Landru was approaching his fiftieth birthday.
The long search was over.
The difficult part was beginning.
"Yes, I Am Landru"
When confronted with his identity, Landru did not suddenly confess.
According to the historical account preserved by Criminocorpus, his position was essentially:
Yes, I am Landru.
Beyond that, I refuse to make a statement.
It was the beginning of a strategy he would use for the rest of the case.
Admit what could no longer be denied.
Refuse to explain the missing women.
Force investigators to prove everything else.
Then police found the notebook.
Small.
Dark.
Meticulously kept.
Inside was a page containing abbreviated names and references.
Cuchet.
Another Cuchet.
Brésil.
Crozatier.
Havre.
Buisson.
Collomb.
Babelay.
Jaume.
Pascal.
Marchadier.
Some entries were names.
Others were coded references.
Investigators began translating.
"Brésil" corresponded to one woman through her background.
"Crozatier" pointed toward the street associated with another.
"Havre" toward another.
The list was not random.
It mapped almost perfectly onto women who had disappeared.
Landru had kept his own index.
The careful record keeping that had once helped him manage fraud now gave investigators a roadmap through his relationships.
But a notebook is not a body.
Landru knew that.
The Accountant of Disappearance
Investigators discovered that Landru recorded almost everything.
Expenses.
Meetings.
Train journeys.
Financial transactions.
Women.
Properties.
Furniture.
Money.
He wrote like a bookkeeper.
That became one of the eeriest features of the case.
The accusations concerned murder, yet the documentation often looked like business administration.
A trip to the country.
A train ticket.
A payment.
A purchase.
The destruction of someone's life reduced to a line in an account.
Police reconstructed movements from those notes.
They compared dates with when women were last seen.
They examined train travel.
Later accounts emphasized a particularly chilling pattern.
Landru often traveled to his country properties with women.
The women disappeared.
He returned.
The logic of the train tickets became almost cinematic.
A return ticket for Landru.
A one-way ticket for the woman.
Even where individual ticket evidence varied, the wider investigative pattern was devastating.
Again and again:
A woman enters his life.
He takes her toward Vernouillet or Gambais.
She is not seen afterward.
Landru returns alone.
Then he begins dealing with her property.
The Property of the Missing
Police searched garages and storage spaces connected to Landru.
They found furniture.
Clothing.
Documents.
Personal objects.
Items linked to women whose names or coded references appeared in his records.
The missing women had supposedly moved on.
Yet pieces of their lives remained with Landru.
Why?
Landru offered explanations.
The property had been entrusted to him.
There had been business arrangements.
He had purchased certain things.
He had received others lawfully.
He knew the women.
He did not deny that.
But knowing someone is not murder.
Taking her money is not proof of killing her.
Fraud is not homicide.
Again, the same wall.
Where are the bodies?
Landru understood criminal proof well enough to recognize the prosecution's weakness.
He could be proven a liar.
He could be proven a fraudster.
He could be proven a thief.
But murder required more.
Investigators needed the women to be dead.
Searching Gambais
Police descended on the country property.
They searched the house.
The garden.
Outbuildings.
The stove.
The fireplace.
The ashes.
The surrounding grounds.
Crowds gathered.
The case had already become sensational.
France wanted bodies.
Police wanted bodies.
Families wanted bodies.
They dug.
They sifted.
They inspected.
But no hidden grave containing ten women appeared.
No intact skeleton.
No row of bodies under the garden.
No cellar full of corpses.
For a moment, that absence may have seemed to support Landru.
Then investigators began finding fragments.
Tiny pieces.
Burned bone.
Teeth.
Material from the stove and ashes.
The crime scene was not yielding bodies.
It was yielding what might remain after someone had deliberately tried to make bodies disappear.
295 Pieces
Forensic experts eventually examined hundreds of fragments recovered at Gambais.
At the 1921 trial, anthropologist Raoul Antony testified about approximately 295 pieces of human bone recovered from the property.
Together, the pieces weighed only around a kilogram.
They were small.
Burned.
Damaged.
But they still contained information.
Experts believed they could identify portions corresponding to multiple parts of the human body.
Fragments associated with skulls.
Hands.
Feet.
The analysis suggested remains from at least three different individuals, probably women.
That was a critical development.
The prosecution could no longer be told:
There are no human remains.
There were.
But another problem immediately emerged.
Could those fragments be conclusively tied to the ten missing women and Jeanne Cuchet's son?
Not individually.
No DNA technology existed.
Many pieces were too damaged for conventional identification.
The investigators could say human bones were found at the house.
They could not take one fragment and announce:
This is Célestine Buisson.
That gap became one of the defense's strongest weapons.
The Stove
Attention focused on Landru's stove.
Could an ordinary household appliance really destroy enough human remains to explain the absence of bodies?
Investigators decided to test it.
The historical record preserved by Criminocorpus describes experiments involving animal tissue.
Half of a sheep's head could be calcined in less than half an hour.
A leg weighing more than two kilograms took roughly an hour and ten minutes to burn thoroughly.
The conclusion was grim.
The stove appeared capable of destroying portions of a dismembered human body.
Perhaps not an entire intact torso easily.
But pieces?
Yes.
And Landru had purchased numerous saws.
The combination created a disturbing hypothesis.
The victims may have been dismembered.
Certain parts burned in the stove.
Other remains disposed of elsewhere.
Investigators searched ponds, woods and surrounding land, trying to discover where larger portions might have gone.
They never reconstructed the entire process.
That is important.
Even today, it would be irresponsible to pretend investigators proved exactly how each person was killed and exactly how every part of every body was disposed of.