Marie Besnard

Marie Besnard (born August 15, 1896 in Saint-Pierre-de-Maillé , † February 14, 1980 in Loudun ) was the accused in a sensational, nine-year murder trial. She was charged with twelve homicides.

prehistory

Marie Besnard was born as the daughter of the smallholders Pierre and Marie-Louise Devaillaud in the French province of Vienne. Shortly after the First World War , Besnard married her cousin Auguste Antigny. Both moved to Château des Martîns as the caretaker couple. Antigny died in 1927. The doctor gave tuberculosis as the cause of death . In 1929 she married her second husband, Léon Besnard. Besnard owned his own house and rope factory in Loudun . The marriage remained childless. Léon Besnard died on October 25, 1947 after a brief illness. Only a few hours before his death he had confided to the postman at Louduns, Madame Pintou, that he believed he was being poisoned by his wife. Madame Pintou kept telling this suspicion until the local police finally heard it. This then initiated investigations that were the beginning of the almost 14-year-long Besnard affair . Marie Besnard's mother, eighty-seven-year-old Marie-Louise Devaillaud, who had lived in her daughter's household since 1940, died on January 16, 1949 during the police investigation. Since there was a flu epidemic in Loudun at that time , the attending physician certified it was a natural death. Marie Besnard was said to have had an extramarital relationship with a German prisoner of war named Dietz who worked on her farm since 1947. The police therefore suspected that Besnard had moved her husband and mother out of the way in order to maintain their relationship with Dietz undisturbed. In May 1949, Léon Besnard's body was exhumed and examined for poison. The assigned toxicologist Béroud found 39 mg of arsenic per kilogram of body weight in Besnard's remains. A dose indicative of fatal arsenic poisoning. A short time later, Marie-Louise Devaillaud was also exhumed. 58 mg of arsenic per kilogram of body weight were found in her. Thereupon Marie Besnard was taken into custody and gradually all deceased family members and neighbors were exhumed.

The alleged victims

Auguste Antigny, Besnard's first husband, died in 1927 at the age of 33. 60 mg of arsenic per kilogram were found in his remains. Louise Lecomte, Léon Besnard's great-aunt, died in 1938. She was over 80 at the time of her death and had given Besnard generously in her will shortly before her death . 35 mg of arsenic per kilogram was found in her corpse. In 1939 a neighbor of the Besnards, the confectioner Toussaint Rivet, died. Béroud found 18 mg of arsenic per kilogram of body weight in him. Pierre Devaillaud was buried in May 1940. He was found to be 30 mg arsenic per kilogram of body weight. In September 1940, Léon Besnard's grandmother, Mme. Gouin, died. Besnard was the sole heir. So little arsenic was found in her remains that it was insufficient to be charged with murder. Marie Besnard's father-in-law, Marcellin Besnard, died just two months later. The couple inherited 227,000 francs. The exhumed body parts contained 38 mg of arsenic per kilogram. Less than three months later Besnard's mother-in-law Marie-Louise Besnard followed her husband into death. Again Marie and Léon Besnard inherited a six-figure sum. In Marie-Louise Besnard's case, the fatal amount of arsenic was 60 mg per kilogram of body weight. In March 1941, Léon's sister Lucie was found hanged in the attic. The suicide posed some puzzles even at the time of death. Lucie Besnard had been a devout Catholic. In their remains, Béroud found 30 mg of arsenic per kilogram of body weight. Two months later, two of Léon Besnard's cousins ​​sought refuge from the German troops with their relatives. Pauline and Virginie Lalleron died surprisingly within a few days after making Marie Besnard sole heir. Pauline Lalleron had 48 mg, Virginie 24 to 30 mg arsenic per kilogram of body weight. In December 1941, Blanche Rivet, the confectioner's wife, died. After the death of her husband she had moved to the Besnards and had given them their house in return for a small pension. Mme. Rivet's remains contained 18 mg of arsenic per kilogram of body weight. León Besnard died in October 1947. Marie-Louise Devaillaud was the last victim of the series of murders in 1949.

The accusation

The first trial

The examining magistrate Pierre Roger wanted to avoid a purely circumstantial trial, but apart from Mme. Pintou there were no witnesses. Nobody had seen Marie Besnard buying arsenic. In addition, in almost no deaths there were symptoms of acute or chronic arsenic poisoning. On February 20, 1952, the trial of Marie Besnard began in Poitiers . Her attorney was Albert Gautrat, then sixty-four, a star attorney at the time. First there was a conviction for unjustifiably accepted pension payments, which Marie Besnard had acknowledged with a false name. The sentence was two years in prison and a fine of 50,000 francs. The actual process relied mainly on the arsenic finds in the exhumed corpses.

Besnard's attorney Gautrat doubted the veracity of the investigations and managed to create doubts. Thereupon a new report and new toxicologists were ordered. The Poitiers court hired four renowned toxicologists and coroners to repeat the investigation. Professors Fabre, Kohn-Abrest, Griffon and Piédelièvre needed two years for their investigations. Since no one had thought of a second exhumation after the first examinations, z. B. the thighbones of several dead have been placed in a single grave. It was impossible to determine whose bones were here. Piédelièvre took numerous soil samples from the various layers of the earth to determine how much arsenic was in the earth. Hair samples were also buried in the cemetery to determine whether arsenic from the soil migrated into the hair. The investigations underpinned Béroud's results, while Besnard's lawyer Gautrat had counter-experts work, who dealt intensively with the fundamentals of the investigation methods used by the other side. Gautrat's goal was to track down errors and scientifically not yet perfectly proven methods in order to discredit the court's appraisers as he had already done with Béroud.

The second process

On March 15, 1954, the second trial began in Bordeaux . Gautrat's tactic worked, Prof. Griffon had made a mistake in the poison analysis, which shook the court's confidence in the accuracy of the calculated amounts of poison in the victims. As early as March 31, 1954, the second trial had reached where the first trial had left off. The court approved new expert reports and released Marie Besnard on bail of 1.2 million francs until the third trial. The prosecutors won the nuclear physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie , who had received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 , as an appraiser for the public prosecutor's office. Joliot-Curie worked on the expert opinion for the Besnard trial until his death in 1958. Then his student Pierre Savel took over the work. He irrevocably confirmed that the hair of the Loudun dead contained deadly amounts of arsenic. The court was also confronted with the problem of arsenic in the cemetery soil, with the solubility of arsenic through water and soil microbes. Three experts of international repute were commissioned to finally solve this problem: Prof. René Charles Truhaut as toxicologist, Prof. Albert Demolon and, after his death, Prof. Maurice Lemoigne as microbiologist and specialist in soil research. Body parts were again exhumed and hair samples and animals were buried in the cemetery. Dead unrelated to the case were also exhumed and examined for arsenic. A large model of the cemetery was made for extensive studies of underground water movements.

The third process

After seven years of work as an expert, the third and last trial against Marie Besnard began on November 21, 1961. Once again, all the witnesses and all previous experts and counter-experts appeared in court and Gautrat tried again to discredit the new experts. Despite all the experiments, the court's appraisers were unable to conclusively prove that the arsenic did not reach the dead under any circumstances. Marie Besnard was acquitted on December 12, 1961 for lack of evidence on charges of twelve-fold poisoning.

literature

• Jacqueline Favreau-Colombier: MARIE BESNARD - La force de l'innocence (French)
• Jürgen Thorwald : The century of the detectives . Volume III: Handbook for Poisoners . 1968.
• Peter & Julia Murakami: Lexicon of Serial Killers . 10th edition. Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-548-35935-9 , p. 35 .

Film adaptations

The "Marie Besnard Case" was filmed in France in 1986. Alice Sapritch , directed by Yves-André Hubert, played the leading role . In 2006 a TV film was produced for French television under the title Marie Besnard, l'empoisonneuse .

Web links

• The Marie Besnard trial (French)