Word: besnard
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...typewriter. Originally, magistrates were recruited from men of substance anxious to perform civic duty. Today, the underpaid magistrature has become the refuge of law graduates who fear failure as lawyers, and the juge d'instruction is the lowest rung on the judicial ladder. In the case of Marie Besnard, accused poisoner of 13 relatives and friends, the juge d'instruction was a 26-year-old, newly promoted from clerk, who never visited the scene of the crime, sent out to the local grocery for canning jars to hold the viscera of the 13 alleged victims, and the jars...
Then came the payoff. In Amsterdam last week, Albert Besnard, a naval affairs editor, of the daily Algemeen Handelsblad, read Le Monde's "document" and thought it had a vaguely familiar ring. Digging into his closet, Besnard found some old copies of the Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute. In the September 1950 issue he found an article by Commander Anthony Talerico, U.S.N., entitled "Sea of Decision." Almost word for word, many parts of it were identical with the so-called "Fechteter report." Instead of being a state paper, the arguments were the hazy theorizing of an unknown junior...
Judge Pierre Roger then ordered the bodies of Marie's first husband and other relatives exhumed and analyzed. One by one, as the weeks went by, the reports came in: Auguste Antigny, first husband of Marie Besnard, died 1927, overdose of arsenic; Madame Leconte, a cousin, died 1939, arsenic; Madame Rivet, a friend, died 1939, arsenic; Marcellin Besnard, a father-in-law, died 1940, arsenic; Marie Louise Davailland, a sister-in-law, died 1940, arsenic; Monsieur Rivet, died 1941, arsenic; Alice Bodin, a sister-in-law, died 1941, arsenic; Marie Louise Besnard, a mother-in-law, died 1941, arsenic...
Outside the gloomy Pierre-Levée prison in Poitiers, where Marie Besnard awaited trial, her dapper attorney Henry de Cluzeau offered what was perhaps the only possible defense. "In this country of good wines and fine living," said he, "one might possibly conceive of one murder, two murders, even three murders. But eleven murders? Preposterous...