She Stands Accused

by She Stands Accused(Lit)

  The witness then ran to Dr Pinault's, but met the doctor in the street with his confrere, Dr Guyot. To the two doctors M. Bidard expressed the opinion that there were either worms in the intestines or else the case was one of poisoning. ``I have thought that,'' said Dr Pinault, ``remembering the case of the other girl.'' The doctors went back with M. Bidard to his house. Magnesia was administered in a strong dose. The vomiting stopped. But it was too late.

  Until that day the witness's orders that the ejected matter from the invalid should be conserved had been ignored. The moment a vessel was dirty Helene took it away and cleaned it. But now the witness took the vessels himself, and locked them up in a cupboard for which he alone had the key. His action seemed to disturb Helene Jegado. From this he judged that she had intended destroying the poison she had administered.

  From that time Rosalie was put into the care of her mother and a nurse. Helene tried hard to be rid of the two women, accusing them of tippling to the neglect of the invalid. ``I will sit up with her,'' she said to the witness. The witness did not want her to do so, but he could not prevent her joining the mother.

  In the meantime Rosalie suffered the most dreadful agonies. She could neither sit up nor lie down, but threw herself about with great violence. During this time Helene was constantly coming and going about her victim. She had not the courage, however, to watch her victim die. At five in the morning she went out to market, leaving the mother alone with her child. The poor mother, worn out with her exertions, also went out, to ask for help from friends. Rosalie died in the presence of the witness at seven o'clock in the morning of the 1st of July. Helene returned. ``It is all over,'' said the witness. Helene's first move was to look for the vessels containing the ejections of the invalid to throw them out. These were green in hue. M. Bidard stopped her, and locked the vessels up. That same day justice was invoked.

  M. Bidard's deposition had held his hearers spellbound for over an hour and a half. He had believed, he added finally, that, in spite of her criminal conduct, Helene at least was a faithful servant. He had been wrong. She had put his cellar to pillage, and in her chest they had found many things belonging to him, besides a diamond belonging to his daughter and her wedding-ring.

  The President questioned Helene on the points of this important deposition. Helene simply denied everything. It had not been she who was jealous of Rosalie, but Rosalie who had been jealous of her. She had given the two girls all the nursing she could, with no intention but that of helping them to get better. To the observation of the President, once again, that arsenic had been administered, and to his question, what person other than she had a motive for poisoning the girls, or had such opportunity for doing so, Helene answered defiantly, ``You won't redden my face by talking of arsenic. I defy anybody to say they saw me give arsenic.''

  The Procureur-General invited M. Bidard to say what amount of intelligence he had found in Helene. M. Bidard declared that he had never seen in any of his servants an intelligence so acute or subtle. He held her to be a phenomenon in hypocrisy. He put forward a fact which he had neglected to mention in his deposition. It might throw light on the character of the accused. Francoise had a dress hanging up to dry in the mansard. Helene went up to the garret above this, made a hole in the ceiling, and dropped oil of vitriol on her companion's dress to burn it.

  Dr Pinault gave an account of Rosalie's illness, and spoke of the suspicions he and his colleagues had had of poisoning. It was a crime, however, for which there seemed to be no motive. The poisoner could hardly be M. Bidard, and as far as suspicion might touch the cook, she seemed to be lavish in her care of the patient. It was not until the very last that he, with his colleagues, became convinced of poison.

  Rosalie dead, the justiciary went to M. Bidard's. The cupboards were searched carefully. The potion which Rosalie had thought to be mixed with burning stuff was still there, just sampled. It was put into a bottle and capped.

  An autopsy could not now be avoided. It was held next day. M. Pinault gave an account of the results. Most of the organs were in a normal condition, and such slight alterations as could be seen in others would not account for death. It was concluded that death had been occasioned by poison. The autopsy on the exhumed body of Perrotte Mace was inconclusive, owing to the condition of adipocere.

  Dr Guyot spoke of the case of Francoise Huriaux, and was now sure she had been given poison in small doses. Dr Boudin described the progress of Rosalie's illness. He was in no doubt, like his colleagues, that she had been poisoned.

  The depositions of various witnesses followed. A laundress said that Helene's conduct was to be explained by jealousy. She could not put up with any supervision, but wanted full control ofthe household and ofthe money.

  Francoise Huriaux said Helene was angry because M. Bidard would not have her as sole domestic. She had resented Francoise's being engaged. The witness noticed that she became ill whenever she ate food prepared for her by Helene. When she did not eat Helene was angry but threw out the food Francoise refused.

  Several witnesses testified to the conduct of Helene towards Rosalie Sarrazin during her fatal illness. Helene was constant, self-sacrificing, in her attention to the invalid. One incident, however, was described by a witness which might indicate that Helene's solicitude was not altogether genuine. One morning, towards the end of Rosalie's life, the patient, in her agony, escaped from the hold of her mother, and fell into an awkward position against the wall. Rosalie's mother asked Helene to place a pillow for her. ``Ma foi!'' Helene replied. ``You're beginning to weary me. You're her mother! Help her yourself!''

  The testimony of a neighbour, one Francoise Louarne, a domestic servant, supports the idea that Helene resented the presence of Rosalie in the house. Helene said to this witness, ``M. Bidard has gone into the country with his housemaid. Everything SHE does is perfect. They leave me here—to work if I want to, eat my bread dry: that's my reward. But the housemaid will go before I do. Although M. Bidard has given me my notice, he'll have to order me out before I'll go. Look!'' Helene added. ``Here's the bed of the ugly housemaid—in a room not too far from the master's. Me—they stick me up in the mansard!'' Later, when Rosalie was very ill, Helene pretended to be grieved. ``You can't be so very sorry,'' the witness remarked; ``you've said plenty that was bad about the girl.''

  Helene vigorously denounced the testimony as all lies. The woman had never been near Bidard's house.

  The pharmacist responsible for dispensing the medicines given to Rosalie was able to show that arsenic could not have got into them by mistake on his part.

  At the hearing of the trial on the 12th of December Dr Pinault was asked to tell what happened when the emissions of Rosalie Sarrazin were being transferred for analysis.

  DR PINAULT. As we were carrying out the operation Helene came in, and it was plain that she was put out of countenance.

  M. BIDARD [interposing]. We were in my daughter's room, where nobody ever came. When Helene came to the door I was surprised. There was no explanation for her appearance except that she was inquisitive.

  DR PINAULT. She seemed to be disturbed at not finding the emissions by the bed of the dead girl, and it was no doubt to find them that she came to the room.

  HELENE. I had been given a funnel to wash. I was bringing it back.

  M. BIDARD. Helene, with her usual cleverness, is making the most of a fact. She had already appeared when she was given the funnel. Her presence disturbed me. And to get rid of her I said, ``Here, Helene, take this away and wash it.''

  The accused persisted in denying M. Bidard's version of the incident.

  % V

  M. Malagutti, professor of chemistry to the faculty of sciences in Rennes, who, with M. Sarzeau, had been asked to make a chemical analysis of the reserved portions of the bodies of Rosalie, Perrotte Mace, and Rose Tessier, gave the results of his and his colleague s investigations. In the case of Rosalie they had also examined the vomitings. The final test on the portions of Rosalie's body carried o
ut with hydrochloronitric acid—as best for the small quantities likely to result in poisoning by small doses—gave a residue which was submitted to the Marsh test. The tube showed a definite arsenic ring. Tests on the vomit gave the same result.

  The poisoning of Perrotte Mace had also been accomplished by small doses. Arsenic was found after the strictest tests, which obviated all possibility that the substance could have come from the ground in which the body was interred.

  In the case of Rose Tessier the tests yielded a huge amount of arsenic. Rose had died after an illness of only four days. The large amount of arsenic indicated a brutal and violent poisoning, in which the substance could not be excreted in the usual way.

  The President then addressed the accused on this evidence. She alone had watched near all three of the victims, and against all three she had motives of hate. Poisoning was established beyond all doubt. Who was the poisoner if not she, Helene Jegado?

  Helene: ``Frankly, I have nothing to reproach myself with. I gave them only what came from the pharmacies on the orders of the doctors.''

  After evidence of Helene's physical condition, by a doctor who had seen her in prison (she had a scirrhous tumour on her left breast), the speech for the defence was made.

  M. Dorange was very eloquent, but he had a hopeless case. The defence he put up was that Helene was irresponsible, but the major part of the advocate's speech was taken up with a denouncement of capital punishment. It was a barbarous anachronism, a survival which disgraced civilization.

  The President summed up and addressed the jury:

  ``Cast a final scrutiny, gentlemen of the jury,'' he said, ``at the matter brought out by these debates. Consult yourselves in the calm and stillness of your souls. If it is not proved to you that Helene Jegado is responsible for her actions you will acquit her. If you think that, without being devoid of free will and moral sense, she is not, according to the evidence, as well gifted as the average in humanity, you will give her the benefit of extenuating circumstance.

  ``But if you consider her culpable, if you cannot see in her either debility of spirit or an absence or feebleness of moral sense, you will do your duty with firmness. You will remember that for justice to be done chastisement will not alone suffice, but that punishment must be in proportion to the offence.''

  The President then read over his questions for the jury, and that body retired. After deliberations which occupied an hour and a half the jury came back with a verdict of guilty on all points. The Procureur asked for the penalty of death.

  THE PRESIDENT. Helene Jegado, have you anything to say upon the application of the penalty?

  HELENE. No, Monsieur le President, I am innocent. I am resigned to everything. I would rather die innocent than live in guilt. You have judged me, but God will judge you all. He will see then . . . Monsieur Bidard. All those false witnesses who have come here to destroy me . . . they will see. . . .

  In a voice charged with emotion the President pronounced the sentence condemning Helene Jegado to death.

  An appeal was put forward on her behalf, but was rejected.

  On the scaffold, a few moments before she passed into eternity, having no witness but the recorder and the executioner, faithful to the habits of her life, Helene Jegado accused a woman not named in any of the processes of having urged her to her first crimes and of being her accomplice. The two officials took no notice of this indirect confession of her own guilt, and the sentence was carried out. The Procureur of Rennes, hearing of this confession, took the trouble to search out the woman named in it. She turned out to be a very old woman of such a pious and kindly nature that the people about her talked of her as the ``saint.''

  It were superfluous to embark on analysis of the character of Helene Jegado. Earlier on, in comparing her with Van der Linden and the Zwanziger woman, I have lessened her caliginosity as compared with that of the Leyden poisoner, giving her credit for one less death than her Dutch sister in crime. Having investigated Helene's activities rather more closely, however, I find I have made mention of no less than twenty-eight deaths attributed to Helene, which puts her one up on the Dutchwoman. The only possible point at which I may have gone astray in my calculations is in respect of the deaths at Guern. The accounts I have of Helene's bag there insist on seven, but enumerate only six—namely, her sister Anna, the cure, his father and mother, and two more (unnamed) after these. The accounts, nevertheless, insist more than once that between 1833 and 1841 Helene put away twenty-three persons. If she managed only six at Guern, that total should be twenty-two. From 1849 she accounted for Albert Rabot, the infant Ozanne, Perrotte Mace, Rose Tessier, and Rosalie Sarrazin—five. We need no chartered accountant to certify our figures if we make the total twenty-eight. Give her the benefit of the doubt in the case of Albert Rabot, who was ill anyhow when Helene joined the household, and she still ties with Van der Linden with twenty-seven deaths.

  There is much concerning Helene Jegado, recorded incidents, that I might have introduced into my account of her activities, and that might have emphasized the outstanding feature of her dingy make-up—that is, her hypocrisy. When Rosalie Sarrazin was fighting for her life, bewailing the fact that she was dying at the age of nineteen, Helene Jegado took a crucifix and made the girl kiss it, saying to her, ``Here is the Saviour Who died for you! Commend your soul to Him!'' This, with the canting piety of the various answers which she gave in court (and which, let me say, I have transcribed with some reluctance), puts Helene Jegado almost on a level with the sanctimonious Dr Pritchard—perhaps quite on a level with that nauseating villain.

  With her twenty-three murders all done without motive, and the five others done for spite—with her twenty-eight murders, only five of which were calculated to bring advantage, and that of the smallest value—it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Helene Jegado was mad. In spite, however, of evidence called in her defence—as, for example, that of Dr Pitois, of Rennes, who was Helene's own doctor, and who said that ``the woman had a bizarre character, frequently complaining of stomach pains and formications in the head''—in spite of this doctor's hints of monomania in the accused, the jury, with every chance allowed them to find her irresponsible, still saw nothing in her extenuation. And very properly, since the law held the extreme penalty for such as she, Helene went to the scaffold. Her judges might have taken the sentimental view that she was abnormal, though not mad in the common acceptation of the word. Appalled by the secret menace to human life that she had been scared to think of the ease and the safety in which she had been allowed over twenty odd years to carry agonizing death to so many of her kind, and convinced from the inhuman nature of her practices that she was a lusus naturae, her judges, following sentimental Anglo-Saxon example, might have given her asylum and let her live for years at public expense. But possibly they saw no social or Civic advantage in preserving her, so anti-social as she was. They are a frugal nation, the French.

  % VI

  Having made you sup on horror a la Bretonne, or Continental fashion, I am now to give you a savoury from England. This lest you imagine that France, or the Continent, has a monopoly in wholesale poison. Let me introduce you, as promised earlier, to Mary Ann Cotton aged forty-one, found guilty of and sentenced to death for the murder of a child, Charles Edward Cotton, by giving him arsenic.

  Rainton, in Durham, was the place where, in 1832 Mary Ann found mortal existence. At the age of fifteen or sixteen she began to earn her own living as a nursemaid, an occupation which may appear to have given her a distaste for infantile society. At the age of nineteen and at Newcastle she married William Mowbray, a collier, and went with him to live in Cornwall. Here the couple remained for some years.

  It was a fruitful marriage. Mary bore William five children in Cornwall, but, unfortunately, four of the children died—suddenly. With the remaining child the pair moved to Mary's native county. They had hardly settled down in their new home when the fifth child also died. It died, curiously enough, of the ailment which had supp
osedly carried off the other four children—gastric fever.

  Not long after the death of this daughter the Mowbrays removed to Hendon, Sunderland, and here a sixth child was born. It proved to be of as vulnerable a constitution as its brothers and sisters, for it lasted merely a year. Four months later, while suffering from an injured foot, which kept him at home, William Mowbray fell ill, and died with a suddenness comparable to that which had characterized the deaths of his progeny. His widow found a job at the local infirmary, and there she met George Ward. She married Mr Ward, but not for long. In a few months after the nuptials George Ward followed his predecessor, Mowbray, from an illness that in symptoms and speed of fatality closely resembled William's.

  We next hear of Mary as housekeeper to a widower named Robinson, whose wife she soon became. Robinson had five children by his former wife. They all died in the year that followed his marriage with Mary Ann, and all of `gastric fever.'

  The second Mrs Robinson had two children by this third husband. Both of these perished within a few weeks of their birth.

  Mary Ann's mother fell ill, though not seriously. Mary Ann volunteered to nurse the old lady. It must now be evident that Mary Ann was a `carrier' of an obscure sort of intestinal fever, because soon after her appearance in her mother's place the old lady died of that complaint.

  On her return to her own home, or soon after it, Mary was accused by her husband of robbing him. She thought it wise to disappear out of Robinson's life, a deprivation which probably served to prolong it.

  Under her old name of Mowbray, and by means of testimonials which on later investigation proved spurious, Mary Ann got herself a housekeeping job with a doctor in practice at Spennymore. Falling into error regarding what was the doctor's and what was her own, and her errors being too patent, she was dismissed.