The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection (38 page)

After the first day, the newspapers generally gave Meg high marks for successfully parrying de Valles’s questions, more by theatrics than by the veracity of her answers. One reporter dubbed her “the Sarah Bernhardt of the Assises.”
¹⁰

The examination resumed on the following day, and Meg seemed to have gained confidence. De Valles had discovered that a detective novel,
Les cing doigts de Birouk
(
The Five Fingers of Birouk
), described a crime very similar to the one in Meg’s account of the murders — black-robed burglars and all. The police had found several books by the same author, Louis Ulback, in the Steinheils’ library. Did Meg enjoy those novels? She replied that she did, but had never read that particular one.

Various inconsistencies in Meg’s story were noted, and she attributed them all to police incompetence. The cotton gag that she said she had spit out to cry for help was found to have no traces of saliva on it. Meg responded that the police had probably picked up the wrong piece of cotton. Why would the burglars strangle Meg’s mother and husband with pieces of cord they had cut from a supply in the kitchen? “They told you all of this?” Meg responded as if surprised, drawing laughter from the spectators.
¹¹
Irritated at Meg’s riposte, de Valles suggested that she was indeed a cold-hearted killer, for she had murdered her own mother to cover up the fact that her intended victim was her husband. Meg was waiting for this and launched into an extended soliloquy about the love she had for her mother.

So it went for three days of examination. Questions from the judge were answered by passionate speeches from Meg. Even the fact that Meg had placed the incriminating pearl in Couillard’s case, something she could hardly deny, was brushed aside. “I have been punished enough for that!” she said. “I have been in prison a year for having placed Couillard there for a day.”
¹²

The prosecutor, Trouard-Riolle, now took command of the case. He was to call some eighty witnesses to testify, most of them experts of various sorts reporting on the physical evidence. Bertillon, for instance, said that he had found ninety-one fingerprints at the crime scene, but that only a fraction of these were clear enough to identify. Much of this testimony was tedious for the jury to sit through.

When the prosecutor summoned young Couillard, however, the jurors sat up to listen. Now serving his required military service and hence decked out in a handsome uniform, Couillard had become a minor celebrity. Vendors outside the court sold postcards with his picture. Nevertheless he made a crucial error describing the scene when he discovered Meg in bed, recalling now that she had been covered by a blanket. This differed from the deposition he had originally given the police, in which he stated that she had been nearly naked. The defense attorney made much of the discrepancy, and Couillard merely replied that his original deposition had been wrong.

He added that Meg had at first told him not to talk about the crime to anyone. In the lively procedure of the French judicial system, Meg was permitted to respond immediately that he was lying. She further demanded to know about the letter he had stolen. Couillard responded that he had forgotten to mail it and countered with the accusation that Meg had instructed him to claim, falsely, that the thieves had stolen some draperies — draperies that never existed. Meg again hotly denied it. On this indecisive note, Couillard was excused.

Three days later, with little testimony of note in the interim, Mariette Wolff came to the stand. There were great expectations: she was privy to all Meg’s secrets and, since Meg had accused Mariette’s son, had no reason to be discreet. But Mariette disappointed the prosecutor by suddenly developing a shockingly poor memory.

De Valles once more took over the questioning, leading Mariette through the events leading up to the night of the murders. Nearly all of his questions drew the answer, “I don’t remember.” Even the night of November 25–26, when Meg had accused Mariette’s son of murder, had now become serene in the housekeeper’s recollection. Astonishingly, she claimed no one had told her that Meg had accused her son of the murders. Frustrated, the prosecutor dismissed her.

Following her to the stand was Alexander Wolff, the very person who had been the object of Meg’s reckless accusations. Did he feel resentment toward her? Not at all, he responded, for it had been an exciting time for him. Clinging to straws, the prosecutor asked if it was true that his sister had provided a watchdog to protect the Steinheil house, and that Meg had sent it away just before the murders. Actually, Alexander said, it was he who had taken the dog back to his sister’s: it was a very poor watchdog and would have been of no use. Clearly, for some reason, Meg’s housekeeper and her son were not going to incriminate her.

Thwarted, the prosecutor began to call some of Meg’s lovers. Chouanard, the most generous of them, had gone on a long trip to avoid testifying. De Balincourt, who had helped Meg home from the Métro, was reluctant to say how deep their involvement had been. Finally, Borderel, the man Meg had supposedly killed her husband in order to marry, came to the stand. As he entered, he turned to Meg and gave her a look that told the spectators he still loved her. He was a sympathetic figure, neither an aristocrat nor a wealthy businessman using power to attract young women, but instead a respectable middle-aged widower who was in search of someone to console him for the loss of his wife. He described an idyllic affair, but one that he had told Meg from the start could not end in marriage. She had seemed content with that. After the murder, when the newspapers had revealed Borderel as Meg’s lover, it had shocked his family and neighbors (he was the mayor of a village in the Ardennes), but he had come now to tell the truth as a matter of honor.

He was the last witness for the prosecution and could easily have been the first for the defense, because the impression he left was completely sympathetic to Meg. Her attorney, Aubin, added to that by immediately presenting character witnesses. Relatives testified to Meg’s love for her mother and said that she had never tried to get an advance on her inheritance, indicating that she was not in need of money. Aubin then called André Paisant, an attorney who had been a good friend of the Steinheils. He gave a portrait of their marriage that moved many of the spectators to tears. Adolphe Steinheil was an “almost childlike” man, a dreamer, “melancholic, disappointed, beaten, sitting in his big armchair, watching the fall of night.” Meg brought joy into his life, “gave him courage, was his inspiration, pawned her jewelry to pay for his extravagances.”
¹³
When Paisant first learned about Meg’s lovers, his initial response was to condemn her, but over time his disapproval turned to pity. Hoping to leave the jury with that emotion in mind, Aubin closed his presentation.

The prosecutor, Trouard-Riolle, began his summation with a detailed recounting of the evidence. To most observers, the jury appeared bored and unimpressed. However, as Trouard-Riolle reached the end of a long day, he hinted at spectacular revelations to come. Some of the technical testimony had indicated that it was nearly impossible for one person to have committed the murders. Meg must have had an accomplice, and the prosecutor implied that he would indicate who that person had been on the following day.

The next morning, Trouard-Riolle never specifically named his suspect, but as he gradually filled in the description of her, everyone realized it was Mariette Wolff. As he took the jury through the supposed events of the night of the murder, the prosecutor said that Meg and “this woman” planned to catch Mme. Japy asleep in her bed, tie and gag her, strangle Steinheil, and then tie Meg to the bed. Meg’s mother would then be able to confirm Meg’s story of burglars. Unfortunately, the gag forced her dentures down her throat and killed her. Trouard-Riolle left the jury with a powerful argument: If there really had been burglar-murderers in the house, why did they not murder Meg and eliminate any possible witness? And why had the clock stopped? Meg had stopped it herself because, Trouard-Riolle declared, like the tell-tale heart of the murder victim in Poe’s famous story, it made a noise in the silent house that she could not bear to listen to.

The following day, November 13, Aubin gave the summary for the defense. He pointed out the holes in the prosecution’s case, notably that there had been no motive at all for Meg to kill her mother. Nor, he added, was there any convincing reason for her to murder her husband. Meg “was his idol — alas, the idol also of others… she was radiant and adorned with all the charms, a bouquet of smiles. Everyone wanted to pluck from the bouquet. So, she was unfaithful.”
¹⁴
But she was not a murderess.

Aubin pointed out that Mme. Japy would surely have been aware of it if Meg and her female accomplice had bound her. How then could she provide an alibi for them? What really happened, he suggested, was that thieves broke into the house, expecting to find it empty, and then killed Steinheil when he discovered them. Leaving Meg alive, they thought, would throw suspicion on her — and it did.

As his trump card, Aubin brought Meg’s daughter, Marthe, to the courtroom for the first time in the trial, seating her behind her mother. Aubin signaled for her to rise: “I call to my side,” he said, “this pure and noble child. I want her close to me, stretching her arms appealingly toward you and defending her mother! These two unfortunate beings, how many tears they have already shed, how many tears they will still shed! Ah, gentlemen of the jury, give them the means to console one another and to forget together.”
¹⁵

Meg responded to the judge’s invitation to make a final statement by dissolving into tears. That was probably her best argument.

In the French system of justice, a unanimous verdict was not required. Seven to five would be enough to convict; six to six would mean acquittal. However, when the jury deliberated till midnight without reaching a verdict, courtroom observers felt it a bad sign for Meg. De Valles asked them to continue their discussions. On three occasions they asked him to explain the penalties for different kinds of verdicts.

At last, at 1:30 in the morning of November 14, the jurors filed into the courtroom. Despite the hour, many spectators had remained to hear the denouement of the drama, and they were not disappointed: the jury announced that it had found Meg not guilty of all charges. Amid the cheers, she fainted.

vi

Meg escaped her notoriety by moving to England, but those who believed in her innocence, as well as those who argued for her guilt, continued to speculate on what really happened at the impasse Ronsin that murderous Saturday night in 1908. Her own memoirs, published in 1912, shed no further light on the crime.

In 1925, however, a man whose credentials as a criminologist could not be questioned published his own reconstruction of the case. This was Dr. Edmond Locard, now director of the forensic laboratory at Lyons. His book
Le crime et les criminels
had a chapter on methods of strangulation, and he used the Steinheil case to show how one method (manual) might be mistaken for a second (using a cord). In doing so, Locard went much further than simply describing the causes of death of Steinheil and Mme. Japy — he reconstructed the case in such detail that people assumed he had access to hitherto secret sources.

Locard portrayed Meg, in that phase of her life, as little better than a high-class streetwalker, saying that she picked up lovers at the Métro exits regularly, pretending to twist “her too-delicate ankle” when a wealthy-looking man came near. Accepting his gallant offer to see her home, she would lead him to the impasse Ronsin, where she made it clear that her husband would look the other way if a romance began. De Balincourt had testified at the trial that this was how he met Meg, and certainly she might have repeated the performance with others.

Locard asked rhetorically, “Is it in this way, or by some intermediary, that one day she makes the acquaintance of an aristocratic foreigner?”
¹⁶
He suggested that Meg cultivated this mysterious figure and from time to time obtained money from him. One day, in need of more, Meg calls him to come to the house, but she is not “able to comply with his passionate demands. He feels that he has been duped. Fury. Clamour.” Then Steinheil “makes the mistake of poking his worried nose into the business,”
¹⁷
further arousing the suspicions of the aristocratic foreigner that this is a blackmail scheme. There is a scuffle, and the foreigner takes Steinheil by the throat, only to discover that the artist is even weaker than he looks. His larynx crushed, Steinheil falls to the floor, where the police find him later. As for Meg’s unfortunate mother, she investigates the noises she hears, and on seeing Steinheil’s body, she swallows her dentures, choking to death.

The foreigner, who Locard later revealed was “a grand-duke, a close relative of the Tsar,”
¹⁸
has to be protected from scandal. Meg calls “a very high official, who arrives, duly organizes the staging of the scene, and discreetly leaves.”
¹⁹
He was the person that a neighbor saw leaving the impasse Ronsin, hurrying to a waiting car. Benjamin F. Martin, a modern interpreter of the case, suggests that the high French official was none other than Magistrate Leydet, who then requested appointment as the
juge d’instruction
in the case so that he could manage the investigation to avoid incriminating the foreigner.

In this scenario, Meg had to be willing to endure imprisonment and risk conviction at trial in order to protect this powerful man. Just as she had earlier been discreet about the death of President Faure, so she repeated the performance this time. Had she resisted, the wheels of justice would have ground her up. Locard suggested that she was rewarded by a deliberately botched investigation that left too much doubt in the jurors’ minds to convict her.