Landru, the Bluebeard of Gambais: a Criminological Analysis of a Killer Who Kept the Books

In the article on Bluebeard I separated Perrault's fairy tale from the real figures to whom his name has been attached. Of the three, only one earned the nickname "in the field", from the press of his own time: Henri Désiré Landru, the "Bluebeard of Gambais".

His case deserves an analysis of its own, because it is one of the most studied in French criminology and because, for someone in my line of work, it is a textbook case. Landru left neither witnesses nor bodies, but he left documents: a notebook, receipts, powers of attorney, train tickets. And it was those documents, read with method, that convicted him.

A note on method. The sources on the Landru case are plentiful but not always consistent: several dates, figures and quotations vary between French and English-language accounts, and some circulate without documentary support. I flag these in the text. The trial files are kept in the departmental archives of the Yvelines; this article is based on secondary and institutional sources, not on direct consultation of those archives.

1. Who Landru was before he killed

An ordinary childhood

Henri Désiré Landru was born in Paris on 12 April 1869, at 41 rue de Puebla, in the Belleville district. His father, Julien Alexandre, worked as a stoker in a foundry; his mother, Flore Henriquel, was a seamstress and laundress working from home. Both were practising Catholics.

Young Henri attended the school of the Brothers of the Christian Schools on the Île Saint-Louis, where he excelled in drawing and mathematics, and was an altar boy at the church of Saint-Louis-en-l'Île. In 1889 he found work as a clerk in an architects' office, then did his military service in the 87th Infantry Regiment at Saint-Quentin. Sources differ on its length and on the rank he reached.

On 7 October 1893 he married a cousin, Marie-Catherine Rémy, with whom he already had a daughter. They had four children in all.

A first element useful for analysis already emerges here: Landru did not come from a criminal or deprived background. He was an educated man, with a good aptitude for numbers and drawing, who had worked in a professional office.

A career as a swindler

Between 1893 and 1900 he changed jobs around fifteen times: accountant, sales clerk, cartographer, plumber, furniture dealer. Then he began to swindle. His first scheme was a fake motorbike factory: customers paid a deposit and received nothing.

The 1909 conviction is a criminologically decisive detail: the scheme of using a matrimonial advertisement to take a woman's assets already existed five years before the first murder. Landru did not invent the method during the war: he perfected it, adding the elimination of the victim.

The 1914 conviction also matters. With lifelong relegation hanging over him, Landru was a fugitive facing deportation to a penal colony. A living victim who reported him was no longer a nuisance, but a definitive threat.

Two bereavements

Sources place his mother's death in 1909 or 1910, while Landru was in prison, and his father's suicide, by hanging in the Bois de Boulogne, in 1912. According to his wife, Landru also took the money his father had left to the family. Some authors read these events as breaking points; a careful criminologist records them without assigning them a causal value the sources do not demonstrate.

2. The context: war and women on their own

The first murder took place at the beginning of 1915, a few months after the outbreak of the First World War. That is no coincidence.

• Millions of men were at the front, and France had a growing number of widows and women on their own.
• Matrimonial advertisements in newspapers were a common and socially accepted way of meeting a partner.
• People moved around a great deal, communications were slow, and the disappearance of a woman who "had moved away with her fiancé" might arouse no suspicion for months.
• Landru presented himself as a man from the northern regions occupied by the Germans: a credible story that explained the absence of documents and relatives.

In criminological terms, the war created for Landru an environment with many potential victims, few checks and a ready explanation for every disappearance.

3. The modus operandi

The bait

Landru placed advertisements in newspapers such as L'Écho de Paris and Le Journal. One version reported by English-language sources reads, in essence: widower with two children, aged 43, comfortable income, serious and moving in good society, wishes to meet a widow with a view to marriage.

The selection

Replies were not handled at random. In his notebooks Landru sorted the women into categories such as "no money", "no reply", "probably has property". It is a genuine victim selection system, based on their assets.

The identities

He used more than ninety false names, including Raymond Diard, Dupont, Georges Frémyet and Lucien Guillet. Each woman knew a different man. This made it almost impossible for families to link the disappearances.

The money

Landru got the women to sign powers of attorney over their accounts and securities, and after their disappearance sold their furniture and belongings, kept in garages he rented in Neuilly and Clichy. His wife later admitted forging some signatures for the accounts of two victims.

The places

The women were taken to an isolated villa outside Paris:

The single ticket

The most famous detail of the case: for every trip to the villa, Landru recorded buying a return ticket for himself and a single ticket for the woman. At his trial he explained that buying a return ticket for a fiancée would have been tactless.

Disposal of the bodies

According to the prosecution's reconstruction, the bodies were dismembered: heads, hands and feet burned in the stove, the rest buried in the woods or thrown into the local ponds. It must be stressed that this is a prosecution hypothesis: no body was ever found.

4. The victims

The dates come largely from entries in Landru's notebook, as reported in published reconstructions; some sources give slightly different dates.

The Babelay anomaly

For a criminologist, the most interesting victim is the seventh: Andrée Babelay, aged 19, a servant to a fortune-teller, met by chance on the Métro. She had no money. The notebook contains an entry: "12 April 1917, Mlle Babelay, 4 p.m."

Babelay is the element that undermines a purely financial reading of the case. If Landru killed only for money, why kill a poor girl? The sources give no answer, and any explanation, from the risk that she might reveal something to a non-financial motive, remains a hypothesis. But a good profile must record anomalies instead of hiding them.

5. The investigation: how they got to Landru

The families

The case was not solved by the police, but by the families. As early as 1915 some relatives had approached the mayor of Gambais. At the end of 1918 the new mayor received two letters:

• from Marie Lacoste, sister of Célestine Buisson, who was looking for a certain "Monsieur Frémyet";
• from Victorine Pellat, sister of Anna Collomb, who was looking for a certain "Monsieur Dupont".

Two different names, the same villa. The families filed a complaint against an unknown person with the prosecutor's office. It is the perfect example of how linking two isolated pieces of information can break a case.

The arrest

The investigation was assigned to the mobile brigades, the so-called "Brigades du Tigre", and in particular to Inspector Jules Belin. In April 1919 Landru was recognised in Paris by someone close to one of the families (sources differ on who and when). On 12 April 1919, his fiftieth birthday, he was arrested at 76 rue de Rochechouart, where he was living as "Lucien Guillet" with his last companion, Fernande Segret.

According to one account, during the transfer he tried to throw his notebook out of the carriage window, but an officer retrieved it.

The black notebook

It is the key evidence of the case. It contained:

• the names of 283 women contacted through advertisements; the police traced a substantial number of them alive;
• a list of eleven names, corresponding to the victims;
• meticulous records of expenses: bus, Métro and train tickets, and purchases of saws and charcoal.

Landru remarked ironically that the police would have liked to find a written confession on the first page.

The stove at Gambais

On 29 April 1919 the search of the villa at Gambais collected 4.176 kilos of calcined bone debris. The forensic doctor Charles Paul identified about one and a half kilos as human: 295 fragments and 47 teeth or tooth fragments, belonging to at least three individuals, whose sex and identity he could not establish. Hairpins, pieces of corset and buttons were also found.

The investigators also carried out an experiment: they burned a sheep's head and a leg of mutton in the stove, to check that it could destroy them. It did. Digging in the garden, on the other hand, turned up only the skeletons of one victim's dogs.

The judicial investigation

The investigation, led by examining magistrate Gabriel Bonin, lasted about two and a half years and produced a file of more than 5,000 documents, none of which, taken alone, was irrefutable proof. Landru's wife and son were detained for some months and then released without charge.

6. The trial

The trial took place before the Seine-et-Oise Assize Court, in Versailles, from 7 to 30 November 1921. The defence was led by Vincent de Moro-Giafferi, one of the most celebrated French lawyers.

The assessments

Three psychiatrists appointed during the investigation concluded, in June 1920, that Landru suffered from no mental illness and was fully responsible.

Landru in court

Landru turned the trial into a show. Some of his remarks have become famous:

• "Show me the corpses!"
• "My private life is my own business."
• To questions about the disappearances he responded by invoking the right to silence: it was, he said, his secret.

The defence relied on three arguments: the absence of bodies, the hypothesis that the women had ended up in a white slave trade network, and willingness to accept a conviction for fraud, but not for murder.

The audience

The trial was a society event. Among the spectators were the writer Colette, the singer Mistinguett, Maurice Chevalier and the playwright Sacha Guitry. Colette wrote that she had searched in vain, in Landru's eyes, for human cruelty. Special trains ran from Paris. As early as the 1919 elections, some 4,000 ballots had carried his name.

The verdict

On 30 November 1921 Landru was found guilty of the eleven murders, as well as fraud and theft, and sentenced to death. Sources disagree on how long the jury deliberated, from about two to eight hours. Some jurors signed a request for clemency. His appeal to the Court of Cassation was rejected, and President Alexandre Millerand refused a pardon.

The execution

Landru was guillotined on 25 February 1922, at 6:05 a.m., outside the Saint-Pierre prison in Versailles. The executioner Anatole Deibler noted in his notebook: "6:10. Clear weather." He refused rum and a cigarette. When his lawyer asked him one last time whether he wanted to confess, he replied, according to the most quoted version: "That, Maître, is my little baggage…"

7. After the execution

• Fernande Segret, his last companion, had defended Landru at the trial. Years later she sued over Claude Chabrol's film Landru (1963) and obtained damages. In 1968 she took her own life by drowning in the moat of the château of Flers, in Normandy.
• The drawing of the stove. Landru had given one of his lawyers a drawing of the Gambais stove. A sentence written on the back has been read by some as an indirect confession. Sources disagree on when it was discovered, and I was unable to verify the exact wording: that is why I do not quote it.
• The stove was sold at auction in 1923 with Landru's other belongings.
• The head. A private museum in Los Angeles displays a head it claims is Landru's. There is no evidence of its authenticity, and the claim conflicts with Landru's burial in the Gonards cemetery in Versailles.
• Cinema. As well as Chabrol's film, the case inspired Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947).

8. The criminological analysis

What kind of killer he was

In criminological classifications, Landru belongs among financially motivated serial killers who recruit victims through the promise of a romantic relationship: a model the English-language literature often calls the lonely hearts killer, and which popular tradition has named precisely the "Bluebeard type". Similar cases include that of Johann Otto Hoch in Chicago, whom I mentioned in the article on Bluebeard.

The profile: what is documented and what is inferred

A serious profile must distinguish between traits documented by the sources and those inferred by analysis.

The psychiatric reading

The assessments of the time followed a significant trajectory: in 1904–1906 doctors described a "degenerate" subject or one in an abnormal mental state; in 1920 the experts declared him fully responsible. More recently, psychoanalyst Francesca Biagi-Chai has reread the case, proposing the hypothesis of a psychosis without visible signs of madness. It is an interesting interpretation, but it remains a theoretical reading after the fact.

A "silent" crime

What sets Landru apart from many famous serial killers, including Jack the Ripper, is the total absence of spectacle. No bodies displayed, no letters to the press, no challenge to the police. The victims vanished silently, and their disappearance could pass for a move. Landru did not seek to be seen: he sought not to exist, multiplying his identities.

9. Convicted without a body: the value of the evidence

The Landru case is still cited as an example of a murder conviction without the bodies being found. In the French system of the time, the jury decided according to its intime conviction (personal conviction), and the law did not require a corpse to be found.

Here is how each element contributed to the picture, and what it did not prove on its own:

No single piece of evidence was decisive. All together, they pointed to one explanation. It is the same logic I described when analysing the remains attributed to Hitler: when independent sources converge, the picture becomes solid even without a "smoking gun". The difference is that in the Landru case the chain of custody was French, documented and discussed in a public trial; in Hitler's it was Soviet and secret.

10. Landru today: romance scams

A hundred years later, Landru's method has not disappeared: it has changed tools. Newspaper advertisements have been replaced by dating apps and social networks; powers of attorney by bank transfers and cryptocurrencies. Romance scams follow almost the same pattern:

The warning signs have been the same for a century: a relationship that moves too fast, a person who never really shows themselves, a story that explains every inconsistency in advance, a request for money that always comes with urgency. And the defence is the same one used by the families of Landru's victims: verify and connect information. Today this is done with OSINT analysis, for example through reverse image searches, checking claimed identities and verifying the stories told.

It is also one of the topics I cover in security training for companies and individuals, and in the checks I carry out for those who have doubts about someone they met online: you can find the details among my services.

What the Landru case teaches investigators

Landru was convinced that without bodies nobody could convict him. He was wrong, because he underestimated two things: the determination of the families and the strength of a file built with method. It is a lesson that still holds today, for investigators and for anyone who has to tell a credible story from a true one.

Main sources: Wikipedia entries in French and English on Henri Désiré Landru, with their sources (including Richard Tomlinson, Landru's Secret, 2018); French Ministry of Justice, page on the Landru trial; Unidivers and RTBF on the exhibition and the investigation by the Brigades du Tigre; Egon Roland, Der Fall Landru (1920s, Projekt Gutenberg); Pierre Darmon, Landru (Plon, 1994); Francesca Biagi-Chai, Le cas Landru à la lumière de la psychanalyse (2007); press reports of the verdict, December 1921.