September 22, 2020 • 30 mins
The most interesting thing about Marie Besnard might not be that she was accused of poisoning about a dozen people. It's that she got away with it -- and got wealthier with each murder.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shonda Land Audio in
partnership with I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to Criminalia.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Maria Trumrqui. And this week
we are talking about a woman named Marie bay Now
and she had a knack for getting ahead in life
(00:22):
by employing poison. Uh. That is how she eventually gained
her nickname, which was the Black Widow, likening her, of
course to the spiders that killed their mates for money. Uh,
at least once they had served their purpose. The most
amazing thing about Marieo not that she was accused of
poisoning at least a dozen people, but that she got
(00:43):
away with it and with each time she got wealthier.
Spoiler alert. I know. Marie was born Davao to a
farming family in lou De France, in and she was
(01:06):
educated at a convent school, not all that unusual for
the place and time, and she was remembered by her
classmates though as being quote vicious and immoral and wild
with boys. Well you know, they also described her as
a mean so she didn't really curry a lot of
favor from early child. When she was twenty four, so
(01:27):
we're fast forwarding a little bit to which she's an adult.
She married her cousin, August Aunty. The two actually were
first cousins. Um. The way that that worked out was
her mother was his father's sister. Now, this was not
an arranged marriage. This was just your yeah, just the
just just a friendly cousin marriage. Moving along, So these
(01:51):
two cousins in love had been married for seven years
when August became ill and he died and the official
cause of his death was listed as tuberculosis. But where
we're going to find out later is that he did
not die of TV or, as it was commonly called
at the time, the galloping consumption. Um. But let's not
(02:13):
gallop ahead of ourselves. So when he died, Marie's husband
left her seven thousand, two hundred forty francs. And while
that wasn't like a huge amount, she wasn't set for life.
It also was not a meager sum to come into right. Um.
She was still she was living with her parents, and
say she didn't have to worry about her rent or anything.
This was her money. Um. When she was thirty one,
(02:36):
that's when she became a widow. And it didn't take
very long for her friends to start encouraging her to
find another husband, as she that's what one did at
the time. Her parents, too, encouraged her to remarry, although
they may have been more concerned about gaining an extra
hand for their farm than about Marie's love life or
her personal security. Listen, I'm from farm stock. I understand
(02:57):
this ideology. I'm not saying it anything wrong with that.
It just, you know, like wishing your daughter to be
in love is also a good thing, right. There's a
there's a reason that a lot of farm families have
late in life babies, and it's because the more hands
I'm not kidding, right. Grieving for her husband, Marie initially
turned down every potential suitor that her friends and family suggested,
(03:19):
but then in Marie met Leon Bernard, and it is
said that her cousin Pascaline made this match and remarried
him within a year after her first husband's death. Ley
All ran a saddle and harness shop which was about
forty eight miles away from her parents farm, and although
their marriage remained childless and there were some rumors about infidelity,
(03:42):
we'll talk a little bit about that, the two of
them actually appeared to be a pretty contented couple together.
Neighbors and friends could never recall ever seeing them fight.
So Leon had a nickname for his new ride, which
was Moose, which means fly in French. And I'm actually
really not sure if that should be in the positive
or the negative category of their relationship, but there it is. Uh.
(04:07):
You know, it's also common for French people to call
their beloved a cabbage. So great it could be perfectly
lovely like and and among couples, you know, you never
you never know what's going on between people, like it
might have been a very loving, happy, funny nickname. It
could have just been that she was a past I
have no idea sweet little fly because it's French. It
(04:30):
sounds cute, it's right. Over the years, Leon and Marie
actually became pretty wealthy. They did really well for themselves.
They ended up owning six houses, They had an inn,
they had a cafe, and they also owned two farms
where they bred horses. So not too bad. So that's
that's money. Yeah. Um. Not very long after they got married,
(04:51):
Leon began disappearing in the evenings and it was not
for work. Uh, And the local gossips didn't hesitate to
point an accusatory finger at two women in particular in town.
One they told Marie was her cousin Pasquleen Um, the
very same woman who had introduced the two um. And
he was also said to be having an affair with
(05:11):
the postmistress Louise Pinto. And it turns out that Leon
did have a roving eye, but it always seemed like
Marie just kind of turned a blind eye to his indiscretions.
When he died in October of nine, his doctor did
not list the cause of death as anything suspicious. It
(05:31):
was listed as euremia. So, knowing what Marie's future would hold,
as we have this great perspective, his cause of death
is actually pretty interesting, okay. And this is why. So
this is a condition that most commonly develops when you've
already been diagnosed with chronic kidney disease. This isn't something
(05:52):
that you're just like, oh, like a U T I
or something, you know. This is something that's long standing
disease or your kidneys. Um happens when all the toxic
waste products in your body start to build up because
your kidneys just can't remove them from you anymore. And
once they get to a toxic level that can be fatal.
So here is why we are telling you all of
this and why it is interesting. This type of kidney
(06:15):
damage can also be caused by repeated long term exposure
to arsenic what's happening in this little French town chill domage.
(06:35):
So though the investigation into the murders surrounding Marie initially
focused only on the death of Leon Um, we'll get
to that. It turns out that she wasn't just targeting
a husband. When we come back, we're gonna expose Marie
as a serial poisoner. Welcome back to Criminalia, where we're
(07:06):
about to name Marie's targets. So, nine years before Leon
Bernard died of uremia, Leon's great aunt, Madame Marie Louise
le Comte, died, presumably of natural causes due to her
old age. She was eighty six at the time and
she had been ill for a considerable period before this.
(07:27):
It was actually Marie who was sort of her nursemaid
and cared for her at the end of her life. So,
because she had never had any children, there was great
speculation over who would be remembered in her will, and
the whole family knew that Marie Louise had a considerable
amount of satings, and Marie and Leon thought that they
were going to be the recipients of her wealth. After all,
(07:50):
she had moved in with them at that point and
Marie had been her caregiver. But it turned out it
was neither of them that was named in the will.
Leon's parents, who were still alive, inherited everything, furious they
received nothing for their good deeds. Neither Marie nor Leon
attended the funeral and the second death that Marie is
accused of at this point, because remember we're going back
(08:12):
in time before her husband is actually her husband's best friend. Interestingly,
according to some accounts of this story, Toussaint was one
of the men Marie may or may not have had
an affair with. Maybe there were some infidelities in this marriage.
The other affair speculation was that there was a German
(08:32):
handyman who worked at their home and on their farm.
Marie's infidelities, though may or may not have been factual.
Both men denied the affairs over the years, and Marie
never seems to have even addressed them. Uh. This is
probably the gossip mill in her small town at its
finest but you never know, because sometimes rumors have bases
in fact. So to go back to that first person,
(08:56):
Maria mentioned to Saint Rivas and his wife Blanche may
have actually been borders in Marie and Leon's home, or
they might have actually just been neighbors. The record gets
a little unclear on this point, but what we do
know is that Toussaint and Leon were very good friends,
so to still have been unwell, and Marie had helped
his wife care for him during this time. He wasn't
(09:17):
a poor man. I read in one source that he
was a baker, but I couldn't verify that really anywhere. Um,
he was a poor when he died, and probably no
surprise that his wife was named as his soul heir
in his will. As one does. This was really not
acceptable for Marie. She felt once again as though she
had been slighted since she had once again been his
(09:38):
deathbed caregiver. But as we'll see, she had some other
projects going on. Was definitely this is definitely a woman
who knew how to diversify her potential revenue streams. That's
one way I'm saying it again, through nefarious means, but
it's still a revenue stream, right, She's she's making herself
(09:59):
wealthy here. Um. So it was Marie's father who was
the next pass away. In May of nine, which was
about ten months after Toussaint's death. Marie and her mother
shared the assets, which included two farms, and after her
father's death, Marie's mother moved in with her and Leon
never move in with Marie. Leon, yes, that they just
(10:20):
don't board at their house. Good life advice, solid life advice.
It's like dine with the Borges, right, yes, uh, which
makes they're in a whole fascinating right, I think. Didn't
they have a cafe to she were delicious? Just four
(10:44):
months after the death of Marie's father, Leon's grandmother fell
ill and Marie stepped into care for her, and when
dear Colmer died, she left her assets once again, they
went to Leon's parents. So if it sounds like it's
a bad time to be Leon's parents, it was. Yeah.
A short two months later, Leon's father accidentally eight poisonous
(11:09):
mushrooms and collapsed and died, and he had willed his
assets to his wife, So now she had all the
things as also makes sense. So as you might imagine
as we continue down this list of victims. Leon's mother
was not a widow for very long um. Four months.
That's a really short time. Four months after Leon's father's death. Um.
(11:32):
Where that puts us now in January of one For
anybody who's keeping score here, Uh, Leon's mother fell ill um.
So guess who nursed her on her deathbed? Marie. So
here's the thing. You would think the line of the
line of deaths for them to finally get this at
this point accumulated hefty inheritance would go right to them,
(11:55):
but no, neither Marie nor Leon were named in the will. Instead,
Leon's mother left all of her assets to her daughter,
Leon's sister, Lucy. Two months go by after Leon's mother's death,
and Leon discovers that his sister Lucy had hanged herself
in her home. So, while we don't know very much
about Lucy or her story, which is very clearly a
(12:17):
tragic one. Her death was suicide, not by poison, it
is still an interesting death in Marie's lineup because Lucy
didn't have a will when she died, and she had
at this point just inherited a whole lot of real
estate and a substantial amount of money from her parents.
I mean, I think it was fairly substantial. It was
(12:37):
like close to like three thousand francs or something, and
like at least two houses. It was. It was a
nice chunk that I'm sure Marie thought should be hers.
Um So during the time she knew Marie. It said
that Lucy had remarked at least once um and we
quote this, I will not leave that Marie woman even
a teaspoon, so that a woman really kind of says
(13:01):
it all, doesn't it like, But under French law, her
assets without a will would go to her next of kin,
and that was Leon. Uh. Yeah, I think that Lucy
probably talked to Marie's classmates. Maybe they didn't. She's she's mad,
She's like none of them liked him. So less than
a year after Lucy's suicide, Blanche, remember she was to
(13:23):
Saint Rivet's widow, also died and Marie had stayed by
her side as she lay dying, and Leon very thoughtfully
bought her house right out from under her. What happened
there was under a life annuity contract, which you can
still do now. It was very popular at the time
in France. An ownership of Blanche's house would have been
transferred to Leon and he would pay her monthly until
(13:46):
she died. But she died so quickly that he actually
never ended up having to pay her anything. So Blanche a,
grateful for Marie's comfort, is the one person who did
name Marie as her soul heir in her will. Finally right,
She's like, I'm getting the recognition I deserve. She's like,
I feel all whole now I can just take my money.
(14:07):
And I don't think she ever felt whole, But that's
my speculation. I think A probably onto something there. So,
but for three years it was quiet in her family.
Three years went by without any deaths among Marie and
Leon's friends and family, and they spent this time just
generally buying things and enjoying their wealth. But you know,
(14:30):
they've had a lot of mourning and death, so people
probably thought, oh, at last they're getting to have a
good time. They were black all the time, right, the
Baynard's are finally enjoying life. Yes, good for them. In
Marie's elderly cousins, Pauline and Virginie were the next to go.
(14:54):
The two of them had made that foolish mistake of
moving in with the Baynard's and Marie was carry for them.
This gets so strange because under Marie's care, first Pauline
died after she mistook a bowl of Lie left on
the counter for her dessert one night. Now, I do
want to say that lie at the time, it wasn't
(15:17):
so weird to have it on the counter because you
could wash your dishes with it, right, But the idea
that you would mistake it for like a bowl of
ice cream or something seems really suspicious. Um. And the
other thing that's really suspicious is that amazing as it
may sound, Virsionie made the very same mistake not even
(15:37):
a week later. So this might be a good teachable moment. Uh.
Just as a rule of thumb, don't eat things you
find left behind on the counter, but if they look
like ice cream. Um. And I have a I have
a family member who accidentally ate a spoonful of butter
(15:59):
that way and they are horrified it. But when you
discover it's fly also, I'm like, how much did they
eat before they realize? Like? Were they just what's going on?
I would think that it would sort of feel funny
in the mouth before you would swallow, But I don't
spit it out right. We know that both Pauline, as
we said, and Virginie were poisoned. However it may not
(16:21):
have been with Lie. Right. Um, you know this is
sometimes it's just a it makes the story a little
bit better. But when you when you go back and
you recall what's going on, Lie doesn't necessarily make a
lot of sense here. But hey, maybe it was like
and we don't know, like this is the account given
(16:42):
by Marie Baynard, right, yes, So, I mean sure her
cousins really really dopey andate Lie. I thought it was dessert.
I mean it probably won't surprise either that Marie and
Leon were air to both of their will. However, so
(17:02):
she made them a lie Sunday. Um not long, not
long at all after Leon Emrie inherited both Pauline and
Virginie estates, Leon, who was fifty five at this time,
started to experience terrible abdominal pain and he also had
vomiting and symptoms of kidney failure. He had a heart attack,
(17:25):
and he finally fell into a coma and in October
of nine he passed away, and there was only one
heir named on his will. Like they had no children,
he has lost his family and his sister. Uh so
Marie inherited everything. But wait, there's there's one more. I
(17:45):
feel like there there. We could all benefit from a
flow chart at this point of like how the wealth
has transferred and who has died and what's been accumulated.
So right, so there's one more. Less than two years
after her husband died, Marie's mother, who was elder and
who was losing her sight, became sick with the flu,
which was apparently um really quite strong that year, so
(18:07):
everyone was sort of falling down with it. But at
this point Marie was her mother's only air and her
mother died and she inherited a sizeable nest egg from her.
So this is once again maybe a good time to pause.
We haven't even gotten to any of the crazy trial
business yet, and when we returned, we're going to talk
about why all of these deaths were not simply bad
(18:28):
Bernard family luck. Welcome back to criminal Lea, where we're
talking about how there was no such thing as the
Bynard family chinks. Although the Bynards had suffered an extraordinary
(18:50):
number of deaths in a really short period of time,
still no one suspected that it was anything more than
just bad luck. I mean, think about the number of
funerals they went to, like what five years um The
locals actually started referring to it as the Bynard family
jinks until Leon died. And when he died, Marie inherited
(19:11):
all of their accumulated wealth and she finally emerged as
a suspect. But not at first, as it turns out
that when he fell ill, Leon became suspicious of his
wife and he told his possible lover, Louise, that Marie
was trying to poison him. In the days after Leon's death,
(19:31):
his possible mistress, Louise, concerned and very suspicious of Marie,
sent a letter to the public Prosecutor's office, and initially
her claim that Leon suspected his wife of poisoning him
was just outright dismissed. But that, along with the suspicions
of other citizens that had been brought to the prosecutor's
(19:52):
office uh caused investigators to finally be swayed to at
least take a cursory look into this vast swath of deaths.
The first of the bodies that they exhumed was Marie's
first husband, So dial it way back here two toxicologists
found a significant amount of arsenic in his organs um,
(20:13):
and so you know, maybe he didn't die of tuberculosis
after all. And recall when we mentioned earlier that euremia
can be caused by arsenic poisoning. When Marie's second husband
was exhumed, an autopsy found that he too had ingested
a large amount of arsenic over a period of time.
So at this point, these two bodies both come back
(20:35):
with arsenic, and the judge orders the bodies of every
member of Marie's family who died within twenty five years
before this to be exhumed. So by the time this
investigation was over, fatal levels of arsenic had been found
in eleven bodies. Each time a body was exhumed and
then the findings were that it had been poisoned, the
(20:55):
headlines would announce another one for Marie. So it's interesting
to note that of all of the bodies that were exhumped,
no arsenic was found in the remains of Marie's mother
in law. Her cause of death had been pneumonia. So
I mean, actually, perhaps this was really one case where
mother Nature did the work for Marie. Yeah, she was
(21:19):
probably like, who I can put the Arsenic away. Marie
was arrested. That took place on July twenty one, nine
and she was charged with the poisoning of a total
of eleven people, including her two husbands, parents, two cousins,
a great aunt, too close friends, and possibly a couple
of in laws. She may have been accused of more
(21:40):
than the poisonings, though there's an account of her trial report,
and it only appears in in one write up of
her trial that Marie was also accused of fraud. They
reported that she had cashed pension payments that had been
meant for one of her aunts, but it never comes
up again. While awaiting trial, Marie's a turn Ernie A
(22:00):
dapperman named Henri Ducluzzo explained her defense. He said, quote,
in this country of good wines and fine living, one
might possibly conceive of one murder, two murders, even three murders,
but eleven murders. Reese first trial took a little while
for it to begin. It begin in February. Remember she
(22:21):
was arrested in Well, they had to dig up all
those bodies and do tests. They did, and then that
does take a while. Exhamations are not you don't rush
them so in the courtroom, Marie's attorneys questioned the coroner's
methods and the tests that we're being used for finding
arsenic in a body. They accused the scientists who conducted
the tests of mishandling evidence or in some cases altogether
(22:44):
losing the evidence. They also led with a new theory
suggesting that arsenic could enter a corpse from the soil
around it through the actions of anaerobic bacteria, and no
one tested the soil, so the defense could just go
with that theory. Unable to come to any sort of verdict,
the court ruled that it needed more time to review
the scientific evidence and adjourned. So a new panel of
(23:07):
experts comes in and it takes them two years to
review the forensic evidence from the first trial. They were
forced to eliminate five of the charges at this time
because there actually was no longer in a physical evidence
to test anything in the corps whatever they exhumed for arsenic.
So Marie's second trial was also declared a mistrial. Seven
years later, Marie went on trial again, but by now
(23:31):
we are talking about nineteen sixty one, so that means
that like over the twelve years since this all began,
in a legal sense, even more of the physical evidence
had been lost, and that left very little physical evidence
against her. After all, we are talking about even in
a best case scenario, like going from the first trial
(23:52):
nine years at this point having gone, I was twelve
from the first and maybe nine from the second at least.
It's like a decade that we're talking about here. Yeah,
So experts admitted in court that the techniques that that
had been used to detect the arsenic were actually outdated tests,
and that there were too many factors to put the
pieces together anyway, which I thought was really who says that,
(24:14):
Like you're in court, You're like, there's too much to
do here, just I can't do it. It's such an
epic case of like I don't know anymore. Marie's attorney,
in the meantime, had learned that the caretaker of the
Ludin Cemetery, just where many of these people were buried,
(24:36):
had grown a garden near the burial sites, and his
garden included potatoes, which, as is the case with many
root vegetables, contained naturally occurring arsenic in their skins. The
caretaker also admitted that he had sprinkled his garden with
fertilizers that contained arsenic, and so both of these things
(24:58):
could have contaminated the soy around the bodies. At least
that was the defense's argument. So in addition to a
problem with this evidence, there were witnesses now who have
retracted their earlier testimonies from the first and second trials
um and one of those witnesses to retract her testimony
was his potential mistress that we talked about with Leon, Louise,
(25:20):
who now admitted that Leon had actually never told her
that he suspected his wife of trying to kill him.
His fabrication, it kind of seems like she suspected the
wife and added Leon's name to make it have more gravity.
I feel that way too. The Queen of Poisoners, which
is another nickname that Marie came to be known by,
was acquitted during her third trial in December of nineteen
(25:43):
sixty one. The jury took only three hours and twenty
five minutes to deliberate, So in the end, Marie's case
lasted across twelve maybe thirteen years. She was in prison
for about five of those years, but for most of
the time she was out on bond um. But when
she walked straight faced, as they reported from the courthouse
on December twelfth, nine. She remained a free woman, a
(26:09):
free woman with a lot of inheritances. She lived almost
twenty more years. She died in nineteen eighty on Valentine's Day. Yeah,
Maria is one of those interesting cases because you and
I have talked many times about the fact that in
researching any of these women that we've talked about on
the show so far, there's almost always something that you
(26:32):
admire or identify with them, or you know, Maria is
a little harder, like there's not a lot that's likable
about her. Yes, No, I completely agree. Uh in less
mean thoughts, Mario, It's time for what's your poison? What
is your poison? This week? Hollie? So uh, this week
(26:52):
we are going with the suassonquez, which is the French
seventy to those of us who don't speak well. And
in case you've ever wondered, also, numbers are always hard
in any any foreign language. But the it's just a
little fun quirk that in French sois san cans really
means sixty. Yeah. Before I even start with this, I
(27:16):
will say that if you go looking for recipes for
the French seventy five or sans uh. You will see
variations because some use gin and some use kognac. Oh,
I didn't see that. I only saw the ones that
used gin. This is a fun argument to get into
with bartenders, um or just to just not an argument,
(27:37):
even just a discussion. There's there's room on my bar
tab for all kinds of delightful cocktails. But I went
with gin because I am not by nature a gin drinker,
so I'm trying to expand my horizons. So this one
is one ounce of gin, a half ounce of fresh
lemon juice, a little dash or two of simple syrup.
(27:57):
Some recipes call for a specific amount uh, and then
three ounces of champagne or another sparkling wine is fine
if you don't have champagne. So this is kind of
like a ricky It's it's very similar to a lot
of other drinks. Yeah, I mean, the base ingredients are
all there, um. So you just put the gin, the
lemon juice, and the simple syrup into a shaker. You
(28:19):
can also use a flavored syrup if you want to
kick it up a notch um. Throw it in your
shaker and shake it up with some ice. And then
you strain it into a chilled champagne flute and you
top it with the champagne and the sparkling wine. I'm
not really a gin person myself, but it sounds delicious.
It's amazingly delicious. I used vanilla syrup instead of just
(28:42):
a plain simple syrup because I like vanilla and everything obviously,
so uh so remarkably delicious. So you also tried a
different cocktail this week as well, which which is the
Henning Way, which I actually was really curious about because
the Henning Way is absinthe and champagne, right. It's actually
(29:02):
called Death in the Afternoon. It was invented by Hemingway,
and I texted Maria death in the Afternoon should be
renamed Black in the Afternoon, and broke my heart because
it was I was like, I would have tried the Hemingway,
and maybe I don't. That was not a delightful. Of
the two cocktails, one was an absolutely delightful romp and
one I could not finish, no, ma'am. I like to
(29:26):
think of of Marie and Leon sitting out those three
years where they were just enjoying their wealth and buying
horses and houses and stuff. That they would sit out
on their porch and have because it would have been
invented by then. There's some there's some debate about when
it was invented, but this is twentieth century, you know,
this is you know, yeah, it would have existed. But
one of the things that drew me and you too,
(29:48):
it is the fact that it kind of was a
nice representation because it contains shamping of like Maurice ascendency financial.
I liked that it had Champagne, and I liked that
it had this really like Edi because that you know,
like lemon juicy kind of like squirt that went into
it as well, And I was like, I could really
see that being Marie. Yeah. Yeah. Criminalia is a production
(30:16):
of Shawonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from Shawonda land Audio, please visit the
I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shonda Land Audio in
partnership with I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to Criminalia.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Maria Trumrqui. And this week
we are talking about a woman named Marie bay Now
and she had a knack for getting ahead in life
(00:22):
by employing poison. Uh. That is how she eventually gained
her nickname, which was the Black Widow, likening her, of
course to the spiders that killed their mates for money. Uh,
at least once they had served their purpose. The most
amazing thing about Marieo not that she was accused of
poisoning at least a dozen people, but that she got
(00:43):
away with it and with each time she got wealthier.
Spoiler alert. I know. Marie was born Davao to a
farming family in lou De France, in and she was
(01:06):
educated at a convent school, not all that unusual for
the place and time, and she was remembered by her
classmates though as being quote vicious and immoral and wild
with boys. Well you know, they also described her as
a mean so she didn't really curry a lot of
favor from early child. When she was twenty four, so
(01:27):
we're fast forwarding a little bit to which she's an adult.
She married her cousin, August Aunty. The two actually were
first cousins. Um. The way that that worked out was
her mother was his father's sister. Now, this was not
an arranged marriage. This was just your yeah, just the
just just a friendly cousin marriage. Moving along, So these
(01:51):
two cousins in love had been married for seven years
when August became ill and he died and the official
cause of his death was listed as tuberculosis. But where
we're going to find out later is that he did
not die of TV or, as it was commonly called
at the time, the galloping consumption. Um. But let's not
(02:13):
gallop ahead of ourselves. So when he died, Marie's husband
left her seven thousand, two hundred forty francs. And while
that wasn't like a huge amount, she wasn't set for life.
It also was not a meager sum to come into right. Um.
She was still she was living with her parents, and
say she didn't have to worry about her rent or anything.
This was her money. Um. When she was thirty one,
(02:36):
that's when she became a widow. And it didn't take
very long for her friends to start encouraging her to
find another husband, as she that's what one did at
the time. Her parents, too, encouraged her to remarry, although
they may have been more concerned about gaining an extra
hand for their farm than about Marie's love life or
her personal security. Listen, I'm from farm stock. I understand
(02:57):
this ideology. I'm not saying it anything wrong with that.
It just, you know, like wishing your daughter to be
in love is also a good thing, right. There's a
there's a reason that a lot of farm families have
late in life babies, and it's because the more hands
I'm not kidding, right. Grieving for her husband, Marie initially
turned down every potential suitor that her friends and family suggested,
(03:19):
but then in Marie met Leon Bernard, and it is
said that her cousin Pascaline made this match and remarried
him within a year after her first husband's death. Ley
All ran a saddle and harness shop which was about
forty eight miles away from her parents farm, and although
their marriage remained childless and there were some rumors about infidelity,
(03:42):
we'll talk a little bit about that, the two of
them actually appeared to be a pretty contented couple together.
Neighbors and friends could never recall ever seeing them fight.
So Leon had a nickname for his new ride, which
was Moose, which means fly in French. And I'm actually
really not sure if that should be in the positive
or the negative category of their relationship, but there it is. Uh.
(04:07):
You know, it's also common for French people to call
their beloved a cabbage. So great it could be perfectly
lovely like and and among couples, you know, you never
you never know what's going on between people, like it
might have been a very loving, happy, funny nickname. It
could have just been that she was a past I
have no idea sweet little fly because it's French. It
(04:30):
sounds cute, it's right. Over the years, Leon and Marie
actually became pretty wealthy. They did really well for themselves.
They ended up owning six houses, They had an inn,
they had a cafe, and they also owned two farms
where they bred horses. So not too bad. So that's
that's money. Yeah. Um. Not very long after they got married,
(04:51):
Leon began disappearing in the evenings and it was not
for work. Uh, And the local gossips didn't hesitate to
point an accusatory finger at two women in particular in town.
One they told Marie was her cousin Pasquleen Um, the
very same woman who had introduced the two um. And
he was also said to be having an affair with
(05:11):
the postmistress Louise Pinto. And it turns out that Leon
did have a roving eye, but it always seemed like
Marie just kind of turned a blind eye to his indiscretions.
When he died in October of nine, his doctor did
not list the cause of death as anything suspicious. It
(05:31):
was listed as euremia. So, knowing what Marie's future would hold,
as we have this great perspective, his cause of death
is actually pretty interesting, okay. And this is why. So
this is a condition that most commonly develops when you've
already been diagnosed with chronic kidney disease. This isn't something
(05:52):
that you're just like, oh, like a U T I
or something, you know. This is something that's long standing
disease or your kidneys. Um happens when all the toxic
waste products in your body start to build up because
your kidneys just can't remove them from you anymore. And
once they get to a toxic level that can be fatal.
So here is why we are telling you all of
this and why it is interesting. This type of kidney
(06:15):
damage can also be caused by repeated long term exposure
to arsenic what's happening in this little French town chill domage.
(06:35):
So though the investigation into the murders surrounding Marie initially
focused only on the death of Leon Um, we'll get
to that. It turns out that she wasn't just targeting
a husband. When we come back, we're gonna expose Marie
as a serial poisoner. Welcome back to Criminalia, where we're
(07:06):
about to name Marie's targets. So, nine years before Leon
Bernard died of uremia, Leon's great aunt, Madame Marie Louise
le Comte, died, presumably of natural causes due to her
old age. She was eighty six at the time and
she had been ill for a considerable period before this.
(07:27):
It was actually Marie who was sort of her nursemaid
and cared for her at the end of her life. So,
because she had never had any children, there was great
speculation over who would be remembered in her will, and
the whole family knew that Marie Louise had a considerable
amount of satings, and Marie and Leon thought that they
were going to be the recipients of her wealth. After all,
(07:50):
she had moved in with them at that point and
Marie had been her caregiver. But it turned out it
was neither of them that was named in the will.
Leon's parents, who were still alive, inherited everything, furious they
received nothing for their good deeds. Neither Marie nor Leon
attended the funeral and the second death that Marie is
accused of at this point, because remember we're going back
(08:12):
in time before her husband is actually her husband's best friend. Interestingly,
according to some accounts of this story, Toussaint was one
of the men Marie may or may not have had
an affair with. Maybe there were some infidelities in this marriage.
The other affair speculation was that there was a German
(08:32):
handyman who worked at their home and on their farm.
Marie's infidelities, though may or may not have been factual.
Both men denied the affairs over the years, and Marie
never seems to have even addressed them. Uh. This is
probably the gossip mill in her small town at its
finest but you never know, because sometimes rumors have bases
in fact. So to go back to that first person,
(08:56):
Maria mentioned to Saint Rivas and his wife Blanche may
have actually been borders in Marie and Leon's home, or
they might have actually just been neighbors. The record gets
a little unclear on this point, but what we do
know is that Toussaint and Leon were very good friends,
so to still have been unwell, and Marie had helped
his wife care for him during this time. He wasn't
(09:17):
a poor man. I read in one source that he
was a baker, but I couldn't verify that really anywhere. Um,
he was a poor when he died, and probably no
surprise that his wife was named as his soul heir
in his will. As one does. This was really not
acceptable for Marie. She felt once again as though she
had been slighted since she had once again been his
(09:38):
deathbed caregiver. But as we'll see, she had some other
projects going on. Was definitely this is definitely a woman
who knew how to diversify her potential revenue streams. That's
one way I'm saying it again, through nefarious means, but
it's still a revenue stream, right, She's she's making herself
(09:59):
wealthy here. Um. So it was Marie's father who was
the next pass away. In May of nine, which was
about ten months after Toussaint's death. Marie and her mother
shared the assets, which included two farms, and after her
father's death, Marie's mother moved in with her and Leon
never move in with Marie. Leon, yes, that they just
(10:20):
don't board at their house. Good life advice, solid life advice.
It's like dine with the Borges, right, yes, uh, which
makes they're in a whole fascinating right, I think. Didn't
they have a cafe to she were delicious? Just four
(10:44):
months after the death of Marie's father, Leon's grandmother fell
ill and Marie stepped into care for her, and when
dear Colmer died, she left her assets once again, they
went to Leon's parents. So if it sounds like it's
a bad time to be Leon's parents, it was. Yeah.
A short two months later, Leon's father accidentally eight poisonous
(11:09):
mushrooms and collapsed and died, and he had willed his
assets to his wife, So now she had all the
things as also makes sense. So as you might imagine
as we continue down this list of victims. Leon's mother
was not a widow for very long um. Four months.
That's a really short time. Four months after Leon's father's death. Um.
(11:32):
Where that puts us now in January of one For
anybody who's keeping score here, Uh, Leon's mother fell ill um.
So guess who nursed her on her deathbed? Marie. So
here's the thing. You would think the line of the
line of deaths for them to finally get this at
this point accumulated hefty inheritance would go right to them,
(11:55):
but no, neither Marie nor Leon were named in the will. Instead,
Leon's mother left all of her assets to her daughter,
Leon's sister, Lucy. Two months go by after Leon's mother's death,
and Leon discovers that his sister Lucy had hanged herself
in her home. So, while we don't know very much
about Lucy or her story, which is very clearly a
(12:17):
tragic one. Her death was suicide, not by poison, it
is still an interesting death in Marie's lineup because Lucy
didn't have a will when she died, and she had
at this point just inherited a whole lot of real
estate and a substantial amount of money from her parents.
I mean, I think it was fairly substantial. It was
(12:37):
like close to like three thousand francs or something, and
like at least two houses. It was. It was a
nice chunk that I'm sure Marie thought should be hers.
Um So during the time she knew Marie. It said
that Lucy had remarked at least once um and we
quote this, I will not leave that Marie woman even
a teaspoon, so that a woman really kind of says
(13:01):
it all, doesn't it like, But under French law, her
assets without a will would go to her next of kin,
and that was Leon. Uh. Yeah, I think that Lucy
probably talked to Marie's classmates. Maybe they didn't. She's she's mad,
She's like none of them liked him. So less than
a year after Lucy's suicide, Blanche, remember she was to
(13:23):
Saint Rivet's widow, also died and Marie had stayed by
her side as she lay dying, and Leon very thoughtfully
bought her house right out from under her. What happened
there was under a life annuity contract, which you can
still do now. It was very popular at the time
in France. An ownership of Blanche's house would have been
transferred to Leon and he would pay her monthly until
(13:46):
she died. But she died so quickly that he actually
never ended up having to pay her anything. So Blanche a,
grateful for Marie's comfort, is the one person who did
name Marie as her soul heir in her will. Finally right,
She's like, I'm getting the recognition I deserve. She's like,
I feel all whole now I can just take my money.
(14:07):
And I don't think she ever felt whole, But that's
my speculation. I think A probably onto something there. So,
but for three years it was quiet in her family.
Three years went by without any deaths among Marie and
Leon's friends and family, and they spent this time just
generally buying things and enjoying their wealth. But you know,
(14:30):
they've had a lot of mourning and death, so people
probably thought, oh, at last they're getting to have a
good time. They were black all the time, right, the
Baynard's are finally enjoying life. Yes, good for them. In
Marie's elderly cousins, Pauline and Virginie were the next to go.
(14:54):
The two of them had made that foolish mistake of
moving in with the Baynard's and Marie was carry for them.
This gets so strange because under Marie's care, first Pauline
died after she mistook a bowl of Lie left on
the counter for her dessert one night. Now, I do
want to say that lie at the time, it wasn't
(15:17):
so weird to have it on the counter because you
could wash your dishes with it, right, But the idea
that you would mistake it for like a bowl of
ice cream or something seems really suspicious. Um. And the
other thing that's really suspicious is that amazing as it
may sound, Virsionie made the very same mistake not even
(15:37):
a week later. So this might be a good teachable moment. Uh.
Just as a rule of thumb, don't eat things you
find left behind on the counter, but if they look
like ice cream. Um. And I have a I have
a family member who accidentally ate a spoonful of butter
(15:59):
that way and they are horrified it. But when you
discover it's fly also, I'm like, how much did they
eat before they realize? Like? Were they just what's going on?
I would think that it would sort of feel funny
in the mouth before you would swallow, But I don't
spit it out right. We know that both Pauline, as
we said, and Virginie were poisoned. However it may not
(16:21):
have been with Lie. Right. Um, you know this is
sometimes it's just a it makes the story a little
bit better. But when you when you go back and
you recall what's going on, Lie doesn't necessarily make a
lot of sense here. But hey, maybe it was like
and we don't know, like this is the account given
(16:42):
by Marie Baynard, right, yes, So, I mean sure her
cousins really really dopey andate Lie. I thought it was dessert.
I mean it probably won't surprise either that Marie and
Leon were air to both of their will. However, so
(17:02):
she made them a lie Sunday. Um not long, not
long at all after Leon Emrie inherited both Pauline and
Virginie estates, Leon, who was fifty five at this time,
started to experience terrible abdominal pain and he also had
vomiting and symptoms of kidney failure. He had a heart attack,
(17:25):
and he finally fell into a coma and in October
of nine he passed away, and there was only one
heir named on his will. Like they had no children,
he has lost his family and his sister. Uh so
Marie inherited everything. But wait, there's there's one more. I
(17:45):
feel like there there. We could all benefit from a
flow chart at this point of like how the wealth
has transferred and who has died and what's been accumulated.
So right, so there's one more. Less than two years
after her husband died, Marie's mother, who was elder and
who was losing her sight, became sick with the flu,
which was apparently um really quite strong that year, so
(18:07):
everyone was sort of falling down with it. But at
this point Marie was her mother's only air and her
mother died and she inherited a sizeable nest egg from her.
So this is once again maybe a good time to pause.
We haven't even gotten to any of the crazy trial
business yet, and when we returned, we're going to talk
about why all of these deaths were not simply bad
(18:28):
Bernard family luck. Welcome back to criminal Lea, where we're
talking about how there was no such thing as the
Bynard family chinks. Although the Bynards had suffered an extraordinary
(18:50):
number of deaths in a really short period of time,
still no one suspected that it was anything more than
just bad luck. I mean, think about the number of
funerals they went to, like what five years um The
locals actually started referring to it as the Bynard family
jinks until Leon died. And when he died, Marie inherited
(19:11):
all of their accumulated wealth and she finally emerged as
a suspect. But not at first, as it turns out
that when he fell ill, Leon became suspicious of his
wife and he told his possible lover, Louise, that Marie
was trying to poison him. In the days after Leon's death,
(19:31):
his possible mistress, Louise, concerned and very suspicious of Marie,
sent a letter to the public Prosecutor's office, and initially
her claim that Leon suspected his wife of poisoning him
was just outright dismissed. But that, along with the suspicions
of other citizens that had been brought to the prosecutor's
(19:52):
office uh caused investigators to finally be swayed to at
least take a cursory look into this vast swath of deaths.
The first of the bodies that they exhumed was Marie's
first husband, So dial it way back here two toxicologists
found a significant amount of arsenic in his organs um,
(20:13):
and so you know, maybe he didn't die of tuberculosis
after all. And recall when we mentioned earlier that euremia
can be caused by arsenic poisoning. When Marie's second husband
was exhumed, an autopsy found that he too had ingested
a large amount of arsenic over a period of time.
So at this point, these two bodies both come back
(20:35):
with arsenic, and the judge orders the bodies of every
member of Marie's family who died within twenty five years
before this to be exhumed. So by the time this
investigation was over, fatal levels of arsenic had been found
in eleven bodies. Each time a body was exhumed and
then the findings were that it had been poisoned, the
(20:55):
headlines would announce another one for Marie. So it's interesting
to note that of all of the bodies that were exhumped,
no arsenic was found in the remains of Marie's mother
in law. Her cause of death had been pneumonia. So
I mean, actually, perhaps this was really one case where
mother Nature did the work for Marie. Yeah, she was
(21:19):
probably like, who I can put the Arsenic away. Marie
was arrested. That took place on July twenty one, nine
and she was charged with the poisoning of a total
of eleven people, including her two husbands, parents, two cousins,
a great aunt, too close friends, and possibly a couple
of in laws. She may have been accused of more
(21:40):
than the poisonings, though there's an account of her trial report,
and it only appears in in one write up of
her trial that Marie was also accused of fraud. They
reported that she had cashed pension payments that had been
meant for one of her aunts, but it never comes
up again. While awaiting trial, Marie's a turn Ernie A
(22:00):
dapperman named Henri Ducluzzo explained her defense. He said, quote,
in this country of good wines and fine living, one
might possibly conceive of one murder, two murders, even three murders,
but eleven murders. Reese first trial took a little while
for it to begin. It begin in February. Remember she
(22:21):
was arrested in Well, they had to dig up all
those bodies and do tests. They did, and then that
does take a while. Exhamations are not you don't rush
them so in the courtroom, Marie's attorneys questioned the coroner's
methods and the tests that we're being used for finding
arsenic in a body. They accused the scientists who conducted
the tests of mishandling evidence or in some cases altogether
(22:44):
losing the evidence. They also led with a new theory
suggesting that arsenic could enter a corpse from the soil
around it through the actions of anaerobic bacteria, and no
one tested the soil, so the defense could just go
with that theory. Unable to come to any sort of verdict,
the court ruled that it needed more time to review
the scientific evidence and adjourned. So a new panel of
(23:07):
experts comes in and it takes them two years to
review the forensic evidence from the first trial. They were
forced to eliminate five of the charges at this time
because there actually was no longer in a physical evidence
to test anything in the corps whatever they exhumed for arsenic.
So Marie's second trial was also declared a mistrial. Seven
years later, Marie went on trial again, but by now
(23:31):
we are talking about nineteen sixty one, so that means
that like over the twelve years since this all began,
in a legal sense, even more of the physical evidence
had been lost, and that left very little physical evidence
against her. After all, we are talking about even in
a best case scenario, like going from the first trial
(23:52):
nine years at this point having gone, I was twelve
from the first and maybe nine from the second at least.
It's like a decade that we're talking about here. Yeah,
So experts admitted in court that the techniques that that
had been used to detect the arsenic were actually outdated tests,
and that there were too many factors to put the
pieces together anyway, which I thought was really who says that,
(24:14):
Like you're in court, You're like, there's too much to
do here, just I can't do it. It's such an
epic case of like I don't know anymore. Marie's attorney,
in the meantime, had learned that the caretaker of the
Ludin Cemetery, just where many of these people were buried,
(24:36):
had grown a garden near the burial sites, and his
garden included potatoes, which, as is the case with many
root vegetables, contained naturally occurring arsenic in their skins. The
caretaker also admitted that he had sprinkled his garden with
fertilizers that contained arsenic, and so both of these things
(24:58):
could have contaminated the soy around the bodies. At least
that was the defense's argument. So in addition to a
problem with this evidence, there were witnesses now who have
retracted their earlier testimonies from the first and second trials
um and one of those witnesses to retract her testimony
was his potential mistress that we talked about with Leon, Louise,
(25:20):
who now admitted that Leon had actually never told her
that he suspected his wife of trying to kill him.
His fabrication, it kind of seems like she suspected the
wife and added Leon's name to make it have more gravity.
I feel that way too. The Queen of Poisoners, which
is another nickname that Marie came to be known by,
was acquitted during her third trial in December of nineteen
(25:43):
sixty one. The jury took only three hours and twenty
five minutes to deliberate, So in the end, Marie's case
lasted across twelve maybe thirteen years. She was in prison
for about five of those years, but for most of
the time she was out on bond um. But when
she walked straight faced, as they reported from the courthouse
on December twelfth, nine. She remained a free woman, a
(26:09):
free woman with a lot of inheritances. She lived almost
twenty more years. She died in nineteen eighty on Valentine's Day. Yeah,
Maria is one of those interesting cases because you and
I have talked many times about the fact that in
researching any of these women that we've talked about on
the show so far, there's almost always something that you
(26:32):
admire or identify with them, or you know, Maria is
a little harder, like there's not a lot that's likable
about her. Yes, No, I completely agree. Uh in less
mean thoughts, Mario, It's time for what's your poison? What
is your poison? This week? Hollie? So uh, this week
(26:52):
we are going with the suassonquez, which is the French
seventy to those of us who don't speak well. And
in case you've ever wondered, also, numbers are always hard
in any any foreign language. But the it's just a
little fun quirk that in French sois san cans really
means sixty. Yeah. Before I even start with this, I
(27:16):
will say that if you go looking for recipes for
the French seventy five or sans uh. You will see
variations because some use gin and some use kognac. Oh,
I didn't see that. I only saw the ones that
used gin. This is a fun argument to get into
with bartenders, um or just to just not an argument,
(27:37):
even just a discussion. There's there's room on my bar
tab for all kinds of delightful cocktails. But I went
with gin because I am not by nature a gin drinker,
so I'm trying to expand my horizons. So this one
is one ounce of gin, a half ounce of fresh
lemon juice, a little dash or two of simple syrup.
(27:57):
Some recipes call for a specific amount uh, and then
three ounces of champagne or another sparkling wine is fine
if you don't have champagne. So this is kind of
like a ricky It's it's very similar to a lot
of other drinks. Yeah, I mean, the base ingredients are
all there, um. So you just put the gin, the
lemon juice, and the simple syrup into a shaker. You
(28:19):
can also use a flavored syrup if you want to
kick it up a notch um. Throw it in your
shaker and shake it up with some ice. And then
you strain it into a chilled champagne flute and you
top it with the champagne and the sparkling wine. I'm
not really a gin person myself, but it sounds delicious.
It's amazingly delicious. I used vanilla syrup instead of just
(28:42):
a plain simple syrup because I like vanilla and everything obviously,
so uh so remarkably delicious. So you also tried a
different cocktail this week as well, which which is the
Henning Way, which I actually was really curious about because
the Henning Way is absinthe and champagne, right. It's actually
(29:02):
called Death in the Afternoon. It was invented by Hemingway,
and I texted Maria death in the Afternoon should be
renamed Black in the Afternoon, and broke my heart because
it was I was like, I would have tried the Hemingway,
and maybe I don't. That was not a delightful. Of
the two cocktails, one was an absolutely delightful romp and
one I could not finish, no, ma'am. I like to
(29:26):
think of of Marie and Leon sitting out those three
years where they were just enjoying their wealth and buying
horses and houses and stuff. That they would sit out
on their porch and have because it would have been
invented by then. There's some there's some debate about when
it was invented, but this is twentieth century, you know,
this is you know, yeah, it would have existed. But
one of the things that drew me and you too,
(29:48):
it is the fact that it kind of was a
nice representation because it contains shamping of like Maurice ascendency financial.
I liked that it had Champagne, and I liked that
it had this really like Edi because that you know,
like lemon juicy kind of like squirt that went into
it as well, And I was like, I could really
see that being Marie. Yeah. Yeah. Criminalia is a production
(30:16):
of Shawonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from Shawonda land Audio, please visit the
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Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Maria Trimarchi
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