The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection Read Online Free Page A

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.
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    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