French wife 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. To varying degrees, Landru’s wife, Marie-Catherine, and their four children were all complicit in shielding him from the police during the war and in abetting his thefts from the missing women.
She first knew of Henri Désiré because she lived with his laundress mother. He lied to Marie-Catherine, claiming he worked in an architectural firm as a technician, in order to seduce her. Landru and Marie-Catherine’s first child Marie was born illegitimately in 1891. They married on 7 October 1893 after his three years of military service with the 87th Infantry Regiment of Saint-Quentin and during which he reached the rank of sergeant. She was already pregnant with their second child Maurice. The couple had two more children: Suzanne, born in 1896, and Charles, born in 1900.
During the 1890s, while his wife Marie-Catherine worked as a laundress, Landru drifted from one job to the next. He was employed for short periods in Paris as a plumber’s accountant, a furniture salesman and an assistant to a toy maker. In a later newspaper interview, Marie-Catherine described Landru as “a model husband” and father in the early years of their marriage, even though she also told police that he was “a skirt chaser” from the very beginning.
In 1904 Landru was arrested in Paris after falling in the street as he was running away from a bank he had tried to defraud. He was remanded in custody at the Santé prison where he was examined by Dr Charles Vallon, one of France’s leading criminal psychiatrists, who warned Marie-Catherine to be on guard about him in future.
Landru was in and out of prison for the next decade, During this period, Marie-Catherine and their four children lived in a series of cheap rented apartments in and around Paris. She claimed that her father-in-law had killed himself partly in despair at her husband’s criminal career. She also said that in the autumn of 1912, as soon as he was released from prison, Landru stole around 12,000 francs (approximately $40,000 in modern money) that his father had pointedly left her and the four children, rather than him.
Landru was able to avoid capture during World War I. Marie-Catherine and the four children knew his whereabouts throughout the war but shielded him from the police and also abetted his criminal activities. Marie-Catherine lived for most of the war in the northwestern Paris suburb of Clichy under the false name “Frémyet” (one of Landru’s aliases) in an apartment where he was seen coming and going at regular intervals. She forged the signature of his eighth known victim, Célestine Buisson, so he could gain access to Célestine’s bank account, and impersonated his ninth known victim, Louise Jaume, for the same purpose.
In December 1919 the investigating magistrate Bonin ordered the arrest of Marie-Catherine Landru and son Maurice Landru on suspicion of complicity in Landru’s thefts and frauds. However, Bonin never formally charged them and in July 1920 they were released from custody – in Marie-Catherine’s case on medical grounds (she had a bad back) and in Maurice’s case because according to Bonin, his continuing detention was not helpful to the investigation.
The Landrus divorced on 3 May 1920. Marie-Catherine Landru died on 5 November 1944 in Clichy-sur-Seine at age 76.
Link to Wikipedia biography