The Crimes of Paris

by Dorothy Hoobler; Thomas Hoobler

  The crime became a cause célèbre. Marie declared that she was being persecuted by anti-royalists because of her links to the royal family. Throughout the country, people took up sides for or against her. Some saw her as a saint, a political martyr because of her royal blood. Other people saw her as a liar who had killed her husband to avoid having sex with him. Not until the Dreyfus case of the 1890s would a trial so divide the country.

  Marie received more than six thousand letters in prison, most of them showing support. Some of them, often heavily cologned, were proposals of marriage. Others promised support in her legal defense. Money poured in, as well as such lavish gifts as perfumes, wines, lingerie, and expensive foodstuffs. Marie clearly enjoyed her celebrity, fantasizing that she was the Marie Antoinette of her time. Writing her memoirs in prison, she portrayed herself as “the poor reviled one.” 21

  Her trial began on September 3, 1840, in the town of Tulle in the Dordogne region. Gendarmes had to be stationed to keep back the crowds, though it was a hot day. All the inns in the vicinity were filled with journalists and curiosity seekers who had arrived from all over Europe. The prosecutor opened what he saw as a very strong case. He described Marie’s unhappiness with the marriage and read to the jury the letter she had written Charles on her arrival at Le Glandier, emphasizing her reference to arsenic. He linked her purchases of arsenic to Charles’s bouts of illness: Her first purchase came only a few days before she had sent her cake to Charles in Paris. Her second was one day before he returned home, where he steadily grew worse after eating food that she fed him. One of the most damning pieces of evidence seemed to be the chemical analysis of the so-called rat paste, which turned out to be bicarbonate of soda. The prosecutor drew the conclusion that Marie had substituted bicarbonate for the arsenic when she gave the material to the groom and used the real arsenic to poison her husband. When Marie was asked why the “arsenic” she had given to the groom was harmless, she cheerfully answered, “Now I understand why the rats continued coming. Bicarbonate would never stop them.” 22

  But Marie’s high-powered Paris lawyer, Maître Paillet, was ready to refute the prosecution. In Paris, he had shown Orfila copies of the autopsy and chemical reports, and Orfila picked holes in them. The local doctors in Brives were using outdated methods and were inept to boot. During one of their analyses, the test tube had exploded. Paillet grilled the doctors about their knowledge of the newest developments in toxicology, exposing them as woefully behind the times. He asked the doctors if they had ever heard of the Marsh apparatus, developed just four years earlier; they had not.

  Paillet called his own experts — three noted chemists from Limoges. They were asked to use Marsh’s method of measuring the amount of arsenic in Charles’s stomach. The chemists reported the results of their tests on February 5, dealing a severe blow to the prosecution’s case. The conclusion was that “in the materials presented to us no trace of arsenic is contained.” 23 The court record noted, “These final remarks produced an indescribable commotion in the court… Madame Lefarge, clasping her hands, raised her eyes to heaven.” 24 Paillet “wept tears of triumph.” 25 Couriers rushed to the nearest telegraph in Bordeaux to spread the word throughout France. The news elated Marie’s supporters everywhere.

  The prosecutor was not ready to give up. He pointed out that Paillet had referred to Orfila as France’s leading expert on poisons, but Orfila had not personally examined the evidence in the case. The counsel for the defense had often said that chemists could make errors. Did this not also apply to the chemists from Limoges? The prosecutor had learned that Orfila had stated that in cases of arsenic poisoning, arsenic is not always found in the stomach, but in other organs, such as the liver. Had the Limoges experts tested anything but the stomach? As it turned out, they had not. The prosecutor insisted that Orfila himself should be called on to testify. Perhaps this move was one of desperation, for he could not have known what Orfila would say.

  The defense attorney had little choice but to assent. Orfila was asked to come to Tulle, and he agreed. Lafarge’s body was exhumed and samples of other organs were taken from it. (The stomach was found in the drawer of a court clerk, where it had decayed considerably.) Nonetheless, Orfila set up the Marsh apparatus and set to work under the eyes of several of the other experts who had testified. He continued through the night of September 13 and appeared the next morning before a hushed court to give his opinion. Orfila declared that there “is arsenic in the body of Lafarge.” 26 Anticipating objections, he said that the poison did not come from the reagents with which he tested the material, nor from the earth around the coffin, which he had also tested. He further testified that the arsenic he found was not the arsenic compound that was naturally found in the human body. Only the bones, the scientist explained, have minute amounts of arsenic. The presiding judge asked the key question: “Do you consider the amount of arsenic obtained by you to be sufficient to indicate murder by poisoning?” 27

  Orfila went further than that. He declared that considering the victim’s symptoms, there was no doubt he died from the administration of arsenic. The jury found Marie guilty on the toxicological evidence. She collapsed and had to be carried to her cell, where she sobbed for two days.

  Unswayed by Marie’s noble lineage, the judge sentenced her to hard labor for life and public exposure in the pillory at Tulle. Marie’s appeal was rejected, but King Louis-Philippe reduced his cousin’s sentence to life imprisonment.

  Sent to Montpelier Prison, Marie corresponded with Alexandre Dumas and wrote her memoirs, along with a tragedy, The Lost Woman. In 1852, after she contracted tuberculosis, Napoleon III released her from jail. She died six months later in a spa in the Pyrenees, without ever having confessed to the murder. Her memoirs merely added to the legend — which many still believed at her death — that she was a martyr.

  The Lafarge case was a milestone in criminological history, establishing the standard for expert scientific testimony. Chemists would subsequently develop tests for other kinds of poisons, and trial attorneys for both sides would continue to call dueling experts, as they do to this day.

  iii

  During the Christmas season of 1869, human remains began turning up all over Paris. Body parts wrapped in packages appeared in different areas of the city — a human thighbone was discovered in the rue Jacob, and a thigh with flesh still attached, wrapped in a sweater, was pulled out of the Seine. These gruesome discoveries were taken to the Paris mortuary, where it was concluded that they came from the same person. But there was no clue to the identity of the victim of such a hideous crime.

  On December 19, the proprietor of a riverside laundry near the Quai Valmy told the police that he had seen a short, stout man with a mustache taking pieces of meat from a large hamper and scattering them in the Seine. On being asked what he was doing, the man claimed that he was “baiting the river” so that he could catch fish on the following day. The laundryman recalled only that the man was short and wore a long coat and tall hat.

  In January, the owner of Lampon’s Eating House, a small restaurant in the rue Princesse a few blocks south of the Seine, noticed a bad odor coming from his well. Customers started to complain that the water tasted foul. On investigation, the owner fished up a smelly package wrapped in cloth. When he cut it open, he was horrified to find the lower portion of a human leg.

  He went to the local police to report his discovery and found a friend, Sergeant Ringué, who came to the restaurant to view the latest ghastly find. The discovery reminded Ringué of a man that he had stopped and questioned late on the evening of December 22. The man had been carrying a large hamper and a package that he said contained some hams. He told Ringué that he had just arrived from Nantes and was carrying his luggage to his room on the rue Princesse. Ringué had let the man go on his way but now regretted that he had not looked inside the package. He further recalled that the man was short and wore a tall hat.

  The young policeman went to his superior, Gustave Macé
, the police commissaire of the district. Then unknown, Macé was on a career path that would, ten years later, bring him to the top of the Sûreté. Now he was an eager young man, fascinated with his work and very ambitious. Macé went to the restaurant and discovered another parcel in the well, which he fished out with difficulty. Like the first, the package was wrapped in black calico, sewn shut. Within lay a second severed lower leg, encased in a drab cotton stocking on which was stitched in red thread the initial B with a small cross on each side of it. Macé noticed that the sewing was very fine, probably done by a professional.

  The first pathologist to do a medical examination on the legs concluded that they were those of a woman and that the killer had not been very adept in the dismembering. He estimated that the legs had been in the well for about a month. The well was emptied, but no further body parts were found. Next, Macé, like Canler trying to trace Lacenaire, started the tedious work of going through a list of eighty-four females reported missing in the previous six months. Unfortunately, he found none who could be connected to the embroidered stocking.

  Then Dr. Auguste Tardieu took a look at the evidence. A former student of Orfila’s, he was now the foremost forensic physician in France. After a thorough examination, he declared that Macé was wasting his time looking for a woman. “These remains,” he said, “are those of a man advanced in years.… The feet are larger than those of a woman. The dismemberment has been done skillfully by a cleaver or chopper. The cuts were made soon after death. There has been a considerable effusion of blood. I observe also that there is a clearly marked scar on one leg, only recently healed. But without the head it will not be easy to establish the identity, and the murderer appears to have taken good care to conceal that most important piece of evidence.” 28

  This information put Macé on the right track. He was now convinced that the other human parts recently discovered in Paris were part of the same victim whose legs were in the well at Lampon’s. He believed that the murderer must live near the rue Princesse; the man questioned by Ringué must have been frightened into dumping his incriminating burden into the well instead of taking it to the Seine, and he had to have been sufficiently familiar with the area to do so. The concierge of the building where Lampon’s was located, an old woman, told Macé that an outsider could get to the well only if he knew about a small button on the outer door that worked a string latch.

  Macé was still looking for someone who was skilled at sewing. When he asked if any tailor had ever lived in the building, the concierge told him about a Mlle. Dard, a seamstress who had lived there but was now singing at café concerts. She had done piecework for a tailor who visited often. When Macé located Dard, a pretty young woman, she gave him the name of her tailor friend, Pierre Voirbo. He used to live nearby in the rue Mazarine, but very recently he had married and moved away. Her description of him matched that given by Sergeant Ringué and the witness who had seen someone scattering meat into the Seine. Dard suggested that Mme. Bodasse, the aunt of one of Voirbo’s friends, might know where Voirbo was.

  Inspector Macé noted the matching initial B and had Mme. Bodasse brought for questioning. She said she had last seen Voirbo when he had gone to a concert with her nephew, Désiré Bodasse, who lived in the rue Dauphine. That was on December 13, a month earlier, and she hadn’t seen Désiré since, but that did not worry her, for he was eccentric and sometimes disappeared for periods of time. Macé asked her to describe Voirbo. “He was short,” she said, “and generally wore a long overcoat and a tall hat.” 29

  On a hunch, Macé took Mme. Bodasse to the morgue to show her the stocking with the initial B. Shocked, she said it had belonged to her nephew. She herself had sewn the B and the two crosses on the stocking. She identified her nephew’s leg by a scar which had come from a fall on the jagged edge of a bottle. Macé was now sure he knew the name of the victim, and he had a good idea who his killer was.

  Macé went to Bodasse’s apartment at 50, rue Dauphine. No one answered his knock, but the concierge claimed that he had seen light in the room each night. Indeed, after gaining entrance to the rooms, Macé found a candle still flickering, making him think that someone had tried to make it seem as though Bodasse was still living there. There was another notable absence: Mme. Bodasse had told Macé that her nephew had a strongbox containing valuables hidden in a secret compartment of his old bureau. It was gone. Further search turned up a slip of paper hidden in the case of a silver watch; it contained a list of numbers of Italian securities. These could easily be negotiated, for they were payable to the bearer.

  Macé assigned two policemen to keep watch over Bodasse’s rooms while he proceeded to Voirbo’s old apartment on the rue Mazarine. The concierge of the building confirmed that Voirbo and Bodasse were very good friends, though she did think it strange that Bodasse had not been at Voirbo’s wedding. She recalled that the two men had argued about Bodasse’s stinginess. Voirbo had been angry when his friend had refused to lend him ten thousand francs for the wedding. Most interesting of all was the story told by Voirbo’s former maid. When she had arrived to clean his apartment on the seventeenth of December, she found that it had already been scrubbed down — some of the floor tiles were still wet. She was surprised, for Voirbo had not been very tidy and never cleaned his own room. When she asked him why he had done so this time, he claimed that he had spilled some kerosene on the floor accidentally. Even more incriminating was the fact that when he was about to move to a new place, he paid his remaining rent with an Italian stock certificate. Macé was able to determine that it bore one of the serial numbers from the list found in Bodasse’s watchcase.

  The police on duty at Bodasse’s apartment reported that nothing unusual had happened except that Voirbo had dropped by to see his friend. It turned out that Voirbo was a police spy who pretended to be an anarchist and attended meetings of radicals to report on their activities. The policemen, not knowing that he was in fact a suspect in the murder, accepted him as one of their own and told him what they were doing in Bodasse’s place.

  Annoyed that Voirbo must now know that he was a suspect, Macé decided to call him in and confront him. He saw before him a short, stout man with a high hat and long coat. Voirbo was very calm and confident and answered questions precisely. He explained that he had been worried about his old friend and that as a member of the secret political police, he had used his contacts to investigate his disappearance. His chief suspect, he told Macé, was a butcher named Rifer. Rifer was a gambler and heavy drinker who hung out in low-class dives. Macé was not deceived, but he agreed that Voirbo should keep up his surveillance of Rifer. In fact, Voirbo was pushing the hapless Rifer to heavier drinking; the butcher soon suffered a bout of delirium tremens and was taken to an asylum, where he died the same night.

  As soon as Voirbo learned of the butcher’s death, he hurried to Macé to report. He was astonished when Macé placed him under arrest. A search of Voirbo’s pockets revealed that Macé was just in time. Voirbo had a false passport and a ticket for steamship passage to the United States on the following day. He was to have left for the port of Le Havre that very afternoon.

  Taken before the juge d’instruction, Voirbo was defiant. He refused to be photographed, making faces so that capturing an image was difficult. Macé knew that he was dealing with a clever man and went looking for more proof. He visited Voirbo’s young wife, Adélia, who had brought a dowry of fifteen thousand francs to her marriage. Pale and delicate, she struck Macé as naive. Before meeting Voirbo, she had planned to enter a convent and become a nun. Expressing shock that her husband had been arrested, she told Macé that the dowry and some Italian stocks belonging to Voirbo were kept in a strongbox. But when Macé asked her to open it, she discovered that it was empty. Searching the premises, the detective found in Voirbo’s workshop items that seemed strange for a tailor: huge sharpened shears, heavy flatirons, a metal mallet, and a large butcher’s cleaver. There was also an old iron spoon that had been used for melting lead. Fin
ally, Macé found some cord very much like that which had been used to tie the bundles found in Lampon’s well.

  Voirbo’s cellar yielded more. The detective noticed that the bung on one of the two casks of wine was higher than on the other. He removed it and discovered a string attached. He drew up from the barrel a tin cylinder. When he broke it open, he found the Italian securities for which Bodasse had been killed. There was only one missing — the one Voirbo had used to make his final rent payment on his former room.

  Macé had a fair idea of where and how Bodasse had been murdered; now he set out to re-create the scene of the crime to prove his hunch. Scouring the crime scene as a source of clues was one of Vidocq’s ideas. Later, Bertillon would take extensive photographs of crime scenes and measure them as carefully as he measured suspects’ faces. But Macé’s experiment produced its own spectacular result, one that made such examinations a regular part of the investigation of violent crimes. Collecting Voirbo and several officers from the station, he took them to Voirbo’s former room in the rue Mazarine. With the help of the concierge, Macé arranged it exactly as it had been when Voirbo lived there. Given the small space, he realized that Voirbo would have had to dismember the body on the table in the middle of the room. He noticed that the tiled floor had a sharp slope that ended under the bed.

  With a theatrical flourish, Macé picked up a carafe of water. “I notice a slope in the floor. Now, if a body had been cut up on a table here in the center of the room, the effusion of blood would have been great, and the fluid must have followed this slope. Any other fluid thrown down here must follow the same direction. I will empty this jug on the floor and see what happens!” 30 With that, he poured out the water on the tiles. Everyone present watched it gather in a pool beneath the bed. Voirbo remained tight-lipped as Macé ordered that the tiles there be removed. As each tile came up, dried bloodstains could clearly be seen on the sides and underneath.