LOUIS OF THE VOSGES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 15 April 1939, Page 5

LOUIS OF THE VOSGES

ENGLISHWOMEN AMONG MARKED VICTIMS. DISCLOSURES TN DIARY OF DEATH. Two wealth}’ Englishwomen, who travel to the Riviera every year for a holiday, were to have been among the next victims of “Louis of the Vosges." the French gunman who boasted of .11 murders when he was captured bv the police. ’When Louis was arrested, he handed the police a carefully kept diary in which he had kept a profit-and-loss account of his crimes, which ranged from petty larceny to murder. In that diary Louis—his real name, was Louis Charles Phillippe—had listed all his “ordin-, ary" crimes in black. Murders and attempted murders were entered in rod ink. A marginal note against each set out the estimated gain or loss over the transaction. The names of 13 prospective victims were also carefully written in. Their names were surrounded with black crosses, and the reason for wanting to kill each one. Two of them were the wealthy Englishwomen. The diary gave details Of their movements and the best time for finding them alone in their sleepers in the Riviera Express. Louis knew that they always had'a great deal of money and jewels with them. A London paper says he has confessed that he and an accomplice, Louis Belligand. boarded a train on which one of them was travelling from the Riviera to Paris. But Belligand lost his nerve, and an entry, in red ink, shows that Louis had made him the 13th prospective victim. “Belligand is too weak for this man s job of mass murder,” Louis is alleged to have told the police. Another of the 13 marked down for killing was a man who had refused to allow’Louis to sleep in an outhouse. Five members of the staff of a remand home to which Louis was sent in his youth were also included. He planned .to send poisoned chocolates to them. After his arrest Louis told the police that he killed another accomplice,_ Durand, nicknamed “The Mosquito;’ because Durand was dissatisfied with his share of the spoil after they murdered a seventy-year-old grocer in Paris. , , ~ The police subsequently exhumed the body of “The Mosquito,” who had been found “drowned” in the Seine. It had been recorded as a case of suicide. But when the body was dug up and reexamined, a surgeon found several stab wounds in his back.