the Jews of France.

And to this day, it's a source of great controversy.

The relative ease

with which the Vichyites surrender the Jews

of France to the gas chambers.

Times had changed for Jews in France, for foreign Jews.

People who had fled from their old countries, from Germany,

from Poland, from wherever, thinking that France,

the land of the Enlightenment would protect them.

And suddenly they're seeing

that it wasn't gonna protect them.

13,152 Jewish people

were taken in one fell swoop.

So it didn't take long, therefore,

given how many thousands of policemen were in Paris

on the 16th of July knocking on doors.

The fact that there was so much chaos,

the fact that busloads

of Jewish families were being transported

to the Vel d'Hiv stadium.

Parisians knew what was going on.

They saw, they heard the concierges knew

to the families in their building.

Any Jew who hadn't been taken at that point was terrified

that they would be next.

[Narrator] And this leads many Jews

with the necessary contacts and financial means

to frantically attempt to evacuate Paris.

And one family who do have the money

to flee are the Knellers, a German couple with a young son.

Kurt and Margaret Kneller were German Jews

who had left Germany in 1933

when Hitler came to power.

On the first day of the roundup at the Velodrome d'Hiver,

the Gestapo came to the Kneller's apartment.

Fortunately, they weren't at home at the time.

Unfortunately, they decided to escape

using Dr. Petiot's escape network.

The Knellers were German Jews,

Kurt, Greta and little Rene.

On that day of the roundup,

they went to a friend who was not Jewish.

They went to hide with her.

They then told her that a very kind doctor,

a saint of a man is going to help them

to escape France.

They were never seen again.

However, a couple of weeks later,

parts of bodies were found floating in the Seine,

which included a man's head, parts of a woman's body

and the vertically sectioned body of an eight-year-old boy.

The Knellers' bodies are the first

of nine dissected cadavers the police discover

in the River Seine over the coming months.

Throughout 1942, more and more desperate Jews come

to the doctor for help through his unwitting accomplices,

the barber Raoul Fourrier and the actor Edmund Pintard,

and they all meet a similar end.

These include Lena Wolff, her husband, Maurice,

and sister-in-law Rachel, Dr. Paul Braunberger

and Gilbert Basch, and five members of his extended family.

As Petiot murders, dissects

and dispatches victim after victim,

the press will later claim

that this killing spree is motivated

by a vicious blood lust.

For the doctor, however,

these horrific murders are simply a means to an end.

There is a common misconception

that psychopaths are necessarily sadists as well,

but it's not the case at all.

However, there does, I think with anyone

who commits violent acts,

that there always has to be something driving that.

It could be survival.

It could be sadism, it could be a paraphilia, for example.

And I think it's actually quite hard for us

to conceive of somebody who simply kills

because it's efficient, an efficient way of getting money,

or because it's carrying out the end of a scam.

And I think Petiot then becomes

a slightly odd character

because the killings are very, very efficient.

They're painless.

He uses cyanide, which I think is probably one

of the more expensive and potent ways

of killing people at that point.

He knows how he's going to dispose of the bodies.

It's almost, it's funny,

it has sort of echoes of Nazi Germany

and the way in which

this sort of very psychopathic organization

simply destroys human life

in order to advance a particular ideal.

Petiot has maybe a sort of slightly earthier human drive

that he seems to want money,

although it's not clear what he ever does with that.

So I don't think there's any evidence

that Petiot is a sadist at all.

In fact, the clinical nature

of his killing is quite striking.

And maybe one of the more disturbing aspects

of the case actually.

[Narrator] But in April, 1943,

just as Petiot is lining up more victims

to invite to his slaughterhouse,

convinced that his scheme is undetectable,

the escape network is discovered by the authorities.

Yet not by the French police officers

investigating the body parts,

washing up on the banks of the Seine,

but by the Gestapo and the Nazis are not hunting a murderer,

but instead take Petiot's cover story at face value.

An informant told the Germans

that there was an escape organization

and there was a mysterious doctor

who they hadn't been able to identify

who was really responsible for it.

So the Gestapo went to the barbershop,

they arrested Fourrier and Pintard.

They tortured these two.

They very quickly gave Dr. Eugene's real name, his address,

and even his telephone number.

[Narrator] And like that the murder network is shut down.

Petiot is dragged into Fresne Prison

and subjected to a brutal interrogation

by Gestapo Commisaire Robert Jodkum.

Yet rather than come clean and explain his criminal scheme

in which he had been murdering

the same people the Nazis themselves were hunting,

the doctor sticks to his cover story

and suffers for months at the hands of his captors.

They tortured him for eight months.

They beat him, they filed his teeth.

They compressed his head in iron bands,

trying to find out more about the escape network,

genuine Resistants, who were in prison with him,

said that he was the bravest person they had ever seen,

that he taunted the Germans.

He ridiculed them. He laughed at them.

They were in awe of his courage and dedication,

and they believed

that he was genuinely a Resistant and fearless.

It's interesting why when he's captured by the Gestapo

that Petiot holds to the line

that he's a Resistance fighter

and that he has a network that he's pursuing,

even when doing so would likely have saved him

from torture by the Gestapo.

You know, he's risking quite a severe end

if the Gestapo think that he is really a Resistance fighter.

But I think that Gestapo take the wrong angle here.

Not that they would necessarily have known that

by torturing him

because you can't really punish a psychopath

for their behavior.

It doesn't really work like that.

So torturing isn't going to encourage Petiot

to do anything different

because psychopaths don't respond to punishment.

It's not something that they really have the capacity

to do in their brains.

[Narrator] Despite his refusal to cooperate,

in January, 1944,

the Gestapo surprisingly releases Marcel Petiot,

planning to monitor the doctor further on the outside.

Yet fearful that his actual crimes will be discovered

by the Germans and with decomposing bodies

still littering the floor of his Rue Le Sueur basement,

Petiot returns to dispose of the evidence.

He calls his brother Maurice in Auxerre

and has him deliver 400 kilos of quick lime,

then fires up his furnace

and begins incinerating the remains.

And yet rather than oversee the entire process,

he leaves the property,

the flesh still burning in the basement.

He let the furnace burn.

Why? Why did he do that?

He seemed to have planned everything else so well,

why was he so stupid doing that?

It really feels like,

and this is actually quite typical of a psychopath,

he sort of lost interest in that part of it.

He's left with these corpses.

What does he do with them?

So he creates this sort of quasi-industrial place

where he can burn them and then dissolve the bodies

in quick lime as quickly as possible.

But it sounds like it's messier

and less straightforward than he bargained for.

And I think this is sort of the roots

of his eventual capture,

because he can't stop the filthy smoke coming out.

He can't stop the smells of decomposition.

So eventually the suspicions are raised and he's found out.

[Narrator] On March the 11th, 1944,

the police are called to 21 Rue Le Sueur

and the fateful discovery is made.

With Petiot and his wife nowhere to be found,

Commissaire Georges Massu's manhunt gets underway.

The note left on the door of the property

leads them directly to the house

of the doctor's brother, Maurice, in Auxerre.

And within three days they track him down and arrest him.

They also discover Petiot's wife, Georgette,

at the Auxerre train station

and she too is brought in for questioning.

But the doctor himself proves more elusive

and the police's search is soon disrupted

as the Second World War enters a decisive new stage.

On June 6th, D-Day occurs

when the Allies invade the beaches of Normandy

and France is transformed into a battleground once again.

And with the tables now turning,

the Resistance suddenly gains an influx of volunteers,

looking to join their ranks.

There's lots of reasons why people

after D-Day decided to join the Resistance.

Some people just felt a sudden urge to want to do something,

anything to kind of release themselves.

But at the same time, some people really thought,

I have not had a very good record for the last four years.

Some of my actions have actually been quite shady.

I better join the Resistance now,

so that there's a good place for me in the new France.

Once Vichy and the occupation ends,

my Resistance record is going to protect me.

[Narrator] And although the motivations

of these new recruits may be ambiguous,

as the Allies fight their way across France,

within rural towns and in cities countrywide,

this expanded Resistance joins the campaign.

The D-Day invasion was the beginning of June, 1944,

and it took about two months for the Allies

to make their way across Normandy to Paris.

(dramatic music)

As soon as the Allies landed,

the Resistance everywhere started blowing up bridges,

blowing up trains, doing everything they could

to make sure that the Germans couldn't send reinforcements.

And in Paris, the Resistance put up barriers in the street

and began attacking the Germans

and creating as much chaos as they possibly could.

(dramatic music) (guns firing)

The liberation of Paris is accomplished

by the Americans, British and Canadians advancing

from the Normandy beaches.

The French Resistance though is important

in securing the city from within.

The existence of large and growing numbers of Resistors,

who now are emboldened to become Resistors

by the turning of the tide,

leads to the rapid pacification of Paris

and its preservation as one of the jewels of civilization.

(dramatic music)

The Parisians were out on the streets,

they were kissing the GIs and giving them flowers and roses.

It was their liberation.

Paris was free.

The occupation was over.

[Narrator] With victory comes an immediate regime change.

The Vichy government of collaborationists is toppled

and power passes to General Charles De Gaulle.

And his central aim is to unify the people

of this fractured nation.

At the liberation of France,

it was really important for De Gaulle

and for others at the top

to make sure that France spoke with a single voice.

And one of the ways it tried to do this was to say

we were a nation of resistors,

a handful, a minuscule number

of people in France collaborated,

but the rest of you, the rest of France,

even if we weren't acting as resistors,

we believed in the Resistance.

So this myth of the resistance,

I mean, which was created at the liberation by De Gaulle,

this was very powerful.

[Narrator] While celebrations break out across the city,

there are some who are far less jubilant.

For those who aided the Germans,

there are brutal repercussions

as angry Parisians set up people's courts

and begin serving out harsh street justice.

To bring order to the city, the Resistance transforms

into the French Forces of the Interior, the FFI,

and they help police the liberated streets.

But again, with motivations to join often dubious,

this voluntary army becomes the perfect hiding place

for fugitives looking to escape their past.

Everybody who just wanted to help

and be patriotic joined the FFI

and collaborators joined the FFI to hide.

Petiot joined the FFI

and they made him a captain.

[Narrator] Remarkably, undeterred

by the extensive police operation

that has been hunting him for months,

Marcel Petiot has never left Paris at all.

Assuming a false identity, Captain Henri Valleri,

the doctor has remained one step ahead

of the investigators pursuing him

and proving a master of disguise even played a role

in the liberation of Paris itself.

Yet Commissaire Massu, the detective in charge

of the manhunt sees an opportunity

in newly liberated France.

With the press free once again,

he leaks a phony newstory to a reporter,

one that falsely exposes Petiot as a Nazi collaborator.

Massu clearly knew that with somebody like Petiot

and he knew enough about him by then

that this was going to make him very angry,

which indeed it did.

Within a few days,

a letter from Marcel Petiot reached the newspaper

boasting of how he had been a Resistor

and how he had never collaborated and so on.

The police looked at the handwriting on the letter

and they knew from some of the internal information,

that one, it suggested that Petiot was still in Paris

and two, that he was probably serving

in the French Forces of the Interior.

So they sent samples of the handwriting around to officers

in the French Forces of the Interior

and asked them to compare them

to the handwriting of all of the officers

in the FFI stationed in Paris.

[Narrator] The trap works

and within weeks Petiot is arrested

at a Paris metro station and pulled in for interrogation.

Heavily bearded and significantly more gaunt,

on his person are several false documents,

including the altered ration card

of eight-year-old Rene Kneller.

Protesting his innocence and claiming the murders

of which he was accused

were legitimate Resistance executions,

he is immediately jailed pending a trial.

Here he waits for more than a year,

the story disappearing from the headlines

amidst the more substantial cases

of high level collaborators and Vichyites.

Yet when he finally does go before a judge,

the doctor comes to the forefront, once again,

pushing even the Nuremberg Trials from the front pages.

Exuding intelligence, passion and charisma,

he maintains his innocence like a master showman.

It was a sensational case

and people had been following this in the newspapers

for two years by then,

and Petiot had been so defiant and announced ahead of time

that he was going to have fun,

that this was gonna be an entertaining trial.

So nobody knew what was going to happen with him.

And it really is, one person said

was the theatrical event of the year.

Suddenly he was famous.

Infamous, yes, but to him,

he was famous and he wasn't guilty.

Oh no.

I think there was probably a very real danger

that Petiot could have walked free from that trial.

I think it was, I'm not gonna say it was poorly conducted,

because I just, I don't think

that the justice system had ever seen anybody

quite like Petiot at that time.

And certainly not in the context of, you know,

a country just coming out of occupation.

Most psychopaths usually have IQs probably in the region

of around about 90.

So significantly below the norm.

It is quite rare to see somebody who's quite so articulate,

quite so, you know, professionally

And to have somebody like that,

who's also got the psychopathic features

of being very charming, very glib,

up to a point it ceases to become about

whether he's found guilty or not.

He wants to be the Marcel Petiot show

and he wants to make sure that his voice is heard

and his identity as a patriot is affirmed

by the people in the courtroom.

The prosecution has substantial material evidence

to link the doctor to his alleged victims.

At Petiot's Rue Le Sueur home,

the police have recovered a wealth of personal clothing,

dresses, hats, shoes, and fur coats,

belonging to Josephine Grippay, Jo Le Boxeur,

Kurt and Margaret Kneller and many others.

Interrogation of the doctor's brother, Maurice Petiot,

has also led to the discovery of 49 suitcases

in a large attic in Auxerre,

all of which are sat piled high in the courtroom

as evidence of this murder network.

But Petiot himself does not dispute this evidence

and instead incorporates it into his own defense.

Outside of the courtroom,

although Petiot is back on the front pages,

the French public is no longer so certain of his guilt.

The backstory puts him on the map.

People have now gone, oh, let's have a look at him.

What does he look like?

People are looking for an answer and they get an answer,

but it's an answer that's full of ambiguities.

It isn't like Petiot's on trial

and then they decide he's insane and not fit to stand trial.

No, we have a man who's standing up

and putting forward a very elaborate story

to defend himself.

Petiot was accused of 27 murders.

He claimed that he had killed 63 people,

but he said his were all justifiable homicides.

For people like Gushinov he said, "I got him out of France.

He's in South America, South America's a big place.

Go find him."

For Jo Le Boxeur and the pimps and collaborators,

he said, "Yes, I killed him.

And I'm very proud of it.

I should get a medal rather than being prosecuted.

Why are you persecuting me this way?"

The ambiguity of Petiot's defense,

there is an echo with the ambiguity of the moment,

if you like.

There are going to be people in any situation

where there's a change of regime,

particularly where the regime is being replaced

is one that's involved collaboration with

There's going to be a moment when people will say,

actually, I'm going to pretend I was something else.

I'm gonna pretend I did things I didn't do.

And I'm gonna deny I did things

that other people say I did do.

Now you have gonna have that on a mass scale.

People are gonna tell themselves stories

about what they did or didn't do.

You have people who say they were in the Resistance.

Where's the evidence?

In order to try and adapt to the new society,

and Petiot is living that out publicly

in a very extreme form, I think.

[Narrator] And Petiot latches on these ambiguities

to his own advantage, knowing that his claims

of being a persecuted Resistance hero will play well

to his audience.

A psychopath is particularly well poised

to exploit those kind of things

because of a trait that we call pathological lying.

A pathological liar,

doesn't have really a sort of grand truth

to what they're saying.

There isn't really, I think, in Petiot's mind a grand truth

about whether or not he is a Resistance fighter,

whether or not

he has been gassing the Gestapo collaborators,

whether he or not he is doing this

for financial gain.

It's all very murky.

And because of that,

he can simply emphasize the parts

of which he wants to believe at any given time

to any given responder.

Which means that you can't really catch

a pathological liar out of a lie

because they can always find another way around it.

It's simply left to the beholder to try and find a point,

which I think in Petiot's trial,

they do find where simply the lie

just isn't convincing anymore

because the weight of evidence goes against it.

[Narrator] No matter how engrossing his performance

nor how inconclusive the case against him,

as the trial draws to a close,

the jury swiftly delivers a verdict of guilty.

While his wife, brother

and unwitting accomplices

Fourrier and Pintard are exonerated,

Petiot is sentenced to death,

still maintaining that he was acting

only on orders as a genuine member of the Resistance.

On May 25th, 1946, he is brought into the courtyard

of Sante Prison and awaits his execution.

As he stands beside the guillotine,

he addresses the witnesses and tells them,

"Look away, this won't be pretty."

After the blade comes down,

a court official looks at his severe head

and later reports that Petiot was smiling.

You only have to see right at the last,

when he's facing the guillotine

and good riddance too, I might add,

even that's a smiling affair.

"Turn away. This won't be pretty."

It's psychopathic.

(dramatic music)

[Narrator] With the war now over

and with the treacherous masterminds

of the Vichy regime brought to justice,

the years of occupation become an era

many survivors choose to forget.

And the unbelievable case

of Dr. Marcel Petiot is also confined

to that same dark chapter in France's history.

One of the nation's most prolific

and cold-hearted serial killers

who may never have become so infamous

were it not for the war itself.

(dramatic music)

In a time of sort of tragedy and death,

this was almost a footnote of tragedy and death,

which is the funny thing.

I think Petiot will probably remain a unique case

because it just required such a precise set of circumstances

for somebody who was quite psychopathic, yes,

but also quite prone to violence

and had this very callous attitude

to his fellow men and women,

that they were simply chaff under the wheels

for him to advance his career and his financial standings.

And I don't think that if that was to happen today,

there would be anything like the space

for him to get away with that for so long.

It is totally grotesque, what he did.

He shamelessly, ruthlessly took advantage

of the situation for his own gain.

And it is marvelous that finally justice came to him.

Would he have become a serial killer

if the war had never happened?

I don't think so.

The war gave him a fantastic opportunity to enrich himself

and to enrich himself he had to kill.

He enjoyed showing that he was better than everyone else,

and he could make other people believe anything.

He could make people love him and adore him and respect him.

He could take their things. He could take their lives.

Everybody else was at his disposal.

He was the one who was in supreme control of everything.

My question is why wasn't he a Resistant?

I mean, he was brave. He was intelligent.

He was absolutely courageous and defiant of the Germans

when they had him in a prison.

If he had wanted money,

Germans and collaborators probably had more

of the poor refugees that he in fact killed.

If he just liked killing people,

there were plenty of Germans and collaborators to kill.

He would've genuinely been admired by people.

So why did he not do that?

And the only explanation that I can come up with

is that he only would've been fooling half people.

Whereas this way he was fooling everybody.

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