09.) Imposters II

Our look at imposters continues with the case of a man who abandoned his identity - and then tried to get it back - when his ex wife was accused of his murder.

To read Tim Stanley's article in the Tulsa World about the 'Phantom' Marine, visit https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/tim-stanley-mystery-of-phantom-iwo-jima-veteran-lingers-76-years-later/article_3648a3e8-71ff-11eb-bf92-cf43e2105f77.html

Episode Transcript

(00:09):
Hello and welcome to episode nine ofThe Phantom Marine. This is christ Rose.
Hello to everyone who found us throughthe Tulsa World article by Tim Stanley
in January and February of nineteen fortysix. The story of the Phantom Marine
dominated newspaper covers across the United States, but in the seventy six years that

(00:30):
followed, almost nothing has been writtenabout William Langston and this incredible story that
changed recently with a piece in theTulsa World following our investigation in this podcast.
If you haven't had a chance toread it, I've provided a link
at our web page at christ Rosebooksdot com slash phantom and on our Facebook

(00:51):
page Facebook dot com slash Phantom Marine. In today's episode, we will continue
exploring the concept of impostors. Inour last episode, we focused on the
story of Martin Gere, a manwho left his family and who was replaced
by an impostor for four years.Today we will be looking at the inverse
situation of a man who abandoned hisprevious life but later sought to return and

(01:17):
claim his identity and what he hadto go through in order to prove it.
Joining me to discuss this incredible caseis doctor Jeffrey Ravel of the History
Department at MIT. He is theauthor of The Would Be Commoner, A
Tale of Deception, murder and Justicein seventeenth century France. I'll let Jeff
take it from here. Louis laPivacier was a very minor member of the

(01:40):
provincial nobility towards the end of theseventeenth century, and he lived what for
a nobleman was a pretty penurious existence, did not inherit a lot from his
father. Married a woman who isnot a member of the local nobility but
was well off i bourgeoisie named margharleach Alan, and it was not particularly

(02:05):
the sparkswork flying in the marriage.And he then decided to pursue a military
career, which is another way toboth prestige and wealth if you manage it
correctly. But he wasn't very goodat that either. He was doing that
during the time of the war,let's see the Nine Years War sixteen eighty

(02:30):
nine to sixteen ninety eight, andeventually he kind of gave up on that
as well, but didn't really tellhis wife. Back in the befy in
the center of France and kind ofwandered off and ended up getting involved with
an innkeeper's daughter in the Burgundian townof Osaf and eventually married her. And

(02:53):
there's a marriage contract that he signed, and he sort of changed his name
a little bit. He called himselfLouis du Bouche instead of Louis kidof Kieff,
and eventually the word got back tothe first wife back in the Behi,
and he from time to time wouldwander back to the home he shared
with the first life, and onetime when he showed up, she said,

(03:14):
you know, look, I've heardabout this. What gives And they
had a big fight and in themiddle of the night he seems to have
disappeared from their house. And withina week or two, rumors were circulating
that Margarette shows down the first wifehad murdered him or had him murdered,

(03:37):
and perhaps part of one of heraccomplices was a local priest whom she allegedly
was having an affair with. Noneof it is clear that that was going
on at all. So then somelocal police inspectors started looking into the case
and decided to pursue it and whatwe would call filing charges Paul charges against

(03:58):
her. Today tried to imprison her. She disappeared. Her two maid servants
became major witnesses in the case,and they testified that they had actually watched
her murdering him and had helped.It's unclear if that really happened or if
the police officers who detained them forcedthem to say this for their own reasons.

(04:20):
And anyway, Louis la Pievagier disappearedand they couldn't find him, and
there was nobody and nobody knew whatwas going on with his case. So
eventually it went through the courts inthe local area and in the center of
France, and the Becky and theKate send it up being kicked up to

(04:41):
the appeals court in Paris, andat that point word went at word got
out that the guy was still alive, supposedly, and he was with the
second wife in Burgundy, and hewas sent a safe conduct pass to travel
from Burgundy up to Paris to appearin the case, and he showed up.
And for about year there was acourt procedure that went on in Paris
where they attempted to determine if thisperson who allegedly was le lepidaftiere and would

(05:09):
exonerate the first wife from having murderedhim if he was still alive really was
who he said he was. Andto my mind, that's when the case
gets really interesting because of the varioustechniques that were available at the end of
the seventeenth century to try to proveidentity. I mean, it was a
period before fingerprints and before there werestate fashion forms of identity, but nothing

(05:35):
as reliable as we assume those documentsare today. And so the court went
through a series of procedures to tryto identify whether or not to try to
determine whether or not this really wasthe man who was supposedly murdered. Those
included handwriting samples, interviews with peoplewho had known him both before he is

(06:00):
allegedly murdered and then afterwards, andthen a very lengthy interrogation of the man
himself to see if he really knewall the right details of the story and
could prove to be who he was. And so they went through this process
and at the end of the daythere was a very learned magistrate who becomes
an important political figure. In thefirst half of the eighteenth century in France,

(06:21):
a man named Cree Francois Degusau andDougusau examines all the evidence and makes
this very interesting statement to the courtthat as far as we can tell,
yes, we think this is Louisla Pivatier, but we have to be

(06:43):
humble in the face of what wedon't know and what only God ultimately understands.
And so part of the interest ofthe story for me is this sense
that there is a kind of Cartesianlogic to the steps of identifying whether or
not luid Up Afteria is who hereally says he is. But there is
also a sort of profoundly Jansenist,which is a sort of Catholic sect that

(07:11):
was popular in France at the time, a kind of Jansenist sense of humility
and the ultimate limitations of human knowledge, and that tension between what humans can
and can't know and what epistemological toolsare available to them to know things is
also a very interesting part of thestory to me. Can we discuss the

(07:32):
evidence on both and what did peoplecome away with the people who'd known him
before his alleged death, what didthey were they divided? Was there a
consensus did he have the right answerto their question that the majority of people
and there was a It was aninteresting variety of people who had known him.
There were other sort of provincial noblemenin lesser greater circumstances, and then

(07:54):
there were sort of farm hands andother people who had interactions with him,
sometimes in neighboring village is where therewere market places, and the ones who
were in Paris for the most part, were able to They told the the
investigators that they thought this really wasthe true Louis Lativaftiere because he was able

(08:18):
to recollect certain events that they hadshared, or remember the details of land
transactions or that sort of thing.The handwriting part, I thought was very
interesting because what they had were documentsthat Louis Lativaftie had signed before he was
allegedly murdered by the first wife,and then documents which the person who claimed

(08:43):
to be Louis Lativaftia afterwards had signedhad also signed. And so they had
these handwriting experts, and this wasa pretty common sort of legal technique in
the late seventeenth and eighteenth century comein and compare the hand and they came
to the conclusion that for the mostpart, it seemed as though the documents

(09:05):
signed after the death used the samehand as the document signed before the death.
They cited some discrepancies in spelling,but at the end of the day,
that's not a big concern because spellingwas far less standardized in written European
languages, not just French, butmost of them at the end of the
seventeenth century. I mean, Idon't know if you'd like me to talk
at all about the interrogation which tookplace in eight sessions over six days of

(09:31):
the man who claimed to be Louisla pi Raftier, which is really I
found to be the most amazing documentin the whole story. It's very lengthy.
It's I think like sixty or seventypages of this procedure that was codified
by French law for how you interrogatepeople in a criminal manner, and it

(09:52):
consists of a series of questions,and the interrogator asked questions jumps around to
different parts of the life story.There's no consistency because he's constantly trying to
trip up the person who is tryingin this case to alighte that he's Louis
la Pivaquier. And what was reallyinteresting was the number of times that the

(10:13):
interrogator says, all right, well, if you really were the real Louis
la Pivachier, you would have donethis and that, and the guy always
interrupt him and says, but Iam the real Louis la Pigafuier, and
you don't know what you're talking about, and the people who are telling you
otherwise don't know what they're talking about. He was very on point throughout the
entire interrogations, and if he reallywasn't Louis la pie Vaquier, it was

(10:35):
a bravura performance because the transcript seemsto indicate that he really pulled it off,
since the case is a little bitdifferent than Martaguiere, because the false
Martaguiere showed up after about a twelveyear absence, and you know, he'd
been off at war. He cameback, he was older a little The
person who showed up was older,a little bit stockier. But people just

(10:56):
thought that was kind of a naturalprogression with Louis Lativaftief. So, if
I'm remembering the chronology correctly, it'sabout sixteen ninety three or ninety four that
he stops being home regularly in theBecky with his first wife, and he

(11:16):
comes back periodically and The last time, of course, is in sixteen ninety
seven, when he is allegedly murderedand he just disappears when he came back
that last time, when he wasallegedly murdered, nobody had any question whether
or not it was him. Butin the immediate aftermath in the local vicinity

(11:39):
is people started to speculate that maybeshe had had him murdered and they cut
up the body and buried it orsomething like that. I think the desire
to fuel that narrative made people predisposedto think back to what they had seen
and wonder if that was really theperson who was supposed to be Louis la

(12:01):
Pivaquier. And for the next yearor so, as the case makes its
way to Paris and then is beinginvestigated, there is a lot of contradiction
and confusion about what his physical appearancelooked like and how one should identify him.
And there's also an interesting point Italk about this in the book.
So when the case gets to Paris, there are legal briefs that are published

(12:26):
because that was a common practice,especially in sensational criminal trials, and the
legal briefs for this trial have engravingsfrontispieces design that purport to represent both Louis
La Pivakier and his first wife,Marguerite Chauvelin, the Marquis Chauvelin one.
Perhaps that's accurate. The Louis LaPivakier frontispiece is entirely stylized. It makes

(12:52):
him appear much wealthier than he was, much younger than he was, much
more dashing than he was. Whatwe know about the actual circumstances of his
life at that point make that itentirely impossible that that image was what he
actually looked like, But it kindof took on his appearance in the popular

(13:13):
imagination because of its circulation in thepress. And this is another interesting part
of the story. I didn't talkmuch about the sort of media ecology of
Paris when this case arrives there insixteen ninety eight, but there are all
sorts of ways that information circulates,both via print and also the theater is

(13:33):
an important part of that sort ofmedia ecology in late seventeenth century Paris.
And another interesting thing. In fact, the way that I got started working
on this project is that the leadingtheater company in Paris at the time the
case was being tried, which isthe confront says, and which still exists

(13:54):
and performs in Paris today. Commissionedto play about the case. It didn't
use the exact names. It sortof changed some circumstances, but people contemporaries
recognized that, oh, this isa riff on the p Valfrier case.
And so while his case was beingtried, while these briefs for circulating his

(14:15):
image was in the public, youcan also go to the theater and see
the case being staged and see howpeople responding to it every night. So
all of this is very far fromthe local specificities of the bahrie where he
lived with the first wife, andtransforms the case into something quite different and
interesting within the context of late seventeenthcentury Paris. So if he's recognized by

(14:39):
people who've seen him, and quitea few people come to see him,
and he withstands its interrogation, whythe protracted legal proceedings it seems to go
on for another eight months after hisreturn right well, the first Paris trial,
he still isn't there, and theyonly discovered the somebody who supposedly is

(15:01):
him is in hiding in Burgundy abouthalfway through that trial. But the first
part of the trial is still themurder trial against the first life, and
then they realize, oh, maybemaybe he's still alive, and so he
gets brought back to Paris, andthen the court issues a sort of stay
in the murder trial and says,no, now we have to conduct this

(15:22):
investigation into his identity using all thetools that are available according to the criminal
code at the end of the seventeenthcentury. And so that second eight months
that you're talking about, when heshows back, it's not the murder trial.
It's an investigation into whether or nothe is still alive, which,
obviously, if they determine he isstill alive, brings a halt to the

(15:45):
murder case, and that's what theywere trying to figure out. Yeah,
and I know, you know,Louie drifts out of the historical record shortly
after this case. But I knowmy listeners will want to know what happens
with that second marriage. You know, it's an incredible trial that this marriage
goes through, with him having toown up to his becamy, you returning

(16:07):
to Paris and being in such apublic way to their marriage. Well,
what happens is that the family ofthe first wife, Margauerite Chauvelin I mean,
she doesn't live a very luxurious lifein the center of Paris, but
she has family relatives in Paris whoactually are They become high up government officials

(16:34):
and enjoy a certain amount of statusand wealth in Paris. And so when
all of this is going on,she comes up to Paris, and it's
clear that she relies on her familyto help get her out of this mess,
being accused of murdering her first husband. And one of the things that
I think the family, with itsconnections, is able to do is to
reach out to the second wife,who's a young girl at that point,

(16:55):
probably you know, teenage or earlyteenagers or early twenties. And there is
a record of the young girl andher mother from Burgundy coming up to Paris,
and it does appear that the firstwife and her family paid them off
to just basically go away and notmake any more claims and just leave the

(17:18):
whole acquaintance. And so there isn'tany record of a formal annulment of that
marriage. It just seems that thesecond wife and her mother and her family
were paid off and they went awayand agreed not to pursue any claims they
might have had Louis maybe never evensees her again after coming to Paris under
the safe conduct letter. Yeah,that's entirely possible. I mean, you

(17:41):
know, in my sort of fantasymovie script, what I imagine happening is
that he kind of you know,at one point we know that he went
to one of the Atlantic seaports ofFrance and was possibly exploring getting into the
navy. And you know, mysort of fantasy continuation of his story is

(18:03):
that he gets involved in privateering andgets involved in piracy circles in the Caribbean,
and who knows what else. Imean, that seems like the kind
of adventure he would throw himself into. But you know, we don't know.
The last the last trace I foundof him in any historical document is
in the summer of sixteen ninety nine, back in the Dafty for one last

(18:26):
time with the first wife, andthen there's nothing more. Thank you again
to doctor Ravelle for joining us.If you are interested in the full story

(18:47):
behind louise dramatic reappearance in Paris,check out doctor Ravelle's book, The Would
Be Commoner. So what does allof this mean for our case? Despite
a lengthy and detailed investigation into Louie'sreappearance in Paris during the murder trial of
his ex wife. The fact ofthe matter is that people who knew Louie
didn't really seem to be in doubtthat it was him. He answered the

(19:10):
right questions the right way, andhe passed the test, and indeed he
should have it was really him.Likewise, the man with the limp succeeded
in convincing almost everyone he encountered inNewport, Arkansas that he was William Langston.
We don't have a sixty page transcriptof what he was asked and how

(19:30):
he answered, as we do withLouie, but we do have a few
concrete examples. The first, intomy mind, the most convincing, is
his exchange with Lacy Fields. Fieldsaid, if you're William Langston, tell
me whether I was ever at yourhouse. The man with the limp responded
that the answer was yes, thatit was when he was living with his

(19:52):
mother, and that he had comewith Dutch Vaughan and when he arrived Dove,
Duncan and Moe Jury and we're alreadypresent. That is such a specific
recollection, It is such an oldevent that he's describing, and it is
just not the sort of thing youwould talk about with someone in a foxhol
It's just a totally ordinary visit toyour house with some people from the neighborhood

(20:15):
when you were young that I don'tknow how anyone besides William Langston could have
possibly known that. According to Fields'swife, the man with the limp described
to her a specific event we don'tknow what exactly that happened at a pool
hall that had been owned by theFields, and his description was sufficient to
convince her that he was, infact William Langston. We have a few

(20:37):
concrete examples of the man with thelimp recognizing people and calling them by their
nicknames, sometimes old nicknames, andreferencing their family members by nicknames. So
while we don't have a long listof things that the man with the limp
was asked and how he answered,we know that whatever it was he said

(20:59):
was sufficient to convinced people who hadknown William Langston his entire life, people
he'd grown up with, his formerneighbors, his classmates, his teammates.
And we know that the man withthe limp wasn't shying away from these kinds
of potentially revealing exchanges. His visitoccurred at a leisurely pace. He went
into cafes and into bars and billiardhalls. He went into stores, He

(21:22):
visited people at their homes. Hestayed the night at George Crownover's house.
It hardly seems like the kind ofthing that you would do if you felt
you were at risk of exposure.So Louis is able to convince all of
Paris that he's the genuine article,because he really was who he said he
was. And the man with thelimp was similarly able to convince nearly everyone

(21:44):
in Newport, Arkansas. Arnauld deTe, the impostor who impersonated Martin Gare,
was met with a lot of skepticismwhen he arrived in town. However,
he was embraced by Martin Gare's wife, not because she was fooled by
whether this man was her husband,but because abandoned women were left in limbo
at this particular point in place intime. She couldn't socialize with married women,

(22:10):
nor could she find a new husbandfor herself. So of course,
after eight or nine years, she'sgoing to accept this man as her husband.
That part isn't surprising, and shesupplied him with the memories he needed
to convince the rest of the community. It's even possible that our no deity
impersonated Martin Gare at the request ofMartin Gare's sisters. But in our case,

(22:32):
there is no obvious explanation for howthe Man with the Limp had the
memories, specific detailed memories of WilliamLangston. Perhaps, as in Louis's case,
he managed to convince everyone because hewas who he said he was.
In our next episode, we willbegin wrapping up the mystery of the Phantom

(22:55):
Marine, find out what happens whenhis body is exhoomed an Iwashima, and
learn where the mystery stands today.As the Man with the Limp once wrote,
I'm yours for the truth. ChristRose