Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [55]
As soon as Voirbo learned of the butcher’s death, he hurried to Macé to report. He was astonished when Macé placed him under arrest. A search of Voirbo’s pockets revealed that Macé was just in time. Voirbo had a false passport and a ticket for steamship passage to the United States on the following day. He was to have left for the port of Le Havre that very afternoon.
Taken before the juge d’instruction, Voirbo was defiant. He refused to be photographed, making faces so that capturing an image was difficult. Macé knew that he was dealing with a clever man and went looking for more proof. He visited Voirbo’s young wife, Adélia, who had brought a dowry of fifteen thousand francs to her marriage. Pale and delicate, she struck Macé as naive. Before meeting Voirbo, she had planned to enter a convent and become a nun. Expressing shock that her husband had been arrested, she told Macé that the dowry and some Italian stocks belonging to Voirbo were kept in a strongbox. But when Macé asked her to open it, she discovered that it was empty. Searching the premises, the detective found in Voirbo’s workshop items that seemed strange for a tailor: huge sharpened shears, heavy flatirons, a metal mallet, and a large butcher’s cleaver. There was also an old iron spoon that had been used for melting lead. Finally, Macé found some cord very much like that which had been used to tie the bundles found in Lampon’s well.
Voirbo’s cellar yielded more. The detective noticed that the bung on one of the two casks of wine was higher than on the other. He removed it and discovered a string attached. He drew up from the barrel a tin cylinder. When he broke it open, he found the Italian securities for which Bodasse had been killed. There was only one missing — the one Voirbo had used to make his final rent payment on his former room.
Macé had a fair idea of where and how Bodasse had been murdered; now he set out to re-create the scene of the crime to prove his hunch. Scouring the crime scene as a source of clues was one of Vidocq’s ideas. Later, Bertillon would take extensive photographs of crime scenes and measure them as carefully as he measured suspects’ faces. But Macé’s experiment produced its own spectacular result, one that made such examinations a regular part of the investigation of violent crimes. Collecting Voirbo and several officers from the station, he took them to Voirbo’s former room in the rue Mazarine. With the help of the concierge, Macé arranged it exactly as it had been when Voirbo lived there. Given the small space, he realized that Voirbo would have had to dismember the body on the table in the middle of the room. He noticed that the tiled floor had a sharp slope that ended under the bed.
With a theatrical flourish, Macé picked up a carafe of water. “I notice a slope in the floor. Now, if a body had been cut up on a table here in the center of the room, the effusion of blood would have been great, and the fluid must have followed this slope. Any other fluid thrown down here must follow the same direction. I will empty this jug on the floor and see what happens!” 30 With that, he poured out the water on the tiles. Everyone present watched it gather in a pool beneath the bed. Voirbo remained tight-lipped as Macé ordered that the tiles there be removed. As each tile came up, dried bloodstains could clearly be seen on the sides and underneath.
Realizing that the game was up, Voirbo broke down and confessed. He had needed money to show his fiancée in order to prove that he would be an equal partner in the marriage. Bodasse was a miser who hoarded his money, and he refused to lend it to Voirbo. On December 13, 1868, Voirbo had lured Bodasse to his apartment, battered him unconscious with a flatiron, and then slit his throat. Afterward,