Murder he wrote

OpinionJournal - Five Best

This list of Theodore Dalrymple's "favorite books on the criminal mind" brought to my attention some mass murderers of whom I had not previously heard.

This one is very Alfred Hitchcock material (except it may be hard to fit in a blond female protagonist in a film about a homosexual killer):

The serial killer was a man called Dennis Nilsen, who used to pick up stray homosexuals in London, take them home, strangle them and then watch television with their corpses beside him on the sofa. As we doctors put it in our special, technical language, he was a bit odd.

But the story which interested me most was the one about the mad French Dr Petiot:

The Occupation during World War II gave him his opportunity to become one of the most prolific serial killers in French history. He offered Jews an escape to Argentina for 25,000 francs, but when they came to his house to deliver the money he killed them and incinerated them.

His story must have a following of sorts, because he has quite a lengthy Wikipedia article. It explains the murder method, and body disposal, as follows:

Petiot claimed that he could arrange a safe passage to Argentina or elsewhere in South America through Portugal. He also claimed that Argentinean officials demanded inoculations and injected his victims with cyanide. Then he took all their valuables and disposed of the bodies. People who trusted him to deliver them to safety were never seen alive again.

At first Petiot dumped the bodies in the Seine, but he later destroyed the bodies by submerging them in quicklime or by incinerating them. In 1941, Petiot bought a house at 21 rue le Sueur.

What Petiot failed to do was to keep a low profile. The Gestapo eventually found out about him and, by April 1943, they had heard all about his "route." Gestapo agent Robert Jodkum forced prisoner Yvan Dreyfus to approach the supposed network, but he simply vanished.

When he was found with many bodies and body parts in his house, the doctor claimed it was because he was a member of the French Resistance, and the victims were "enemies of France".

He was finally convicted in 1946 and:

On May 25, Petiot was beheaded, after a stay of a few days due to a problem in the release mechanism of the guillotine.

It would appear from the Wiki article that no one has every made a film of this story, which is pretty surprising. Given the jewish connection, I see it as Spielberg material.