French murder victim, she was the first known victim of serial killer Henri Désiré Landru (1869-1922) who murdered at least seven women in the village of Gambais between December 1915 and January 1919.
Born Jeanne Jamast, she married Jules Cuchet in 1904 and was widowed upon his death in 1910. Her illegitimate son André Cuchet was born in 1897.
In July 2014 Landru had escaped to a village near the town of Chantilly, 50 km north of Paris, in the company of Jeanne Cuchet, a pretty, 39-year-old Parisian seamstress who had been widowed in 1909. She knew him at this stage as “Raymond Diard”, an industrialist from northern France, who had promised to marry her and had persuaded her to give up her job making lingerie for a dress shop in Paris. Cuchet appears to have hoped that Landru, alias Diard, would provide a respectable home for her and her only son André, 17, who was illegitimate.
The balance of Cuchet’s relationship with Landru changed completely in early August 1914 when France declared war on Germany. Landru failed to make a rendezvous with Cuchet, who had returned to Paris to be with André, still living in her old apartment. In despair, Cuchet went back to the house near Chantilly, accompanied by André and her brother-in-law, hoping to find the man she still knew as “Diard”. The house was empty, but she found Landru’s identity papers inside a chest, along with various fake documents. The next day, Cuchet visited Landru’s abandoned apartment in southern Paris where she discovered that he was a criminal on the run who should have been deported to New Caledonia.
Cuchet insisted to her sister and brother-in-law that her engagement with Landru was over, but when he reappeared in late August 1914 she resumed their relationship. Meanwhile, she kept a close watch on her patriotic son André, who was desperate to join the army and fight the Germans, even though he was too young to volunteer. In late November 1914, Cuchet suddenly pulled André out of his job at an automobile factory in northwest Paris. At the start of December, Cuchet, Landru (posing as “Monsieur Cuchet”) and André moved to a house in Vernouillet, a small town by the Seine, 35 km northwest of Paris. Over Christmas, Cuchet wrote to a woman friend in Paris, explaining that it would not be convenient to visit her in Vernouillet because of the poor weather: “at the moment the place is rather muddy”. In mid-January, André learned to his joy that his scheduled recruitment to the army had been brought forward two years to the summer of 1915. He wrote to a friend in the army on 20 January, reporting his good news, and another to an uncle a week later. Then Cuchet and André disappeared without a trace. No one ever saw them again. She died on 2 February 1915 in Vernouillet.
Link to Wikipedia biography