Henri Landru’s One-Way Tickets

French serial killer Henri Désiré Landru carried out his murders in France between 1915 and 1919, during the turmoil of World War I. Landru lured lonely widows and vulnerable women through newspaper marriage advertisements, promising romance before inviting them to his rented villa in Gambais, near Paris. When he traveled with these women by train, he consistently bought round-trip tickets for himself but only one-way tickets for his companions, a small detail that revealed his deadly intentions. Investigators later uncovered stacks of ticket stubs and financial records showing the same pattern. Landru was eventually convicted of 11 murders in 1921 and executed by guillotine in Versailles in 1922.

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