After careful examination of Dr Grasset’s report, he denied that extenuating circumstances could be found. He had sought in vain for a trace of remorse in the female prisoner, and had only found selfishness. The only signs she had given was when she realised the peril in which she stood.
After two hours deliberation, the judge sentenced Goold, in whose case extenuating circumstances had been found, to penal servitude for life, and Mrs Goold to death.
In reply to Mrs Goold’s cries that she was innocent, the President informed her that she had three days in which to appeal.
As the public were retiring, the condemned woman had another hysterical attack, during which she declared that she was “going to die.”
The jewellery of Madame Levin, who was murdered by the Goolds has now been sold for the benefit of her heirs. It has realised a sum of £880. The famous diamond and ruby necklace, which was broken in the struggle with her assassins fetched £640. Madame Levin, the beautiful widow of a Swedish broker had an income of £1,500 a year and much valuable jewellery which she always wore. The post mortem showed ten wounds inflicted, one pierced the heart.
In January 1908, both of the Goolds appealed unsuccessfully against the verdict. A month later Mrs Goold’s sentence was commuted to life. During April 1908 they were transferred back to Marseilles. Mrs Goold was sent to Montpellier prison while her husband was placed in the Central Prison. He was later transferred to the Île de Ré and put on a convict ship to French Guiana on July 19th 1908.
14
LA MAISON DU DÉFUNT
FRENCH GUIANA, SEPTEMBER 1909
The tentacles of fever spread over and gripped the aching bones of his body. The memories of his earlier incarceration, so vivid at the time, had faded into a mixture of confusion and wanton forgetfulness. It was too painful, oppressive and dangerous to commit to memory. The escape was the past, also a source of suffering, but anything to escape from the present.
Within a year he was stripped of honour and friends and his background, with death hanging over him. All the worst results of his downfall in his face and in his mind. In a state of exile that no one that ever knew him could imagine. Nothing left, not even the reward of a good conscience. Worst of all, reputation is the first thing to abandon the unfortunate.
He had no reputation left as he faced death. The awful cut of what he would be remembered for. That haunted his feverish consciousness. Not the whack of his racquet over the net, putting his opponent off, running to the return and failing. Those glorious days in Fitzwilliam and Wimbledon and Cheltenham, those sunny days of his youth.
Days when the sun seemed to shine forever, life and especially hope stretching into an infinity, when nothing of your existence would ever end. Those times you should never forget. Where fortune crowned the head without any sense of recompense. Where audacity and evil had no place to dwell, and the unhappy deserved their fate.
Grief and suffering was his fate, and probably in his case well justified. Nonetheless he sought redemption as any condemned man would. The click-clack of the roulette wheel ran through his head, a constant reminder of his love of the blind woman, the one with the veil and the inconstant wheel at her feet, his addiction to the perfidious Wheel of Fortune.
He loved her, this wife that had brought him to living hell, this house of the dead.
Boethius came back to him on this matter. With analogy.
“Thou hast found out how changeful is the face of the blind goddess; she who still veils herself from others hath discovered to thee her whole character. If thou likest her, take her as she is and do not complain. If thou abhorrest her perfidy, turn from her in disdain, renounce her, for baneful are her delusions. The very thing which is now the cause of thy great grief ought to have brought thee tranquillity.”
His perfidy was beyond even his own imagination. But even after the awful event when he was gripped with tremens it never left his mind. There were men whom he was imprisoned with who displayed on the surface no sense of the consequences of the crimes they had committed. One had killed a wife, another a lover, another a father. But all had dreams and nightmares. Shouting out from their subconscious the confused details of their crimes.
He was no different. Emma Levin’s deathless eyes came back to him again and again. Staring at him. Not letting him escape. The closer he came to death, the nearer she came. “Cut the head off, cut the head off!” His wife’s voice came into his mind. She was far away in Montpellier prison and he missed her beyond his own belief.
He cut the legs away, he cut the head away. Blood spattered everywhere. He cut, he cleaned, she cleaned but nothing would clean. It was all crazy, he felt mad in its stupid execution. Her eyes stared at him, they wouldn’t close. He was drowning in her blood. He wanted to scream and his voice was silent. There was nothing. Her staring, unrelenting staring. Nothing. He screamed, nothing, nothing. The bloodstained walls said nothing.
Other than his fate.
He felt the wall of darkness descending. At last. Final relief from this hell on earth. Nothing afterwards could possibly match it. His body was for the sharks. It didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered anymore. Eternal darkness, sleep forever.
Or was it?
Click, clack, click, clack, the wheel rolled and stopped. Zero.
Vere St Leger Goold died on 8th September 1909 in Devil’s Island. The same day a telegraph was sent and received in Paris to announce the fact. His wife Marie Goold died in Montpellier prison in 1914.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Belbenoit, R:
Dry Guillotine, Fifteen Years Among the Living Dead (EF Dutton & Co, 1938)
Berlière, J-M:
“Professionalism of the Police Under The Third Republic in France” 1875-1914 (in C. Emsley and B. Weinberger, eds., Policing Western Europe: Politics, Professionalism, and Public Order, 1850-1940, London: Greenwood Press, 1991)
Cohen, WB:
Urban Government and the Rise of the French City (Palgrave Macmillan 1998)
Dostoevsky F:
“The Gambler”
Foucault M:
Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison (Vintage 1995)
Furlong, CW:
“Cayenne – The Dry Guillotine”, Harper’s Magazine (1913)
Heathcote JM:
Tennis, Lawn Tennis, Rackets, Fives (Ashford Press Pub.; Facsimile edition 1891)
Hyndman, HM:
Clemenceau: The Man and his Time (Grant Richards, 1919)
Kidd, C; Williamson D (editors):
Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage (Debrett’s, 1990)
Kindleberger, C; Aliber, R:
Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crisis (Wiley Investment Classics, 2005)
Krarup Nielsen, A:
Hell Beyond The Seas: A convict’s story of his experiences in the French penal settlement in Guiana (Garden City Pub Co, N.Y. 1938)
Machiavelli:
The Prince
Maugham, Somerset W:
“A Man with a Conscience” (William Heinemann 1952)
O’Connor, Ulick:
The Fitzwilliam Story 1877-1977 (Publisher, Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Club, 1977)
Renneville, Marc:
La Criminologie Perdue d’Alexandre Lacassagne (1834-1924) (Crimino Corpus, 2005)
Toth, Stephen A:
Beyond Papillon – The French Penal Colonies 1854-1952 (University of Nebraska Press, 2006)
Newspapers
The Adelaide Advertiser
Feilding Star
The Grey River Argus
Hawera and Normanby Star
The Irish Times
The New York Daily Globe
The New York Times
The Times
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The Gouffé Affair
Hanging Gouffé
Putting body in sack
Dumping the body
Bompard accuses Eyraud
The infamous Gouffé Trunk – a replica was viewed by 25,000 visitors. Paris, 1889
Gouffé’s remains, 1889
Gabrielle Bompard, murderess
Michel Eyraud, murderer
Eyraud approaching the guillotine, 1891
Célestin Hennion (1862-1915), Préfet de Police: father of modern policing
The Tiger: President Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929)
Professor Alexandre Lacassagne (1843-1924), criminologist, pioneer in forensic science
Dr Edmond Locard (1877-1966), pioneer in forensic science, the ‘Sherlock Holmes’ of France
Irish Open Tennis Championship 1883 (Goold second back right, standing)
Monte Carlo Casino
Vere St Leger Goold (1853-1909)
The Goolds’ victim: Emma Erika Levin
Vere St Leger Goold, condemned, Monaco 1908
Marie Giraudin Goold, condemned, Monaco 1908
Guillotine on Devil’s Island
THE MONTE CARLO CRIME – A WOMAN CUT INTO PIECES
Murder in Monte Carlo Page 27
