A STUDENT CHAEGED WITH MURDER.

Southland Times, Volume I, Issue 48, 24 April 1863, Page 3

A STUDENT CHAEGED WITH MURDER.

The Court of Assizes of the Seine-et-Oise recently tried a young man of respectable family (a Gorsican and a relation of the Pozzo di Borgo), named Pierre de Signorio, aged twenty-four, a medical student, on a charge of murdering a coachman, named Olivrot, at Enghien-les-Bains, on the 11th of September last. A young woman, named Bertin, aged nineteen, with whom the prisoner cohabited, was also charged as an accomplice. Early in the morning of the llth of September, two men saw a man in a sitting posture leaning against the wall of a house in the Rue de l'Arrivee. On approaching him they found he was dead, and as his clothes were bloody, they suspected he had been murdered, and. immediately gave notice to the police. On examination, it was proved that the man had received two stabs in the chest, one of which had penetrated the left lung, and must have proved almost instantly fatal. As no marks of blood or of struggle were found near the spot, it was inferred that the man was murdered elsewhere, and afterwards deposited there. The body was soon recognised as that of a coachman named Olivrot who had been cohabiting with the female prisoner some -weeks previously, but had recently been discarded by her, to make way for a new lover, the prisoner. From the inquiry instituted, it appears that the two prisoners had gone to a ball the preceding evening, and there met the deceased, who was greatly excited, and threatened to take vengeance on them both. An hour or two after the prisoner had returned to the girl's lodgings, the deceased knocked at the door and demanded admittance, which was refused and he then went away, but soon returned with a large paving stone to beat in the door. Meanwhile Signorio had risen and dressed himself and when the man forced an entrance, a struggle ensued between them, in which the prisoner received several contusions about the head, and inflicted the wounds which caused his antagonist's death. The evidence did not clearly flhow whether the deceased had walked to the place where he was found, or had been carried there by the male prisoner. The medical man who made the post mortem examination could not undertake to say that the deceased could not have walked the distance, but he thought it improbable. M. Luchaud, who defended the male prisoner, pleaded that the wounds were inflicted in self-defence, and adduced numerous facts and arguments in support of that conclusion. The procureu-imperial abandoned the prosecution against the female prisoner. The jury acquitted both prisoners. — Lloyd's News.