The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection (17 page)

When Lacassagne was called in on this case, he was forty-six years old and had already made several contributions to the field of forensic medicine. He was in fact to become known as the “father of forensic science.” As a young man he had served as an army physician in North Africa, which gave him a chance to study bullet wounds. He also noted the importance of tattoos in identifying bodies.

Lacassagne combined the scientific skills of a physician with the curiosity of a policeman. He was to use both throughout his career. In 1880 he founded the Department of Forensic Science at Lyons University, where he liked to remind his students, “One must know how to doubt.”
³⁶

Doubt was distinct from ignorance. Lacassagne had started his career when morgues and sometimes even cemeteries had bell-pulls for supposedly dead people to yank in case they were still alive and had only been in a coma when death was pronounced. The normal test for life was to place a mirror or feather in front of the mouth of the body, to see if the mirror would steam or the feather move, but these methods were by no means infallible.

Lacassagne studied the significance of blotches on the body that appeared after death, deducing that blood collects at the lowest points of the body after circulation stops. If the body was moved within a certain time after death, the blood was still motile and the blotches could move, but after about twenty hours, the discoloration was permanent. He also noted that the body did not always cool at a given rate; earlier observers had generalized that the body temperature dropped one degree centigrade per hour during the first hours after death, but Lacassagne found that there were variations depending on the temperature of the environment. He also studied the onset and duration of rigor mortis, the stiffening and then relaxation of the body after life ceased. Such information was helpful in ascertaining the time of death.

Lacassagne was also the first forensic scientist to show that a bullet could be matched to a particular gun. A few months before being called in on the Gouffé case, he had studied under a microscope a bullet that had been removed from the body of a murder victim named Echallier. Lacassagne noticed that the bullet had seven longitudinal lines, or striae, and theorized that they were the result of rifling — the grooves that were made inside gun barrels to cause the bullet to spin and thus move in a more accurate path. In the Echallier case, when the suspect’s gun was fired, it produced the same seven lines as were found on the test bullet. On that basis the suspect was convicted of murder. The science of ballistics was born.

Nevertheless, when the exhumed body found at Millery was delivered to Lacassagne’s laboratory at Lyons University, he could not have been optimistic. Not only was it in a state of advanced decay, but as he told his students, “A bungled autopsy cannot be revised.”
³⁷
Though Dr. Bernard had been a student of Lacassagne’s, he certainly had botched his attempt. Lacassagne decided to concentrate his examination on the bones and the hair. The work was gruesome, for the pathologist did not have the advantages of refrigeration or latex gloves. He plunged his hands into the putrid, maggoty flesh, cutting and scraping it away until the bones were exposed. The skeleton told him a lot. He found a deformation on the right knee that would have caused the man to walk with a limp. He discovered that the victim’s right ankle had been injured as well. Family members confirmed that Gouffé had walked with a limp owing to a childhood accident.

Lacassagne agreed with the earlier pathologist’s conclusion that the cause of death had been strangulation, because there was clear damage to the thyroid cartilage. He thought, however, that it might have been manual strangulation, rather than strangulation by ligature or rope. He also disagreed with Dr. Bernard’s estimate of the victim’s age. Bernard had believed that the man was no older than forty, but Lacassagne put his age closer to fifty, which matched the forty-nine-year-old Gouffé. Lacassagne had based his estimate on the corpse’s teeth. Dental forensics were in as primitive a state as dentistry, and Lacassagne’s achievement here was another breakthrough: he judged the wear of the dentin in the teeth, the amount of tartar at the roots, and the thinness of the roots themselves to produce his estimate.

Lacassagne clinched the identification with a hair from one of Gouffé’s hairbrushes. He compared it under the microscope with a hair from the corpse, checking for hair-dye residue, which came up negative. Then he measured the thickness of the hairs and found them identical. Certain in his conclusion, Lacassagne dramatically addressed Inspector Goron: “I present you with Monsieur Gouffé!”
³⁸

“The Corpse Has Been Identified,” trumpeted the Paris newspaper
L’Intransigeant
on its front page the following day, November 22. The newspaper ran two illustrations side by side — one showing the decomposed head of the corpse and the other the face of Gouffé in life. “It Is He,” the headline crowed. Other newspapers treated their readers to the gory details and stressed the glory of French forensic medicine.
Le Petit Journal
paid tribute to Dr. Lacassagne’s skills, concluding, “The solving of the mystery of Millery demonstrates that French medicine can show criminology the way to great progress in the future. Identification of the Millery corpse is a milestone in history.”
³⁹

Goron was content for now to let the spotlight shine on someone else and to take up the next stage in the case: finding who killed Gouffé. The brother-in-law was now shown police photos of several known criminals. Goron was pleased when he identified pictures of Michel Eyraud and Gabrielle Bompard as the pair previously seen with Gouffé. On his return to Paris, Goron had found yet another witness who linked the lovers to the murdered man. But Eyraud and Bompard seemed to have dropped out of sight.

Goron was creative in his search. He hired a carpenter to make an exact copy of the rotten trunk that had been used to take the body to Lyons. Put on display at the Paris morgue, the trunk attracted some thirty-five thousand curious viewers in the first three days. Photographs of it were sent around the world. The Gouffé family offered a reward for information, and letters poured in from all over France. Soon Goron heard from a man in London who claimed that a Frenchman and his daughter, later identified as Eyraud and Bompard, had lived in his lodgings and before departing had bought a trunk like the one shown in the newspapers.

A police spy in Paris gave Goron more important details. Michel Eyraud was an army deserter and a small-time crook and, though married, had taken up with a prostitute, Gabrielle Bompard. The two of them operated the traditional badger scheme: Bompard would take a client to her apartment, and after a suitable amount of time, Eyraud would burst in, pretending to be her husband. He would threaten the john, who was usually ready to pay to get out of the situation.

The con worked well, but Eyraud was a greedy man. One of Bompard’s clients was Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé, who had foolishly let her know that he kept large sums of money in his office. Eyraud, Goron’s spy reported, had decided to kill Gouffé and take the money.

Despite massive newspaper coverage and the fact that photos of the pair were sent to police throughout Europe and North America, they managed to keep one step ahead of the law. They reached San Francisco, where Bompard met another man who fell for her charms. She ran off with the American after telling him that Eyraud planned to kill her. Jealous, Eyraud pursued the pair, tracking them from city to city.

It was not until January 1890 that Goron firmly connected with the culprits — not through detective skills, but by sheer luck. A resentful Eyraud sent him a letter, protesting his innocence and putting all the blame on “that serpent Gabrielle,” whom he accused of the murder. “The great trouble with her,” he wrote, “is that she is such a liar and also has a dozen lovers after her.”
⁴⁰

Even more astonishingly, a few days later, Gabrielle Bompard herself appeared in Goron’s office. Small, delicate, and well-dressed, she was accompanied by her new lover, who believed that she had been victimized by Eyraud. She told a racy story of greed, sex, and murder. Gouffé had been killed during an assignation at a room on the rue Tronson du Coudray south of the boulevard Haussmann. Bompard admitted that she had lured him there, but claimed that she had not been directly involved in the murder and did not know that Eyraud planned to kill the bailiff. Nevertheless, she was placed under arrest.

After Bertillon took her facial and body measurements for identification purposes, Bompard was subjected to “Monsieur Goron’s cookshop” treatment — being kept hungry and questioned day and night. Female police spies were placed in her cell to win her confidence. Eventually, she was taken to the crime scene, where the concierge immediately recognized her, causing Bompard to confess.

Bompard explained that she had brought Gouffé to her room on July 26, 1889. While she was getting him ready for a lovemaking session, she playfully tied the cord of her dressing gown around his neck. Eyraud, hiding behind a curtain, sprang into action. Using a series of pulleys he had set up earlier, he yanked the hapless victim into the air, but when the cord broke, Eyraud finished him off, strangling Gouffé with his hands.

Eyraud searched the victim’s pockets for the key to his office and stuffed the dead body into the trunk. He then coolly returned home to his wife, leaving Bompard to spend the night with the corpse. Goron, curious, asked her what the experience had been like. Her response was chilling. “You’d never guess what a funny idea came into my head! You see it was not very pleasant for me being thus
tête-à-tête
with a corpse, I couldn’t sleep. So I thought what fun it would be to go into the street and pick up some respectable gentleman from the provinces. I’d bring him up to the room, and just as he was beginning to enjoy himself say, ‘Would you like to see a bailiff?’ open the trunk suddenly and, before he could recover from his horror, run out into the street and fetch the police. Just think what a fool the respectable gentleman would have looked when the officers came!”
⁴¹

The next morning, Eyraud had gone off to the bailiff’s office, which he searched frantically. Even though the police had no trouble finding the money later, Eyraud was unsuccessful. When he heard the footsteps of a guard in the hall, he fled through a window. He returned to Bompard’s room, where the two made passionate love on the floor next to the trunk that held the corpse. In confessing to this, Bompard insisted that Eyraud had forced her to do it.

The next day the pair rented a carriage and set off for Millery, where they dumped the body in the woods and left the trunk on the banks of the Rhône River. From there they fled to Marseilles and then to England, where they took a ship to New York.

Bompard’s spectacular confession set off a feeding frenzy in the Paris press. Parisians rushed to the rue Tronson du Coudray, where the landlady charged admission to view the murder scene. When Bompard was taken back to Lyons to reenact the dumping of the body, the crowds trying to watch were so large that cavalry troops had to be called to keep order. Some people even threw flowers at the murderer, whose celebrity overcame her deeds.

Goron still had to find her accomplice. Two French detectives were sent to North America, where they followed Eyraud’s trail from New York to San Francisco and into Canada. But Eyraud managed to elude them. Meanwhile, he sent a letter to the newspaper
L’Intransigeant,
placing all the blame for the murder on Gabrielle and an unknown man.

Eyraud’s flight from justice could not last forever: his photograph was in every police station in North America, and on May 20, 1890, Cuban police arrested him while he was leaving a brothel. French detectives arrived to take him back to Paris. When their ship landed at Saint-Nazaire on June 30, a huge mob was waiting. Someone in the crowd had a parrot that had been trained to call the name Eyraud over and over. Enterprising reporters clung to the sides of the train taking the killer to Paris.

The trial opened in the Paris Cour d’Assises on December 16, 1890, and it was everything the journalists could have hoped for. Each of the accused pointed a finger at the other. Few codefendants had shown such hatred and acrimony against each other, and the demand for seats in the courtroom was so great that the chief judge personally distributed the tickets of admission to friends and influential people.

Gabrielle Bompard portrayed herself as a victim, claiming that Eyraud threatened her life if she did not cooperate with him. She had a brilliant defense lawyer, Henri Robert, who caused a stir when he claimed that his client had been raped as a child while under hypnosis and as a result was very sensitive to hypnotic suggestion. Eyraud, he claimed, had made her his slave by hypnotizing her. The burgeoning science of neurology grappled with the question of whether hypnosis was powerful enough to compel someone to commit a crime, but Robert made this a main point of Bompard’s defense.

The prosecution countered with a Dr. Brouardel, a respected medical jurist, who said that there were no known cases of crimes committed by a perpetrator under the influence of hypnosis. Three doctors appointed by the examining magistrate came to the conclusion that though Bompard might be susceptible to hypnotic suggestion, her main problem was that she was morally deficient. Robert asked that his client be put under hypnosis on the witness stand to give the truest possible account of the crime. It would have been a dramatic scene, but the judges turned down the request, since there was no precedent for it.

The outcome of the trial was never in doubt, for the evidence against the defendants was overwhelming: only the severity of the sentence was open to question. At the end of five days, the jury found both Bompard and Eyraud guilty. French courts had traditionally been lenient toward female criminals, especially attractive ones. As a result, Bompard received a twenty-year sentence at hard labor. Released early after having served only thirteen years, she published her memoirs, which sold quite well. Despite her criminal past, she retained her celebrity status and was often seen at fashionable restaurants. Alberto Santos-Dumont, the pioneer Brazilian aviator, escorted her regularly.