Who Was Henri-Désiré Landru?
Landru was born in 1869 to working-class parents and had a seemingly normal childhood. “As a lad he was of exemplary character, an excellent schoolboy,” William Le Queux, a British journalist and author, wrote in The Washington Times in 1922.
He served in the military, rising to the rank of sergeant, before marrying a Parisian woman. The couple had four children and soon fell on hard times. Unemployed and struggling to make ends meet, Landru began thieving and swindling.
In 1902, he was convicted in absentia of fraud and sentenced to three years in prison plus a fine, but time behind bars apparently did little to change his ways. After his release, he returned to fraud, specializing in bogus deals involving motor cars and garages.
By 1909, he was renting country cottages outside Paris and placing matrimonial advertisements in newspapers, posing as a widower looking for love. Using a variety of aliases, he courted the women who responded to his ads—many of them widowed or single with money or property—and persuaded them to hand over their valuables. By 1915, women Landru had swindled were disappearing.
“Landru has an uncanny power over women,” reported the New York Daily News in July 1921. “It is said he fascinates them. They become powerless…Landru is said to be a Don Juan of a peculiarly virulent and deadly type.”
The Trial, Conviction and Beheading of Henri-Désiré Landru
Investigators came to believe Landru may have swindled as many as 283 women in five years. He is thought to have killed at least 10 of them, plus one woman’s son, but their bodies have never been found. Investigators also never determined exactly how Landru killed his victims, but they suspected he burned their remains.
Landru was arrested April 12, 1919, in Paris after a woman with a connection to one of his victims spotted him on the street. As investigators dug deeper, a series of damning details came to light. Landru had purchased round-trip railroad tickets for himself but only one-way tickets for the women who went missing. Police also found a notebook they believed contained the names of his victims and dates that may have corresponded to their killings.
But because investigators never recovered the bodies of the women Landru was accused of killing, their case rested largely on circumstantial evidence. His trial began November 7, 1921.
“The Landru whom you have to judge is a savage beast tracked down in the midst of his career of crime,” prosecutor Robert Godefroy told the jury, as reported by The New York Times. “He is a murderer, a monster whose heart no human sentiment has ever touched, whom it is your duty to wipe out of human society, as one cuts a withered and rotten branch from a tree if it is to be kept healthy."
Landru maintained his innocence, arguing that the missing women would eventually be found. But at the end of the three-week trial, he was convicted and sentenced to death. After unsuccessful appeals, he was beheaded via guillotine at dawn on February 25, 1922.
Bluebeard’s Enduring Appeal
Even after his execution, Landru remained a fixture of popular culture. Villa Tric, one of the country homes where he took his victims, was eventually turned into a restaurant that advertised the macabre history of the property.
His story has also been the subject of numerous books and has even made its way to the big screen: Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles drew inspiration from Landru for their 1947 film Monsieur Verdoux, while the French film Landru, directed by Claude Chabrol, followed in 1963.
More than a century after his death, the legend has taken on an even stranger afterlife, including an exhibit at Hollywood’s Museum of Death featuring a severed head purported to be from Landru’s guillotined remains.
