In the summer of 1925 Georges-Alexandre Sarret invited Louis Chambon-Duverger, an unfrocked priest who had helped him cheat insurance companies and had become too greedy, to a villa outside Aix-en-Provence. Chambon-Duverger came with his mistress, Noémie Ballandraux. While Catherine Schmidt kept a motorcycle engine roaring in the cypress-shaded courtyard to cover the noise, Sarret shot them both from behind a screen. He had already bought about a hundred liters of sulphuric acid. The bodies went into a bathtub upstairs with the acid, and after three days of dissolving Sarret and the Schmidt sisters carried the black sludge out and tipped it onto the grass of the garden. The killings went undiscovered for six years. The date is given as August 10, 1925, in some accounts and August 20 in others.
He was born Giorgio Sarrejani on September 23, 1878, in Trieste, then part of Austria-Hungary, into a family of Greek descent, and came to France as a young man. At Marseille he studied medicine, chemistry and law, and he practiced as a lawyer while living, by the accounts of the time, a dissolute life of parties, gambling and drink. In the 1920s he met two sisters from Bavaria, Philomène and Catherine Schmidt, who had left Germany after being accused of being too friendly with the Allied occupation troops. They became his lovers, and he installed them at a villa near Aix that they called L'Hermitage.
The fraud used marriage. Sarret found the sisters elderly, sick husbands and insured the husbands' lives. Because the husbands would have failed a medical examination, Chambon-Duverger went to the doctor in their place, posing as the husband, and the policy was approved. The husband's death was then awaited, and hastened if necessary with poison or gas, and the money was shared, with Sarret taking most of it by threatening to turn the sisters over to the police. When he was later questioned about the deaths of the two husbands, Sarret pointed out that both had been buried in a common grave, so that nothing could be proved.
The scheme came apart in 1931. The three staged Catherine's death to collect on a policy on her life, substituting the body of a woman of about her age and description who had died of tuberculosis; the prosecution later charged that the woman, Magali Herlin, had been poisoned because she did not die quickly enough. Catherine went into hiding in Nice, but in March 1931 she followed a man to Marseille, and there someone who believed her dead recognized her in the street and went to the police. Philomène was arrested first, and Catherine gave herself up two days later and confessed, naming Sarret. By then the owner of the house where the 1925 killings had taken place had found the mess in his garden and the stains on the floor.
Sarret denied everything and used every procedural flaw and inconsistency in the sisters' statements to delay the case for more than two years. The three were finally tried before the Bouches-du-Rhône assize court in the autumn of 1933, charged with four killings: the priest, his mistress, Magali Herlin and an insurance victim. The trial lasted about ten days. The jurors, shaken by the method of disposal, were severe with him. On October 31, 1933, Sarret was condemned to death. The sisters, who had not fired the shots, received ten years each.
On April 10, 1934, the executioner Anatole Deibler guillotined him in public at Aix-en-Provence; he was the last person executed there. His case is said to have inspired the British killer John George Haigh, who dissolved his victims in acid in the 1940s and was also called the Acid Bath Murderer. Solange Fasquelle told the story in the book Le Trio infernal, filmed in 1974 by Francis Girod with Michel Piccoli as Sarret and Romy Schneider as Philomène Schmidt.