Cold-Blooded Parent Who Murdered Child

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 533, 10 December 1928, Page 12

Cold-Blooded Parent Who Murdered Child

Grim Experiments ith Deadly Germs FRENCH CRIMINAL CHARACTER t The trial in Paris of Pierre de Rayssae, who drowned the IS-months-old baby of which he was the father rather than contribute to its upkeep, has brought out something very typical of the French character. It is certainly not the inhuman crime itself, nor the cold premeditation with which hte murderer undressed the baby, as it lay by his side in the motor-car, before dropping in into the river, so that there should be no evidence of its identity, says the correspondent of the London “Observer.” It is not the cruelty of the murderer's parents, who dismissed the young servant-girl when she was found to be with child. It is the nature of the public reaction to the horror of it all; and the typical thing about that reaction is that what has shocked French opinion, at least as much as the crime itself, is the fact that both the murderer and the child’s mother could talk about the whole thing at the trial without visible emotion, without a tear. For convulsive sobs there might have been pity. For that calmness there is | none. | Something typical, not about French character, but about the administration of law in France, is illustrated by another case which has come up recently. Armand Sehirmer is a man who has been convicted more than a dozen times for fraud. One of these convictions led to his serving a sentence in the penal settlement of Cayenne, and since his return to France he has been supposed to be living under police supervision. Lent Money and Sold Drugs This, however, did not prevent his setting up as a general financial agency in the little provincial town of Nogent-sur-Marne and opening -an office to which he gave the high-sound-ing title of the Omnium Nogentais. It also did not prevent his carrying on, from another address, a lucrative trade in morphine, cocaine, and other forbidden drugs. Most sensational of all, it did not prevent his having etsablished, at this second address, a wellequipped laboratory, where the police have discovered a number of phials, labelled as being each the virus of a dangerous and contagious disease, such as leprosy, typhoid, or cholera. This discovery has naturally stimulated the public imagination, and it is already being asked whether this ex-convict with the German name was not preparing to destroy the population of France on behalf of a foreign power, though the less cliauvinisticallymincled merely recall the case of a certain Girard, who insured the lives of his friends and then inoculated them with typhoid. The report that Sehirmer, on being questioned, has stated that he set up the laboratory for his own study and amusement, and *vas first taught to take an interest in chemistry through having been attached to the dispensary of the penal settlement when he was serving his sentence, has naturally added another picturesque element to the affair. Certainly he appears to have had employment as a chemist’s assistant for a short time since his return to France, and his continued interest in the subject is shown by his possession of a number of recently published books of medical prescriptions and treatises on poisons. Easy To Procure Germs The case has naturally directed at- i tention to the ease with which cultures of disease germs can be procured. The Pasteur Institute has declared that it only supplies such cultures to persons whom it knows well, but that there are German, Austrian and even French firms, who are quite willing to sell them, while there is nothing to prevent students at the School of Medicine, who have been given tubes of germs, and encouraged to cultivate them in order to study the evolution of microbes, from taking some of the tubes away. A mere laboratory attendant at the school could do so. These rather fantastic and melodramatic developments are not, however, what is really the most interesting thing about the case. This is that nothing has been done until now to prevent this nolorious swindler resuming his career of fraud. He has at last been disturbed, because one of his victims has succeeded in inducing the Procureur de la Republique to take aetion; but it appears that this is by no means the first complaint that has been laid against him at the Procureur’s office, and that the other complaints led to nothing and were not followed up. Whether this is true or not it is certain that other cases have occurred of the victims of dishonest financiers and business firms making official complaints, of which nothing further is ever heard. It is said that the office of the Procureur de la Republique is overwhelmed with such petitions, and that it is impossible even to examine all of them, and far less to take action Perhaps this flagrant case of a convmted swindler resuming his practices with impunity may stir the office to greater activity.