Sarret was born in 1878 in Turkey to a Greek family, under the name Giorgio Sarrejani, and practised as a lawyer in Marseille. He worked with two German sisters, Philomene and Catherine Schmidt, in a series of frauds on insurance companies.
The scheme was this: a healthy person would be insured under the name of someone who was terminally ill, or a policy would be taken out on a life the conspirators controlled; a death would then be produced or documented, and the claim collected. In 1925 they shot Louis Chambon, a struck-off lawyer, and his mistress Noemie Ballandraux at a villa near Aix, and dissolved both bodies in a bath of sulphuric acid. Sarret had bought a hundred litres of it. Two elderly men were later insured and killed, one starved and one poisoned. The French press called him the Acid Bath Murderer, two decades before Haigh was given the same name in Britain.
The fraud unravelled in 1931 when a claim was queried and the Schmidt sisters were questioned. All three were tried at Aix-en-Provence.
Sarret was convicted and guillotined at Aix on April 10, 1934. The Schmidt sisters received ten and two years.
The case was internationally famous at the time as the acid-bath murders: the phrase later attached in England to John George Haigh, whose method was the same and who is often assumed to have originated it. Sarret's case precedes Haigh's by two decades. The higher figure reflects further deaths suspected within the fraud and never established.