The True Crimes of Dr. Petiot
& Other Murderous Physicians
by Serge Janouin-Benanti
Translated by Eva N. Siskowski Boatwright
Here’s a book that does something sly and satisfying with true crime: it wraps thirteen meticulously retold cases of murderous physicians inside a taut prison-cell drama, turning history into a series of midnight confessions. Serge Janouin-Benanti’s Killer Doctors, The True Crimes of Dr. Petiot & Other Murderous Physicians isn’t a thriller, these are true stories, but it reads like one, anchored by a dialogue between guard and prisoner that frames every case, sharpens the stakes, and keeps you turning pages to the very end. The author’s conceit (and the book’s big payoff) is to let one infamous doctor, Marcel Petiot, “teach” his night guard, Pierre, about other doctors who killed. The result feels, as one early notice aptly put it, like a dark, Arabian Nights for true crime: each night, another tale unfolds, and each tale refracts Petiot’s shifting self-portrait.
What it’s about (and why it works)
The frame opens in La Santé Prison in 1946. A young guard, Pierre, takes over the night shift watching Petiot, the notorious Parisian physician on death row. Their first exchanges are terse, sparring, and electric. Petiot sizes up Pierre, nicknaming him “little sparrow,” and the guard, rattled but dutiful, tries to keep the upper hand. That intimate, claustrophobic setting -two men, bars between them, hours to kill- becomes the crucible for the book’s thirteen case studies. Each study is “told” by Petiot, as if he can prove that he, a doctor, cannot be the aberration Pierre believes, because physicians have always been capable of murder.
It’s a brilliant structural choice. Stories arrive as staged lessons, and they’re titled with avian proverbs and metaphors (“The Sparrow and the Eagle Owl,” “The Jay Dressed Up in Peacock Feathers,” “Happy as a Lark”), creating a chorus of fables whose morals are anything but simple. The table of contents reads like a gruesome cabinet of curiosities: Edmond Couty de La Pommerais (insurance, poison, and audacity); Hawley Harvey Crippen (domestic horror dressed in respectability); William Palmer and Théodore Durrant; Castaing; Bougrat; Gorguloff; the Jack the Ripper doctors (Cream and Klosowski); and H. H. Holmes’s “Murder Castle,” among others, braided with recurring chapters on Petiot himself.
Serge Janouin-Benanti gives the book heft by interleaving Petiot’s own arc -arrest, trial, grandstanding, eerie calm- with the guard’s mounting dread and fascination. The frame propels us inexorably to dawn and the guillotine (Petiot is executed at 5:05 a.m.), but the path to that final page is crowded with ghosts from medical history who make his case (and our judgment) anything but straightforward.
A tour through the cases
If you read only one chapter to test what the book can do, make it “The Jay Dressed Up in Peacock Feathers,” on Dr. Edmond Couty de La Pommerais. Petiot recounts, with unnerving relish, how this Parisian doctor engineered a life-insurance scam using an ex-mistress as the insured, and how she died via the “perfect” poison: digitalis. Digitalis leaves no chemical fingerprint, Petiot explains: unless you think like Ambroise Tardieu, the forensic dean who turned to physiology when chemistry failed, using living hearts (dogs, frogs, rabbits) to prove the poison’s effect by the telltale slowing and stoppage of the pulse. The way the author reconstructs that courtroom duel feels almost novelistic: hypothesis, counter-hypothesis, grisly experiments, and finally, the jury’s turn. It’s a forensic procedural staged in miniature, and it lands with a thud.
The book is full of such explanatory set-pieces, and they’re both chilling and strangely clarifying. La Pommerais instructs a mistress to fake a stairway fall and “collect” diagnoses from top Paris specialists; he hoards a homeopath’s bounty of pure toxins; he counts on digitalis’s undetectability in the autopsy room. The author lets Petiot explain how and why these choices worked, until Tardieu dismantles them. The methodical walk-through (including the recovered vomit between floorboards, sterilized and tested in animals) is as unforgettable as it is macabre.
Jump continents and decades, and you arrive at “The Murder Castle.” The way Serge Janouin-Benanti renders H. H. Holmes is a study in horror’s architecture. Holmes builds a corner-lot hotel ahead of the Chicago World’s Fair, a labyrinth with secret corridors, two-way mirrors, gas lines routed into rooms, chutes, and a basement outfitted with a furnace, quicklime pit, surgical tables, and a vat of acid. The chapter’s imagery is ghastly, but controlled; you see the machine and the man. And the narrative never loses its anchor: we’re still in La Santé, still listening to Petiot draw lessons from someone else’s monstrosity.
The “Jack the Ripper” chapter is more speculative but no less gripping. Petiot sifts rival suspects with a doctor’s eye for anatomy and technique, weighing the case against Thomas Neill Cream, the “Lambeth Poisoner,” hanged in 1892, whose alleged last words (“I am Jack…”) turned him into a perennial suspect, and then turning, more persuasively, to Severin Klosowski (a barber-surgeon trained in Warsaw, later executed as wife-poisoner George Chapman). It’s a deft demonstration of the book’s method: sift rumor, test plausibility, and force the reader to think like an investigator.
The selection is eclectic in the best way. You get domestic poisoners and opportunists (Palmer, Castaing), political assassins (Paul Gorguloff), and colleagues killing colleagues. The timeline stretches across centuries and countries, but the chapters never sprawl; each is shaped to an argument and a mood, and each returns us to Pierre and Petiot, whose nightly debates are the drumbeat under it all.
Petiot as narrator: charisma, cruelty, and the “sport” of killing
Let’s be clear: the most unsettling pleasure of this book is being trapped with Petiot long enough to hear him at length. He is manipulative, erudite, and often very funny, in ways that make your stomach drop. He brags about his memory, claims to read 150 pages an hour, delights in chess-like “martingales” for life and death, and is forever testing Pierre’s gullibility. He insists the doctors he killed were “bastards,” that he’s a patriot, and that the justice system botched even its counting: “Not 26… I admitted to 63,” he crows, even as he shifts the terms of his own confessions. Serge Janouin-Benanti doesn’t sanitize any of that; he lets the contradictions accrue until they clang.
Along the way, Petiot drops aphorisms (and epigraphs) from his prison-written tract Chance Conquered, and the author sprinkles those at the openings of chapters like poisoned bonbons. They sharpen the theme that runs through the whole book: games of chance, games of power, and the fatal allure of believing you can outwit rules, systems, even death. That theme peaks late when Petiot, facing the end, still taunts, still performs, and still treats murder like a contest played for “sport.” Serge Janouin-Benanti stages that bravado against the starkness of the wake-up call, the corridor walk, and the blade. The tension, between swagger and silence, makes the last chapter a punch in the gut.
How it’s told: pacing, texture, and a translator’s touch
Two things make these tales feel fresh even if you think you know the case names.
First, the pacing. Each chapter is a tight braid of storytelling and explanation. The author knows when to dwell on a forensic wrinkle (Tardieu’s “living heart” insight), when to sketch a setting (Holmes’s castle rooms with their concealed valves and chutes), and when to cut back to Pierre, whose discomfort is a moral compass the book never loses. That rhythm keeps the pages moving without ever cheapening the material.
Second, the texture. The book includes historical photographs and visual plates (anthropometric images of Petiot after his arrest; a spread on Holmes’s hotel and victims) that punctuate the text without turning it into a scrapbook. They’re carefully placed, and they deepen the sense that you’re not just being told about these crimes, you’re being shown their human scale.
A word on the translation: Eva N. Siskowski Boatwright renders Serge Janouin-Benanti’s French into English with clean, idiomatic snap. She preserves Petiot’s needling tone and the author’s precise, almost playful chapter headings, while keeping the forensic passages crisp. The result reads smoothly for a broad audience, no jargon choke points, no over-literalisms, and still carries the French flavor of the frame. (The book is published by 3E éditions; this English edition is © 2023, ISBN 978-2-37885-072-2.)
Themes that linger
By filtering thirteen cases through Petiot’s voice, the book asks you to sit with three discomforts:
- The double edge of medical authority. Doctors command trust, carry specialized knowledge, and have access to tools: an unbeatable advantage if they choose to harm. Again and again, Serge Janouin-Benanti shows how that trust becomes the weapon: the neat signature on a death certificate, the prescription no one questions, the bedside presence that disarms suspicion. The author doesn’t sensationalize that; he anatomizes it.
- Forensics as a moral drama. Tardieu’s digitalis breakthrough is science but it reads like theatre: the wrongdoer banking on “undetectable” poison, the expert flipping the problem on its head, the courtroom as stage. The book returns to this pattern, where reasoned method brings order to cruelty, often enough that it becomes a quiet counter-argument to fatalism.
- Myth-making and the press. Petiot needles Pierre about what newspapers printed about him during and after the Occupation; chapters like Jack the Ripper and Holmes trace how rumor, headlines, and spectacle inflate villains into legends. The book is honest about the allure of those legends and about the damage they do.
Who will love this
If you enjoy narrative nonfiction that reads with the urgency of a thriller, you’re in the target zone. Killer Doctors is ideal for readers drawn to forensic history, courtroom strategy, and psychological portraiture. It’s also unusually good for people who think they “don’t read true crime”: the frame story gives the book a novel’s shape, and Pierre’s skepticism gives you a way in even if your first instinct is to recoil.
Be warned: the content is dark. Some passages (especially on Holmes’s methods and certain Ripper details) are disturbing, though the prose never wallows. The author’s restraint -describing just enough, then stepping back- earns trust.
Bottom line
Serge Janouin-Benanti has built a cunning structure out of real horrors: a death-row Socratic seminar in which a killer physician lectures us through a gallery of his kind. It’s propulsive, grimly witty, and uncommonly illuminating about how murders by doctors get planned, executed, covered up, and, sometimes, solved by ingenuity as sly as the crime. By the time the final walk to the guillotine begins, you’ve heard enough to know that Petiot’s insistence on being exceptional is a dodge, and that the exception has a history as long as medicine itself. You don’t need to excuse him to be fascinated by how he thinks; the book counts on that tension and uses it.
Read it for the cases. Read it for the forensic ingenuity. Read it for the portrait of a manipulator who, even at the end, tries to turn murder into a game, and for the guard who refuses to become his pawn. And if you’re the kind of reader who likes a sly structural flourish, savour the avian titles and the recurring epigraphs from “Chance Conquered”: they’re the flutter of wings you hear before each trap springs. These “cruel tales,” inspired by true events, earn their shiver.
Credits and edition info: translated by Eva N. Siskowski Boatwright; 3E éditions, 2023; Collection “Cruel Tales”; ISBN 978-2-37885-072-2. Photos and plates include Petiot’s anthropometric shots and spreads on Holmes’s hotel; the table of contents lists thirteen doctor cases interleaved with Petiot chapters.
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