“Widower with two children, aged 43, with comfortable income, serious and moving in good society, desires to meet widow with a view to matrimony.”
The personal ads sections of the Parisian papers were the stalking-grounds of French Bluebeard Henri Désiré Landru, guillotined in Versailles this date in 1922.
A former soldier himself, Landru trawled the Craigslists of World War I for their ample population of ample war widows.
His M.O.: enchant one into letting him get his hands on her huge … fortune.
(No, really. Her fortune.)
Then, kill her and incinerate the body in his kitchen stove.
Repeat x10 (plus one teenage son of one the widows), and you’ve got yourself your basic Bluebeard.
Landru’s story inspired the 1947 Charlie Chaplain flick Monsieur Verdoux.
And that’s not the only thing of Landru’s that made it to Hollywood. His severed dome is on exhibit at the Museum of Death.
On this day..
- 1998: Three Afghan men under a toppled wall
- 1663: William Dillon, anatomized and diarized
- 1930: Luigi Versiglia and Callistus Caravario, missionary martyrs
- 1984: Ten members of the Tudeh party
- 1881: Edwin C. Hayden, Vermonster
- 1601: Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex
- 1920: Albert Fournier
- 1969: The peasants of Thanh Phong (allegedly)
- 1897: Henri-Osime Basset
- 1716: Four Jacobite rebels at Liverpool
- 1536: Jacob Hutter, Anabaptist leader
- 1879: Charles Peace, Victorian cat burglar