A March evening, in 1944, in German-Occupied Paris, like most others: fear and uncertainty devil the air. As does normality, or what has become normality.

The city, the most beautiful one in the world, is silent: curfew is to start shortly and the Parisians are huddled indoors, black-out drapes cover windows.

On this night, however, a man calls police to an uninhabited house on a tranquil street in the elegant 16th Arrondissement. For five days a foul smoke has poured from the house's chimney.

The police and firemen break in.

They make a spine-chilling discovery: the remains of countless humans are being incinerated in a furnace in the basement. In a pit, in an outhouse, quicklime consumes still more bodies.

The house belongs to Dr. Marcel Petiot - a charming, caring, family doctor who lives elsewhere in the city with his wife Georgette and their teenage son Gerhardt.

The Petiots have vanished.

Three days later, Madame Petiot is arrested.

Seven months later, police arrest the doctor. He claims he is the head of a French Resistance cell.

Petiot also claims that the bodies found in his town house were those of executed Germans, French Gestapo and Collaborators.

But the police know the truth: the corpses were of people hell bent on fleeing Occupied France and Nazi tyranny - many of them Jews. Petiot had offered them an escape route to Argentina. They had paid him astronomical fees. They had gone nowhere. He had slaughtered them, slaughtered them in a way too bestial for an abattoir. Then, he had gone with a cart and looted their homes.

In 1944, France was at last free of the Nazi monstrosity.

In 1946, Petiot was convicted and guillotined for the murder of 26 people. The police and pathologists thought 200 a more realistic number.

Today, 61 years later, Dr. Marcel Petiot -- or Dr. Satan as the media called him - remains France's most prolific killer.

Indeed, Dr. Petiot remains France's greatest criminal. If 'great' is the word.