Murder in Monte Carlo Page 6

  They had gone to America together, he to avoid financial difficulties. There Gabrielle had deserted him for another man. He concluded the twenty-page letter by attacking his accomplice: “The great trouble with her is that she is such a liar and also has a dozen lovers after her.” He promised that as soon as he heard that Gabrielle had returned to Paris he would, of his own free will, place himself in the hands of Goron.

  When he had finished it did not take long for the officer to recognise the epistle as longwinded and entirely self-serving and a pathetic attempt to pin the blame on Gabrielle, more than likely prompted by her deserting the sinking ship. It was an expression of rage for this betrayal more than anything and he was so stung that he revealed his admittedly very large hiding-place. Goron was somewhat bemused. He could have spent a lot of time in conjecture about where the wanted couple had ended their flight. Here, without any effort on his part, was the answer.

  Eyraud was a man who could not apply a harness to his emotions, whether rage, panic or fear. So much so that the rejection he suffered at the hands of his mistress must be punished, even at enormous risk to himself. His hatred was evidenced by two more letters on the 18th and 20th renewing his accusations against Bompard. Goron was struck down again by his illness and was forced to take to the bed. Shortly there was to be another, again, entirely unpredictable development.

  The very next day, a short attractive young woman with a neat figure, dyed hair, greyish-blue eyes and a lively intelligent expression arrived in the front office of the Prefecture of Police in Paris, seeking an interview with the Prefect (Préfet). When asked her name, she replied in a haughty tone: “Gabrielle Bompard.” She was accompanied by a middle-aged man who identified himself as Monsieur Garanger.

  They were brought to the office of the Prefect Loze to whom she detailed her version of events, stating that she had been an unwilling accomplice of her lover Eyraud in the murder of Gouffé. She gave the location of the crime as No 3 Rue Tronson du Coudray. She was not there on the night in question and relied on the account of her lover for what happened. They had later gone to America where they had met the man now with her and, finding themselves in the usual pecuniary difficulties, Eyraud proposed killing him and robbing his money.

  She divulged the plot to Garanger and asked him to take her away from the pernicious influence of her lover. They had travelled to Vancouver where he persuaded her to make a clean breast of the affair, return to Paris and face the music.

  She was prepared to give evidence against Eyraud and on that basis both she and her companion clearly assumed that they could just leave the building to be contacted at the Préfet’s pleasure. Garanger said he would vouch for the greater part of her account. Loze had other ideas. He sent for a detective inspector who produced an arrest warrant for Bompard.

  Bompard was brought to prison where she did not seem to be unduly perturbed by her situation, probably under the misconception that she would walk away from her part in the ghastly act. While the investigation had suddenly made a big jump in progress and one of the accomplices was under lock and key, the other had to be found and brought back to face justice. Goron was under no illusion that would be an easy task but it would prove far more protracted than he could have predicted.

  Two detectives, Jaume being one, travelled to New York to begin the operation of tracking down Eyraud. He would prove to be a very able and inventive fugitive despite leaving a trail littered with clues due to the necessity of thieving and swindling for funds to keep on the move. The trail led from New York to San Francisco and then to Mexico. In one location he “borrowed” an exotic oriental robe from a wealthy Turk and disappeared with it. This act would way down the line prove to be his undoing.

  His inventiveness was displayed by his conning of a naïve actor who was staying in the same boarding house. Eyraud, befriending him, railed and ranted about his wife deserting him and running off with another man. He wanted to wreak revenge but did not have the funds to do it. He wheedled 80 dollars from the actor who later told the French detectives that the conman delivered a performance that he as a professional would scarcely match.

  A myriad of such incidents littered the journey the detectives took in the effort to hunt him down. He still managed to stay ahead of the posse. He ended up in Mexico where he could not resist writing a letter to a French newspaper insisting that Gouffé had been murdered by Bompard and an unknown. He was obviously still deeply affected by her flight and was determined to cast her as the real villain of the crime. But he could not temper his rage, a fact that would later be revealed as an ingrained aspect of his character. It did not seem to occur to him that nobody could possibly interpret his efforts as anything other than an attempt to save his own hide.

  HAVANA, FEBRUARY 1890

  By whatever subterfuge, he managed to make his way from Mexico to Havana. In the Cuban capital a Frenchwoman by the name of Madame Puchen ran a business as a clothes merchant and dressmaker. In February 1890 a man of haggard appearance and dressed in clothes that had seen much better days came into her shop. He introduced himself as Gorki. He was clutching an exquisite oriental robe and asked her if she was interested in buying it.

  Not knowing its provenance and he making no attempt to explain it, she was reluctant to engage in the matter, all the more so because of his bedraggled state. For all she knew it might have been stolen. She declined the offer. She quickly forgot about the incident until in May of the same year she was reading an American newspaper and came across an item that brought it back to her and confirmed her original suspicion. The article mentioned the fact that an expensive Turkish robe had been stolen by a Michel Eyraud who was the chief suspect in a murder and was wanted for questioning by the French authorities.

  Later in the day she spotted the same man who had offered her the robe walking past the door of the shop. She called him and asked if he still had the robe and he replied that he had sold it. They had a general conversation. He mentioned that he had been in Mexico and Madame Puchen enquired if he had come across the murderer Eyraud who was believed to be hiding there. He replied in the negative. When she asked him if he had been in Paris at the time of the murder he became somewhat nervous. Half-jokingly she said that he looked rather like him. He laughed in a hollow way and said: “I will see you again.” Any other man in his position would have never darkened the street, not to mind the door of Madame Puchen’s establishment, given the content of the conversation. But Michel Eyraud, typical of a particular category of killer, had a peculiar habit of seeking attention at a time when he should most avoid it.

  On the other hand, her observation “You look rather like him” more than likely rang in his ear with the impact of a tolling church bell. And he could not make up his mind whether the dressmaker was half joking or half in earnest. Either way, Eyraud was without doubt thinking that she was a danger to him. He could brazen it out or disappear; he chose the former.

  Madame Puchen in retrospect felt greatly uneasy that she had been so bold and was not looking forward to seeing him again.

  He duly reappeared carrying a copy of a newspaper which he said he had found in a café. He pointed out a photograph of Eyraud which was fuzzy and indistinct.

  “What a blackguard!” he remarked.

  “Indeed!” replied Madame Puchen, affecting a more forthright attitude in his company. “What an awful end he gave to that poor bailiff! He truly deserves the guillotine when he is caught.”

  The vagabond’s eyes narrowed. “I suppose that is true.”

  He then abruptly left the premises with a hurried farewell and no promise of coming back. In the rush, he left the newspaper behind and the more she examined the photograph the more she felt that it resembled the man who had just left.

  It then struck her that the unusual act of coming back with the newspaper was a bungled attempt to allay any suspicions she might have harboured, by sheer brazenness. His performance did not impress her one bit; in fact, the very opposite. Her remark abo
ut the guillotine was foolish in retrospect. If this man was indeed Eyraud then she could be in danger. No one, not even the newspapers, knew he was in Havana. All presumed that he was still in Mexico.

  She decided to act at once and made her way to the French consulate where she gave a statement to the consul, outlining her suspicions and detailing the substance of the encounters she had with the man she believed to be Eyraud.

  “I believe,” said Madame Puchen, “that these encounters are beyond the realm of coincidence. Whatever suspicions that I had, when the man had the temerity to return with the newspaper and made remarks about Eyraud in the third person, this confirmed what was simply an uneasy feeling at the start.”

  “Certainly,” replied the consul, “there is more than enough from what you have observed to check this man out. And I agree with you that there comes a time when fate takes over from coincidence. If this man is indeed Michel Eyraud then it would appear that his past has caught up with him.”

  The consul thanked her and promised to take the matter in hand immediately. They shook hands and Madame Puchen left the consulate.

  A pair of eyes sunken in a haggard countenance followed her progress down the street. What she did not know was that Eyraud had been observing the building to cover such an eventuality. It was as well for Madame Puchen that she had followed up her instinct so quickly or she might have suffered a similar fate to Gouffé’s. The killer’s back was against the wall and he was more dangerous than ever. But, luckily for the French dressmaker, the advantage for killing her had passed.

  But Providence was going to have its way. By another twist of fate that had been at the heart of the case from the beginning there was a man living in Havana who had worked for Eyraud when he ran the distillery at Sèvres, the collapse of which had sent him on the road to financial ruin. The consul, aware of the fact, summoned this man and told him that it was suspected that Eyraud was living in the capital and if he encountered him to immediately inform the consulate.

  The consul then contacted the Spanish authorities and arrangements for a search for the fugitive were put in place. No sooner had the man left but he encountered Eyraud who was still keeping the consulate under surveillance. He took the former employee to a café and there admitted who he was and begged the man not to betray him. It was after midnight when they left the café. Already the killer was regretting making himself known to the man and murderous thoughts seized his mind as they walked down a dark street. Simultaneously fear gripped his companion and he hailed down a cab and made off.

  Earlier in the day Eyraud had moved out of his hotel to another establishment near the station, but he was afraid to go back there. He decided to spend the night in a brothel but was turned away from the door because of his ragged clothes. The down-at-heel killer wandered the streets, gripped by tension and apprehension. It was as if his victim was exacting revenge from beyond the grave. Eyraud had been at the end of the tether many times but now the rope had frayed right through.

  He again encountered the man from Sèvres like a ghost in the street. “It’s all over for me now,” Eyraud croaked and melted into the darkness.

  He was haunted by the apparitions of his blighted and depraved past. He was drowning in a despair that he had never experienced before. The noose was now around his neck and he was choking and gasping. He staggered along the empty street and felt the ground moving up to meet him. He was suddenly aware of another presence. He turned, a police officer approached.

  “Who are you? What is your address?”

  “Gorki, Hotel Roma.”

  The officer recognised the name he used as an alias and a hotel they had visited earlier. He handcuffed the fugitive and brought him to the station where he was questioned and thrown in a cell. The police took his luggage from the other hotel. He attempted suicide in the early hours but did not succeed. For Michel Eyraud the game was up.

  On June 16th he was handed over to the French police. They reached France on the 20th and Eyraud was at last incarcerated in a Paris prison.

  PARIS, JULY 1890

  By July 1st when Eyraud made his first appearance in a Paris court in front of an examining magistrate, Bompard had already been subjected to intense questioning and medical examination to determine principally her mental state. A favourite defence ploy in the face of overwhelming odds was to plead insanity to avoid the razor-sharp edge of the guillotine. As part of that process of examination, to which Eyraud was also subjected, the background history of the prisoners was considered an important component.

  Bompard was 22 years of age at the time of her arrest. Investigation of her family history was, as it turned out, very revealing. She was the fourth child of a respectable merchant of Lille, a hardworking man of good moral principle. His wife, who had suffered from delicate health, died when Gabrielle was 13, thereby removing an important element in her parenting.

  She was a rebellious and difficult teenager who was expelled from four boarding schools and managed to stay at the fifth for three years. There she developed her worst instincts – for lewd behaviour, lying on a grand scale and a foul tongue most unusual for a girl of her age. At 18 years of age she returned to her father’s house but soon ran off with a lover who she later said had hypnotised and seduced her.

  Her father asked the family doctor to induce her into a hypnotic state in an effort to reform her errant ways. It was a popular method at the time for dealing with mental aberrations, particularly hysteria. It made no difference, the doctor diagnosed her as a neuropath and, worse still for her afflicted father, said that there were no home influences that would help her overcome her instincts. The doctor was held by experts who examined her later to be too ready to empathise with his subject.

  The 20-year-old was immoral, unduly self-centred, vain, lewd, intelligent but with no grasp of the difference between right and wrong. After the murder, she spent the night alone with the body in the trunk as her accomplice went back to stay with his wife.

  Goron asked what she had been thinking during that most unusual of circumstances. Most would shiver at the memory.

  Not Gabrielle who with a broad smile replied: “You would never guess what a funny idea came into my head. You see, it wasn’t very pleasant for me being in this tête-à-tête with a corpse. I couldn’t sleep. So I thought what fun it would be to go into the street and pick up some respectable gentleman from the provinces and bring him to the room and, just as he was beginning to enjoy himself, say: ‘Would you like to see a bailiff?’ Then open the trunk suddenly and, before he could recover from the horror, run into the street and fetch the police. What a fool the respectable gentleman would have looked when the officers came!”

  Goron was taken aback by the sheer callousness of the young woman who gave not a thought to the murdered man but in her fantasy used his body to perform a bizarre act of malice on a “respectable” person who she would lure back to the death room for sex and then shock and deliver to a form of punishment. Clearly, in her depraved imagination, conventional respectability was not a status that she cherished. Little wonder that the investigation team nicknamed her “the little demon”.

  Eyraud’s adolescence followed a parallel path. At 13 his conduct was so troublesome that his father had to have him put into a reformatory school. At 19 he enlisted in a chasseur (light infantry) regiment from which he was transferred to the Foreign Legion. He served in the war between France and Mexico, then deserted his regiment and joined the enemy guerrillas under General Juarez. He betrayed the position of the French forces and when captured was tried by court martial and sentenced to death.

  He was spared by the amnesty of 1869 and returned to France where he then embarked on a career of ruinous business activity first, followed by crime, mainly theft and swindling, and was committed to a life of drink and debauchery. He was subject to outbursts of violence especially towards women and had great difficulty in keeping control of his temper.

  For some reason he thought himself above labouring
for a living. “Understand this,” he told detectives who brought him back to Paris, “I have never done any work and I will never do any work.”

  Such a statement, given his grave circumstance at the time, was an indication that he was just as much a fantasist as the young woman he was destined to meet on July 26th, 1888, a year to the day before the murder. At that time he was, as usual, scraping the bottom of the financial barrel – a bankrupt and discredited in every way. And he still lived with his wife. Apart from her small dowry, Eyraud was bereft of resources. If he had pursued a frugal existence or worked at menial tasks as others had to, he would have got by. But like his new consort he had delusions of grandeur, quite at odds with his situation. Most women would have quickly departed the company of a born loser but Gabrielle had a similar appetite for vice and chaos in life.

  Even her earnings from prostitution could not support their habits and faced with poverty they hatched a plan to bring a customer of hers back to a place where, dead or alive, he would part with money. Dead would be the better option as then there would be no witness and no retribution, or so they thought.

  Through separate interviews with the accomplices, whose versions differed less about the general narrative than who was the prime mover and therefore took major responsibility, the police got as accurate an account of the events as possible from the perpetrators and then nailed it with corroboration.

  In July 1889 they went to London. The first stop was the West End where a red-and-white girdle of plaited silk was purchased by Gabrielle; this was to be the means of snaring their chosen victim both literally and metaphorically. Next the trunk to act as temporary coffin. They also acquired thirteen feet of rope and a pulley. Back in Paris they got hold of twenty feet of duck packing cloth which Gabrielle sewed into a large sack. A ground-floor apartment was rented at No 3 Rue Tronson du Coudray.