Maria Popescu

Mari (oar) a Popescu , also Popesco (born September 4, 1919 in Bucharest ; † November 3, 2004 in the canton of Valais ) was the victim of a Swiss judicial scandal . Some see her example as characteristic of the interweaving of masculine notions of feminine subjectivity and their influence on social practices, in this case the objectivity of justice .

Life before trial

Maria Popescu grew up in Romania as the daughter of an oil magnate, her mother came from an old Romanian family. In 1942 she came to Switzerland with her husband, the son of the Romanian politician and newspaper publisher Stelian Popescu , whom she had married against her father's will. She lived first in Bern , then in Geneva and continued to associate with the wealthy on an international level who were unaffected by the upheavals and hardships of the Second World War.

Process and consequences

Popescu was arrested in Geneva in 1945 and charged with the poisoning of her mother-in-law Lelia Popescu (died June 26, 1945) and her housekeeper Lina Mory (died July 25, 1945), as well as the attempted poisoning of her father-in-law Stelian Popescu (former Justice Minister Carols ). The coroner François Naville contributed significantly to her indictment as a "distracted professor". After a process that was spectacular by Swiss standards, in which her guilt could not be clearly proven, she was sentenced to life imprisonment . The prosecutor General Charles Cornu from Geneva represented the indictment .

Popescu spent the time in the Saint-Antoine prison in Geneva, in the Hindelbank prison and in two other institutions. In 1950 and 1953 she obtained revisions of the procedure, but was rejected. In 1957 she was pardoned by the Geneva Grand Council at the urging of Yves Maître , who later became Pierre Jaccoud 's opponent . In the foreword to her biography, the publisher Paul Haupt wrote: Popescu experienced the “naked ... brutal reality [...] of our orderly Swiss righteousness. An individual case? Certainly ” .

Wrong chain of evidence, dubious expertise

Before 1945 there had been no case of veronal poisoning in the history of forensic medicine , since veronal poisoning , which was very bitter, difficult to dissolve and therefore not suitable for injection, was poorly suited for murder. The charges against Maria Popescu were based on veronal. The accusation was that Popescu had that with veronal

• Maid Lina Mory poisoned
• poisoned her mother-in-law who died of breast cancer in hospital
• want to poison her father-in-law Stelian Popescu with the alleged intestinal flu tablets Lacteol , which in fact contained veronal .

There were no clear motives for murder. Inheritance intentions were assumed as the motif, although in view of Maria Popescu's childlessness such were hopeless from the start under Romanian law. In 1953, Anton Gordonoff stated that the maid, mother-in-law and father-in-law regularly took the sleeping pill Quadronox , which was widely used at the time and which mainly consisted of veronal. He thus subsequently proved that the evidence of veronal in the alleged victims was not evidence of murder.

Alleged attempted murder of Stelian Popescu

On July 25, 1945, Stelian Popescu filed a lawsuit against his daughter-in-law Maria in Geneva. She tried to poison him with alleged intestinal flu tablets Lacteol, which in reality contained "veronal". On Maria's advice, he took five of the tablets after lunch on July 13th. In the afternoon he kept a few appointments and had dinner with a good appetite, but then a strange fatigue set in and he let the doctor Dr. "M." come. He then informed him of his suspicions against Maria. The doctor did not view the patient's condition as alarming and only made one vitamin B injection. At the patient's request, however, he admitted the patient to the clinic, where traces of veronal were found in the urine.

Alleged murder of Lina Mory

On July 23, 1945, Maria Popescu herself reported to the police that the house maid Lina Mory was lying groaning in her locked room. Mory was found dying, with superficial cuts on her right wrist from a razor blade found on the carpet. The investigators forgot to take the fingerprints on the blade. Lina Mory was left-handed and the key was on the inside door - evidence of suicide - but the investigators didn't care, as veronal traces were again found in Lina's urine. Lina Mory suffered from depression, her father was an alcoholic. From a letter from a Romanian who was only “put into a drawer” in court, it was also found that Lina was pregnant at the time, although Maria Popescu's husband was possibly the father. He probably already had an illegitimate child from a Parisian mistress .

Alleged murder of Stelian Popescu's wife

In addition, the mother-in-law Maria Popescus , who had recently died in the hospital from breast cancer , was exhumed. Again traces of veronal were found in her urine. At first there was no motive why Maria Popescu should have hastened the death of her dying mother-in-law. A nurse ("S.") was found who considered it likely that Maria had injected her mother-in-law's vein with poison during a visit to the hospital because the transfusion needle had been displaced afterwards. François Naville, who took up this accusation, overlooked the fact that veronal would have been insoluble and therefore not injectable at all. In addition, in such a case the poison could simply have been added to the infusion. The syringe, the "murder weapon", was not found. These circumstances were ignored by the jury.

reception

A historical project at the University of Basel looked at what ideas about the "delinquent woman" were "widespread in the past and what the expectations of 'normal femininity' looked like":

“Popescu, who, in his own words, was often portrayed as a“ particularly reprehensible and dangerous woman ”, is not an isolated case. The portrayals of delinquent women mostly reveal the entanglements between the ideas of female subjectivity and normalizing practices of formalization. "

Autobiography

• German: From Wednesday to Wednesday. Translation by Bee Juker . Paul Haupt Verlag , 221 pages, Bern 1961
• French: Entre deux mercredis . Editions de la Baconnière, 1961. 247 pages.
• Romanian: Între două miercuri . Corint publishing house, translation by Rodica Vintilă. 251 pages 2018 ISBN 978-606-793-390-1

Secondary literature

• Jean-Noël Cuénod : De l'Assassinat de Sissi à l'Acquittement de Mikhaïlov, Un siècle de Procès à Genève. Tribune de Genève, 1999.
• Yolanda Eminescu : Din Istoria Marilor Procese. Junimea, Iasi 1992.
• Jacques Antoine , Pierre Bellemare : Les Dossiers Extraordinaires de Pierre Bellemare. Fayard, 1976.
• William Matthey-Claudet: Une ereur judiciaire? L 'Affaire Popesco. Self-published , 1947.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Dominique Grisard. From criminals . Uni Nova. Science magazine of the University of Basel, 91, July 2002.
2. ↑ Website about the magazine Universul ( Memento of the original from September 24, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in romanian. 
3. ↑ ^{a b} The case of Maria Popescu (or the absent-minded professor). In: Hans Martin Sutermeister . Summa Iniuria: A pitaval of errors of justice - five hundred cases of human error in the area of ​​justice from a criminal and social psychological point of view. Elfenau, Basel 1976, pp. 40-47.
4. ^ Paul Haupt : Foreword by the publisher. In: Maria Popescu: From Wednesday to Wednesday: My life for 11½ years in Swiss women's prisons. Translation by Bee Juker. Haupt, Bern 1961, pp. 5-6.

Web links

• Literature by and about Maria Popescu in the catalog of the German National Library
• Jean-Noël Cuénod . Maria Popesco échappe aux geôles perpétuelles: avait-elle commis trois empoisonnements mortels? La belle Roumaine n'a jamais avoué. Grands procès. Tribune de Genève , 2008.