CHARGE OF WIFE POISONING IN PARIS.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume VIII, Issue 2194, 14 January 1886, Page 2

CHARGE OF WIFE POISONING IN PARIS.

A remarkable poisoning case is before the Seine assizes. The accused, Ribout, an artificial flower-maker in the Rue de Strasbourg, and with a country villa at Nois : le-See, is charged with having poisoned his wife with colchicine. The evidence showed that the prisoner had been on terms of too great intimacy with one of the shop girls, whom he married immediately after his wife's funeral. A man in his employ reported to Madame Ribout's mother that shortly before her daughter's death ho had been sent to a chemist's with a prescription, which the chemist refused to make up; but he know another chemist had done so. This, together with'the symptoms of Madame Ribout's illness, aroused the suspicions of the, mother, who had the body exhumed. No traces of poison, howover, could bo found, which the prosecution explained by asserting that, oolohioine being a vegetable poison, no indications would be preserved by a corpse which had been interred ten months, The prescription, which was produced m Court, was for a gramme of colchicine crystal, to be mixed with lemonade, and drunk by the patient. It was ostensibly signed •by a medical man. The prisoner denied having written the prescription, but ultimately owned that he had done so. fle, however, pretended the preparation was required for coloring artificial flowers,' and that he resorted to the device of obtaining it by a medical prescription, in order that the tricks of jiis trade might be kept secret, The medical evidence was the reverse of conclusive. It was stated that Madame Ribout's symptoms were consistent with poisoning, but were none the less suggestive of cholera, and might eren have been produced by cancer in the stomach. What seems most to incriminate the prisioneo is the circumstance that he wrote from his cell to his newly-married wife, in which he implores her to be obstinately silent, and all would be well, adding that she might depend upon nothing being discovered from an examination of the body.