But a small group disappeared completely.
And the pattern of those disappearances began in 1915.
Jeanne Cuchet
One of the first was Jeanne Cuchet.
She was a widow.
Landru entered her life under one of his assumed identities.
He presented himself as a suitable partner.
A man with plans.
A man capable of giving her stability.
The relationship developed far enough that Jeanne's life became increasingly entangled with his.
She was not alone.
Her son was also part of her household.
In March 1915, Jeanne Cuchet and her son were seen for the last time in connection with Vernouillet, where Landru had access to an isolated property.
Then both disappeared.
Two people.
A mother and son.
No confirmed new address.
No later ordinary life.
No body.
At the time, there was no national understanding that their disappearance might be part of something larger.
France was at war.
People moved.
People fled.
Men vanished at the front.
Civilians vanished for other reasons.
Jeanne and her son became two absences among millions of disruptions.
Landru moved on.
Another Widow
By the summer of 1915, another woman had disappeared.
The widow Laborde-Line was last seen around June or July, again connected to Vernouillet.
Then another.
The widow Guillin vanished in August.
Then, in December, another widow, Héon, disappeared.
Four women.
One young man.
All gone.
But the families were separate.
The aliases were different.
The relationships had developed independently.
There was no central database capable of immediately saying:
These missing people all knew the same man.
And Landru was extremely careful about names.
A family asking about one woman's fiancé might know him as one person.
Another family knew another name.
A landlord knew another.
A merchant another.
Police records contained Landru's real identity, but he had been living outside it for years.
The connections remained hidden.
From Vernouillet to Gambais
Eventually Landru shifted operations to another property.
Gambais.
A quiet village west of Paris.
The house there was isolated enough to provide privacy.
For a supposed couple beginning a life together, the location could seem romantic.
For a man who did not want neighbors observing every visitor, it was also practical.
Women came to Gambais with Landru.
What happened inside the property has never been reconstructed with absolute certainty.
That uncertainty became central to his defense.
No eyewitness watched him kill the missing women.
No surviving victim described the process.
Landru never confessed.
No complete corpse was recovered from the villa.
Investigators therefore had to infer the method from what remained.
But something about the house began attracting attention.
The chimney.
Neighbors noticed smoke.
At times the smell was so unpleasant that it became memorable.
This was not simply the ordinary odor of coal or wood.
Later testimony would describe a foul smell associated with the chimney on certain nights.
One butcher reportedly compared it to burning flesh.
And residents wondered why the stove seemed to be working so intensely at strange times.
Even when weather made heavy heating seem unnecessary, smoke could rise from the property.
Nobody yet knew what it meant.
A smoking chimney is not proof of murder.
People burn rubbish.
People burn household waste.
Country properties have fires for countless ordinary reasons.
So the smoke became a strange local detail rather than a criminal alarm.
Only later would every remembered plume acquire a completely different meaning.
The Women Keep Disappearing
In December 1916, the widow Collomb was last seen in connection with Gambais.
April 1917 brought the disappearance of another woman, the widow Babelay.
September 1917, Célestine Buisson.
November 1917, Mme Jaume.
April 1918, Mme Pascal.
January 1919, Mlle Marchadier.
One by one.
Different women.
Different circumstances.
The same endpoint.
Landru's country properties.
Then silence.
The list would eventually contain ten missing women and the son of Jeanne Cuchet.
Eleven people.
But police did not discover the pattern.
Families did.
Célestine Buisson
Célestine Buisson's disappearance became one of the crucial breaks.
She was a widow.
She had a sister.
She had a son.
Unlike a victim whose family might have been distant or fragmented by war, Célestine had relatives who continued asking questions.
They knew she intended to remarry.
They knew the man used the name Fremyet.
Her sister had even spent time around the couple and reportedly did not approve of the proposed marriage.
Then Célestine disappeared.
At first, wartime explanations were possible.
Maybe she had moved.
Maybe she was traveling with her fiancé.
Maybe letters had been interrupted.
But months passed.
Her son suffered an accident and tried to contact her.
No answer.
Repeated attempts failed.
That silence became impossible to ignore.
Célestine's sister eventually wrote to the mayor of Gambais.
She asked about her sister.
The mayor checked.
There was a problem.
The records did not support the story the family had been given.
The villa associated with Célestine's fiancé was not rented under the name Fremyet.
It was linked to another name.
Dupont.
One man seemed to have two identities.
That alone was suspicious.
But the mayor had heard something strangely familiar.
Another inquiry.
Another missing woman.
Another family.
Anne Collomb
A second woman had disappeared after becoming involved with a man in Gambais.
Her family was looking for her too.
The circumstances were so similar that the mayor connected the families.
Imagine that moment.
Two families who believed they were searching for unrelated women suddenly compare information.
Different missing women.
Same village.
Similar isolated property.
A fiancé.
Names that did not stay consistent.
The private mysteries became one shared mystery.
The families realized the women had apparently been connected to the same man.
Now disappearance no longer looked like coincidence.
Complaints were filed.
The mobile police brigade became involved.
The case moved from family concern to criminal investigation.
On April 10, 1919, prosecutors opened an investigation against an unknown man using identities including Fremyet and Dupont.
The suspected crime was no longer simply fraud.
Investigators were considering murder.
But they still had a basic problem.
Who was Fremyet?
A Face in Paris
The breakthrough came almost accidentally.
On April 11, 1919, a friend of Célestine Buisson saw a man in Paris.
She recognized him.
The missing woman's fiancé.
Fremyet.
He was leaving a shop.
And he was not alone.
He was with another woman.
The sighting gave police something they had lacked.
A living target.
Investigators learned that goods purchased at the shop were to be delivered to a man named Lucien Guillet, supposedly an engineer living on rue de Rochechouart.
Another name.
Police checked.
Guillet was Fremyet.
And the man associated with Gambais under yet another identity was the same person.
Investigators moved in.
Inside the apartment they found evidence that finally cracked the identities open.
Among the material was a patent registered under the name Henri Désiré Landru.
The fugitive fraudster from before the war.
The man condemned in 1914.
The aliases collapsed.
Dupont.
Fremyet.
Guillet.
Landru.
One man.
Police arrested him in April 1919.