A WOMAN'S TERRIBLE CRIME.

Waikato Times, Volume XXVIII, Issue 2325, 4 June 1887, Page 2 (Supplement)

A WOMAN'S TERRIBLE CRIME.

A .species of rustic Lucrezia Borgia, named liluchet, who: lived at Brienon, a, small town in the department of Youne, has just beeu condemned to hard labour for life on a charge of having poisoned her husband and a lodger in her house. The woman haying exhibited a weakness for the company of a barber, was remonstrated with by her husband. The lodger, an elderly man named Forgest, also ventured to point out to her the wickedness of her ways, and thenceforward became a mark , for her revenge. Bluchet resolved to put the two meu out of the way, and began with her husband, by patting doses of arsenic in , his soup. She treated Forgest in the same fashion, and, after the lapse of a few days, the old man sickened and died,; The husband succmnbed six days afterwards, and, as happens very often, in .French rural districts, even in the present epoch of civilisation,: the bodies were buried without inquests being; held. The unseemly haste,- however, with which the mur- : doress displayed in endeavouring'to induco the barber to marry, her immediately after her husband's death aro.used the) suspicions of her rural neighbours, who, los,t no time in communicating with the police. Bluchet .was then . arrested, the bodies of her victims were disinterred, and.t.lve murder.was put. • She had used enough arsenic in the accomplishment of her purpose to poison half-a-dozen men. During the trial she made the most shameful allegations against her victims, and denied her guilt in the. most barefaced manner. The jury, in finding extenuating circumstances, showed their readiness, like most of their colleagues, both in Paris and in the provinces, to make things easy for criminals, who are growing bolder every clay. : •