Murder

Jan. 9, 2012

(Photo used by permission of BlueStar Forensic)

Extra-marital affairs are accepted in France. Wives and husband who indulge in them are even admired. It means that a woman, though married and probably a mother, is still attractive and desirable to the male of the species, and that despite marriage and fatherhood a man remains virile. Yet, occasionally, a spouse will cry “Stop!” and when the philandering continues, the result can be foul murder.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

On Wednesday, February 25, 2004, early in the morning, Florence Bourgade dialed the telephone number of her sister.

Yves and Florence

The sun was shining but it was bitterly cold – just 42° F – in Moigny-sur-École in the Department of Essonne, 36 miles south of Paris, and the 42-year-old’s news was as chilling. Her husband, Yves, 44, had only got back home in the early hours of that morning after a night of drinking and he’s being very abusive verbally and she did not want their children to witness such behavior. Could she therefore send them over for a couple of days? The next-door neighbor would be dropping them off on her way to work. It was the February school vacation.

That call was not the first that Florence made that morning.

Her first call had been at 6:45 a.m. She had called her husband’s employee to say that he would not be in that day.  Her husband was a self-employed mason.  “Yves has blown a fuse. He has left,” she told the man. What she had said in French was Yves a pétée les plombs for which “blowing a fuse” is a polite translation.

At 7 a.m. she had made a second call. She had called her neighbor to ask if she could bring over the children for her to look after for that day. “She wanted me to take the children, but I had to go to work which I told her,” the neighbor would later testify to the police.

Fifteen minutes later Florence had made yet again another call. She had again called her neighbor to ask if she could, on her way to work, drop the children off at her sister’s house. The neighbor had replied that she could do that, yes.

Florence’s sister lived 10 miles away in the town of Barbizon, so, as the neighbor had to go in that direction, dropping the children off would not make her late for work, but, all the same, within 15 minutes she was at the Bourgade house.  The three children, two boys and a girl, aged respectively 12, 10 and 5, were still in bed and were told to get dressed immediately and quickly.

“I understood that Yves was not well,” the neighbor would also later say in her testimony. “I thought of the alcohol.”

She knew that Yves Bourgade drank.  In 2004 there were only about 500 houses in Moigny-sur-École and not even 1,500 people lived there, so it was not easy to hide that a spouse habitually returned home in the early hours of the morning and in an inebriated state.

Florence’s family and friends, although they did not live in the village, were also aware of the drinking. They also knew that Yves was a womanizer. And it had not been necessary to stick their noses into the couple’s life to have known about the women because Yves bragged about his exploits. He even made it his dinner conversation. He did not appear to care that his wife was at the table tending to their guests for whom she had prepared a splendid meal.

The two had been married since 1997 but they had been partners for more than 14 years and Yves had not ever been faithful.

Dec. 5, 2011

by Claudette Walker & Matrix Filia

Permission granted for use of the following experts from the book to Crime Magazine by Abacus Books, Inc. Copyright © 2011 by Abacus Books, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

With Postscript  by Laura Schultz, MFT

Excerpt from Chapter 1

WHY?

No other single word is less relevant or more relevant in the death of Caylee Anthony. A lovely child, she was allowed only 34 months to dance on this earth.

Caylee Anthony, not quite three years old, had been missing for 31 days before a police report was filed. That, we believe, is what brought worldwide media attention to this case. Since that day, the media has brought every detail they could find to the attention of the public, including the arrest of the child’s mother, who will be tried for first-degree murder over the next month.

The media has provided us with everything from pictures of the beautiful child to pictures of the mother out dancing during the 31 days she did not report her child missing. We have heard the 911 calls and seen thousands of pages of discovery documents filed in the court by the prosecution and defense for the upcoming criminal case. All which are available online in a click, from the media. TV coverage from the Discovery Channel, 48 Hours, Geraldo Rivera, True TV, and Nancy Grace has played week after week during the three years the criminal charges have been pending. Some of that coverage has been because of the peculiarities of the case, some of it because the defendant is a pretty young white woman, and some of it because of Florida’s position among the top five states in both death row population and the imposition of executions.

The mother, Casey Anthony, has been tried in the media and presumed guilty by most who have heard the massive media coverage. Now the questions are what of this information will be admissible and what other evidence yet unknown will make the courtroom? Who will judge her on that evidence and what will the result be under the judicial system of the United States of America? 

Lawyers have debated this case on national TV. The defense team’s lawyers have granted interviews for pretrial publicly. To us, that is simply stunning – their job is not to aggrandize themselves but to defend their client, and most of the media interviews seem to be the former and not the latter. Casey has a legal dream team that has been paid in part by her parents, in part by her sale of photos of her child, in part by taxpayers, and in part pro bono (without pay) except for the massive media advertising the lawyers are receiving for free. And the people of the State of Florida are paying for all other costs: investigators, costs of prosecution, discovery documents, hearings, judges, bailiffs, and so forth. The list is unending, and the dollars spent are said to be in the millions.

Nov. 14, 2011

Marie Besnard

In France, in the 17^th Century, alchemists became wealthy grinding arsenic rock into a colorless and odorless powder and selling the powder to their countrymen who wanted to do away with a wealthy old parent, grandparent, uncle or aunt. There was even an “epidemic” of arsenic poisonings in the year 1670 so that the substance became known as the “succession powder.” Three centuries later, kind and homely Marie Besnard amazed her female friends when she described arsenic as an excellent substitute for divorce. They thought she was joking. But was she? 

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

Illness and death were no strangers to Marie Antigny, yet, cradling Auguste, her dead husband, in her arms she sobbed uncontrollably.

Marie was 31 years old and she and Auguste, who was two years her senior, had been married for seven years. The two were first cousins – her mother was his father’s sister – and Marie had fancied Auguste since she was 17 years old, but it was not until she was 18 that her parents allowed the two to step out together, and another six years had to pass before they’d given their consent for the two to walk down the aisle. By then Marie was 24 and Auguste 26, and what doctors had described previously as his weak constitution had been diagnosed as tuberculosis. It was 1920 and tuberculosis was an incurable, even untreatable illness, but in Marie’s own words, “We were in love!”

Marie was born Marie Josephine Philippine Davaillaud in the village of Saint-Pierre-de-Maillé, 200 miles south-west of Paris, in the Vienne department close to the beautiful Loire valley.  Her parents, well-to-do farmers, adored her because before she arrived, they lost two infant sons to long illnesses. Her father Pierre Eugène used to cuddle her when he came in from working his fields, and her mother Marie-Louise never failed to tell her that she loved her “for three,” including the girl’s two dead brothers in her affection.

Oct. 31, 2011 

Special to Crime Magazine:  An excerpt from David A. Gibb’s book, Camouflaged Killer: The Shocking Double Life of Canadian Air Force Colonel Russell Williams.  By day Williams commanded the largest military base in Canada; by night he stalked single women in their bedrooms.  What began as a fetish to steal women’s undergarments grew into a compulsion to rape and murder. 

by David A. Gibb

Chapter Ten

Enemy under Fire

With true military precision, Colonel Russell Williams arrived at the Ottawa police headquarters at 3 p.m. and reported for his scheduled interview.

He was introduced to Detective-Sergeant Jim Smyth, a forty-something, slightly bookish, unassuming officer in a dark suit and tie. Mild-mannered in his approach and soft-spoken by nature, Smyth was not the type of fellow one would suspect of being a police officer. In fact, much like TV’s Columbo, he probably owed much of his success to people’s innate tendencies to underestimate his talents and resolve. At six feet two, Williams’s tall and lean build dominated the smaller-framed officer.

Smyth, who had started his policing career in 1988, was one of only a half-dozen certified criminal profilers in Canada. His success as a profiler and polygraph operator for the OPP’s Behavioral Sciences and Analysis Services unit had been well documented.[1] As far as cops went, he seemed to have the proverbial Midas touch, the kind of cop most case investigators would want holding their ladder.

Nov. 28, 2011

Ana Cardona

There are over 3,500 inmates on death row in the United States, spread out over the 34 states that still use the death penalty.  Less than 1 percent of death row inmates are women and all 61 of them have been convicted of murder.

by Amanda Carlos

Since 2000, 11 states have executed 28 women. The last female executed was, Teresa Lewis, in Virginia on September 23, 2010. Lewis’s execution was controversial because her IQ score was 72 and 70 and below would have excluded her from being given the death sentence. Lewis along with two accomplices, Matthew Shallenberger and Rodney Fuller, killed her husband and stepson for insurance money. Shallenberger and Fuller were sentenced to life without parole by the same judge who sentenced Lewis to death calling her the mastermind of the murder.

Fourteen of the women on death row are there for murdering their own children.  Here’s a look at the crimes they committed.  

Oct. 10, 2011 Special to Crime Magazine

An excerpt from Scott Bartz’s recently published book, The Tylenol Mafia: Marketing, Murder, and Johnson & Johnson, available at Amazon.com and Barnes&Noble.com.

by Scott Bartz

Introduction

On September 29, 1982, seven people in Chicago died after taking Extra Strength Tylenol capsules laced with cyanide. Authorities immediately blamed the poisonings on an anonymous madman who had supposedly put the poisoned capsules into Tylenol bottles in several local retail stores. The evidence, however, refutes this madman-in-the-retail-stores hypothesis, and points instead to a culprit who planted the lethal capsules at a warehouse in the Tylenol distribution system - a system the police did not understand and the media did not investigate.

Sept. 27, 2011

Ian Brady and Myra Hindley

Myra Hindley was, for the British public, evil personified, and was the most hated woman in Britain from the time of her arrest in 1965 until the day she died in 2002 for murdering children with her boyfriend and burying them on the Moors.

by Mark Pulham

At around 8:40 on the morning of Thursday, October 7, 1965, Bob Talbot knocked on the back door of 16 Wardle Brook Avenue. He wore a long white coat and carried a basket of bread under his arm. A woman opened the door and looked at him. He wasn’t the usual bread delivery man, and she told him he’d got the wrong house. The woman was tall and square-jawed, with honey-platinum hair and thick black eyebrows. Talbot would have put her age as around 35-years-old, but he would have been wrong, she had only turned 23 a few months before.

Talbot dropped the pretence. “I’m a police officer.” he said, as he stepped through the door, “Is the man of the house in?”  The newly promoted Superintendent Bob Talbot followed the woman through the kitchen and into the living room, as behind him, his Detective Sergeant Jock Carr slipped into the kitchen through the back door.

In the living room was a bed, and a man was lying on it, writing a letter. He looked up as they entered. It was a neat and tidy room, with a couple of dogs and a budgie. It was not the superintendent’s idea of what a crime scene looked like. He looked at the man and said that he believed that a murder had been committed there.

It had started less than three hours before, when a frantic call had come into Hyde Police Station. It was just after 6 a.m. when the young police constable picked up the telephone and heard the called say, “Is this Hyde Police Station?” The caller was stammering with nervousness, but told the constable his name was David Smith. He said he was speaking from Hattersley, his broad Manchester accent causing him to drop the ‘H’. There’s been a murder, Smith told him, and that he was phoning from the call box on Hattersley Road West.