Lalaurie was born Marie Delphine Macarty in New Orleans in 1780 and belonged to a wealthy Creole family. By 1831 she was living at 1140 Royal Street with her third husband, Louis Lalaurie, and the people she held in slavery.
Neighbours reported her treatment of them. In 1828 a girl fell to her death from the roof of the house while, by the accounts given, fleeing a whipping. A local court investigated in 1832, found her in violation of the laws governing the treatment of slaves, such as they were, and ordered nine of them forfeited and sold. They were bought back by relatives on her behalf.
On April 10, 1834 a fire broke out in the kitchen. It had been set by an elderly enslaved cook, chained to the stove, who later said she had done it rather than be taken to the upper room from which people did not return. Bystanders who broke into the house found seven enslaved people in the attic, chained, starved and mutilated. A crowd gathered, the house was ransacked, and Lalaurie left the city. She is generally held to have gone to Paris, where she died in 1849, and was never charged with anything.
What must be separated out is everything added afterwards. The accounts of a torture chamber with instruments and surgical experiments, of victims in the dozens, and of specific atrocities described in loving detail, derive from George Washington Cable's writing in the 1880s and from the tourist trade that grew around the house in the twentieth century. Contemporary sources, the 1832 court record, the New Orleans Bee's report of the fire, and the accounts of those who entered the house, establish the chaining, the starvation, the mutilation and the seven people found. They do not support the rest, and no burial ground of victims has ever been identified.
This roster gives her victim count as null and the figure several, which is the right way to carry it. The entry is written on the documented record: a woman who tortured people she owned, whose neighbours knew, whose city's courts fined her and gave the people back, and who left without ever answering for it.