Jean de Koven was a young American dancer spending the summer of 1937 in Paris with her aunt, Ida Sackheim, at a hotel on the Left Bank. In July she wrote to a friend about a charming German of keen intelligence who called himself Siegfried and had invited her to his villa, near the mansion Napoleon gave Josephine. On the afternoon of July 23 she went to meet him. At La Celle-Saint-Cloud he gave her a cigarette and a glass of milk, and she took pictures of him with her new camera. Then he strangled her and buried her in the garden. Her aunt received a letter demanding five hundred dollars for her return. When the police finally dug her up, the camera was lying beside her, and the developed film showed the man who had killed her.
His name was Eugen Weidmann. He was born in Frankfurt on February 5, 1908, into a Catholic family; his father was in the export trade. Sent to his grandparents when war broke out in 1914, he began to steal. At eighteen he went to Canada, joined a gang that robbed a wheat company's paymaster in Saskatchewan, served a year and was deported. Back in Germany he served five years for robbery at Saarbrucken, and a further term in Frankfurt for assault and robbery, from which he was released in December 1936. In March 1937 he came to Paris, by one account to escape German military service. He spoke English and French fluently and is thought to have met de Koven while working as an interpreter at the Paris Exhibition.
In prison he had met the men who became his partners, Roger Million and Jean Blanc. The plan was to kidnap well-off tourists, most of them American or English, and hold them for money, and they rented a villa at La Celle-Saint-Cloud for the purpose. The first attempt failed when the man they seized fought too hard and had to be let go. De Koven was the second. She had three hundred francs in cash and four hundred and thirty dollars in traveler's checks, which the gang sent Million's mistress, Colette Tricot, to cash. Her brother Henry came to France with a ten-thousand-franc reward from their father, Abraham, and got nowhere.
The kidnapping idea was dropped and the killing stayed. On September 1 Weidmann hired a chauffeur, Joseph Couffy, to drive him toward the Riviera, and in a forest outside Tours shot him in the back of the neck and took his car and twenty-five hundred francs. Two days later he and Million lured Janine Keller, a private nurse, into a cave in the forest of Fontainebleau with the offer of a job; he shot her the same way and took fourteen hundred francs and a diamond ring. In mid-October they arranged to meet Roger LeBlond, a young theatrical producer, on the pretext of investing in one of his shows. LeBlond was shot at Neuilly and robbed of a wallet holding five thousand francs. On November 22 Weidmann killed Fritz Frommer, a young German he had known in jail, a Jew who had been held for his opposition to the Nazis, and buried him in the basement of the villa where de Koven lay. Five days later Raymond Lesobre, a real estate agent, was shot in the back of the neck while showing him a house in Saint-Cloud, and five thousand francs were taken.
Weidmann had left his business card at Lesobre's office. On December 8, 1937 two officers of the Surete, led by a young inspector named Primborgne, were waiting at the villa when he came home. He invited them in, then turned and fired three shots at them. They were unarmed and both were hit, but they wrestled him to the floor and knocked him senseless with a hammer that happened to be lying nearby. In custody he was cooperative and confessed to all six killings and implicated the others. De Koven's was the only one he said he regretted. She had been gentle and unsuspecting, he said, and when he reached for her throat she went down like a doll.
The trial of Weidmann, Million, Blanc and Tricot at Versailles in March 1939 was the largest in France since that of Henri Landru eighteen years before, and one of Weidmann's advocates, Vincent de Moro-Giafferi, had defended Landru too. Colette covered it for Paris-Soir. The jury answered some eighty questions covering the murders, the thefts and the degree of premeditation in each. It found Weidmann guilty of premeditated murder for Couffy, Keller and LeBlond, of murder without premeditation and with extenuating circumstances for Lesobre and Frommer, guilty of de Koven's murder, and guilty of trying to extort a ransom from Ida Sackheim. Weidmann and Million were sentenced to death. Blanc, who had killed no one, got twenty months for harboring criminals, and Tricot was acquitted. Million's sentence was commuted to life.
Weidmann was guillotined by the chief executioner, Jules-Henri Desfourneaux, on a scaffold outside the Saint-Pierre prison at Versailles at about half past four on the morning of June 17, 1939. A large crowd had gathered overnight, and its conduct became a scandal: spectators pushed and shouted, some dipped handkerchiefs in the blood, and photographs and film shot from windows above the square were published. Christopher Lee, then seventeen and visiting Paris, was taken along by a friend and wrote long afterward that he failed to look away and was sick to his soul.
Within days the government issued a decree ending public executions. The guillotine went on being used inside prison walls until Hamida Djandoubi was executed at Marseille in September 1977, and Weidmann remained the last person beheaded in public in France. Jean de Koven's age is given as twenty-two in the reports of the case; a record of her birth in Boston in 1913 would make her twenty-four.