Marilyn Z. Tomlins

Sept. 23, 2010

An excerpt from the opening chapters of Marilyn Z. Tomlins’s Die in Paris, published in the United States in September of 2010 by Raider Publishing International. The book is available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com and borders.com.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

In the early evening of Saturday, March 11, 1944, the telephone rang on the desk of the duty officer at the Porte Maillot police station house. Until that moment, Rue le Sueur in Paris’ elegant sixteenth arrondissement had made it into the news just once. That was in April 1912. That month, the French singer and actress, Léontine Pauline Aubart, from Number 17, had set sail from Southampton for New York with her lover, Benjamin Guggenheim, but she had returned to Rue le Sueur, alone and grieving. The ship she and her Ben had boarded in Southampton for the Atlantic crossing was the Titanic. Guggenheim had gone down with the ship.

Rue le Sueur would yet again be in the news.

On the phone was Jacques Marçais, a retired clerk. Jacques and Andrée, his wife, lived in an apartment at Number 22 Rue le Sueur. He was calling to report that for the past six days pestilential smoke has been pouring from the chimney of a townhouse across the street.

The duty officer did not understand why someone would think that a smoking chimney needed investigating. In 1938, world war had broken out and France had capitulated to the enemy – Nazi Germany – and, since June 1940, when the Germans had occupied northern France, which included Paris, they’d been imposing frequent power cuts on the Parisians.  It might have been spring, but it was still cold in Paris, and the Parisians had to light fires for heat. Consequently, in just about every Paris living room, a fire was roaring, and, from every Paris chimney, poured smoke.

Jacques explained. It was the chimney of an uninhabited house, and that was certainly not normal. The duty officer promised to send a patrolman over as soon as possible.

Jan. 20, 2010 Updated May 21, 2010

Tony Musulin

 It’s always about the money – but was it this time? No one had heard of security van driver Tony Musulin until he drove off with $16.7 million – France’s biggest robbery ever – without having even uttered one threatening word.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

As any French cop will tell you, the weeks before a great festive occasion – Christmas, Easter, Mothers’ Day – robbers are active people.  They target any place where there ought to be large amounts of cash – supermarkets, jewelry stores, gold bullion dealers, post offices, banks, and security vans. Always, they use guns as a means of persuasion – from ordinary hand-held pistols to Russian AK47s or Israeli Uzis, but when it comes to security vans, their favorite way of getting to the money is to blast their way through the armored steel with rocket-propelled grenades; the latter are easily obtained these days from former Communist Bloc countries.

Thursday, November 5, Christmas little over a month away, television and radio newsrooms in France hastily prepared a Breaking News item. A Loomis security van had disappeared.  So too one of the van’s three guards: The driver.

Nov. 19, 2009 Updated Nov. 7, 2011

André Bamberski

For 27 years the heartbroken André Bamberski kept an eye on the fugitive serial rapist who murdered his 14-year-old daughter. Then he arranged a vigilante kidnapping to deliver the murderer to the police. 

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins 

In the early hours of the morning little happens in the town of Mulhouse.

Mulhouse, of slightly over 110,000 inhabitants, is geographically in eastern France, in the region of Alsace, but it is often said by skeptical French that the Mulhousiens and the Mulhousiennes, as the inhabitants are called, have German hearts. The reason is that Germany starts just a few miles east of Alsace, and indeed of Mulhouse, and the Germans have therefore annexed the region three times. The first annexation had been after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war (July 1870-May1871), the second, during World War 1 (1914-1918), and the third in World War Two, after France’s June 1940 capitulation to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi army. This third annexation had lasted until the end of the war in May 1945. Since, Alsace has remained French.

During the early morning of Sunday, October 18, 2009 Mulhouse was again silent, but the silence was disturbed when the computer screens in front of the officers on duty in the police’s emergency call room flashed an incoming call.

The caller, a male, speaking with a marked Russian accent despite his flawless French, gave the cop who took the call the name of a local street: Rue de Tilleul. On that street, said the caller before he rang off, the fugitive, Dieter Krombach, could be found.

Oct. 26, 2009 Updated March 9, 2010

Treiber Police Photo

Awaiting trial for murder, Frenchman Jean-Pierre Treiber goes on the run and makes the police look like idiots.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

Before the invention of television, head hunters rode on horseback into dusty towns and in their saddlebags were the wanted poster for the man they’d gone to find.

Today, a head hunter is a cop in a fast car with an earsplitting siren and a rotating red light, or he is cop in a helicopter equipped with infra-red camera equipment that turns night into day. And, today, because of 24/7 breaking news reports on television, the wanted poster has become obsolete because now we know the face of a man on the run like we know our own.

This became the case with the man on the picture above – Jean-Pierre Treiber – who was on the run from prison where he was awaiting trial for the kidnap and murder of two young women.

So familiar had become his face that his marked squint was even being targeted by stand-up comics and talk show hosts.

But Treiber’s story is far from something to laugh about.

March 8, 2009

The Durban Castle Steamship

Dubbed "The Porthole Murder Case" by the British tabloids, a steward was sentenced to hang for the disappearance at sea of an aspiring actress.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

At noon, shining Chevrolets and Fords began pulling up beside the large white steamship with the lavender hull and the black and red funnel anchored along the quayside.

From the automobiles stepped middle-aged ladies in frumpy summer frocks, comfortable shoes and small feathered hats, all clutching purses in which were the medication they were certain they would need for seasickness on the 14-day voyage that lay ahead.

At the ladies' sides were their husbands; men who were also no longer in their prime wearing their double-breasted suits cut by London or New York's best tailors and their fedoras bought in Paris or Rome.

December 02, 2007

Daisy de Melker, mugshot 1932

Daisy killed the old fashion way, with arsenic and strychnine.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

No one present at the birth of Daisy Louisa Hancorn-Smith had reason to believe that she would one day be famous or, for that matter, infamous. A generation would grow up before a baby girl born in South Africa would again be named Daisy – such was the unpleasant odor that clung to the name.

It was Thursday, June 1, 1886. The place was Seven Fountains, 25 miles from the town of Grahamstown, in the British Cape Colony. The city of Cape Town was 550 miles further south.

Grahamstown was a frontier town: Antelope, leopard and lynx roamed the surrounding valleys. As for Seven Fountains, it was a cluster of white-washed homesteads with corrugated-iron roofs and wooden verandas. The locals were farming folk: A small plot of land surrounded each homestead. They spoke English and not Afrikaans, the language of the Dutch-descendant Boer people, the majority of the colony's inhabitants, and they attended the English church. Indeed, they looked on themselves as Brits, which they were. Most had arrived from Britain not all that long into the past, while the rest were descendant from the boatloads of British (English, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish) settlers who had arrived in the colony in 1820, 66 years before Daisy's birth.