Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [139]
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Meg escaped her notoriety by moving to England, but those who believed in her innocence, as well as those who argued for her guilt, continued to speculate on what really happened at the impasse Ronsin that murderous Saturday night in 1908. Her own memoirs, published in 1912, shed no further light on the crime.
In 1925, however, a man whose credentials as a criminologist could not be questioned published his own reconstruction of the case. This was Dr. Edmond Locard, now director of the forensic laboratory at Lyons. His book Le crime et les criminels had a chapter on methods of strangulation, and he used the Steinheil case to show how one method (manual) might be mistaken for a second (using a cord). In doing so, Locard went much further than simply describing the causes of death of Steinheil and Mme. Japy — he reconstructed the case in such detail that people assumed he had access to hitherto secret sources.
Locard portrayed Meg, in that phase of her life, as little better than a high-class streetwalker, saying that she picked up lovers at the Métro exits regularly, pretending to twist “her too-delicate ankle” when a wealthy-looking man came near. Accepting his gallant offer to see her home, she would lead him to the impasse Ronsin, where she made it clear that her husband would look the other way if a romance began. De Balincourt had testified at the trial that this was how he met Meg, and certainly she might have repeated the performance with others.
Locard asked rhetorically, “Is it in this way, or by some intermediary, that one day she makes the acquaintance of an aristocratic foreigner?” 16 He suggested that Meg cultivated this mysterious figure and from time to time obtained money from him. One day, in need of more, Meg calls him to come to the house, but she is not “able to comply with his passionate demands. He feels that he has been duped. Fury. Clamour.” Then Steinheil “makes the mistake of poking his worried nose into the business,” 17 further arousing the suspicions of the aristocratic foreigner that this is a blackmail scheme. There is a scuffle, and the foreigner takes Steinheil by the throat, only to discover that the artist is even weaker than he looks. His larynx crushed, Steinheil falls to the floor, where the police find him later. As for Meg’s unfortunate mother, she investigates the noises she hears, and on seeing Steinheil’s body, she swallows her dentures, choking to death.
The foreigner, who Locard later revealed was “a grand-duke, a close relative of the Tsar,” 18 has to be protected from scandal. Meg calls “a very high official, who arrives, duly organizes the staging of the scene, and discreetly leaves.” 19 He was the person that a neighbor saw leaving the impasse Ronsin, hurrying to a waiting car. Benjamin F. Martin, a modern interpreter of the case, suggests that the high French official was none other than Magistrate Leydet, who then requested appointment as the juge d’instruction in the case so that he could manage the investigation to avoid incriminating the foreigner.
In this scenario, Meg had to be willing to endure imprisonment and risk conviction at trial in order to protect this powerful man. Just as she had earlier been discreet about the death of President Faure, so she repeated the performance this time. Had she resisted, the wheels of justice would have ground her up. Locard suggested that she was rewarded by a deliberately botched investigation that left too much doubt in the jurors’ minds to convict her.
Corroboration for Locard’s explanation of the case had to wait until eighteen months after Meg’s death in 1954. Armand Lanoux, a French writer and biographer of Zola, revealed “confidential information” that he had received from someone in a position to know the truth. This may have been Roger de Chateleux, the ghostwriter Meg had employed in writing her memoirs. The informant quoted a “Dr. D” who had assisted during the first autopsy