A Killer of Children
One of the most extraordinary, because so unexpected, of these female killers is Madame Jeanne Weber, née Moulinet, of whose childish victims we are assured of at least seven, although there must have been others unknown to us. Her long and successful career was based largely on luck and could not possibly be repeated today, although even so recently as 1906, the doctors in the case appear to have been even greater fools than most doctors appear in early trials when society, as yet, could not bring itself to believe that these delicate creatures could be homicidal. Also, she operated with such success largely because she operated at first within the family; and although few members of most families have any illusions about one another’s baseness, they would often prefer to suffer even a murderer or murderess to live than to truckle under the disgrace of having police and public prying into their affairs. Besides, it is almost impossible to believe that anybody whom you know intimately can be a murderer—a drunkard, a thief, a bully, a bore, an adulterer, a forger or an incendiary, yes! even these and many other eccentricities can be accepted; but surely, that man or woman with whom you have sat at table and laughed and quarrelled and played games, even made love, cannot be a killer? not really one of those practically mythical monsters who give salt to our breakfasts on Sunday in the newspapers? It was this natural human failing, this deliberate family refusal to open one’s eyes to the truth, which not only protected Jeanne but gave her the opportunities of continuing her chosen career.
The drama properly opens on March 2, 1905, although it is more than likely that other little corpses lay already buried in the past. On this March day, Jeanne called on her sister-in-law, Madame Pierre Weber, and volunteered to look after the woman’s two children while the mother went to the public wash-house, that same wash-house in which Zola’s Gervase fought her heroic battle with Virginie in L’Assommoir. Within an hour or two of her scrubbing the family clouts, she was called home by a friend with the news that her daughter, Georgette, was in convulsions. On reaching home, she found the child lying red-faced on the bed, breathing jerkily. Jeanne stood beside the bed, one hand, under the bedclothes, on the child’s chest. Soon the mother had little Georgette smiling again, out of bed, away from Jeanne, and on her lap. Then she hurried back to finish her washing and Jeanne took up the child once more. Georgette was dead before Madame Weber returned again.
It was a neighbour, watching with the open eyes of a suspicious friend untouched by family loyalties, who noted strange markings on Georgette’s throat and who pointed them out to the father. He said he would do something about it, but doubtless with indignation he silently dismissed the woman’s base suspicions of anyone in the family. The child was buried, and nine days later, her sister, little Suzanne, also died with a purple face. Again was Jeanne alone with the child and again the same shrewd neighbour noticed the tell-tale markings around the throat—a long bruise under a scarf that had been wound about it. This time the doctor was notified and he summoned the police. But the police took no action and without protest Suzanne was buried.
Two weeks later, on March 25, infant mortality again appeared in the Weber family group. Madame Leon Weber’s seven-months-old Germaine was left in Jeanne’s care while Madame Leon went shopping. Luckily, the woman’s mother was in the apartment upstairs, and hearing the baby scream, she hurried down to find Germaine with the same symptoms as her departed cousins and, of course, with Jeanne at her side. Frustrated for the moment by this interference, Jeanne waited until after lunch when she asked her sister-in-law, back from shopping and appallingly unsuspicious after her baby’s recent escape, to buy her some cheese, as she didn’t feel well enough to go out at the moment. Madame Leon returned just in time to save her child who lay in convulsions, and with Jeanne’s hand pressed on her chest. Jeanne, however, did not intend to be cheated of her pleasure for the second time. The following day, back to the attack she went and again she persuaded her sister-in-law to do her shopping for her. Now, determined not to be baulked, she acted expeditiously and when the mother came back, her child was on the point of coughing to death. This third interruption was too exasperating for the murderess to tolerate. Only after a fight was the mother able to drag her from the bed; then she rushed for salts and vinegar as possible restoratives. Again was Jeanne alone with the baby; and when the mother and a friend returned, Germaine at last lay dead.
Suspicion must have been beginning to sprout even in these simple folk and Jeanne attempted to stifle it as efficiently as she had stifled the babies—or, more probably, the joy to be found in killing the helpless had grown uncontrollable—for that night her own seven-year-old son died in almost the same way as the others. Perhaps the pleasures of killing had become an obsession that ousted mother-love and thought of retribution. Alone with her own little Marcel, Jeanne stretched out her hands . . .
She was a drunkard, and drink can lessen the will. In that lies its danger. What is long controlled may take the opportunity to escape into action when the drunkard is—to use that old and excellent phrase—‘disguised in liquor’. In Jeanne’s life we can follow the slow growth towards murder and trace it back to its sources; and drink became to her a refuge, blotting away memory while fostering resentments. But the resentments were what turned her to drink: drink did not breed the resentments; therefore it cannot be blamed for the killings any more than a doubtful book can be blamed for the harlot’s life.
The deaths of her own children had first set Jeanne on the road to murdering other women’s children. One of eight born in semi-poverty, the daughter of a fisherman in a small French village, she had left home at the age of fourteen to earn her living as a servant. After her going, the family never saw or heard of her again until she had made her name notorious. No sign was there of the future murderess in the obedient little servant; and soon she began a wandering existence, shifting from job to job in a hopeless search for the perfect job, until she reached Paris and married Marcel Weber. Now followed a few years of happiness. It would have seemed then that the discontented girl would settle into a commonplace wife; and as one need not doubt she would have done had her two daughters not died, leaving her with an only son. At this disaster, Jeanne took to drinking. Happiness fled with those deaths and there is no reason whatever to believe that she had murdered these children. Only, after this cruelty from heaven, she looked with hating eyes on life, intent upon revenge, her rancorous jealousies of luckier mothers heated by wine and raw spirits—it is the era, remember, of Zola’s mighty L’Assommoir—and she was remarked on as often falling into melancholy fits of brooding. And in these fits, brooding on God’s injustice, she saw her sisters-in-law fat and happy mothers with their babies. Therefore those babes of theirs had to die.
Revenge first provoked pleasure in the deed. After having begun to kill, the impulse to kill again became overpowering until Jeanne had to feel and watch even her own son under her hand. Beyond all control had now become this terrible itch; and when Madame Charles Weber arrived from Charenton to visit her relations and brought with her her ten-months-old Maurice, Jeanne set again to work. While lunching with Madame Charles and Madame Pierre, she sent Madame Pierre to buy some wine and Madame Charles to buy her some needles. Once she was alone with the child, Jeanne became busy; and the doctor, summoned by the child’s hysterical mother, noticed blackish markings around the throat.
Now could the family no longer hide from the truth. The coincidence of so many infants’ deaths occurring only when Jeanne was alone with the children made them wonder whether she might not be a murderess. Even the doctor became suspicious. He sent the dead body to a hospital that a post-mortem might determine the cause of death.
Jeanne was arrested and on January 29, 1906, she stood her trial, only to be acquitted because of the footling medical evidence. The bodies of the other two children, Georgette and Suzanne, had been exhumed and examined. Yet in the witness-stand the doctor, the expert witness, airily dismissed the possibility of there having been any murder. He was an important man in his profession, a professor of the faculty of medicine in Paris, but he scoffed away the idea that these children could have been strangled. Altogether, seventeen other doctors also swore that they could find no proofs of murder; and amidst applause from the court, Jeanne was unloosed, her husband leaping over benches to clasp her in his arms.
“I didn’t kill them,” she cried to him. “Say that you believe me now!”
Even murder can grow monotonous to the reader, although never to murderer or murderess, when it repeats itself exactly, as it usually does, the murderer being very conservative and distrustful of new methods of work. Nevertheless, we must follow Jeanne to her own terrible end, so perfect a specimen is she of this type of killer.
Next she appears as a housekeeper the following year at Chambon in the family of the Bavouzets who had three children, two girls and a boy. The boy, aged seven, died, and Jeanne grumbled at the doctor because, had he come earlier, she said, he might have saved the child; and when the doctor remarked on the curious fact that the boy was wearing a clean nightgown which had obviously not been slept in, Jeanne confessed that she had taken away the soiled one because the boy had vomited while dying. Suspecting the truth, the doctor reported to the police; and again Jeanne stood her trial; and again was she freed, thanks to the conflicting medical evidence.
A certain philanthropic M. Blonjean had been so touched by her martyrdom that he set her in a child-murderess’s paradise, in a children’s infirmary, where she was surrounded by tempting subjects, like a vixen in a chicken-run. Soon out of a job she was again, having been caught just in time with her hands around a child’s throat. For the sake of the infirmary’s reputation, the sentimental good man hushed the scandal, nobody liking to confess that, when compos mentis, he had appointed such a notorious woman to such a post.
One cannot believe that the pleasures of killing were waning, but, most likely, Jeanne missed the éclat of a trial and resented being pushed out like this in disgrace without any extra renown. For she went to the police, and, cunningly, confessed to only the killing of the Webers’ children. Having been acquitted of these crimes, she knew that she could not be tried for them again. So she opened her mouth and had the self-glorious satisfaction of confession, realizing before her enemies, the police, that urge which is always pressing behind the murderer’s teeth, the need to purge the soul and to relive and exult in brute achievements. Only after such a catharsis can he throw off Christian’s burden and walk with angels and trumpets into paradise.
“I want to confess,” Jeanne told the police; but she did not fully confess. Just as the drunkard, in remorse, will swear never to drink again even while he has a bottle concealed in the wardrobe, Jeanne relieved her mind and relived her acts by telling how she had slain her three nieces and nephew; beyond that, she would not talk. When the police pressed for details about later victims, she withdrew; she had not murdered them, she said. Hyde had returned to reject the miserable Jekyll, and Jeanne defied all questioning. Thus was her conflict resolved for a time: her guilt had been expressed, expiated and her conscience cleansed.
Now she was able to begin again.
In company with a young cement-worker, she travelled about the country until they reached Commercy and here her companion left her. Jeanne had noticed the landlady’s little son and her desires itched alive again. Pleading that she had a fiendishly jealous husband who, should she sleep alone, would be certain to accuse her of infidelity, she asked if she might have the boy to sleep with her.
This time she was caught beyond any possibility of rescue even by the talkative doctors in the box. A lodger at the inn heard sinister gurglings in the night and she ran into Jeanne’s bedroom to find her leaning over the little boy. Help was needed from the landlord and his wife before the woman could drag the murderess from her prey.
She had enjoyed her last debauch, save for dreams, and in the asylum in which she was confined, it was noticed that she would crook her fingers around invisible throats until at last they crooked about her own and she was found dead with dried foam on her lips. Unable to find further subjects, she had been reduced to performing on herself, for we may rest assured that was definitely not suicide in a paroxysm of remorse.
Of course Jeanne was mad. Even the specialists who examined her before her first trial suspected lunacy, although they found her calm in manner and logical in speech. Once when she fainted and, on suddenly recovering, complained of giddiness, they diagnosed her condition as hysteria; but hysteria—from the Greek word for “womb”—is an elastic-sided word and can mean very much or very little. They put her neurotic behaviour down to grief at her children’s deaths—here, without understanding why, doubtless they were correct—and to that pre-Freudian all-comprehensive mumbo jumbo for any woman who wasn’t feeling well: “gynaecological disorders”, which meant precisely nothing.
Yes, Jeanne was mad; but so are all mass-murderers when we set them beside the norm of sanity—a relative term which, for each of us, has its own moveable point—and so can be classified any genius in any form of self-expression. But what interests us in Jeanne is her inability to learn, her cravings proving stronger even than her self-protective instinct. Typical is this of these creatures of bad habits, repeating, until crushed by an outraged society, their automatic deeds as of a machine.
At least she did not bother to conceal, even from herself, that she killed for the pleasure of killing, and that is as unusual in murderesses as it is in murderers.
—P.L.