Word: arsenic
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...July morning in 1949, a police commissaire in the town of Loudun, north of Poitiers, knocked on the door of Marie Besnard, a dowdy, 52-year-old widow, and ordered her to come along. The charge: that she had poisoned with arsenic her mother, father, two husbands, father-in-law, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, grandmother-in-law, two cousins, great-aunt, and two close friends. Last week, after twelve years and three trials, one of the century's most intricate murder cases-and one of the longest-came...
...gossips had it otherwise. But only after the death of Marie's 78-year-old mother 15 months later did the police begin to take the rumors seriously. Exhuming the body of Léon Besnard, they found it to contain a heavy dose of arsenic. The state took 31 months to build its case. Townspeople recalled that Marie had once recommended arsenic to an unhappily married friend as a substitute for a hard-to-get divorce and that Léon had asked friends to have an autopsy performed if he died suddenly. Postmistress Pintou flatly accused Marie...
...Marie's lawyer quickly shattered the state's case by disproving Dr. Beroud's contention that he could tell arsenic from antimony with the naked eye. Adjourning the trial, the judge sent Marie Besnard back to "preventive detention," appointed a panel of three new experts. They spent two years re-examining the bodies brought up from Loudun's cemetery, eliminated five more corpses from the list of victims...
...Stewart and Joshua Logan, helped start the University Players and hit the big time after he directed Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt in Robert Sherwood's Idiot's Delight (1936) and in Jean Giradoux's Amphitryon 38 (1937), went on -to stage Life with Father (1939), Arsenic and Old Lace (1941), Finian's Rainbow (1947), and The Great Sebastians (1956); in Manhattan...
Waving to the crowd, shaking hands, kissing his friends, ebullient Arsenic Lacson, 47, marched bouncily into city hall last week to take the oath of office as mayor of Manila (pop. 2,000,000). He was the first Manila mayor ever elected to a third term. As usual, dark glasses were perched on his broken nose, but, instead of his customary open shirt, Lacson was soberly clad in a blue suit and maroon tie. In a 35-minute speech he promised Manila land-reclamation projects, bigger parks, new farmers' markets and bus terminals. Typically, he could not resist taking...