10 Most Evil Women of France Who Changed the Course of History

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2 days later, Hog found a similar bag on the staircase, half full of sand, and said it smelled of blood.

Weber’s explanation was that the bags contained canned food.

Police investigations turned up a critical detail.

Weber had rented a power saw the day before Hedier’s disappearance.

That saw was later found in the trunk of Hedier’s own car.

Forensic analysis detected traces of human protein on it.

Meanwhile, a human torso had been recovered from the Marn River, sealed inside a suitcase, the head, arms, and legs removed with the kind of precision that investigators found difficult to attribute to chance.

The torso was never officially confirmed as head ears.

He remains officially listed as a missing person to this day.

The absence of a confirmed body was one of several things that made the case against Weber circumstantial.

But the circumstantial evidence was dense enough that the prosecution pushed for life.

Imprisonment.

The trial ran for 6 weeks, beginning in January 1991.

It became the most talked about case in France at the time, second only in the news to the Gulf War.

Weber fought every charge.

She dismissed the neighbor as a spy.

She denied knowing anything about the power saw.

She told the jury she was not capable of what they were accusing her of.

When the closing arguments ended and she addressed the jury directly, telling them she was not the demon they had made her out to be, she collapsed to the floor.

The courtroom watched.

Paramedics came.

She was back the next morning.

The 12- member jury took only a few hours to deliver their verdict.

Weber was acquitted of poisoning Fixard.

The exumation had yielded no chemical proof, but she was found guilty of the murder of Bernard Hedier.

The sentence was 20 years.

The woman who had asked her neighbor how to use an electric carving knife, who had rented a power saw, who had loaded garbage bags into her car before sunrise, walked out of the courtroom as a convicted murderer.

Hedier’s torso, if it was his, still lies in some French municipal record as an unidentified body.

His head was never found.

His arms were never found.

And the blue bags, wherever they went, were never definitively accounted for.

What made Simone Weber’s case so deeply unsettling to those who followed, it was not just the crime itself, but the contrast between her appearance and what she was alleged to have done.

French journalists noted repeatedly that she could have been anyone’s grandmother.

She sat in the dock looking placid, domestic, wounded by the accusations.

The courtroom performance was so convincing that even some reporters who had covered every day of the trial admitted to moments of doubt.

That gap between the image of a woman and what a woman is capable of is what France spent 6 weeks staring at.

The jury ultimately decided that the evidence pointed in one direction regardless of how Weber looked.

Bernard Hedier disappeared in 1985.

He has not been found since.

She asked her neighbor how to use an electric carving knife.

She rented a power saw the next morning.

Before dawn, she loaded seven bags into her car.

Hedier had gone in.

He did not come out.

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Case 2, Florence Ray, October 4th, 1994, Paris, France.

She was 19 years old and studying philosophy.

By 10 pm that night, for people were dead.

Florence Ray was born on August 25th, 1975.

By the autumn of 1994, she was 19 years old, enrolled in the philosophy program at Sciencespur in Paris and living with her boyfriend Audrey Mopin in a squat inside an abandoned bajgeoa house in Nantair.

Mopin was 22, a dropout from the medical faculty, and the two of them had built an interior world from anarchist and situationist literature, guideboard, the society of the spectacle, writings that treated modern society as a spectacle designed to pacify the population.

French intelligence, the Rensamment’s general, had already taken notice of their involvement with an underground political group and placed them under observation.

What happened on the night of October 4th, 1994 turned them from a footnote in a surveillance file into the center of a national story.

At 9:25 in the evening, Ray and Mopin climbed the perimeter fence of the Port Depant car pound on the northeastern edge of Paris.

The plan, as investigators later pieced it together, was to steal the service firearms of the two police officers on night duty inside and neutralize them with their own handcuffs.

It was a plan that collapsed almost immediately.

The officers did not carry handcuffs.

Ray and Mopin sprayed them with tear gas and fled.

Outside the compound, they boarded a taxi idling at a red light.

The driver was Amadu Dio, 49 years old, originally from Guinea, working the night shift.

A passenger, Gor Mete, was already in the back seat.

At gunpoint, they ordered Dio to drive to the place Dar Republic.

The incident might have ended there.

A failed robbery, an armed carjacking, serious but not catastrophic.

What changed? Everything happened 10 minutes later.

Arriving at the place Da Republic, Dio spotted a police patrol carrying three officers returning to their station after the end of their shift.

Dio panicked and rammed the patrol car at full speed, badly injuring one officer.

The other two jumped out.

Ray and Mopin opened fire.

Lauron Gerard, 25 years old, and Terry Maymard, 30 years old, were killed on the pavement.

During the gunfight, Mopin also shot Dio.

Mete had escaped from the taxi and was lying flat on the ground.

Amidu Dio died from his wound.

He had done nothing except try to signal for help.

Ray and Mopin hijacked a second car, a Renault driven by Jackie Ben Simon, and ordered him at gunpoint to drive toward the Bad Vincens.

Police pursuit began.

As the chase reached the outskirts of Vincens’s, Mopin fired through the rear window and killed motorcycle patrolman guy Jacob, 37 years old.

At a roadblock ahead, Mopin told Ben Simon not to stop or he would kill him.

Ben Simon pulled the handbrake 100 m before the barrier.

The car spun three times.

Ben Simon was thrown clear, likely saving his own life.

Police opened fire on the Renault.

Mopin was fatally wounded.

He died the following evening at the Kremlin by Cedar Hospital.

Before her arrest, Florence Ray walked to him and kissed him.

She showed no emotion.

She would not discuss what had happened throughout her entire interrogation.

Rey was held on remand at the Maison De’ar defe at Flurry Marogis for 4 years before her trial began on September 17th, 1998.

During those years, she read extensively, participated in amateur theater, and told no one, not her lawyers, not her family, not the prison staff, anything about what had happened or why.

At trial, she sat impassively through weeks of testimony.

Her own lawyer rebuked her in court for her indifference.

10 witnesses gave contradictory accounts.

The central legal question was whether Rey had fired any of the fatal shots herself.

Ballistic evidence proved that Mopin had fired all of them.

On that basis, after 5 hours of deliberation, the jury found her guilty as an accomplice rather than as a principal.

She was sentenced to 20 years.

In certain circles in Paris, Rey became something of a romantic figure after her arrest.

a young woman who had taken her radical politics to their logical conclusion, who had refused to explain herself, who remained silent in the face of a system she had already declared her contempt for.

Punk bands dedicated songs to her.

A writer published a sonnet in her name.

The anarchist group Chumba referenced her at live performances.

None of these tributes paused for very long on Amadu Dio, who had been driving home from his night shift, or on Lauron Gerard and Terry Maymard, who had been ending their duty, or on Guy Jacob, whose motorcycle was still on the road when the bullet found him.

For men, for lives, for absences that no manifesto addressed.

Florence Ray was released quietly on May 3rd, 2009, having benefited from a remission of sentence.

She had studied history and geography during her incarceration and worked as a waitress in the prison cafeteria.

Her release was discreet.

No press conference, no statement, no memoir.

Unlike other notorious criminals who have converted their notoriety into book deals and documentary appearances, Rey remained silent.

She has given no interviews.

She has made no public statements.

Whatever she believed in October 1994, whatever framework had made the events of that night seem like a meaningful act rather than a catastrophe, she has kept entirely to herself.

The four men killed that night left behind families who were not given the same silence.

Their grief was not voluntary.

She kissed him before they arrested her.

She said nothing in interrogation, nothing at trial, nothing after release for people died that night.

Their silence was not a choice.

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Case three.

Christine Malevra 1997 to 1998.

Mantis Lajoli Paris.

She said she was helping them die.

The families said their loved ones never asked.

On July 25th, 1998, Christine Malevra attempted to take her own life.

When she survived, she confessed to police that she had helped approximately 30 terminally ill patients die at the Francois Kenna Hospital in Mantis Lajali on the outskirts of Paris between early 1997 and May 1998.

She was 28 years old.

She was a nurse.

And with that confession, she ignited one of the most contentious medical legal debates in French history.

One that divided the country between those who saw her as an angel of mercy and those who saw her as something far more troubling.

The victims, if they are called that, were all between 72 and 88 years old and all in the terminal phase of incurable lung diseases.

Malevra initially said she had acted at their request or at the request of their families to end unbearable suffering.

She described it as a compassionate act performed in the shadows of a system that had no legal framework for mercy killing.

France, a predominantly Catholic country, did not recognize euthanasia.

The Netherlands and Belgium had already legalized it under stringent conditions.

Switzerland allowed assisted suicide.

France had nothing.

Whatever Malevra had done, and the question of exactly what she had done would take years and three separate proceedings to even partially answer, she had done it without any legal protection and without any transparent process.

The investigation that followed her arrest did not support the narrative of saintly compassion that some in the press had initially offered.

A psychiatric report concluded that Malevra had a morbid fascination with illness and death and that she had been fully aware of what she was doing.

A statistical analysis of mortality in the nemology department revealed that patients were three times more likely to die when Malevro was on duty.

Hospital management had initiated an internal inquiry before police were even involved.

And most significantly, the families of several of the deceased came forward to say that their relatives had never expressed any wish to die, let alone asked a nurse to help them do it.

These families pressed charges.

They sat through the trial.

They disputed every characterization of their loved ones as willing participants.

Malevra recanted, revised, and contradicted herself repeatedly between her arrest and her trial.

The initial confession of 30 cases shrank to four, then to two requested deaths and two accidents, then to a denial of responsibility for three of the seven cases eventually charged.

Her lawyers argued that the first confession had been made under the influence of neurolleptic medication and could not be trusted.

The prosecution argued that the shifting accounts reflected not genuine uncertainty but deliberate evasion.

The presiding judge overseeing two weeks of testimony had to navigate a case in which the central question, did these patients want to die? Could not be definitively answered because the patients themselves were dead.

The verdict delivered on January 30th, 2003 after 4 hours of deliberation was guilty on six of the seven murder charges.

Malevra was sentenced to 10 years.

An appeal extended the sentence to 12 years.

She was permanently banned from nursing.

She sat stone-faced as the ruling was read, then began to cry.

Her lawyer, Charles Libman, stood outside the court and said she was neither the Madonna of Euthanasia nor a serial killer, but simply a nurse who had let her compassion rule her.

The prosecuting lawyer, Alan Junalin, told the court before the verdict that these cases shattered the legend of Christine Malevra as an angel of mercy.

He was referring to the families who had sat through the proceedings, insisting their relatives had never asked to die.

Malevra was released in 2007, having served the majority of her sentence.

The debate her case ignited did not dissolve with her release.

In 2005, France passed the Leonetti law, which permitted doctors to withdraw life sustaining treatment at a patient’s request, not euthanasia, but a step toward acknowledging that some deaths could be managed rather than simply extended.

In 2024, a further bill on assisted dying was introduced in the French Parliament.

Whether any of this would have happened without the Maleva case forcing the conversation into the open is impossible to say.

What is certain is that the conversation France needed to have about how it handled the end of life was happening in secret in hospital corridors behind closed curtains and that one nurse for whatever combination of compassion and pathology drove her made it impossible to keep ignoring.

The six people confirmed to have been killed by Maleva at the Francois Kenna Hospital between 1997 and 1998 were between 72 and 88 years old.

They had lung diseases.

They were dying.

They were also, according to their families, still living their deaths on their own terms until someone decided the terms for them.

That decision made alone, without consent, without transparency, without any of the safeguards that genuine euthanasia advocates had spent decades arguing for is what the court ultimately judged.

Not compassion, not mercy, the act itself, and who authorized it.

The Malevra case exposed something that had long been operating in French hospitals behind closed curtains.

Pruthia advocacy groups, which had spent years arguing for a transparent, legally regulated right to die, were careful to distance themselves from her.

Their position was precisely the opposite of what she had done.

They wanted documented consent, independent oversight, and a clear legal process.

Malevra had acted alone in secret with no documentation and no verification.

Whatever her intentions, the mechanism was indistinguishable from murder.

The 2005 Leonetti law, which allowed doctors to withdraw life sustaining treatment at a patients explicit request, was in part a response to the chaos that cases like hers had revealed.

She said they asked her, their families said they never did.

Both statements were made by people who loved them.

Only one set of people was still alive to speak.

Case four, Dominique Katres 1989 to 2006.

Viller Oertry Nord.

The new owners were digging a pool in the garden.

They found two bodies in plastic bags.

Then police found six more.

Villerotry is a village of fewer than 700 people in the Nord department of Northern France.

the kind of place where most of the population commutes to larger nearby towns and where the same families have lived for generations.

In the summer of 2010, a couple who had recently purchased a house on Rudifress began digging up the garden to install a swimming pool.

What they found brought the entire village to a standstill.

Sealed plastic bags containing the skeletal remains of two infants.

They called the police immediately.

Police traced the property to its previous owners, a couple named Pierre Marie and Dominique Katres, who had sold the house some years earlier after the death of Dominique’s parents, who had originally owned it.

When officers contacted the Katr’s family and asked Dominique about the discovery, she did not hesitate.

She admitted immediately that the bodies belonged to two children she had given birth to.

Then she told them there were six more in the garage of their current home on St.

DRI sealed inside plastic bags and hidden under various objects in a fuel storage tank.

Eight children, eight separate pregnancies, eight births, and eight deaths spanning 17 years from approximately 1989 to 2006 or 2007.

Dominique Catres was 45 years old at the time of her arrest.

She was a nursing assistant.

She and her husband Pierre Marie, a carpenter, had two adult daughters who were in their 20s and had children of their own.

Pierre Marie was a visible member of the community.

He had served on the village council for years, was described by the mayor as a decent, well-meaning type and was regarded as significantly more sociable than his wife.

Dominique, by contrast, was described by neighbors as shy, rarely leaving the house.

A woman who played little part in the life of the village.

Her weight was significant.

People who knew her said her obesity had apparently concealed each of the pregnancies from those around her, including she maintained her husband.

Prosecutor Eric Valiant told a press conference that Dominique had been straightforward in her cooperation with investigators.

She had admitted knowing she was pregnant each time.

She had admitted killing each infant at or immediately after birth by smothering and she had provided a clear explanation for why she did not want any more children and she did not want to see a doctor about contraception.

The reason she avoided doctors, she explained, was that her first pregnancy had been traumatic because of her size and she had been determined never to go through medical involvement in pregnancy again.

Rather than seek any medical help, she had delivered each child alone and killed it immediately afterward, placing the body in a sealed bag and keeping it hidden.

Pierre Marie Catres was initially questioned and briefly detained on suspicion of being complicit or failing to report the crimes.

He was released without charge.

He maintained that he had never known about any of the pregnancies or deaths, a claim that Dominique confirmed.

She said she had hidden everything from him entirely.

His lawyer said the revelation had completely destroyed his world.

His daughters, Virginia and Emiline, came to court to support their mother on the day charges were formally announced and told a local newspaper that what they had learned was incomprehensible, that their mother had always been caring and devoted, that she regularly looked after her grandchildren, and that none of it made any sense to them.

The village priest placed eight candles in front of the Katra’s house, one for each child.

France had seen multiple infanticide cases before.

AFP noted that at least a dozen had come to light since 1984.

In March 2010, just months before the Katras discovery, another French woman had been sentenced to 15 years for killing six of her newborns between 2000 and 2007.

In 1984, a couple in the Kore department had been jailed for killing seven infants over 7 years.

The phenomenon of concealed multiple infanticide was not new.

What distinguished the Katras case was the number eight and the duration 17 years during which the pregnancies and deaths had gone entirely undetected in a small village where people were generally known to one another.

Experts who commented on the case cited the psychological concept of pregnancy denial as relevant to understanding how such crimes are possible.

A condition in which a woman refuses to consciously register or process the reality of her own pregnancy.

But Katra’s own account complicated that framework.

She told investigators she had known about every pregnancy.

There was no denial in the clinical sense.

There was only a decision made eight times across 17 years in private that the pregnancy would end the same way each time.

Her lawyer, Frank Burton, said she was psychologically distressed, that she was relieved to have finally told the truth, and that she had been plagued by what she had done for a long time.

The village priest said he was thinking of all the children in the world who did not ask to be born and were thrown away a few hours later.

He said he could not comprehend it.

The eight children who were born in that house on Rudifessen and in the house on Centur Dupri between 1989 and 2006 have no names on any record.

They were not registered.

They were not buried.

They were kept in plastic bags in a fuel tank and in a garden until the summer of 2010 when new owners of a house wanted to put in a pool and started to dig.

The village of Viller Zotry had without knowing it lived alongside all of this for 17 years.

Eight candles on the doorstep.

Eight bags.

Eight times she was alone.

And the village of 655 people never knew.

Not once across 17 years.

These stories are difficult to hear because they are true.

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Case five.

Ivonne Chevolier, August 12th, 1951, Orleans, France.

She shot her war hero husband five times.

The jury acquitted her in 45 minutes.

Pierre Chevalier was by the summer of 1951 of the most admired men in France.

He had joined the free French resistance at the very beginning of the occupation, becoming a leading figure of the underground movement in Orleans.

While most of his countrymen had accepted defeat, he received the Legion Donor and the Croy Deg Gar for his wartime heroism.

After liberation, he was elected mayor of Orleans and then to the National Assembly, becoming a political protetéé of Renee Pleven.

In August 1951, he was appointed Minister of Education, Youth, and Athletics, a cabinet position that seemed to confirm everything his trajectory had promised.

He was handsome, socially confident, and wellspoken.

He was also for some years by that point treating his wife with a contempt that had become an open secret among those who knew them.

Ivonne Rouso had been a nurse when she met Pierre at the hospital in Orleans in 1935.

She was a farmer’s daughter, unpolished, plain in the way that the French press would later describe with particular cruelty.

She had moved in with Pierre weeks after they met.

They married in 1939.

She bore him two sons during the war years.

Matthew in 1940, Thugle in 1945.

While Pierre built his political career in Paris, Ivonne stayed in Orleans with the children.

She attempted over several years to make herself worthy of the world Pierre was moving in.

Reading about art and literature, visiting fashionable salons, buying better clothes, trying to follow his political conversations.

Pierre remained cold.

He eventually told her directly, “You disgust me.

” He began sleeping in the study.

He stopped coming home most nights.

In the spring of 1951, Ivonne received an anonymous letter suggesting her husband had a lover.

Searching his jackets, she found a crumpled love letter signed Janette.

She identified the writer immediately as Gene Perau, her neighbor, a striking red-haired woman 15 years younger than her husband, wife of a wealthy department store owner, known in their social circle for a string of affairs.

The affair between Pierre and Gene had apparently been going on since 1950 and was Ivonne discovered common knowledge in both Orleans and Paris.

She traveled to the National Assembly to confront her husband and was turned away by an usher who had standing orders not to admit her.

She confronted Gene Perro directly.

The meeting was acrimonious and resolved nothing.

She took the boys to the coast hoping distance would bring Pierre back to his family.

It did not.

On her return, she swallowed a handful of pills in a half-hearted suicide attempt and survived.

She then went to a police station, applied for a handgun license on the grounds that her husband’s political prominence required her protection, obtained the permit, visited a gun shop, and bought a MAB 7.

65 mm semi-automatic pistol with 25 rounds of ammunition.

On August 12th, 1951, Pierre stopped in Orleans on the way to his first public engagement as minister to change his clothes.

Ivonne followed him to the dressing room and made one final attempt to save the marriage.

Pleading, arguing, falling to her knees, Pierre told her for the first time directly that he wanted a divorce and intended to marry Gene Perau.

Ivonne fled the room, retrieved the pistol from the linen closet, returned, and threatened to shoot herself.

Pierre told her to go ahead, but to wait until he had left the room.

She shot him instead four times in quick succession, hitting him in the chest, forearm, thigh, and chin.

She then walked downstairs, led her 10-year-old son, Matthew, who had come running at the sound of the shots, back to the maid and said nothing was the matter.

She returned upstairs.

After a brief interval, she fired a fifth and final shot into Pierre’s back as he lay dying.

Then she called the Orleans police station and said, “My husband needs you urgently.

” She was in a black morning dress when the Jearmms arrived.

The trial held in Reams in November 1952 after a failed attempt to reduce the public spectacle became one of the great French cultural events of the postwar era.

The American journalist Ben Bradley, then working as a Paris correspondent, described the French press coverage as unlike anything he had seen.

Reporters, psychiatrists, novelists, Saab sisters, all throwing caution to the wind.

The proceedings hinged in large part on the French penal code’s crime of passion provision, a Napoleonic era remnant that absolved from punishment any man who killed his wife upon finding her in bed with another man.

The roles here were reversed, but the public instinctively applied the same logic.

A woman had been betrayed, humiliated, and driven to the breaking point by a man who had told her she disgusted him.

The trial offered theatrical moments that the French press consumed with fervor.

Gene Perau arrived in court as though it were a film set, impeccably dressed, proudly unflapable despite hissing from the gallery.

When asked if she was ashamed of having an affair as a married mother of three, she replied firmly, “Not at all.

” Leon Perau, her cuckled husband, told the court he had found Pierre to be his favorite among his wife’s lovers.

The gallery burst into laughter.

A psychiatrist testified that Avon had retained the emotional mentality of a teenager in love and suffered from social, physical, and intellectual inferiority complexes.

The judge addressed her with respectful warmth throughout.

The prosecutor sounded by the end more like a defense attorney.

After 45 minutes of deliberation, the seven-man jury returned, “Not guilty.

” Thousands had gathered outside the courthouse chanting for her freedom.

The crowd roared.

Ivonne Chevier rejoined her sons at her family’s farm.

The Catholic Church granted her absolution, an important appendage for a devout woman.

But the notoriety followed her.

She could not resume a normal life in France.

Under the advice of her priests and family, she eventually moved to French New Guinea in West Africa, where she worked for years as a volunteer nurse in a hospital for the poor, devoting herself to people who needed her in ways that Pierre never had.

She died in obscurity in the 1970s.

Far from Orleans, far from the trial that had made her famous, far from the dressing room where Five Shots had ended a marriage that had already been over for years.

He told her she disgusted him.

He told her to shoot herself, but to wait until he left the room.

She shot him instead.

The jury took 45 minutes.

The crowd chanted for her outside.

She spent the rest of her life as a nurse for the poor alone.

Case six, Maris de Brinvvils, 1666 to 1673, Paris, France.

She practiced poisoning on hospital patients before using it on her father and brothers.

Marie Maline Margarite de Aubrey was born in Paris in 1630, the daughter of Drew D.

Aubrey, one of the senior civil officers of the city.

Contemporary accounts describe her as a pretty much courted woman with a fascinating air of childlike innocence.

An impression that would serve her well for the better part of 15 years during which she killed at least three members of her own family and poisoned an unknown number of charity patients in Paris hospitals as a form of practice.

She is remembered as one of the most methodical poisoners in European history and her trial in 1676 launched a scandal that implicated hundreds of members of the French aristocracy and reached into the inner circle of King Louis I 14th himself.

The story begins with her husband’s friend Goden de St.

Croy, a cavalry officer with expensive tastes, a bad reputation, and a talent for chemistry.

The mares became his mistress.

The affair created a public scandal and her father diabs to have St.

Croy imprisoned in the Bastile on Electra Deache.

The year St.

Croy spent in the Bastile was for the purposes of what came next deeply consequential.

His cellmate was an Italian poisoner named Exeli who taught him the science of slow acting undetectable poisons.

When St.

Croy was released.

He and the mares had both a motive, revenge on her father, and a method.

What distinguished the mares from a simple poisoner was her approach to preparation.

Before attempting to kill anyone whose death would benefit her, she needed to test her formulas under conditions that would tell her how quickly they worked, in what doses, and whether they would produce symptoms that a physician might identify.

She found her test subjects in the charity hospitals of Paris, where she went regularly under the guise of philanthropic work, visiting the sick, bringing food and comfort, being seen as a generous and Christian woman.

The poor who came to those hospitals seeking her charity received instead graduated doses of the compounds she and St.

Croy had prepared.

How many died as a result of these experiments is not precisely known.

Estimates range from 50 to several times that number.

None of them were told what they were being given.

Satisfied with her results, the mares poisoned her father in February 1666.

The death raised some suspicion.

A post-mortem suggested unusual circumstances, but no accusation was made.

In 1670, with the assistance of a servant named Lashos, who was brought into the conspiracy, she poisoned both of her brothers, Antoine and Francois Diab.

The family fortune passed progressively to the Mares.

A third sibling, a sister named Theres, was the next intended target.

Before that plan could be executed, St.

Croy died unexpectedly of natural causes in 1672.

Because he had no heirs, police were called to inventory his possessions.

Among them, they found documents and letters that implicated the mares and lash directly.

Lose was arrested, tortured, confessed in full, and executed by being broken alive on the wheel, one of the most agonizing forms of execution in the French legal arsenal.

The mares fled.

She traveled to England, then Germany, and finally took refuge in a convent in Leech, which she likely believed would provide ecclesiastical sanctuary.

French authorities sent a police emissary disguised as a priest to coax her out.

The deception worked.

She was brought back to Paris.

Among her personal papers, investigators found a detailed written account of her crimes in her own hand, a document she had apparently compiled for reasons that remain unclear.

She attempted suicide after her capture.

The attempt failed.

At her trial, she was convicted on all charges.

On July 17th, 1676, she was subjected to the water cure, forced to swallow 16 pints of water in a form of torture designed to extract any remaining confession and was then beheaded.

Her body was burned.

The consequences of the Marqueesa’s trial extended far beyond her own execution.

The details that emerged, the hospital experiments, the systematic poisoning of relatives for inheritance, the involvement of an underground network of chemists and suppliers produced a wave of fear across Parisian society.

Louis the 14th himself became convinced that he was at risk of being poisoned and ordered food tasters to accompany every meal.

The investigation that followed conducted by police chief Gabriel Darraini through a special court called the chamber ardon implicated 442 suspects resulted in 218 arrests and produced 36 executions.

Among those named were members of the highest aristocracy including the king’s own mistress Madame Deontispan who was alleged to have purchased aphrodesiacs and commissioned black masses to secure the king’s affections.

The court was dissolved in 1682 partly because the implications had become too politically dangerous to pursue.

What the mares de Brinvilliars left behind was not just a body count but a cultural legacy of suspicion.

After her execution, Parisian hostesses watched their guests more carefully.

Aristocrats who had previously trusted their household staff reconsidered.

The word poison acquired new weight in social settings where inheritance was involved.

A neighbor who offered tea at the wrong moment could find the gesture interpreted through a new and sinister lens.

The affair of the poisons that followed her trial shaped French law, French social paranoia, and French literary culture for decades.

Alexander Duma wrote about her.

Robert Browning imagined her inner life in verse.

She appears in operas and novels and historical thrillers.

The woman with the fascinating air of childlike innocence became the archetype of the most dangerous kind of killer.

One who looked at every moment like the last person anyone would suspect.

She visited the hospitals to help the poor.

She was generous, devout, visible.

She was also testing her poisons on the people who came to her for charity.

When she was satisfied with the results, she went home to her family.

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Which case from this episode has stayed with you? Case 7.

Gene Weber, 1905 to 1908, France.

She was tried three times and acquitted three times.

The fourth time she was caught with her hands around a child’s throat.

Gene Weber was born in a small fishing village in northern France in October 1874.

She left home for Paris at the age of 14, worked various menial jobs, married in 1893, and by 1905 had lost two of her three children and was drinking heavily, living in a run-down tenement with her husband and her surviving 7-year-old son.

What began on March 2nd, 1905 when she was babysitting for her sister-in-law would make her one of the most disturbing figures in French criminal history.

Not simply because of what she did, but because of how many times the French legal and medical system looked directly at the evidence and decided it was not enough.

On March 2nd, she was watching two of her sister-in-law’s children when 18-month-old Geette suddenly fell ill and died.

Strange bruises on her neck were noted by the examining physician and then dismissed.

Weber was welcomed back to babysit 9 days later.

2-year-old Suzanne did not survive the visit.

A doctor blamed unexplained convulsions.

On March 25th, Weber was babysitting for her brother when his 7-year-old daughter Germaine suffered a sudden choking episode with visible red marks on her throat.

The child survived that day.

The following day, Weber returned and Germaine died.

Dtheria was listed as the cause.

For days later, Weber’s own son, Marcel, died in circumstances that the examining physician attributed to the same epidemic.

Once again, the marks on the throat were noted.

Once again, they were explained away.

April 5th, 1905 was the day the pattern became impossible to ignore entirely.

Weber invited two sisters-in-law to dinner and remained at home with her 10-year-old nephew Maurice while the women went shopping.

They returned unexpectedly to find Maurice gasping on the bed, his throat covered in bruises and Weber standing over him with what witnesses described as a crazed expression on her face.

This time charges were filed.

Weber’s trial opened in January 1906.

The prosecution alleged eight murders.

Weber was defended by Henry Robert, one of the most brilliant defense lawyers in France, who constructed an image of a grieving mother crushed by coincidence and medical misfortune.

The jury, reluctant, as juries often are, to believe the worst of a woman who had lost her own children, acquitted her on February 6th, 1906.

14 months later, she surfaced in a new town under a new name.

A physician summoned to the home of a peasant named Bevuzit was greeted at the door by a babysitter calling herself Metam Molinette who led him to the bed where 9-year-old Agugust Bevet lay dead, his throat badly bruised.

Cause of death, convulsions.

On May 4th, 1907, Madame Molinette was identified as Gene Weber.

Henry Robert was engaged again.

Weber was held for trial and released in December 1907 after a second autopsy attributed the boy’s death to typhoid.

She had been acquitted again, this time without even reaching a jury verdict.

Weber then disappeared from public view, resurfacing as a hospital orderly in Faulenbalt, then as a worker in a children’s home in Orville run by people who believed the courts had wronged an innocent woman.

Within a week at the children’s home, she was caught in the act of strangling a child.

The owners, embarrassed by their own naivity, dismissed her and suppressed the incident entirely.

Back in Paris, she was arrested for vagrancy and briefly held in the asylum at Nter.

Doctors there pronounced her sane and released her.

She drifted into prostitution and eventually took up with a common law husband.

On May 8th, 1908, they settled in an inn in the town of Commerce.

At the inn, Weber told the inkeeper and his wife that she was afraid to sleep alone and asked if their 10-year-old son, Marcel, could share her room.

The parents agreed for the first night.

She made the same request the second night.

The boy was reluctant, but his parents persuaded him.

That night, a woman sleeping in the adjacent room heard strange sounds, smothered sobs, and what she described as screaming.

She alerted the inkeeper and his wife, and together they opened the door to Weber’s room.

Marcel Porro lay dead in the bed, his head thrown back, his eyes protruding, his tongue bitten and bleeding.

Weber was lying, apparently asleep beside the body, one arm around it, her nightc clothes stained with blood.

Three bloodstained handkerchiefs knotted tightly were found in the bed.

The inkeeper had to punch Weber three times in the face before she would release the dead boy’s body.

This time there was no aqu quiddle.

Weber was charged with murder and held for trial, but the legal outcome was not a conviction in the traditional sense.

On October 25th, 1908, she was declared criminally insane and committed to the asylum at Marville.

She survived 2 years there before strangling herself manually, an act that required a degree of sustained physical force that left the asylum staff shaken.

She was credited with at least 10 murders.

The true number, given the deaths that were never properly investigated and the children’s home incident that was never reported, is almost certainly higher.

10 children, including three of her own, had died in her presence over the course of 3 years.

The French legal system had returned her to the community twice.

The community had returned her to the children twice, and each time the result was the same.

The Gene Weber case became a landmark in forensic history for a reason that had nothing to do with the crimes themselves.

It demonstrated at enormous cost what happens when expert witnesses allow cultural assumptions to override physical evidence.

In every one of the early cases, the marks on the children’s throats were noted and then explained away.

Doctors who should have said strangulation wrote dtheria, convulsions, typhoid.

Each alternative diagnosis required a greater stretch of probability than the one before it.

The medical community in France spent years afterward using the Weber case as an argument for standardizing the protocols around unexplained child deaths.

Three trials, three acquitt, then an inn in commercy.

A boy who did not want to go.

A father who punched her three times before she let go.

By then it was already over.

Case 8.

Charlotte Corde.

July 13th, 1793.

Paris, France.

She bought a knife, wrote her explanation, and walked into his bathroom.

For days later, she was guillotined.

Marian Charlotte Decord Dearmont left the city of Ken on July 9th, 1793, carrying a copy of Plutarch’s parallel lives under her arm.

She was 24 years old, the daughter of a minor noble family, a fifth generation descendant of the playwright Pierre Corna, educated at a convent in Ken where she had read extensively in the Aby’s library.

She had been living with a cousin since 1791 and had during the increasingly radical course of the French Revolution aligned herself with the Gerandon faction, the moderate Republicans who opposed the escalating violence being driven by the Jacabins and their allies.

She had watched the September massacres of 1792 in which more than a thousand prisoners had been killed in Paris jails over several days with horror.

She held one man above all others responsible.

Jean Paul Morat.

Morat was the most radical of the Jacaban journalists.

A physician turned political agitator whose newspaper Lami DuPel had been calling for mass executions of the revolution’s enemies since 1789.

He had survived persecution, exile, and periods of hiding in the Paris sewers, where he had contracted the debilitating skin disease that now confined him largely to a medicinal bath.

From that bath, he continued to write, to denounce, to demand that more heads fall.

Corde believed with the certainty of someone who had thought about almost nothing else for months that Morat’s death would stop the cycle of violence that without him the Jacaban terror would lose its driving engine and France could return to the moderate republican ideals she associated with the Gerandons.

She was wrong about this but she believed it completely and was prepared to die for it.

In Paris she took a room at the hotel to Providence.

She visited the Polaroidal and purchased a large kitchen knife with a 6-in blade and an ebony handle for two franks.

She wrote a long address to the French people.

The address Aux Franc Amos Dlois de laakes explaining her reasoning and justifying what she was about to do.

She went first to Morat’s house on the morning of July 13th and was turned away.

She returned that evening with a note claiming she had information about a Gerandon conspiracy in Ken that Morat would want to know about.

Despite his companion Simone’s objections, Morat admitted her.

He was in his bath as usual.

A board laid across it serving as a writing surface.

A vinegar soaked cloth wrapped around his head.

Corde sat beside the bath and dictated a list of Gerandon names in Ken while Morat wrote them down.

Their conversation, by accounts given at her subsequent trial, lasted approximately 15 minutes.

Then she reached into her clothing, drew out the knife, and drove it into his chest, piercing the lung, the aorta, and the left ventricle.

Morat called out to Simone for help, and died.

Corde made no attempt to flee.

She stood by the window until a household assistant arrived, saw what had happened, picked up a chair, and knocked her to the ground.

She was arrested on the spot, composed, and entirely calm.

Her trial before the revolutionary tribunal lasted one day.

She admitted everything.

She stated that she had acted entirely alone.

No conspiracy, no accompllices, no Gerandon direction.

When asked why she had killed Morat, she said, “I killed one man to save 100,000.

” It was a reference to Robespir’s rhetoric about the execution of Louis V 16th repurposed as a justification for political assassination.

Her lawyer argued that her calmness and composure could only be explained by political fanaticism.

The verdict was foregone.

On July 17th, 1793, 4 days after the assassination, Charlotte Corde was guillotined at the place Da Revolution.

She was dressed in the red shmese given to those convicted of parasite.

She rode in the tumbril, standing up through streets lined with crowds, rain soaking through the thin fabric, looking at a city she had never visited before and would never see again.

The executioner, Charles Henri Sansson, later wrote that he had been unable to take his eyes off her during the two hours they spent in each other’s company before the execution.

He had noted no anger, no indignation, no fear, only an extraordinary calm and he thought a genuine curiosity.

At the foot of the scaffold, she had said, “Please step aside.

I have never seen a guillotine before, and am curious to know what it looks like.

” After the blade fell, one of the day’s hired workers, a carpenter named Lro, lifted her severed head from the basket and slapped it on the cheek.

Witnesses reported that the cheek appeared to reen and that the expression on the face registered what looked like indignation.

Sansson was furious.

Lro was imprisoned for 3 months for the breach of protocol.

The moment was discussed and debated for years whether any consciousness persisted in a severed head.

Whether Corde had felt the insult.

The assassination achieved the opposite of what Corde intended.

Morat became a revolutionary martyr.

Jacqu Lewis David painted his death in the bathtub in an image that became iconic.

Busts of Morat replaced crucifixes in formerly Catholic spaces.

The anti-female stance of the Jacaban leadership intensified.

Cord’s act was used as an argument that women in politics were dangerous, that female involvement in revolutionary activity had to be curtailed.

Marie Antuinette imprisoned in the concierie was brought to trial 3 months later and guillotined in October 1793.

The terror continued.

More than 16,000 people were executed under its authority.

One of the Gerandon leaders looking at what happened to his faction after Cord’s act is said to have remarked, “She has killed us, but she is showing us how to die.

Whether she showed the revolution how to die is still debated.

Whether she stopped anything at all is not.

She wrote the explanation before she went.

She bought the knife at midday.

She was in his bathroom by evening.

For days later, the blade fell.

The terror continued without interruption.

Morat became a saint.

Charlotte Corde believed she was saving France.

History proved her wrong, but it never forgot her name.

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Case 9, Marie Besnard, 1927 to 1949.

Ludan, Vienn, 12 bodies were exumed.

11 contained arsenic.

Three trials, 11 years.

She was acquitted.

Marie Besnard was born in Ludan, France in 1896.

The only child of a comfortably situated family, educated at a convent school.

Remembered by some classmates as somewhat vicious and by others as merely reserved.

She married her cousin Agugust Antiggney in 1920.

He died in 1927 officially of tuberculosis though the formal cause of death was later revised to pury.

She married Leon Besnard the following year.

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