Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [52]
The prosecutor was not ready to give up. He pointed out that Paillet had referred to Orfila as France’s leading expert on poisons, but Orfila had not personally examined the evidence in the case. The counsel for the defense had often said that chemists could make errors. Did this not also apply to the chemists from Limoges? The prosecutor had learned that Orfila had stated that in cases of arsenic poisoning, arsenic is not always found in the stomach, but in other organs, such as the liver. Had the Limoges experts tested anything but the stomach? As it turned out, they had not. The prosecutor insisted that Orfila himself should be called on to testify. Perhaps this move was one of desperation, for he could not have known what Orfila would say.
The defense attorney had little choice but to assent. Orfila was asked to come to Tulle, and he agreed. Lafarge’s body was exhumed and samples of other organs were taken from it. (The stomach was found in the drawer of a court clerk, where it had decayed considerably.) Nonetheless, Orfila set up the Marsh apparatus and set to work under the eyes of several of the other experts who had testified. He continued through the night of September 13 and appeared the next morning before a hushed court to give his opinion. Orfila declared that there “is arsenic in the body of Lafarge.” 26 Anticipating objections, he said that the poison did not come from the reagents with which he tested the material, nor from the earth around the coffin, which he had also tested. He further testified that the arsenic he found was not the arsenic compound that was naturally found in the human body. Only the bones, the scientist explained, have minute amounts of arsenic. The presiding judge asked the key question: “Do you consider the amount of arsenic obtained by you to be sufficient to indicate murder by poisoning?” 27
Orfila went further than that. He declared that considering the victim’s symptoms, there was no doubt he died from the administration of arsenic. The jury found Marie guilty on the toxicological evidence. She collapsed and had to be carried to her cell, where she sobbed for two days.
Unswayed by Marie’s noble lineage, the judge sentenced her to hard labor for life and public exposure in the pillory at Tulle. Marie’s appeal was rejected, but King Louis-Philippe reduced his cousin’s sentence to life imprisonment.
Sent to Montpelier Prison, Marie corresponded with Alexandre Dumas and wrote her memoirs, along with a tragedy, The Lost Woman. In 1852, after she contracted tuberculosis, Napoleon III released her from jail. She died six months later in a spa in the Pyrenees, without ever having confessed to the murder. Her memoirs merely added to the legend — which many still believed at her death — that she was a martyr.
The Lafarge case was a milestone in criminological history, establishing the standard for expert scientific testimony. Chemists would subsequently develop tests for other kinds of poisons, and trial attorneys for both sides would continue to call dueling experts, as they do to this day.
iii
During the Christmas season of 1869, human remains began turning up all over Paris. Body parts wrapped in packages appeared in different areas of the city — a human thighbone was discovered in the rue Jacob, and a thigh with flesh still attached, wrapped in a sweater, was pulled out of the Seine. These gruesome discoveries were taken to the Paris mortuary, where it was concluded that they came from the same person. But there was no clue to the identity of the victim of such a hideous crime.
On December 19, the proprietor of a riverside laundry near the Quai Valmy told the police that he had seen a short, stout man with a mustache taking pieces of meat from a large hamper and scattering them in the Seine. On being asked what he was doing, the man claimed that he was “baiting the river” so that he could catch fish on the following day. The laundryman