Landru
Artist: Charles Verschuuren Jr.
Year: 1920

Henri Désiré Landru was born in Paris in 1869. After being discharged from the French Army in 1891,
he developed a sexual relationship with his cousin which resulted in a child.  
Landru married another woman two years later and had four children.

After being swindled out of money by a fraudulent employer, Landru found himself decimated… and inspired. 
He turned to fraud, operating scams that usually involved swindling elderly widows.  He was sentenced to two years imprisonment in 1900
after being arrested and found guilty of fraud, the first of several such convictions. By 1914, Landru was estranged from his wife
and working as a second-hand furniture dealer.

Landru began to put advertisements in the lonely hearts sections in Parisian newspapers.
With World War I underway, many men were being killed in the trenches, leaving plenty of widows to prey upon.

Landru would seduce the women who came to his Parisian villa and, after given access to their assets, he would kill them -
probably by strangulation or stabbing and burn their dismembered bodies in his oven. Between 1914 and 1918,
Landru claimed 11 victims: 10 women, plus the teenaged son of one of his victims.  With no bodies, the victims were merely
listed as missing, and it was virtually impossible for the police to know what had happened to them as Landru used a wide variety of aliases.
His aliases were so numerous that he had to keep a ledger listing all the women with whom he corresponded
and which particular identity he used for each woman.

In 1919, the sister of one of Landru's victims attempted to track down her missing sibling, and
she eventually persuaded the police to arrest him. Originally, Landru was charged only with embezzlement.
He refused to talk to police, and with no bodies, there was seemingly not enough evidence to charge him with murder.
However, policemen did eventually find various bits of paperwork that listed the missing women, and combining those with other documents,
they finally built up enough evidence to charge him with murder.

Landru stood trial on 11 counts of murder in November 1921. He was convicted on all counts, sentenced to death,
and guillotined three months later in Versailles. Forty years later, there was a rumour that the daughter of
Landru's lawyer (Vincent de Moro-Giafferi) found a picture Landru had drawn whilst awaiting execution, and on the back of it
he had apparently written, "I did it. I burned their bodies in my kitchen stove".

After entering into historical lore as a modern-day Blackbeard, the notorious character was immortalized in two films in the 1960s
and inspired a 1947 Chaplin film, as well as making a wax museum appearance in an episode of The Twilight Zone. 
But before any of these, the mad murderer was first the subject of this play, mounted in the Netherlands in the 1920s.

Facsimile editions

Archival bamboo paper
44” Edition of 150…………$1850
36” Edition of 150………….$950

Cotton rag paper
36” Edition of 300…………. $550