Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [155]
There were several Paris news-papers that illustrated the events of the day with drawings of crime scenes. This one depicts one of the Bonnot Gang’s most spectacular crimes: the shooting of Louis Jouin, the head of the police force as-signed to apprehend the gang. Cornered in his hiding place, Bonnot shot and killed Jouin before jumping from an up-stairs window and escaping. (From the authors’ collection)
A newspaper artist’s rendering of the last stand of Octave Garnier and René Valet, the only members of the Bonnot Gang still at large. The two men had held at bay a force of over 700 police and soldiers for an entire day before dynamite blasts destroyed their refuge. (From the authors’ collection)
Postcards like this one depicted the seige at Choisy-le-Roi, where Bonnot single-handedly resisted a force of at least a hundred men. Newsreel cameras recorded the scene, and when it was shown in theaters, audiences cheered whenever Bonnot appeared on a balcony to fire his rifle. (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)
Bonnot in the morgue. He had recognized that he had become famous and wrote a testament justifying his crimes and exonerating those who were unjustly accused. (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)
Vincenzo Perugia, the man who confessed to stealing the Mona Lisa. Had he acted alone? That was a mystery whose answer took another two decades to solve. (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)
When the Mona Lisa returned to the Louvre, Le Petit Journal, Paris’s most popular pictorial newspaper, devoted its front page to a history of the painting from Leonardo’s presentation of it to King François I to its theft from the museum. (From the authors’ collection)
Alphonse Bertillon’s crime scene photographs, overhead and from the side, of the body of Adolphe Steinheil. Nearly two decades older than his beautiful wife, Meg, he had looked the other way while she engaged in a series of sexual liaisons, including one that reputedly killed Félix Faure, the president of France. (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)
Meg Steinheil in the dock at her trial for murder. Her performance under questioning was so affecting that journalists dubbed her the “Sarah Bernhardt of the Assizes,” after the most famous actress of the day. (From the authors’ collection)
At left, Gaston Calmette, who was shot to death in his office on March 16, 1914, by Henriette Caillaux, center. At right is her husband, Joseph, at that time the finance minister of France, who had been the object of constant attacks by the newspaper Calmette edited. Henriette explained her action by saying, “There is no justice in France. There is only the revolver.” (From the authors’ collection)
AFTERWORD:
THE MASTERMIND
In 1932, the American reporter Karl Decker revealed what he said was the true story of the Mona Lisa theft. Decker was one of the most famous journalists of his time, not only reporting the news but making it as well. His best-known exploit occurred in 1897, when he went to Cuba, then under Spanish rule, and rescued the daughter of a Cuban rebel from jail. Decker smuggled her aboard a ship and brought her back to New York City, where his newspaper, the sensational Hearst-owned New York Herald, lionized both its reporter and the beautiful eighteen-year-old Cuban. The exploit was a prelude to the mysterious explosion that sank the American naval ship Maine in Havana Harbor the following year, setting off the Spanish-American War.
Thirty-five years later, in the Saturday Evening Post, at that time one of the United States’ leading weekly magazines, Decker claimed an even bigger scoop: that he knew who masterminded the theft of the Mona Lisa. In January 1914, while on assignment in Casablanca, Morocco, Decker had met a longtime