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Henri Désiré Landru: The 'Bluebeard of Gambais'

Jun 5
4 min read

Updated: 6 days ago

France in the First World War was a country full of lonely, frightened women — wives and widows whose men had vanished into the trenches, many never to return. Henri Désiré Landru saw in that grief an opportunity. Through newspaper marriage advertisements he courted dozens of women, promised them companionship and security, relieved them of their savings, and then murdered them and burned their bodies in the stove of a quiet country villa. By the time he was caught he had killed at least ten women and a young man, and his 1921 trial became one of the great spectacles of post-war France. History remembers him as the 'Bluebeard of Gambais'.

What unsettles people about Landru is not savagery in the usual sense, but the cold, clerk-like efficiency of it — a man who turned romance and bereavement into a profitable business.

A swindler turned killer

Landru was born in Paris in 1869 to respectable working-class parents, and as a young man he seemed destined for an ordinary life, with training in a practical trade and a family of his own. But he drifted into fraud, accumulating a string of convictions for swindling over the years, and repeatedly served time. By middle age he was a balding, bearded man with a sharp mind for deception and a chronic need for money, and the war handed him a fresh pool of victims who were both vulnerable and, often, in possession of property.

His earlier cons had merely robbed people. The leap to murder turned the same playbook lethal: now there would be no defrauded widow left alive to complain to the police.

Vintage poster of Henri Désiré Landru, the Bluebeard of Gambais, with his portrait, mansion, and French crime headlines.

The lonely-hearts scheme

Posing under a rotating series of false names as an eligible widower or businessman seeking a wife, Landru placed and answered matrimonial advertisements in the Paris papers. He was, by all accounts, a persuasive and attentive suitor, and he specifically targeted middle-aged women — frequently widows — who had savings, possessions or property to their names. He courted them with charm and promises of marriage, gradually drawing them in and gaining access to their assets.

One by one, the women who grew close to him began to disappear, while Landru quietly absorbed their money, sold their belongings, and moved on to the next advertisement, the next name, the next victim.

The house at Gambais

Landru lured several of his victims to a villa he rented in the countryside outside Paris — first at Vernouillet and later at Gambais — where there were no neighbours close enough to ask questions. There he murdered them, and is believed to have dismembered and burned their bodies in his kitchen stove; villagers would later recall the foul-smelling smoke that sometimes drifted from the property. Meanwhile he kept and sold their possessions, and recorded the proceeds with chilling care in a small notebook.

The notebook

That notebook, his carnet, became one of the most damning pieces of evidence against him. In it Landru logged his dealings with the women in cold, businesslike entries — and, most tellingly, the train tickets he bought for his trips to Gambais. For himself, he recorded a return fare. For the woman travelling with him, only a one-way ticket. It was the arithmetic of murder, written in a swindler's tidy hand, and it spoke far louder than any confession he refused to give.

Suspicion and arrest

Landru's undoing came from the families of the missing women, who refused to accept that their relatives had simply vanished and pressed the authorities for answers. It was the comparison of two such inquiries — both involving a man matching Landru's description at Gambais — that finally led police to him, and he was arrested in 1919. At least ten women and the teenage son of his first victim were linked to him, though the destruction of their remains in the stove meant the prosecution had to build its case largely on circumstantial evidence, the notebook chief among it.

Trial and execution

Landru's trial in 1921 was a national sensation, and he treated it almost as a performance, parrying the prosecution with sardonic wit, refusing to confess, and challenging the court to produce the bodies it could not find. The jury was unmoved by his theatrics and convicted him of eleven murders. He was executed by guillotine on 25 February 1922, reportedly declining a final cigarette and maintaining his silence to the end.

The Bluebeard of Gambais became a byword for the charming predator who weaponises romance, and his story has inspired films and endless retellings, including a famous dark comedy. Yet beneath the dark glamour were real women — many of them grieving war widows who wanted nothing more than companionship in a frightening time — whose trust Landru turned into profit and whose lives he ended without a flicker of remorse.