Woman “Bluebeard” to be Cleared?

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 786, 5 October 1929, Page 22

Woman “Bluebeard” to be Cleared?

Confession By Daughter False Evidence To Save Herself . . . Peiplexing Murder Case Re-Opened

|- - "JfFfWkt. EVEN years after she had given evidence I vSyCtESSK/ which might have sent her mother to the • guillotine, and which actually condemned her to 20 years in a French penal prison. Mile. Paule Jacques, the daughter of Madame Louise Bessarabo by her first husband, has made the confession that that evidence was untrue. At the time she gave that evidence Mile. Paule stood in the dock beside her mother,, and there is little doubt that if she had stuck to the original story which she related before the thronged court she, too, would have been sent to prison, although for a lesser term than her mother, who earned the unenviable title of “The Woman Bluebeard.” Now, after seven years, during which she declares the pangs of conscience have torn her heartstrings, she makes the amazing statement that she deliberately lied on important points in order to defend herself against the charge of complicity with which she was faced. It was during the very last hour of the trial, after months of examination, that she broke down and confessed that her previous evidence had been all lies, and it was undoubtedly this last-minute retraction which sealed the fate of her mother, who stood there imperturbable as she listened to the words from her daughter's lips which meant the utter collapse of her defence. The result of her present confession—to the effect that her last story was the false one, and that her first evidence was true—is, that Maitre de Moro Giafferi. tha counsel who fought so strenuously for Madame Bessarabo's life, has now asked the Minister of Justice to have the case reopened, and a fresh trial ordered, on the grounds that his client was convicted on evidence which is now withdrawn, and which is admittedly false. He has explained that the browbeating examination which the unfortunate daughter underwent —far worse than any third degree method j —caused her to break down, and the Juge d'lnstruction's demand for the death penalty on both induced a state of fear which caused her to lie in order to save her own life, when she realised that nothing she could say would save that of her mother. The crime attributed to Mme. Bessarabo was inhuman. It was one of the most cold-blooded in the method of its enactment. It followed closely upon that of Landru, the infamous murderer, who killed many women, and who appeared before the same judge who was trying the case of Mme. Bessarabo. In fact, there was one dramatic meeting within the precincts of the magistrate’s court on an occasion when Mile. Jacques was waiting in a corridor outside the examining room. It happened that Landru was brought along this corridor to hold a consultation with his lawyer. The eyes of the Paris Bluebeard lit up as he gazed upon the pale, yet beautiful, features of the girl, and he asked his counsel to introduce them. Thus the daughter of the Woman Bluebeard and Landru came face to face, and with a cynical smile the arch-murderer bent low over the band of the frankly scared girl, who trembled violently when she heard his name, and murmured “Mademoiselle, I salute you.” Inside Trunk The story of the murder of M. Bessarabo opens on July 31, 1921, when he left his office apparently to return to his home. This was the last time he was seen alive. He did not go to his office the next day, and it was about a week later that his body was found trussed up inside a huge trunk, hands and legs tied with strips of leather. There was a bullet hole in the right temple, and powder marks round the wound showed that it had been fired from a distance of only a few inches.

There was no sign that any struggle had taken place—no bruise or anything of that sort —and the theory of the police was that the unfortunate man had been shot while asleep. The trunk in which his body was found was discovered at Nancy Railway SStation, whither it had been dispatched by train from Paris. It was from the lips of his wife that the police first- learned anything at all about this trunk, and that was when, some two or three days after his "disappearance,” she went to the police and asked them to make search for her missing husband.

She mentioned that before going be had begged her to forgive him all his indiscretions of the past. He had then instructed her to pack the trunk, i:a which his body was afterwards found, with a number of papers and documents connected with certain •'shady affairs” with which he had been concerned, so that they could look through them at their leisure later on, and burn all that was not needful. This she did, and with the trunk, all corded up, drove off to the Gare du Nord where they found the husband •very angry at having been kept waiting. He told them to get out and wait for him. and. having got into the cab, drove off with the trunk still on top of it, saying he would return in an hour.

Sure enough in an hour’s time, according to the story of Mme. Bessarabo, the cab returned with the trunk still upon it, the driver bringing with him a note in her husband’s handwriting telling her to register the trunk through to Nancy station, which she did.

Consequent upon this statement a telegram was dispatched to Nancy station, and there the trunk was discovered, and opened to see whether its contents could throw any light on the missing man's whereabouts. Of course, his dead body was found inside, and soon afterward both the mother and daughter were arrested, and eventually brought to trial. Such was the story of the woman, but It was only one of many stories which she told during the subsequent investigations, first at the court of the examining magistrate, and afterward before a judge. Over and over again she told a different story—different in little, yet not unimportant, details, and once—in the very early stages of her examination by the magistrate—a terribly inhuman system of interrogation in which the magistrate makes all the accusations, and the accused has to prove his or her innocence—she broke down and confessed that hers and hers alone was the hand which slayed her husband. To Save Daughter . But she retracted this confession afterwards when she discovered that it had not removed her daughter from the shadow of the guillotine. “I lied to save my daughter,” she spbbed brokenly. . “I lied because 1 believed that if I undertook the responsibility they would release my daughter from the terrible St. Lazare prison. My daughter was sick unto death almost, and T was afraid for her life. So I lied, as I wotlld lie again.” It is not difficult to understand a mother distraught with anguish, and believing that she herself could never be convicted of her guilt, even though she had confessed, going to such lengths to save her daughter from the shame and ordeal of a public trial, for being concerned in the murder of her step-father. The wife dominated the court, much in the same way as Landru dominated the court during the time of his trial. It was openly suggested that she had her daughter beneath the spell of some hypnotic power. Less likely things have been true. It was urged that this power enabled her to compel her daughter to give such evidence as would support her own story, and as though to give credence to this view, it was a fact that during one part of the ruthless examination of the daughter, the latter sobbingly confessed that there was a “secret" which her mother had forbidden her to reveal. “I will tell you after the trial is over,” she cried. The President of the court ordered the mother to be taken out of court so that her influence might be removed from the girl, and the girl sobbed out that, when she lay ill in the prison of St. Lazare, her mother came to her and told her the true version of the tragedy. “Tell us,” demanded the judge, but the girl only sobbed afresh as she replied once more: “I cannot tell you —I cannot, but what I shall reveal would revolutionise this inquiry.” And when the mother returned to the court it is stated that there was a gleam of triumph in her eyes when she realised that her daughter had not revealed the secret, whatever it was. Later on, in order to combat this same alleged hypnotic influence, two uniformed police officers were placed between mother and daughter as they sat in the dock. And all the time the trial was going on, the somewhat forbidding looking woman was receiving offers of marriage from men in all parts of the world. These letters, couched in the most amazing terms, declared that the writers were ready to give the widow that solace which only a true love could give to one who had suffered so much. Various witnesses spoke to the scenes of violence which had marked the home life of the Bessarabos. The husband “went in fear of his life,” ■ declared more than one. “The daughter was vindictive to her stepfather,” declared others, and during one part of the defence it was alleged that the wife had strongly resented attentions paid to the daughter by her stepfather. Driver’s Story The driver of the taxi-cab which brought the trunk to the station stated that both mother and daughter appeared very perturbed during the journey from their house to the station and that on the way the wife displayed great nervousness over the trunk. To the daughter it was put direct that hers was the hand which had forged the letter which they were supposed to have received on the second journey of the cab, telling them to register it to Nancy. Then came what was perhaps the most dramatic suggestion of all, that Mme. Bessarabo had not only murdered her second husband, but that she had also done to death her first husband, whose body was exhumed during the early part of the inquiry into the death of M. Bessarabo.