The bed of the apartment was in an alcove separated by curtains from the rest of the room. To the beam forming the cross section at the entrance to the alcove, Eyraud fixed a pulley. He ran a rope through the pulley so that, concealing himself behind the curtains, he could provide an improvised gallows and hang the man by pulling strongly on the rope.
It was an extraordinarily complicated mechanism that had no guarantee of success but no doubt the pair thought it nothing short of ingenious.
Eyraud already knew of Gouffé’s existence but during a conversation with a friend on the 25th of July discovered that the bailiff was in the habit of carrying large sums of money and spent Friday nights away from home in pursuit of pleasure. The following day Gabrielle stopped the bailiff on the way to his lunch and they arranged to meet at eight that evening. Little did he think that it was a rendezvous with death in the shape of a young woman.
The afternoon was spent setting up the infernal mechanism. The plan was to sit Gouffé on a chair with his back to the curtained alcove. Gabrielle would sit on his knee and playfully knot her plaited girdle around his neck. Then she would surreptitiously attach the end of the girdle to a swivel at the end of the rope and pulley operated by the hidden Eyraud.
At eight Gabrielle met Gouffé on the street and fifteen minutes later they entered the apartment.
“You have a nice little nest here,” remarked the bailiff.
“Yes, a fancy of mine. Eyraud knows nothing about it.”
“Oh, you are tired of him?”
“Yes,” replied Gabrielle, “that’s all over.”
She then slipped into a robe, with the red-and-white silk cord girdle around her waist, and sat him down on the chair.
Perching on his knee, she took off the girdle and playfully looped it around his neck, laughingly remarking: “What a nice little necktie it makes!”
“Very elegant,” said Gouffé, “but I didn’t come here to see that!”
She then attached the end of the girdle to the swivel behind his back. Behind the curtain Eyraud then pulled on the rope, hauling Gouffé aloft and according to his statement “within two minutes he ceased to live”.
In her statement Gabrielle disagreed and said that while it rendered the bailiff insensible, he was not dead. She said that Eyraud finished the unfortunate man off with his hands, strangling him, which was confirmed by the post mortem finding of manual strangulation.
Eyraud removed the victim’s watch but, searching his pockets, only came up with the meagre amount of 150 francs. All their best-laid plans seemed to have been in vain.
Worse was to follow. He found a set of keys and then rushed off to the bailiff’s office. Letting himself in, despite being in a panic he was too careful not to disturb the papers and documents on the desk. In his haste he missed the 14,000 francs that might have rendered all the effort worthwhile.
He was now gripped by a dreadful sinking feeling. All that planning and travel and expense for nought. Cold perspiration sprouted on his forehead. His hands shook as he tried to light a cigar to induce calm and he threw one half-lit match after another on the floor. He tried to collect his thoughts which were wildly swinging like a pendulum through his brain. The safe was locked, he had no combination.
The folly, the arrogance of his best expectations, were now laid bare as well as the total inadequacy of his preparation and intelligence. If he had threatened and questioned the bailiff before prematurely despatching him he could have established where the money was hidden or got access to the safe. Gouffé could have been trussed up with the rope, a scarf tied around his mouth and guarded while Gabrielle kept watch. He then could have got a large amount of money. Now he had nothing but a corpse. His head was bursting, he was beginning to lose his reason. She would go mad when he arrived back empty-handed.
In a sweat at the danger of being caught, he left the slightly concealed booty behind and quickly made his way down the stairs leading to the office.
It was on the way out that the porter approached but he rushed out into the street. The plan had been a ghastly failure and he returned to the apartment in a rage of frustration and despair. Gabrielle started screaming at him when she heard. He slapped her across the face and threw her on the bed. He gulped down brandy and champagne, now no longer for the purpose of celebration but to ease his shattered nerves.
They stripped the body, put it in the improvised shroud and placed it in the trunk. They then apparently had sexual intercourse on the bed which would have been consistent with their depraved character, after which Eyraud went home to his wife leaving his mistress alone with the trunk. According to his account he slept soundly, “worn out by the excitement of the day”. The consequence of his act would come back to haunt him much later. In the interim he would have to concentrate on the next part of the ill-conceived plot to get rid of the body.
After travelling to Lyons the next day and spending the night with the trunk in the Hotel Bordeaux, they disposed of the body and trunk and took the evening train to Marseilles where they dumped Gouffé’s clothes and boots in the sea. While there he borrowed 500 francs from his brother. Back in Paris, Gabrielle raised another 2,000 francs from her stock in trade. They later travelled to England and from there sailed to America.
After Eyraud’s imprisonment in Paris he was brought to the murder room and, in the presence of Goron, a number of officials and an examining magistrate, he was confronted with his accomplice. Each denied with unrestrained hatred each other’s account of events. One blamed the other, she claiming that he was entirely responsible for the plan and had strangled the bailiff with his own hands when the hanging did not work.
The judicial witnesses to this confrontation were astounded by what they had seen. Not one whit of remorse was displayed by the actors in this ghastly scenario, not one ounce of pity for the victim, just selfish efforts to distance themselves from the blame for the awful killing that both had planned and carried out – both clearly entirely removed in their own minds from the looming consequence.
It was also obvious to the investigators that Eyraud did not care at this juncture about going to the guillotine but he was determined that his former mistress would share his fate. Her defence argued that she had acted under hypnotic suggestion by her accomplice. Three doctors approved by the examining magistrate to assess this argument and her mental state came to the conclusion that, while she was susceptible to hypnotic suggestion, there were no grounds to find that she was acting under such influence when the murder took place. She was alert, intelligent but completely lacking when it came to the matter of morals. As indeed was her accomplice and perhaps guiding hand. The matter would be decided in a court of law on the evidence presented.
The trial took place over four days beginning on December 16th 1890 before the Paris Assizes Court. It had been delayed by an outrageous example of newspaper contempt on the part of a journalist who had interviewed some members of the jury panel whose composition had been previously published. The article which appeared in the Matin newspaper was full of doctored and invented quotes, an exercise in fertile imagination for which the writer was sent to prison for a month to reflect on his woeful grasp of journalistic ethics. There was another scandal.
There was naturally a huge demand for tickets of admission to this sensational case; they could not be obtained for love or money. The Presiding Judge M. Robert circumvented this problem by distributing tickets to favoured friends in high places, attracting the ire of the Minister for the Interior who made sure that this would never happen again.
The trial was naturally mainly concerned with establishing and proving the facts of the case but it was marked by Eyraud’s arrogance, lack of emotion or remorse and the defendants’ insistence that each was responsible for the plan, details and execution of the crime. At one stage Bompard was seized by a fit of hysteria and was carried kicking and screaming from the court to a cell to calm down. Whether this was genuine or performed was not remarked upon.
Much time was taken up on the matter of hypnotic suggestion, a defence witness Professor Liégeois of the University of Nancy giving a four-hour dissertation on the subject which unduly strained the patience of all present. The chief prosecutor demolished his theories, quoting his side’s eminent medical expert, Dr Brouardel: “As to the influence of Eyraud over Bompard, the one outstanding fact that has been eternally true for 6,000 years is that the stronger will can possess the weaker. That is no particular part of the history of hypnotism; it belongs to the history of the world.”
Her advocate, in his address to the jury, ignored the hypnotic theory, resting his plea on the moral weakness and irresponsibility of his client. The upshot was that the jury found that in her case there were extenuating circumstances, namely her accomplice’s influence over her allied to her moral weakness and she was sentenced to 20 years’ penal servitude.
Eyraud received the death sentence. At first he seemed to accept this, writing to his daughter from prison that he was tired of life and his death was the best thing that could happen for her and her mother. But, as his advocate tried to get the sentence commuted, he became hopeful.
“There are grounds for appeal. I am certain that my sentence will be commuted,” he wrote in a letter.
But the Cour de Cassation (the French Supreme Court – ‘cassation’ literally meaning ‘breaking’, referring to its power to break a previous judgement) rejected his appeal.
A petition was sent to President Carnot but he also chose to turn it down. On the morning of February 3rd 1891, Eyraud noticed that the warders who normally finished their shift at 6 a.m. remained at their posts and an hour later the Governor of the Roquette prison entered his cell and announced that the time had come for the execution of his sentence. He remained silent for a while but then burst into a rage directed toward the Minister for the Interior, Monsieur Constans.
“It is he who is having me guillotined – he’s got what he wanted. I suppose now he will decorate Gabrielle!”
Not even facing death did the killer think of anything but the perceived injustice of his mistress escaping the same fate. Perhaps he thought that he was a loser to the last and this was correct. As he lived so should he die, but he accepted the upshot without grace. What about the man he had despatched to his uneasy grave without the slightest reflection? To Gouffé he gave no consideration.
Eyraud went to the guillotine in a mixture of self-pity and rage, and thousands lined the streets hoping to get a glimpse of the notorious killer.
Street vendors sold miniature replicas of the infamous trunk. Inside each was a small toy metal corpse bearing the inscription: “L’Affaire Gouffé.” A bizarre postscript to an equally bizarre crime.
But someone somewhere, such was the knowledge of the crime spread through newspapers all over the world, may well have taken notice of the salient features of this extraordinary case.
All the more so because this could have been the perfect murder but for some avoidable blunders and slip-ups made by the killers. The purchase of the trunk at a London location was clever – a little too clever by half since Eyraud was confident enough to sign his own name on the receipt – nonetheless distant enough to make the origin hard to establish. And the plan to dispose of the body was good enough if not visited by an element of panic, perhaps brought on by the fact that no money was to be had at the end of it all. If they had made sure that the body had made it into the river, that might well have assured success.
There seemed little excuse to leave the label on the trunk while crudely trying to smash it up. But if the body had been given up to the depths and currents of the Rhône that would not have mattered.
But again such slip-ups would have been of even less consequence had not the case involved two distinct but brilliant minds, both tirelessly devoted to the task at hand, whose skill and dedication would justifiably be beyond the comprehension of even the most ingenious of killers. It was the efforts of Goron and Lacassagne that prevented the case from becoming a perfect murder and all the more so as the odds were all stacked against them.
There is hardly doubt that their fictional counterparts, Holmes and Watson, could not have cracked this one because as Lacassagne, an admirer of the pair, remarked: “Why don’t they ever carry out a post mortem?”
The outcome was hailed as a miracle, as if it had been fashioned by some divine intervention. The doctor’s best and most famous student Edmond Locard put this into its proper perspective. “It was no miracle because modern science is contrary to miracles. Yet as a work of deduction it was truly a masterpiece – probably the most astonishing I suspect that has ever been made in criminology.”
But it might well have been different and that is how the criminal mind operates. It would not be the last time a trunk was employed to house and transport the victim of a horrendous murder.
Financial speculators and murderers have notoriously short memories when it comes to considering consequences.
4
LE TIGRE
Most men submit to the whirlpool of life, helpless in the face of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. It takes a man of great fortitude, strength, endurance and action to face and overcome the tide of fate. Georges Clemenceau was such a man – French statesman, physician, journalist, who was nicknamed Le Tigre – The Tiger.
Clemenceau was active, alert, capable and highly intelligent, his face an index to his character, giving an impression of tremendous energy. A teetotaller all his life, he was active and fit. He had a rapidity of perception, a quickness of wit and was a master of irony. He didn’t hesitate to attack in order to defend. Nevertheless his voice was rarely raised above conversational level and as a rule he was quiet and unemotional in his manner. He possessed a power of logical and connected argument and was a brilliant orator. He was 65 beginning his first period as Prime Minister (1906-1909) and 79 when defeated in the 1920 elections after his second period in that office (1917-1920), but had great physical energy for a man of his age, an insatiable appetite for work and the endurance to bear it.
Good or bad luck, success or failure, made no difference to him. Invariably he told the truth about any situation which in a political sense was probably the opposite of conventional practice by politicians. Unlike those, he was not afraid of the consequences of making mistakes. Principle was more important to him. As Aristotle remarked: “Great masses of men are more easily led by personality than they are roused by principle.” Clemenceau had both in abundance. He was not named The Tiger for nothing.
He always upheld the right of free speech and the press, a dangerous position during times of great political and economic flux. The words of the American banker David Harum might have been his motto: “Do unto others as they would do to you and do it first.” He had a firm opposition to compromise. Men in every age become ministers, aware they will refuse in power to do that which they promised in opposition. Not this man. Anyone who takes, like Clemenceau, high principle and serious endeavour into political life is not playing the game.
EARLY LIFE
Clemenceau’s father Benjamin was a passionate Republican who had been sentenced to exile in Algeria by Napoléon III but set free in Marseilles before the deportation order was carried out.
Clemenceau was born in 1841. He studied medicine in Paris and in May 1865 qualified as a doctor like his father before him. During his student years he had founded several magazines and written articles attacking the Imperial regime. He spent 77 days in prison in 1862 for putting up posters announcing a demonstration. In 1865 Imperial agents began cracking down on dissidents many of whom ended up in the penal colony Devil’s Island. In July 1865, Clemenceau left for the U.S. where he ran a medical office and was New York correspondent for a Paris newspaper. Then he took a post teaching French and horseriding at a girls’ school, later marrying one of his students, Mary Elizabeth Plummer, with whom he had three children before they divorced. He returned to Paris around 1870 when the Third Republic was established, after the
collapse of the Second French Empire due to French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.
Clemenceau then threw himself wholeheartedly into a political career and in 1876 he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, joining the far left and quickly becoming leader of the Radical section. In 1880 he founded a newspaper, La Justice, which became the voice of Parisian Radicalism. He held his Chamber of Deputies seat until defeat in the 1893 elections, after which he turned his full energies to journalism.
THE DREYFUS AFFAIR
In December 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a member of the general army staff was found guilty of treason by court martial on the basis of a unanimous verdict. He was given a terrible punishment – condemned to Devil’s Island, the notorious prison camp in French Guiana, and the prolonged torture of solitary confinement in a tropical climate.
The bordereau (detailed memorandum) used to convict Dreyfus had been retrieved in a wastepaper basket at the German Embassy by a cleaning lady who was in the employ of French military counter-intelligence. This document had been torn up into minute pieces but was pieced together. It contained information on French field artillery.
As Dreyfus was a man of means, there had been considerable doubt as to whether he would really have sold secrets to Germany for financial gain when he did not need money. And what else could be the motivation?
The trial had lasted for four days, held in camera, and the accused was defended by one of the country’s most able advocates. However, an element that escaped comment at the time, probably because it was simply not known, was that the evidence for the prosecution was never disclosed to the defence. This was a travesty of justice.
Murder in Monte Carlo Page 7
