September 26, 2023 • 33 mins
Marie Lafarge's trial was a sensation. But when chemists begin to disagree on their conclusions, who's to say what the real story is? NOTE: This is the second part of our discussion of the trail of Marie Lafarge. If you haven't listened to last week's episode, begin there.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim
and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. This is
part two of our series on Marie LeFarge. If you
haven't yet listened to last week's episode, I would go
back and start there. Marie LeFarge arrived at the gravesite
(00:27):
of her husband, Charles Lafarge, wearing mourning clothes. She twenty
four years old, was by all accounts, a striking woman,
with long, dark hair tucked under her hat and a
complexion that looked particularly elegant against her all black wardrobe.
(00:47):
It might have looked, at first glance to an onlooker
that she was at her husband's gravesite for his funeral, or,
perhaps more realistically, in this case, to pay her respects
to vietly placed flowers down on the grave of a
man who had passed away from illness a year earlier.
(01:07):
But no, Marie LeFarge was wearing black at her husband's
grave because his body was being exhumed as part of
a trial. Her trial, she was accused of murdering her husband,
and her case had captivated the country. There were literally
(01:29):
hundreds of spectators crowding the grave as it was dug up,
with the judge of the region Lubersac supervising the digging.
Savvy venders were selling smelling salts. As soon as Charles
Lefarge's coffin was pride open, those salesmen began pulling in
(01:49):
a hefty business. A sea of handkerchiefs were lifted to noses.
In unison, Marie LeFarge swooned and seemed so faint that
someone shouted that court should be postponed for the day.
The jury decreed that the trial should continue to proceed.
(02:10):
When Marie LeFarge had first been charged with the murder
of her husband, local apothecary men had tried to test
her husband's body for arsenic, but they were completely unfamiliar
with the latest scientific method, a chemical test for identifying
arsenic created by the Scottish doctor James Marsh. Not only
(02:34):
had the local men used old fashioned, inexact methods, but
their test had been completely bungled anyway, a glass tube
had broken halfway through, so the judge had determined a
new test would be performed, the Marsh test done by
professional chemists in full view of the court, so no
(02:59):
errors would be made. This time around. Unfortunately, by this
point Charles LaFarge's body had decomposed to the point where
a newspaper described it as paste rather than flesh. The
experts were forced to use a spoon to scrape what
they could into small pots. Those pots were swiftly transported
(03:23):
to an open air laboratory in tool where a group
of chemists were going to be faced with the most
high stakes experiment of their careers. With the court, a
crowd of spectators, and the nation waiting, these chemists scurried
around their charcoal furnaces. They painstakingly added the proper chemical
(03:48):
reagents and set up a piece of porcelain at exactly
the right distance from a flame. And then they held
their breath, probably both from the stench of Charles l
Lefarge's remains and from the anticipation of what they were doing.
The Marsh test was deceptive in its seeming simplicity, though
(04:11):
the chemistry involved wasn't particularly complex, there were a number
of factors in its methodology that had to be absolutely
perfect in order for the test to work, and the
French chemists and toul who had read about the procedure
in translation were performing it for the first time. Finally,
(04:35):
after a day of waiting and anticipating, the chemists returned
to the Palace of Justice. They turned to the judge
and the jury and announced they had reached their scientific
conclusion as to whether there was arsenic in the body
of Charles Lafarge. Marie LeFarge looked as those who were
(04:59):
about to fame as she and the rest of the
room waited to hear the determination that would all but
seal her fate. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is noble blood.
(05:21):
The evidence against Marie LeFarge was building a very compelling
case against her. She had been miserable in her marriage
to Charles Lafarge. She was lied to and forced to
live in his decrepit, crumbling estate out in the country,
far from her friends and her well connected social scene
(05:41):
in Paris. On the first night she had arrived, she
had barricaded herself in her bedroom and threatened to kill
herself with arsenic if he didn't release her from the marriage.
Less than six months later, her husband was dead. Marie
had ordered arson from an apothecary. A few days before.
(06:03):
She sent her husband a cake in the mail, a
cake that he seemed to become ill immediately after eating,
and Marie had procured arsenic again. Once her husband was
back home. She had sent Charles's clerk, Denis Barbier, to
get a sizeable amount of arsenic, allegedly to kill the
(06:25):
rats that still ran about their home. When the investigators
had arrived after Charles's death, they found a bag of
arsenic buried in the garden, seemingly hidden away from private eyes.
A servant told the magistrate that Marie LeFarge had told
him to bury it on her account so law enforcement
(06:47):
wouldn't be able to find it, presumably, and the friend
of the family who worked as a housekeeper, Mademoiselle Braun,
had seen Marie LeFarge putting white powder into broth that
she was preparing for Charles. And then there was the
case of the missing jewelry. Years before Charles's death, back
(07:10):
when Marie was still unmarried, she had visited a friend
of hers, the Vicomtesse de Leotto. Not long after the visit,
the Vicomtesse noticed that some of her diamonds were missing.
Though she and her husband didn't have Marie investigated, they
were always suspicious, and once news of this massive murder
(07:32):
trial hit newspapers. The Vicomte reached out to investigators and
let them know that perhaps Marie's room should be searched
for diamonds, and what should they have found right in
Marie's room but those very jewels. Of course, stealing jewels
is unrelated to the possible murder of one's husband, but
(07:56):
it painted a damning picture of an am a moral
woman who would steal and possibly even murder out of
resentment for the fact that her lot in life had
led her to marriage with a broke iron master. But
of course, with regards to the actual murder, when Marie's
(08:18):
case was going to trial, there was one piece of
evidence more damning than anything else. Investigators on the site
had tested Charles's body for arsenic. They tested the cup
of broth Mademoiselle Bron had put aside, and they tested
the little white box that Marie LeFarge had claimed contained
(08:41):
gum arabic. They had determined arsenic was present. Sure, they
the local men in Brieve had not been expert forensic chemists,
and they hadn't used the more sophisticated March test. And yes,
a tube had broken, but they had found arsenic, and
(09:03):
that had to mean something, but did it? At the trial,
Marie Lefarge's defense council cleared his throat one morning in
court and read out a letter that had come directly
from Paris. There was a rarefied air around the letter.
(09:26):
People knew it was important. It was from a man
who was nothing short of a scientific celebrity. Metuophila was
the dean of the Paris medical Faculty, and he served
on a number of influential committees. He edited important medical
journals and less important but still interesting. He had a
(09:49):
beautiful singing voice and would often hold musical salons that
were considered centers of culture. The defense council began to
read the let letter that Orphila had sent to court.
You ask me, he wrote, if it is sufficient proof
of the presence of arsenic in the digestive organs, if
(10:10):
the liquor produced by boiling them in distilled water yield
when treated with sulfurated hydrogen a yellow precipitate. He was
describing the old method, the non marsh method for finding arsenic.
I answer no, he said. Orphela referenced a previous case
(10:32):
where the yellow precipitate that is so often mistaken for
arsenic had been something completely innocuous. The test that those
men had done in brief Orphela concluded was completely meaningless.
In eighteen forty, an English doctor writing about the case
reached the same verdict, stating no weight can be attached
(10:55):
to the report of the brief commission, the members of
which evidenced the grip josest ignorance of the truths known
to the merest tyro in legal medicine. They had found arsenic,
maybe sure, but factoring in the old, unreliable method and
the broken too, the entire thing was bunk. And if
(11:18):
there was no proof that Charles Lafarge had actually been
poisoned with arsenic, then there was only circumstantial evidence of
a woman who might have been unhappy in her brief marriage,
but wasn't a murderer. And so those were the circumstances
that led to the judge ordering a second examination of
(11:42):
Charles LaFarge's body. This time, experts from Limoge would take
whatever samples they could from the decomposed corpse, used their
spoons to scoop it into jars and use the marsh test,
which could detect even the tiniest train of arsenic By
(12:02):
this time, the trial had become a sensation. If you
were imagining something out of the musical Chicago, where an
accused murderess becomes an object of tabloid celebrity, you wouldn't
be far off. People crowded into the courtroom to get
a glimpse of the young widow dressed all in black,
(12:23):
who was known to swoon and to require smelling salts
at various points during the proceedings. As the trial went on,
Marie LeFarge would begin to be carried into courts on
a setae. So delicate were her sensibilities and so finally,
with anticipation as high as it possibly could be, the
(12:45):
Lamoge Commission issued their report. Using the incredibly scientific Marsh test.
They found no arsenic in Charles LaFarge's body. Marie and
her counsel both burst into tears. She was vindicated, at
(13:07):
least for now. With the scientific consensus that Marie LeFarge
was actually innocent, the events of the preceding year began
to tell a slightly different story. Sure, Marie had been
unhappy when she had arrived at her husband's crumbling estate
(13:30):
to find that he had lied about his financial situation,
wouldn't you be Yes, She had threatened suicide that night,
but she had been overwhelmed, foolish, embarrassed, childish. Her husband
Charles had responded kindly, and from that point on he
and Marie began to get along. It was at least amiable,
(13:54):
something that slowly developed over the weeks into friendship and
then maybe even devotion. Of course, Marie's mother in law
was suspicious and resentful of her from the start. Marie
wrote in her memoirs that when Charles was away, he
would write sweet love notes to Marie in his letters home.
(14:16):
For a time, it was an evening tradition that Marie
would read Charles's letters out loud, but she noticed how
her mother in law stiffened and bristled when she read
anything sweet or romantic. Marie stopped reading those parts. The
fact that Charles had gotten sick after eating cakes they sent, well,
(14:39):
Marie's mother in law had baked those cakes. She was
the only one in the family who baked the desserts,
and if the cakes had been replaced or tampered with
by the time they reached Charles in Paris, there was
no evidence it was Marie who did that. It could
have been anyone at that point. In fact, it seems
(14:59):
unlike Marie would have poisoned the cakes at all, because
she wrote in her letter to Charles that he should
invite her favorite sister over while he was in Paris,
where it seems really likely that she could have shared
the cake. You don't want to suggest your favorite sister
go over to a house where poisoned cake is lying around.
(15:21):
As for ordering arsenic, Arsenic was used as rat poison,
and le Glandier their home was full of rats. They
scampered everywhere, ate Marie's clothes. It's completely reasonable that Marie
would try to make it so that the home that
she lived in might be slightly improved. And then when
(15:44):
Charles came home ill and bedridden, the rats were bothersome.
They made noise and kept Charles up when he needed
bed rest. If Marie had actually planned on poisoning her
husband with the arsenic, then why would she have told
him about every step she was taking to get arsenic
(16:05):
and get rid of the rats. She told him when
she sent his clerk, Denny Barbier to get the arsenic,
and she showed Charles how much had come when Barbier
had returned, there was nothing sneaky about it. Well, what
about the arsenic that was buried in the yard when
the investigators came. In Marie's memoir, she says, a young servant,
(16:28):
panicked by the thought of either Marie or anyone else
in the household being accused of arsenic poisoning, had buried
it without telling Marie. When the investigators interrogated the servant boy,
they had intimidated him. They had threatened him with the
scaffold unless he told them that he had buried the
(16:48):
arsenic on Marie's orders. By then, the investigation had already
set its sights firmly on Marie, who had been accused
by Charles's suspicious family members who hated her from the start.
But sometimes people get cholera, Sometimes people die of cholera.
(17:14):
The matter of the Vicomtess's missing diamonds was a little
more complicated, But even then Marie had an explanation. You see,
when the investigators were given the tip and arrived to
search Marie's rooms for the jewels, well they hadn't actually
needed to search at all. Marie Lafarcee told them outright, yes,
(17:39):
she did have the Vicomtessa's diamonds and told them exactly
where they were. She hadn't stolen the diamonds from her friend.
Her friend had given them to her to sell to
help her friend out of a tricky financial situation. The
Vicomtess was being blackmailed by an ex lover, and she
(18:00):
had asked Marie to secretly sell some of her diamonds
to pay him off. The Vicomtesse had not expected her
husband to even notice that the jewels were gone. In
the meantime, Marie kept the diamonds safe in her room
while she figured out what to do with them. When
Marie was arrested for the alleged jewel robbery, she wrote
(18:23):
to her friend, May God never visit upon you the
evil you have done to me. Alas I know you
are really good but weak. You have told yourself that
I am likely to be convicted of an atrocious crime.
I may as well take the blame of one which
is only infamous. I keep our secret. I left my
(18:46):
honor in your hands, and you have not chosen to
absolve me. The story is a little far fetched, I admit.
While waiting for the murder trial to proceed, Marie was
actually tried and found guilty for stealing the jewels. In
the end, it was her word against her friends, and
(19:08):
the Vicomtesse maintained that there had been no ruinous blackmail plot.
But even if Marie was guilty of stealing her friend's diamonds,
as Marie had pointed out in her letter, that crime
was merely infamous as opposed to the atrocious crime of murder.
And the chemists came back with the marsh test and
(19:32):
absolved Marie LeFarge of murder. There was no arsenic in
Charles LaFarge's body, and so no matter how likely a
suspect Marie Lafarge was, it was going to be very
difficult for a jury to convict her. Still, the prosecution
was convinced that Marie Lafarge was a murderess, and they
(19:54):
were determined to do everything they could to win their case,
even if the defense was already doing a metaphorical victory lap.
After the test results. Wait a moment, the prosecution said,
there was one test that said there was arsenic and
another that said there wasn't. That's not very definitive at all. Sure,
(20:16):
the Lamoege Commission had used the brand new Marsh test,
but it was famously tricky, and they had done it
for the first time, there's no guarantee that they did
it right. The prosecution had an idea, a Hail Mary,
a tiebreaker test done by none other than the celebrity
(20:37):
of the French chemistry world, met to Orphila himself. By
this point, there was nothing left of poor Charles LaFarge's
body but something I read described as a milkshake like
preparation of organ mash. But Orphila was the expert. If
anyone in France could do the Marsh test and do
(21:00):
it absolutely correctly, it was him. Orphila was a distinguished
looking man, with a bald head and fuzzy tufts of
hair circling his temples. Contemporary drawings of him highlight his small,
sharp nose and thin, serious lips. When Orphila entered the courtroom,
(21:26):
I imagine his celebrity brought the room to a hush.
The undisputed expert on arsenic poisoning stood before the judge
and the jury. He had tested the remains of Charles Lafarge,
all the organs that his team had managed to extract
from the decomposing corpse. They had done the Marsh test
(21:50):
and done it correctly. Before Orphila offered his conclusion as
to the fate of Charles Lafarge, he gave the court
some context. Over years of experimentation, he had determined that
human bones contain trace amounts of arsenic, and that sometimes
(22:10):
arsenic can also be found leeched from the soil, and
so he had been extraordinarily careful in his analysis of
Charles LaFarge's body to ensure that his samples taken from
the organs were unspoiled and did not include any bone
or soil. So what was the conclusion arsenic meteu Orphila
(22:36):
had found arsenic in Charles Lfarge's organs half a milligram,
an amount so tiny it could have only ever been
detected using the marsh test. The courtroom erupted. The defense
scrambled and tried to call one of Orphila's rivals, a
man named Francois vincent Resbail, to the courtroom to offer
(22:59):
a counter annal, but Rispel didn't make it in time.
He arrived at the court four hours after the jury
had reached its verdict. Orphila's testimony sealed Marie LaFarge's fate,
and she was found guilty of the murder of her
husband and sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor, though
(23:21):
the labor would later be commuted. Marie Lafarge, twenty four
years old, would spend the next twelve years of her
life in prison. In eighteen fifty two, she became ill
with tuberculosis, and she was released from prison on the
orders of Napoleon the Third. She died a few months later.
(23:43):
That was forensic toxicology and action. Orphila had found arsenic,
and so it meant that Marie Lafarge was guilty. But
did it and did Orphila actually find evidence that Charles
Defarge was poisoned? The question was a little more complicated
(24:04):
than it had appeared that day in the courtroom. The
chemist Francois Raspel, possibly guilty over arriving at court a
few hours too late to offer his own testimony, would
spend years publicly challenging Orphila and criticizing both his methods
and his results. Orphila had claimed he found half a
(24:26):
milligram of arsenic in Charles Lefarge's remains. Respel determined that
amount to be a hundredth of a milligram, and there
were a number of points in Orpheli's testing where a
small amount of arsenic might have snuck in. For Arphela's
final test, the one where he had found the arsenic,
(24:47):
he had sent one of his assistants to a neighboring
town to get some reagent. That reagent hadn't been tested
for arsenic before it was used in the experiment, and
it's conceivable that it was contaminated. As for Orphila's claim
that human bones naturally contain arsenic, well they don't. Actually,
(25:10):
we know that now, and the fact that Orphela believed
that they did indicates that there was some point in
his earlier testing procedure where phantom arsenic was able to
sneak in. Two years after Marie LeFarge was found guilty,
another woman, Madame Lacoste, was accused of murder by arsenic.
(25:33):
Of course, the famous Marie LeFarge case was the closest
point of comparison, and the courts invited a chemist named
Monsieur Chevalier to testify. Chevalier had been one of two
of Orphela's assistants during the Lafarge investigation. For this new trial,
a juryman asked Chevalier was the quantity of arsenic found
(25:57):
by you in this case equal to that which served
as a ground for conviction in the LeFarge case. Chevalier
thought for a while and then answered, extremely carefully, I
cannot reply to a question so put, he said, finally,
what was said to be the poison found in the
(26:20):
body of Lafarge was imponderable. It was so infinitesimal that
it could not fulfill the conditions of a standard comparison
when we use words more or less. The jury was dumbfounded.
They declared Madame Lacoste innocent. Marie LeFarge heard the news
(26:43):
of Madame Lacoste's exoneration while she was still in prison. Allegedly,
Marie remarked, my ghost has saved her. Whether or not
Marie LeFarge actually was guilty of murdering her husband, and
whether or not Charles Lafarge was even poisoned with arsenic
(27:05):
are both mysteries that, barring new information or a historian
with Sherlock holmesy in powers of deductive reasoning, will probably
elude us. But in the aftermath of the trial and
in recent years, a number of theories emerged. The theory
I find interesting, although again not necessarily convincing beyond a
(27:28):
reasonable doubt. But interesting is that Charles Lafarge actually was poisoned,
but by his clerk, Denny Barbier. According to some sources,
Charles Lafarge, our victim, had been somewhat of a more
nefarious character than he had been made out to be.
(27:49):
In the wake of his death, some claim that Lafarge
wasn't merely an iron master who fell into debts, but
that he was also a forger, as in he used
forged bills of exchange in order to procure advances. His
right hand man in that endeavor was Denie Barbier. According
(28:11):
to one unverified claim, when Barbier heard that Charles was
close to death, he was heard saying, now I shall
be master here. If he had been working on shady
dealings with his boss and was nervous that those crimes
might be revealed, it's plausible he had a motive to
do away with Charles LeFarge, especially when he imagined he
(28:34):
might be the one to take over Charles's business after
he died. Barbier also had access to all of Charles's
food and drink, and he had been the one who
procured the arsenic that Marie had asked for to kill
the rats. Barbier easily could have kept some or all
of it for himself and given Marie something harmless in
(28:56):
its place. The Edinburgh Review published an examination in eighteen
forty two, two years after the trial, laying out the
case against Barbier. According to them, Denis Barbier quote lived
by forgery and was the accomplice of LeFarge in some
very shady transactions by which that unhappy man sought to
(29:20):
cover his insolvency. Barbier had also conceived a violent hatred
against Madame LeFarge, as her presence was likely to hinder
his nefarious practices and weaken his hold over his companion
in crime end quote. They continue to explain that Barbier
had unrestricted access to everywhere in the house that Arsenic
(29:44):
was found. If Denis Barbier committed this foul crime, they concluded,
he escaped without any punishment save that which would be
inflicted by an outraged conscience. In the end, the marsh test,
exact as it might have been, simply couldn't tell us everything.
(30:11):
That's the story of Marie LeFarge, but keep listening. After
a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more
about how the legacy of science in courtrooms continues to
affect us today. In two thousand and four, USA Today
reported on a phenomenon that seemed to be affecting the
(30:34):
ways juries rendered their verdicts. It's called the CSI effect,
and according to researchers, what was happening was that the
average person doing jury duty started watching a lot more TV,
specifically a lot more crime TV like CSI, and in
(30:55):
shows like CSI, DNA and other forensic evidence is ubiquitous
and air tight. The CSI effect, then, is the alleged
phenomenon that jurors expect forensic evidence in any trial, and
when it's not present, either because it wasn't available or
(31:15):
prosecutors thought it wasn't necessary, jurors are more likely to
acquit even when there's plenty of other compelling evidence that
someone committed a crime. The CSI effect has definitely informed
the way that legal professionals today build their cases, but
it's also just as possible that watching crime television shows
(31:38):
might be more responsible for jurors wanting to convict more often.
Professor Tom Tyler at NYU argues that television shows offer
stories of catharsis and closure of justice being done, which
jurors would try to replicate with a conviction. Tyler suggests
(31:59):
that increased rates of acquittal might have to do not
with police on television, but with the public's decreasing confidence
in police in the real world. Noble Blood is a
(32:20):
production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky.
Noble Blood is created and hosted by me Dana Schwartz,
with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick,
Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is
edited and produced by Noemi Griffin and rima Il Kahali,
(32:44):
with supervising producer Josh Thain and executive producers Aaron Manke,
Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim
and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. This is
part two of our series on Marie LeFarge. If you
haven't yet listened to last week's episode, I would go
back and start there. Marie LeFarge arrived at the gravesite
(00:27):
of her husband, Charles Lafarge, wearing mourning clothes. She twenty
four years old, was by all accounts, a striking woman,
with long, dark hair tucked under her hat and a
complexion that looked particularly elegant against her all black wardrobe.
(00:47):
It might have looked, at first glance to an onlooker
that she was at her husband's gravesite for his funeral, or,
perhaps more realistically, in this case, to pay her respects
to vietly placed flowers down on the grave of a
man who had passed away from illness a year earlier.
(01:07):
But no, Marie LeFarge was wearing black at her husband's
grave because his body was being exhumed as part of
a trial. Her trial, she was accused of murdering her husband,
and her case had captivated the country. There were literally
(01:29):
hundreds of spectators crowding the grave as it was dug up,
with the judge of the region Lubersac supervising the digging.
Savvy venders were selling smelling salts. As soon as Charles
Lefarge's coffin was pride open, those salesmen began pulling in
(01:49):
a hefty business. A sea of handkerchiefs were lifted to noses.
In unison, Marie LeFarge swooned and seemed so faint that
someone shouted that court should be postponed for the day.
The jury decreed that the trial should continue to proceed.
(02:10):
When Marie LeFarge had first been charged with the murder
of her husband, local apothecary men had tried to test
her husband's body for arsenic, but they were completely unfamiliar
with the latest scientific method, a chemical test for identifying
arsenic created by the Scottish doctor James Marsh. Not only
(02:34):
had the local men used old fashioned, inexact methods, but
their test had been completely bungled anyway, a glass tube
had broken halfway through, so the judge had determined a
new test would be performed, the Marsh test done by
professional chemists in full view of the court, so no
(02:59):
errors would be made. This time around. Unfortunately, by this
point Charles LaFarge's body had decomposed to the point where
a newspaper described it as paste rather than flesh. The
experts were forced to use a spoon to scrape what
they could into small pots. Those pots were swiftly transported
(03:23):
to an open air laboratory in tool where a group
of chemists were going to be faced with the most
high stakes experiment of their careers. With the court, a
crowd of spectators, and the nation waiting, these chemists scurried
around their charcoal furnaces. They painstakingly added the proper chemical
(03:48):
reagents and set up a piece of porcelain at exactly
the right distance from a flame. And then they held
their breath, probably both from the stench of Charles l
Lefarge's remains and from the anticipation of what they were doing.
The Marsh test was deceptive in its seeming simplicity, though
(04:11):
the chemistry involved wasn't particularly complex, there were a number
of factors in its methodology that had to be absolutely
perfect in order for the test to work, and the
French chemists and toul who had read about the procedure
in translation were performing it for the first time. Finally,
(04:35):
after a day of waiting and anticipating, the chemists returned
to the Palace of Justice. They turned to the judge
and the jury and announced they had reached their scientific
conclusion as to whether there was arsenic in the body
of Charles Lafarge. Marie LeFarge looked as those who were
(04:59):
about to fame as she and the rest of the
room waited to hear the determination that would all but
seal her fate. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is noble blood.
(05:21):
The evidence against Marie LeFarge was building a very compelling
case against her. She had been miserable in her marriage
to Charles Lafarge. She was lied to and forced to
live in his decrepit, crumbling estate out in the country,
far from her friends and her well connected social scene
(05:41):
in Paris. On the first night she had arrived, she
had barricaded herself in her bedroom and threatened to kill
herself with arsenic if he didn't release her from the marriage.
Less than six months later, her husband was dead. Marie
had ordered arson from an apothecary. A few days before.
(06:03):
She sent her husband a cake in the mail, a
cake that he seemed to become ill immediately after eating,
and Marie had procured arsenic again. Once her husband was
back home. She had sent Charles's clerk, Denis Barbier, to
get a sizeable amount of arsenic, allegedly to kill the
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rats that still ran about their home. When the investigators
had arrived after Charles's death, they found a bag of
arsenic buried in the garden, seemingly hidden away from private eyes.
A servant told the magistrate that Marie LeFarge had told
him to bury it on her account so law enforcement
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wouldn't be able to find it, presumably, and the friend
of the family who worked as a housekeeper, Mademoiselle Braun,
had seen Marie LeFarge putting white powder into broth that
she was preparing for Charles. And then there was the
case of the missing jewelry. Years before Charles's death, back
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when Marie was still unmarried, she had visited a friend
of hers, the Vicomtesse de Leotto. Not long after the visit,
the Vicomtesse noticed that some of her diamonds were missing.
Though she and her husband didn't have Marie investigated, they
were always suspicious, and once news of this massive murder
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trial hit newspapers. The Vicomte reached out to investigators and
let them know that perhaps Marie's room should be searched
for diamonds, and what should they have found right in
Marie's room but those very jewels. Of course, stealing jewels
is unrelated to the possible murder of one's husband, but
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it painted a damning picture of an am a moral
woman who would steal and possibly even murder out of
resentment for the fact that her lot in life had
led her to marriage with a broke iron master. But
of course, with regards to the actual murder, when Marie's
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case was going to trial, there was one piece of
evidence more damning than anything else. Investigators on the site
had tested Charles's body for arsenic. They tested the cup
of broth Mademoiselle Bron had put aside, and they tested
the little white box that Marie LeFarge had claimed contained
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gum arabic. They had determined arsenic was present. Sure, they
the local men in Brieve had not been expert forensic chemists,
and they hadn't used the more sophisticated March test. And yes,
a tube had broken, but they had found arsenic, and
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that had to mean something, but did it? At the trial,
Marie Lefarge's defense council cleared his throat one morning in
court and read out a letter that had come directly
from Paris. There was a rarefied air around the letter.
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People knew it was important. It was from a man
who was nothing short of a scientific celebrity. Metuophila was
the dean of the Paris medical Faculty, and he served
on a number of influential committees. He edited important medical
journals and less important but still interesting. He had a
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beautiful singing voice and would often hold musical salons that
were considered centers of culture. The defense council began to
read the let letter that Orphila had sent to court.
You ask me, he wrote, if it is sufficient proof
of the presence of arsenic in the digestive organs, if
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the liquor produced by boiling them in distilled water yield
when treated with sulfurated hydrogen a yellow precipitate. He was
describing the old method, the non marsh method for finding arsenic.
I answer no, he said. Orphela referenced a previous case
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where the yellow precipitate that is so often mistaken for
arsenic had been something completely innocuous. The test that those
men had done in brief Orphela concluded was completely meaningless.
In eighteen forty, an English doctor writing about the case
reached the same verdict, stating no weight can be attached
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to the report of the brief commission, the members of
which evidenced the grip josest ignorance of the truths known
to the merest tyro in legal medicine. They had found arsenic,
maybe sure, but factoring in the old, unreliable method and
the broken too, the entire thing was bunk. And if
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there was no proof that Charles Lafarge had actually been
poisoned with arsenic, then there was only circumstantial evidence of
a woman who might have been unhappy in her brief marriage,
but wasn't a murderer. And so those were the circumstances
that led to the judge ordering a second examination of
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Charles LaFarge's body. This time, experts from Limoge would take
whatever samples they could from the decomposed corpse, used their
spoons to scoop it into jars and use the marsh test,
which could detect even the tiniest train of arsenic By
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this time, the trial had become a sensation. If you
were imagining something out of the musical Chicago, where an
accused murderess becomes an object of tabloid celebrity, you wouldn't
be far off. People crowded into the courtroom to get
a glimpse of the young widow dressed all in black,
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who was known to swoon and to require smelling salts
at various points during the proceedings. As the trial went on,
Marie LeFarge would begin to be carried into courts on
a setae. So delicate were her sensibilities and so finally,
with anticipation as high as it possibly could be, the
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Lamoge Commission issued their report. Using the incredibly scientific Marsh test.
They found no arsenic in Charles LaFarge's body. Marie and
her counsel both burst into tears. She was vindicated, at
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least for now. With the scientific consensus that Marie LeFarge
was actually innocent, the events of the preceding year began
to tell a slightly different story. Sure, Marie had been
unhappy when she had arrived at her husband's crumbling estate
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to find that he had lied about his financial situation,
wouldn't you be Yes, She had threatened suicide that night,
but she had been overwhelmed, foolish, embarrassed, childish. Her husband
Charles had responded kindly, and from that point on he
and Marie began to get along. It was at least amiable,
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something that slowly developed over the weeks into friendship and
then maybe even devotion. Of course, Marie's mother in law
was suspicious and resentful of her from the start. Marie
wrote in her memoirs that when Charles was away, he
would write sweet love notes to Marie in his letters home.
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For a time, it was an evening tradition that Marie
would read Charles's letters out loud, but she noticed how
her mother in law stiffened and bristled when she read
anything sweet or romantic. Marie stopped reading those parts. The
fact that Charles had gotten sick after eating cakes they sent, well,
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Marie's mother in law had baked those cakes. She was
the only one in the family who baked the desserts,
and if the cakes had been replaced or tampered with
by the time they reached Charles in Paris, there was
no evidence it was Marie who did that. It could
have been anyone at that point. In fact, it seems
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unlike Marie would have poisoned the cakes at all, because
she wrote in her letter to Charles that he should
invite her favorite sister over while he was in Paris,
where it seems really likely that she could have shared
the cake. You don't want to suggest your favorite sister
go over to a house where poisoned cake is lying around.
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As for ordering arsenic, Arsenic was used as rat poison,
and le Glandier their home was full of rats. They
scampered everywhere, ate Marie's clothes. It's completely reasonable that Marie
would try to make it so that the home that
she lived in might be slightly improved. And then when
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Charles came home ill and bedridden, the rats were bothersome.
They made noise and kept Charles up when he needed
bed rest. If Marie had actually planned on poisoning her
husband with the arsenic, then why would she have told
him about every step she was taking to get arsenic
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and get rid of the rats. She told him when
she sent his clerk, Denny Barbier to get the arsenic,
and she showed Charles how much had come when Barbier
had returned, there was nothing sneaky about it. Well, what
about the arsenic that was buried in the yard when
the investigators came. In Marie's memoir, she says, a young servant,
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panicked by the thought of either Marie or anyone else
in the household being accused of arsenic poisoning, had buried
it without telling Marie. When the investigators interrogated the servant boy,
they had intimidated him. They had threatened him with the
scaffold unless he told them that he had buried the
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arsenic on Marie's orders. By then, the investigation had already
set its sights firmly on Marie, who had been accused
by Charles's suspicious family members who hated her from the start.
But sometimes people get cholera, Sometimes people die of cholera.
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The matter of the Vicomtess's missing diamonds was a little
more complicated, But even then Marie had an explanation. You see,
when the investigators were given the tip and arrived to
search Marie's rooms for the jewels, well they hadn't actually
needed to search at all. Marie Lafarcee told them outright, yes,
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she did have the Vicomtessa's diamonds and told them exactly
where they were. She hadn't stolen the diamonds from her friend.
Her friend had given them to her to sell to
help her friend out of a tricky financial situation. The
Vicomtess was being blackmailed by an ex lover, and she
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had asked Marie to secretly sell some of her diamonds
to pay him off. The Vicomtesse had not expected her
husband to even notice that the jewels were gone. In
the meantime, Marie kept the diamonds safe in her room
while she figured out what to do with them. When
Marie was arrested for the alleged jewel robbery, she wrote
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to her friend, May God never visit upon you the
evil you have done to me. Alas I know you
are really good but weak. You have told yourself that
I am likely to be convicted of an atrocious crime.
I may as well take the blame of one which
is only infamous. I keep our secret. I left my
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honor in your hands, and you have not chosen to
absolve me. The story is a little far fetched, I admit.
While waiting for the murder trial to proceed, Marie was
actually tried and found guilty for stealing the jewels. In
the end, it was her word against her friends, and
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the Vicomtesse maintained that there had been no ruinous blackmail plot.
But even if Marie was guilty of stealing her friend's diamonds,
as Marie had pointed out in her letter, that crime
was merely infamous as opposed to the atrocious crime of murder.
And the chemists came back with the marsh test and
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absolved Marie LeFarge of murder. There was no arsenic in
Charles LaFarge's body, and so no matter how likely a
suspect Marie Lafarge was, it was going to be very
difficult for a jury to convict her. Still, the prosecution
was convinced that Marie Lafarge was a murderess, and they
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were determined to do everything they could to win their case,
even if the defense was already doing a metaphorical victory lap.
After the test results. Wait a moment, the prosecution said,
there was one test that said there was arsenic and
another that said there wasn't. That's not very definitive at all. Sure,
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the Lamoege Commission had used the brand new Marsh test,
but it was famously tricky, and they had done it
for the first time, there's no guarantee that they did
it right. The prosecution had an idea, a Hail Mary,
a tiebreaker test done by none other than the celebrity
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of the French chemistry world, met to Orphila himself. By
this point, there was nothing left of poor Charles LaFarge's
body but something I read described as a milkshake like
preparation of organ mash. But Orphila was the expert. If
anyone in France could do the Marsh test and do
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it absolutely correctly, it was him. Orphila was a distinguished
looking man, with a bald head and fuzzy tufts of
hair circling his temples. Contemporary drawings of him highlight his small,
sharp nose and thin, serious lips. When Orphila entered the courtroom,
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I imagine his celebrity brought the room to a hush.
The undisputed expert on arsenic poisoning stood before the judge
and the jury. He had tested the remains of Charles Lafarge,
all the organs that his team had managed to extract
from the decomposing corpse. They had done the Marsh test
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and done it correctly. Before Orphila offered his conclusion as
to the fate of Charles Lafarge, he gave the court
some context. Over years of experimentation, he had determined that
human bones contain trace amounts of arsenic, and that sometimes
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arsenic can also be found leeched from the soil, and
so he had been extraordinarily careful in his analysis of
Charles LaFarge's body to ensure that his samples taken from
the organs were unspoiled and did not include any bone
or soil. So what was the conclusion arsenic meteu Orphila
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had found arsenic in Charles Lfarge's organs half a milligram,
an amount so tiny it could have only ever been
detected using the marsh test. The courtroom erupted. The defense
scrambled and tried to call one of Orphila's rivals, a
man named Francois vincent Resbail, to the courtroom to offer
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a counter annal, but Rispel didn't make it in time.
He arrived at the court four hours after the jury
had reached its verdict. Orphila's testimony sealed Marie LaFarge's fate,
and she was found guilty of the murder of her
husband and sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor, though
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the labor would later be commuted. Marie Lafarge, twenty four
years old, would spend the next twelve years of her
life in prison. In eighteen fifty two, she became ill
with tuberculosis, and she was released from prison on the
orders of Napoleon the Third. She died a few months later.
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That was forensic toxicology and action. Orphila had found arsenic,
and so it meant that Marie Lafarge was guilty. But
did it and did Orphila actually find evidence that Charles
Defarge was poisoned? The question was a little more complicated
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than it had appeared that day in the courtroom. The
chemist Francois Raspel, possibly guilty over arriving at court a
few hours too late to offer his own testimony, would
spend years publicly challenging Orphila and criticizing both his methods
and his results. Orphila had claimed he found half a
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milligram of arsenic in Charles Lefarge's remains. Respel determined that
amount to be a hundredth of a milligram, and there
were a number of points in Orpheli's testing where a
small amount of arsenic might have snuck in. For Arphela's
final test, the one where he had found the arsenic,
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he had sent one of his assistants to a neighboring
town to get some reagent. That reagent hadn't been tested
for arsenic before it was used in the experiment, and
it's conceivable that it was contaminated. As for Orphila's claim
that human bones naturally contain arsenic, well they don't. Actually,
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we know that now, and the fact that Orphela believed
that they did indicates that there was some point in
his earlier testing procedure where phantom arsenic was able to
sneak in. Two years after Marie LeFarge was found guilty,
another woman, Madame Lacoste, was accused of murder by arsenic.
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Of course, the famous Marie LeFarge case was the closest
point of comparison, and the courts invited a chemist named
Monsieur Chevalier to testify. Chevalier had been one of two
of Orphela's assistants during the Lafarge investigation. For this new trial,
a juryman asked Chevalier was the quantity of arsenic found
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by you in this case equal to that which served
as a ground for conviction in the LeFarge case. Chevalier
thought for a while and then answered, extremely carefully, I
cannot reply to a question so put, he said, finally,
what was said to be the poison found in the
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body of Lafarge was imponderable. It was so infinitesimal that
it could not fulfill the conditions of a standard comparison
when we use words more or less. The jury was dumbfounded.
They declared Madame Lacoste innocent. Marie LeFarge heard the news
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of Madame Lacoste's exoneration while she was still in prison. Allegedly,
Marie remarked, my ghost has saved her. Whether or not
Marie LeFarge actually was guilty of murdering her husband, and
whether or not Charles Lafarge was even poisoned with arsenic
(27:05):
are both mysteries that, barring new information or a historian
with Sherlock holmesy in powers of deductive reasoning, will probably
elude us. But in the aftermath of the trial and
in recent years, a number of theories emerged. The theory
I find interesting, although again not necessarily convincing beyond a
(27:28):
reasonable doubt. But interesting is that Charles Lafarge actually was poisoned,
but by his clerk, Denny Barbier. According to some sources,
Charles Lafarge, our victim, had been somewhat of a more
nefarious character than he had been made out to be.
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In the wake of his death, some claim that Lafarge
wasn't merely an iron master who fell into debts, but
that he was also a forger, as in he used
forged bills of exchange in order to procure advances. His
right hand man in that endeavor was Denie Barbier. According
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to one unverified claim, when Barbier heard that Charles was
close to death, he was heard saying, now I shall
be master here. If he had been working on shady
dealings with his boss and was nervous that those crimes
might be revealed, it's plausible he had a motive to
do away with Charles LeFarge, especially when he imagined he
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might be the one to take over Charles's business after
he died. Barbier also had access to all of Charles's
food and drink, and he had been the one who
procured the arsenic that Marie had asked for to kill
the rats. Barbier easily could have kept some or all
of it for himself and given Marie something harmless in
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its place. The Edinburgh Review published an examination in eighteen
forty two, two years after the trial, laying out the
case against Barbier. According to them, Denis Barbier quote lived
by forgery and was the accomplice of LeFarge in some
very shady transactions by which that unhappy man sought to
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cover his insolvency. Barbier had also conceived a violent hatred
against Madame LeFarge, as her presence was likely to hinder
his nefarious practices and weaken his hold over his companion
in crime end quote. They continue to explain that Barbier
had unrestricted access to everywhere in the house that Arsenic
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was found. If Denis Barbier committed this foul crime, they concluded,
he escaped without any punishment save that which would be
inflicted by an outraged conscience. In the end, the marsh test,
exact as it might have been, simply couldn't tell us everything.
(30:11):
That's the story of Marie LeFarge, but keep listening. After
a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more
about how the legacy of science in courtrooms continues to
affect us today. In two thousand and four, USA Today
reported on a phenomenon that seemed to be affecting the
(30:34):
ways juries rendered their verdicts. It's called the CSI effect,
and according to researchers, what was happening was that the
average person doing jury duty started watching a lot more TV,
specifically a lot more crime TV like CSI, and in
(30:55):
shows like CSI, DNA and other forensic evidence is ubiquitous
and air tight. The CSI effect, then, is the alleged
phenomenon that jurors expect forensic evidence in any trial, and
when it's not present, either because it wasn't available or
(31:15):
prosecutors thought it wasn't necessary, jurors are more likely to
acquit even when there's plenty of other compelling evidence that
someone committed a crime. The CSI effect has definitely informed
the way that legal professionals today build their cases, but
it's also just as possible that watching crime television shows
(31:38):
might be more responsible for jurors wanting to convict more often.
Professor Tom Tyler at NYU argues that television shows offer
stories of catharsis and closure of justice being done, which
jurors would try to replicate with a conviction. Tyler suggests
(31:59):
that increased rates of acquittal might have to do not
with police on television, but with the public's decreasing confidence
in police in the real world. Noble Blood is a
(32:20):
production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky.
Noble Blood is created and hosted by me Dana Schwartz,
with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick,
Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is
edited and produced by Noemi Griffin and rima Il Kahali,
(32:44):
with supervising producer Josh Thain and executive producers Aaron Manke,
Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
your favorite shows.