Club Thomas Goold

Vere Thomas "St. Leger" Goold (* 2. October 1853 in Waterford , Ireland ; † 8. September 1909 on the Devil's Island , French Guiana ) was an Irish tennis player and the first winner of the Irish Championships , the later because murder was sentenced .

Life

Originally from a noble family, Goold won the first edition of the Irish tennis championships in Dublin in 1879 . In the same year he took part in the Wimbledon Championships , but lost in the final to Pastor John Hartley . In 1883 he ended his tennis career and got alcohol and drug problems .

In 1891 he married Marie Giraudin from France , with whom he moved into a furnished villa in London's West End . Due to an extravagant lifestyle, the couple ran into financial difficulties in early 1902. When the landlord tried to confront the Goolds about outstanding rent payments, they sold the furniture and fled to Montreal, Canada . While Marie was opening a tailor shop there, Vere returned to England and founded a laundry chain in Liverpool .

Cover of the August 25, 1907 magazine " Le Petit Journal " about the murder

At the beginning of 1907, the couple went to Monte Carlo with Marie's niece Isabelle . Assuming that they had a secure gaming system, they soon gambled away their money in the casinos there and borrowed 1,000 francs and several pieces of jewelry from the Danish widow Emma Liven . When she visited the Goolds in their hotel on August 4, 1907 and asked for the money back, they were killed by Vere and Marie. The two then fled to Marseille after stowing the body in a suitcase. They planned to flee further to London , but a porter at the train station became aware of the smell pouring out of the suitcase. He called the police, who discovered the body and arrested Vere and Marie shortly afterwards. A court sentenced the couple in December 1907 for collective murder.

Vere Goold was banished to Devil's Island for life imprisonment , where he committed suicide in 1909. His wife, whose death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment a month after the trial, died in prison of typhus in 1914 .

literature

• M. Sheridan: Murder in Monte Carlo. Poolbeg Press, Dublin 2011, ISBN 978-1-84223-471-6 .

swell

• B. Collins: History of Tennis. 2nd Edition. New Chapter Press, New York 2010, ISBN 978-0-942257-70-0 , p. 691.
• Declan Cashin: How Ireland's first Wimbledon hero died a convicted killer. In: Irish Independent . June 23, 2011, accessed September 26, 2012 . 
• Donal Lynch: The Irish murderer of Monte Carlo. In: Irish Independent. January 1, 2012, accessed September 26, 2012 .