Foreign Crimes

October 07, 2007

Main street, village of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. It was here that Dr. Petiot murdered for the first time.

Sixty-one years after Dr. Marcel Petiot, dubbed "Dr. Satan" by French newspapers, was guillotined for the murder of 26 people, he remains France's most prolific murderer.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

"Gentlemen, don't look, this won't be very pretty." It was one minute before five on a spring morning in Paris. Marcel Petiot, a physician by profession, was living his last few minutes on earth. The men he had addressed those words to gave no indication that they had heard him. They had come to watch, to witness the guillotine make him pay for his crimes. They were wishing that they were elsewhere, anywhere, but not there in the front courtyard – the cour d'honneur or ceremonial courtyard, as it was known - of La Santè prison on Paris's Left Bank.

Some of the men had been on the prosecution team that had decided that "Dr. Satan," as the media had dubbed Petiot, was to die; others had been on his defense team. Present also were a couple of prison warders, a couple of uniformed policemen, the prison chaplain, and Paris's chief medical examiner and autopsy surgeon, Dr. Albert Paul. The latter would have to verify, after the guillotine's lethal caress, that the recipient had not survived. Dr. Paul would never tire of saying that he found having to do that such an unnecessary thing – as if anyone could survive the guillotine.

It was May 25, 1946: a Saturday morning. Dr. Petiot, 49, had stood trial at the Assize Court at the Palais de Justice for the murder of 27 people. He had been found guilty of the murder of 26. The police had thought, though, that he had murdered many more: 200 was the number they suggested. "To be on the safe side, I'll settle for 150," one of the police investigators had said.

March 29, 2009

Wrongly accused? Omar Raddad stands outside the courthouse.

French justice can be quite curious. After being pardoned but not exonerated in the murder of his employer, Omar Raddad risked being re-imprisoned by asking for a new trial to clear his name.

by Anthony Davis

Wealthy widow Ghislaine Marchal, 65, lived alone in a luxury villa in the affluent village of Mougins, near Cannes on the French Riviera. On the morning of Sunday, June 23, 1991, she was relaxing beside her pool doing a crossword puzzle, her favourite pastime, when her friends and neighbors Mr. and Mrs. Koster called over the fence to invite her to lunch. She readily accepted.

At 1:30 p.m. Mrs. Koster, anxious that her friend had not yet arrived for the meal, telephoned but there was no reply. She was puzzled, but presumed that something had happened to prevent her from showing up.

Something had happened. The following day, June 24, Mrs. Marchal was found stabbed to death in the basement of her house. Written in blood on the inside of the door was the incriminating message Omar m'a tuer (Omar killed me).

Police immediately arrested Omar Raddad, 28, a gardener who worked part-time for Mrs. Marchal. Although he consistently denied killing his employer, he was charged and three years later, February 2, 1994, found guilty of the murder and sentenced to 18 years' imprisonment.

A fairly straightforward case you might think. So did the police.

June 1, 2009

Emilie Tanay

by Anthony Davis

Saturday, June 11, 1994 was to have been a foretaste of the summer vacation for the children of Gruchet-le-Valasse, a small town (pop. 2,700) in Normandy. Their school was organizing its traditional end-of-term fete and 9-year-old Emilie Tanay was spending the weekend at the house of one of her classmates, Jérome Tocqueville.

Emilie was an only child. Her parents, Denis and Corinne Tanay, had been invited to a christening but, not wishing to deprive their daughter of the pleasure of dressing up for the fete, they gladly accepted the Tocquevilles’ offer to look after her. It was to be the first time she had ever spent the night away from her parents.

Emilie had been suffering from a cold for a couple of days and her mother sent her to the Tocquevilles with a bottle of Josacine ready prepared , but she was not going to let a mere cold spoil her fun.  Dressed like the other merry-makers, both young and old, in medieval costume, she spent a happy afternoon with her schoolmates.

On returning to her friend’s home that evening she felt unwell and Jérome’s mother, Sylvie Tocqueville, gave her a spoonful of the prescription medicine. Emilie pulled a face on taking the dose and rinsed out her mouth with water to get rid of the unusually horrid taste.

Within minutes Emilie collapsed. The Tocquevilles immediately summoned medical help. Although she was rushed to hospital, she died at 10:30 p.m. the same evening. The doctors were unable to determine the cause of death.

September 19, 2007 updated June 22, 2009

Veronique Courjault

Nine recent cases of infanticide in France are causing the French to ask what is it in their psyche that makes the nation's mothers kill their newborns.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

Infanticide is a crime no one living in France can commit; it is a crime that does not exist. Page through the French Penal Code and you won't even find the word. Yet, mothers killing their newborn babies is a French phenomenon. It is just that in France infanticide is called by another name.

Under Art. 221-4-1 of the French Penal Code, infanticide is qualified as the "assassination of a minor under the age of 15." It is "assassination" and not "homicide," because French law makes a distinction between slaying someone in a burst of sudden anger, like a crime passionnel when a spouse kills an unfaithful partner, and a premeditated taking of life. When there has been no medical supervision during pregnancy, no preparation for the confinement, and the pregnancy was concealed from everyone, even from the father of the child, then, French law declares the slaying as "premeditated." Thus, the crime becomes an "assassination," or, as it would be called in the United States, "first-degree murder." Until France abolished the death sentence in 1977, as a rule, punishment for first-degree murder was death on the guillotine; that of second-degree murder was life imprisonment, perpéte in French underworld slang, though it, too, could have fetched a sentence of capital punishment.

Kinga Legg

The murder of Polish millionairess Kinga Legg at the 5-star Le Bristol Hotel in Paris has been solved but her murderer may forever remain unpunished.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

In the language of luxury hotels, it was the quietest hour of the day: 8 p.m.

The carpeted corridors of the 5-star Le Bristol Hotel on Paris’s Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, named after the 6^th century Saint Honoratus, protector of wheat growers and bakers, were deserted.

There were no chamber maids chattering behind their service trolleys, no droning of vacuum cleaners, no tinkling of crystal as waiters from “Room Service” refilled mini-bars with cute little bottles of whisky, brandy and France’s finest wines.

And not a sound from behind the closed doors of the rooms and suites that cost between $1,100 and $3,300 per night. The doors, especially thick, make the rooms soundproof.

On the fifth floor, from the shiny brass knob of the door of Room 503, hung a “Do Not Disturb” sign.  That morning – Tuesday, May 26, 2009 – a man had called the desk of the hotel’s “Concierge” to warn that “Madame Kinga Legg,” one of the double room’s occupants, did not wish to be disturbed. In Le Bristol, known as “one of the best of the best” of Paris hotels, a guest’s wish was never ignored.