A FRENCH MURDERER.

Grey River Argus, Issue 111, 27 September 1866, Page 3

A FRENCH MURDERER.

(Prom the Globe.) On the 11th of January last, a middleaged widow lady in Paris, Madame Midy, by profession a painter, narrowly escaped being murdered. A man who had lately been in her house as a workman in the employment of a framemaker whom she patronised, was the intended murderer ; and he had doubtless been tempted io the deed in order to rob his victim of some small but valuable paintings which had bean intrusted to her by a polish Prince. He called under pretence of looking for a tool which he had accidentally left; behind. Not finding it, lie drew from his pocket a bolster cover, asking the lady if it did not belong to her ; and as she turned away, annoyed by his questions, he took the opportunity to throw the cloth over her head so as to cover it, at the same time placing one hand on her neck and the other on her mouth, stuffing the linen down her chroat so as to stifle her cries. She had been able to Bcream a little, however, and her screams, the noise of the scuffle, and the sound of her fall on the floor, brought a brother painter, — the Sieur Vauchelet — who was in an adjoining apartment, to her assistance. The prisoner, thus interrupted, coolly walked away, merely saying that the lady was ill; but he was followed and arrested. The police soon identified him as the man who wa3 "wanted" for a horrid murder com- I mitted a few days before, and a little more investigation proved their prisoner, Joseph Phillippe by name, to be one of those great criminals of the Duniollard type, who comraitt murder by wholesale, partly from pure bloodthirstiness of nature, and partly for the plunder and outrage of their victims. His trial has just taken place under one of the most formidable actes d'accusation which the ingenuity of French lawyers ever constructed. The prisoner's appearance and antecedents quite correspond with the last epoch of his history. He is a short thick set man, with black hair, closely cut beard and ' moustache, low forehead, deep-set eyes, thick lips, and generally a ferocious look, although dressed in the garb of a well-to-do workman. Born in 1831, so that he is now 35 years of age, he was taken for the military service in 1852, condemned in 1856 to a year imprisonment for miscon- . duct, and enrolled soon after in one of those tenable Battalions d'Afrique into which the scoundrels of the French army are draughted. He retured to Paris in 1861, and has since been in numerous situations as a cook, groom, general servants, and warehouse messenger, but staying long in none on account of his drunken habits. The idea w living by murder and robbery appears to have originated in the necessities of his poverty when out of employment ; and his system is novel, as the first attempt to take advantage of a certain feature iifour social Hie. The murderer two years ago t1 at I?lorence,victimi2edlodging-housekeepers, whom he found out as a faineant lodger, and whom he was enabled to murder on account of their lonely position. Joseph Phillippe selected for his operations the class of unfortunates whose degradation arid isolation, and the pecularities of their miserable trade, expose in a high degree to the danger of assassination. The Waterloo road murder, and the more recent niurder of Emma Jackson, exemplify among oursplvea what these dangers

amout to. But the prisoner is the firsb to have sesn in the facts the chance of a living. Fiom'the evidence now obtained, it is certain that he did act on system-. More than two years ago he revealed his secret to one- of these females in the weakness of in toxic ition. "I love women well," he said, "and I do for them well. I stuff their mouths and cut their throats. Wait a bit, and you will hear me talked about." What passed for grim jest has become a too horrid reality. Several unfortunates had perished in Paris since 1861, strangled, or with throats cut ; but it is only within the last two years that cases have been found in which there is proof against the prisoner. There are three distinct cases, one of them a double murder, in which the infant of one of his victims was also killed, and the circumstances are much alike in all. Three days before his apprehension ho accosted, at 11 o'clock in the evening, in the Rue de la Ville l'Eveque, a girl named Marie Victoire Bodeux ; soon afterwards he was seen entering the building in that street in which were her apartments, and a quarter of an hour later he was observed to leave, by an old man. who lived in the house, and who wanted to see the girl. This man, entering her apartment, discovered her on the floor with her throat frightfully gashed, and the marks of blood-stained lingers on the drawers and their contents, which, as well as the mattress of the bed, had been rumaged for valuables. It was found that ths murdered woman's purse, containing L 4, and several articles of jewelry, had been stolen ; and luckily there were found in the prisoner's possession sufficient articles to identify him. Before leaving, lie had had time to wash his hands in a basin which stood upon the dressing table in the apartment. The other murders with which he is connected were committed in the spring of 1864. One morning in April that year, an unfortunate named Julie Robert, not having appeared since the evening of the day before, was found in her apartment in the Rue St, Joseph with her throat cut in a similar fashion to that of the girl Bodeaux — her pockets and the whole apartment also bearing marks of hasty rifling, and a handbasiu in like manner marked with blood stains. The prisoner is said to have taken with him a handkerchief, which has been identified as the deceased's property, and he is proved to have been spending money freely at the time, although he had but newly entered on an employment after a term of idleness, and had yet received no wages. His strange demeanor and. agitation at the time have also been remembered against him. The most horrid affair of all was the murder in November following, in the Rue St. Margaurite, of a woman named Mage and her two-years-old son. One Sunday morning in that month workmen passing to their work observed for a moment a woman in her chemise, at a window, hoarsely crying out and gesticulating strangely, but, thinking she was drunk or mad, they passed on. She was neither drunk nor mad, but in the fatal grasp of a murderer. Nor did her cries bring the assistance of neighbors. Half an hour after, a man resembling the prisoner was seen to descend the stair of the house and depart, leaving- the key of the apartment on the landing. There was some suspicion, and on an entrance boing made, the two bodies were found horribly mutilated and bruised — the woman having plainly gone through, a tremendous struggle before her antagonist succeeded. There were the same marks of rifling left as in the other cases, showing the same author. The prisoner was not only indentined by those who saw him leaving, but another unfortunate, whom he had addressed the same evening, had been so frightened at his looks that she would not take him home, and seen him afterwards going home with the deceased. She^was not the only woman of the cla? a who testifies to having been saved from probable murder by a similar fear. The strangest fact of all remains, and that is the horror of the prisoner at his own crimes. His sleep was disturbed by frightful dreams. After the last mentioned murder those in the house where he lodged heard him raising frightful cries as if some bloody apparition had appeared before him. He plunged into deeper debauches to drown the terrors of his conscience. One would almost have expected that so wholesale a criminal would have been more hardened. Such is one of the most frightful chapters of crime that have lately been recorded. The prisoner, we learn, is not to escape the last penalty of the law, although it is considered that the 1864 cases are not quite established against him. Even a French jury has found it impossible to give him the benefit of extenuating circumstances, It is cases like these, indeed, make it impossible to give up the idea of death-punishment, and the Florence populace, it will be remembered, were deeply disappointed by the leniency of the Italian law in the affair of the lodging-house murders. The circumstances prove, however, that something else than fear of detection and death operates to prevent murder. If not, it is scarcely possible but i;hat cases like those of Emma Jackson, the murder in the Waterloo road, and the crimes of Joseph Phillippe, would be much more frequent, where the opportunity for committing the deed at leisure is so great, and the chance of detection so small. We must also remark that the affair is by no means creditable to the French police. There are said to have been 23 cases since 1861, but they nailed all that time to find out the. murderers, or rather murderer, since the records all. show a striking similarity of method. We are accustomed to blame our own police severely for much smaller failures ; but the French police, which is trusted as an effective instrument in re-, pressing political crimes, appears to be even more inefficient than our own in the commonplace work of protecting society against great and "acknowledged criminals.