By Alan D. Maislen
The empty pantry in their moldy tenement flat needed the necessities, that chilly March day in Paris, 1905. Mme. Pierre Weber headed for the markets to do her shopping, whatever she could afford, living in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city.
Grief weighed her down as she descended the decrepit wooden staircase. Just nine days before, with no warning, dear Lord: Her eldest daughter, two-year-old Georgette, suddenly went into convulsions.
Mme. Pierre had been at work at the local laundry while her sister-in-law Jeanne minded her children. Then she got urgent word to hurry home. Georgette had suffered a seizure.
But the toddler seemed to recover. She was doing so well, in fact, that Mme. Pierre returned to the laundry. After all, Jeanne was there for any emergency.
Three hours later, Pierre Weber burst into the steamy, noisy washroom, frantic, looking for his wife. His face was contorted in anguish and panic. Now Georgette was dead.
The doctor couldn't find a cause. That nosy Mme. Pouche next door kept saying, "Look at the red marks on her neck!" But the doctor thought nothing of them. And of course, they trusted the doctor.
Losing a child so young, it was enough to crush the soul. But a family had to eat. So Mme. Pierre headed off to market. Thank goodness Jeanne would take care of little Suzette. Poor Jeanne, who'd already lost two girls of her own. She understood a mother's loss.
The Press called her "The Ogress." Before Jeanne Weber was apprehended, eight, and possibly ten children were dead at her hands.
Time and again, the medical authorities failed to stop her, sometimes in ignorance, sometimes in arrogance. And even in captivity, she got her hands on one last victim.
Her path to murder began in Cotes du Nord in Brittany, on the rugged Northwest coast of France. For Jeanne Moulinet, born in 1875, it was a hardscrabble life. When you're a girl of 14 and a poor fisherman's daughter, you don't have many options. And when you can't get by on beauty, when you are short, plain and stocky, with a man's big hands, your prospects seem even dimmer.
Was her self-image a factor in her killing spree? Ask a researcher who interviewed 29 female multiple murderers. Serial murder expert Prof. Peter Vronsky cites a study by Dr. Deborah Schurmur-Kauflin, who found that "100 percent of the female offenders reported childhood obesity, 43 percent reported teenaged acne. And social isolation, loneliness, might arguably be their most common characteristic."
The best Jeanne could hope for was a life in service, doing chores for people above her station.
But a girl of 14 has hopes far beyond her means, hopes for love, for thrills, for everything a serving girl just can't find in a remote fishing village, everything awaiting her in Paris.
So Jeanne took off. She arrived in the capital in 1893. But her romantic dreams crashed quickly. Where could she live? Only in the slums. What could she do? Menial chores. The city was already glutted with people from the countryside, desperate for work in the factories and mills. The poorest quarters teemed with them.
Perhaps she felt her luck had turned when she met Marcel Weber. Perhaps, even a miracle! She'd never had a suitor before. Was this the love she'd been searching for?
If so, she got more than she bargained for. If you were seeking out the most squalid of slums in the dark, gaslit streets of turn-of-the-20th century Paris, you would find the Passage Goutte d'Or.
The name means Drop of Gold, but it was more like a pit of despair, in a quartier of ancient looming tenements and shadowy alleys, far from the world of glittering palaces and bright lights. That's where Marcel brought his new family: Jeanne, two daughters and a son.
They moved into a decrepit, overcrowded apartment building. The whole Weber clan lived in the neighborhood: Marcel, Pierre, Leon, Charles, and their wives and children.
They were a codependent family, the Webers. They gossiped and feuded with everyone, especially one another. But they depended on each another for survival.
They also depended on alcohol. That's when Marcel would start swinging, the moment anyone looked cross-eyed at him. Jeanne learned to expect the blows, and to drown her sorrows. It was a way to cope with the misery all around them.
The alcohol of choice in 1905 Paris was absinthe, flavored with anise and dangerously alcoholic. The name comes from the Latin for "grand wormwood." The drink lived up to its name. It was not only highly addictive. It had psychoactive properties. That's one reason the writers and artists were drawn to it.
But among the poor, it was cheap rot gut, and bottled who knows where. There was plenty that Jeanne needed to blot out.
The dense, rat-infested slums of Paris were breeding grounds for disease. Rats were everywhere. Epidemics spread like wildfire. Cholera struck at the turn of the century, ravaging the poor in particular.
In a time when public health was in its infancy, infant mortality in France was a tragic fact of life. The problem was made even worse by a common custom: mothers using a wet nurse. There was nothing unusual about giving your baby to a stranger for nursing. But that practice made children especially vulnerable.
Then tragedy struck the Webers: Their two daughters died from one of the diseases that swept through Paris. Jeanne put on the mourner's black dress, like so many of the women around her. She stood by the little graves under a black veil, staring down. And she changed. She fell into a dark, interior place and could never quite return. Her drinking only made it worse.
But Jeanne still needed to earn whatever she could, so she took up babysitting. Neighbors regarded her as reliable and steady, if a bit grim. Still, bad luck seemed to follow her. Both Lucy Alexandre and Marcel Peyatos died in her care. The doctors were baffled but didn't find anything suspicious. As for Jeanne, it seemed as if she were struck by some terrible curse. These deaths only added to the heavy weight of her own grief. They drove her deeper into alcoholism and darkness.
Then came the laundry day in March. The crowded, steamy, sweaty washhouse was no place for children. So Mme. Pierre Weber, her sister-in-law, asked Jeanne to stay with her daughters, Georgette, two, and Suzette, 18 months.
The Pierre Weber family lived nearby on the rue Pre-Maudit. The name is French for "Pre-cursed."
In the tenements, everyone knew everybody else's business, and one person always knew everything about everybody. In Mme. Pierre's building, it was the redoubtable Mme. Pouche. As she passed by the open door of the Weber apartment, something disturbing caught her eye. Jeanne held little Georgette in her lap. The toddler jerked and twitched in convulsions, her face turning blue. Mme. Pouche alerted her mother, who rushed home. But Georgette seemed to recover, so back to the laundry Mme. Pierre went. By the time she returned, Georgette was dead. When the doctor arrived, Mme. Pouche got in his face. "Look at those blue marks on her neck!" He considered them of no consequence, the beginning of a long trail of medical mistakes that set Jeanne Weber free to kill again and again.
Little Georgette was in the ground only nine days when the grieving Mme. Pierre faced another logistics problem. She needed to do her shopping. Thankfully, Jeanne would be able to look after little Suzette.
Mme. Pierre returned home to find her daughter dying of convulsions, almost lifeless, with a scarf draped around her neck. The doctor came again, and Mme. Pouche was waiting for him. "Look at the marks on her neck!" Now she pointed an accusing finger at Jeanne: "She did it! Again!"
Jeanne shouted back in outrage as the room erupted in accusations. The doctor had no choice but to call the police. But their investigation also found nothing suspicious.
Apparently, neither did Jeanne's other sister-in-law, Mme. Leon Weber. Just two weeks later, on March 25, she asked Jeanne if she wouldn't mind looking after 7-month old Germaine while she went shopping. Of course, Auntie Jeanne would be happy to! So Mme. Leon went off, leaving the baby in her care.
Mme. Leon Weber's mother lived upstairs. Suddenly, she heard terrifying screams. Grandmama rushed down to find Jeanne Weber with her hands under the baby's nightdress, massaging her chest. Immediately Grandmama took the poor thing into her loving arms and back upstairs to her flat. Jeanne went home. Mme. Leon came home to find Germaine fully recovered.
The next day, kindly Aunt Jeanne returned to see how little Germaine was faring. Just fine today, thank you! (For the time being.) Now it was Jeanne's turn to ask a favor. She was quite under the weather. Would Mme. Leon mind picking up a few things for her at the market? Well, of course she would, so Mme. Leon departed once again, leaving Germaine in Jeanne's capable hands.
When she returned, the infant was twitching and gasping for breath. They summoned the doctor at once, but once again, he found nothing suspicious. The baby seemed normal. That was good enough for Mme. Leon, who left to resume her shopping. And left her alone with Jeanne. On her return, she discovered Germaine once again in convulsions while Jeanne rubbed the baby's chest. For some reason, she immediately left with a neighbor, perhaps to find help. By the time she returned, Germaine was dead.
"Diphtheria," the doctor guessed.
Jeanne trudged home through the shadowy backstreets of the quartier, numb with Germaine's death, numb with Georgette's death, Suzette's death, Lucy Alexandre's death, Marcel Peyatos's death, and the deaths of her own two daughters.
She took regular jolts from a flask as she staggered back to her flat, back to Marcel in his drunken rages, back to little Marcel and the nagging needs of a seven-year-old, and a million miles away from the dreams of a 14-year old girl.
The next day, a terrible wailing echoed in the tenement's halls. It came from the Weber's apartment. Little Marcel. They'd found him in bed, motionless, pale and cold.
"Suffocation," the doctor said, "possibly from diphtheria."
Great loss seemed to haunt the entire Weber clan, perhaps bringing the families closer together, bonded by tragedy. Mme. Pierre, Mme. Leon, and now Jeanne, they were all victims, inspiring deep wells of sympathy.
In that spirit, on April 5, yet a third sister-in-law, Mme. Charles Weber, brought Mme. Pierre to Jeanne's flat for lunch. Mme. Charles also brought along her one-year-old, Maurice.
Jeanne, her face sagging with sorrow, asked if they'd mind running a few errands for her. She just wasn't up to going out today. At this point, a warning bell as big as Notre Dame's should have been gonging in their heads. Instead, the two sisters-in-law dutifully went off. Leaving Maurice alone with Jeanne.
But something prompted Mme. Charles and Mme. Pierre to turn back. Entering the flat, they arrived to see Maurice in the crib, gasping, foaming at the mouth, turning blue. "This is your doing!" Mme. Charles shrieked at Jeanne, who denied it fiercely.
Mme. Charles rushed Maurice to the doctor and then to Brettonneau Hospital. There, Dr. Charles Saillant examined the toddler. He noted the red marks on Maurice's throat. His diagnosis: Attempted asphyxiation.
For the rest of the day Mme. Charles and the baby stayed at the hospital while he recovered. This gave an outraged Mme. Charles plenty of time to vent her spleen about Jeanne and the lengthy trail of family deaths behind her. Alarmed, the hospital contacted the gendarmes. They put Jeanne Weber under arrest.
The Examining Magistrate ordered the dead children exhumed. Then he called in a leading forensic expert: Dr. Leon Thoinot. Dr. Thoinot had both legal and medical training. He was the author of a textbook entitled Attacks on morals and perversions of the genital sense. Dr. Thoinot was a highly regarded authority.
But the highest regard was the one he gave himself. In 1905, you would have called him Old School, a stickler on procedure. He was stuffy, he was proud, and he was rigid in his thinking.
Dr. Thoinot examined Maurice. The child was now healthy since he'd been kept a healthy distance from his aunt. But by that time, any marks on his neck had vanished. The eminent doctor then turned his attention to the other little bodies laid out on the cold morgue slabs.
Luckily, they were well-preserved, but again, time had erased any marks on their necks. Dr. Thoinot conducted the post-mortems precisely as he always had, and while he checked all the boxes, he did not think outside them. Despite the many curious coincidences, he was decidedly incurious.
In the end, he simply shrugged: He couldn't find any evidence of strangulation.
The Examining Magistrate's jaw dropped, incredulous. "Then review your results again," he ordered. "And do so with the greatest care." He refused to accept mere "coincidence." The alternative meant letting a child murderer go free. He recalled every witness for a new round of interviews, determined to get at the truth.
Dr. Thoinot conducted his second review, and for the second time, he ruled out strangulation. The Examining Magistrate was dumbfounded. Despite Thoinot's conclusions, he ordered Jeanne Weber to trial.
And just to be sure, he called in another forensics expert: Professor Paul Brouardel. Professor Brouardel now reviewed Dr. Thoinot's work. It would be one eminent doctor's word against another's.
Except the good professor agreed with Dr. Thoinot. "No evidence of strangulation."
Was this professional courtesy? Did a highly regarded gentleman refrain from contradicting a highly regarded colleague? Or was there something else at play: The same reason Lizzie Borden was acquitted in the U.S., just 12 years before. Doctors, lawyers, jurors, men, simply couldn't believe that a woman could be a murderer. Especially this kind of murderer.
The rest of Paris could believe it though, thanks to the press. "The Ogress of the Goutte d'Or!" screamed the headlines. On January 29, 1906, a screaming mob came close to lynching her as the police drove her to trial.
In the open-topped car, she could see waves of furious faces and fists on both sides. And they could see her expressionless, passive face, uncaring about her fate.
With an officer on both sides, Jeanne Weber stepped into the photographer's flash. She clasped her large hands beneath her long black cape. Her hair was in a tight bun. Her face was blank, bewildered, as she entered the Palace of Justice.
The prosecutor believed Jeanne had murdered her own son to cover her tracks and throw suspicion off herself. He saw this as an open-and-shut case.
But Jeanne Weber had an ace up her sleeve: her defense attorney, Maitre Henri Robert. With his dapper suit and perfectly curled mustache, he might have played Hercule Poirot. Instead, the courtroom was his stage, and he was a giant.
This was the high-profile criminal defense lawyer who saved the murderess Gabrielle Bompard from a death sentence. The case was a sensation back in 1890, when Maitre Robert introduced hypnosis as a forensic tool. He'd brought in an expert witness: the renowned neurologist Dr. George Gilles de la Tourette, the researcher and namesake of Tourette's Syndrome.
The New York Times called Maitre Robert "the favorite advocate of the criminal classes who has already saved innumerable heads from the guillotine." You could probably not have a head in France closer to the guillotine that day than Jeanne Weber's.
But Maitre Robert surgically dissected the prosecution's case, zeroing in on witness inconsistencies. Perhaps the jurors were swayed by having a celebrity before them. Perhaps their hearts went out to the grieving Jeanne, who'd lost all three of her own children in this epidemic of death. Perhaps, they too simply couldn't believe that a woman could be such a vicious murderer.
In any event, they gave Jeanne the benefit of the doubt. They acquitted her. Then the press and public had a swift change of heart. Here was a poor woman, an innocent victim, a grieving mother. Look how the experts cleared her name! How could anyone not feel pity for her? Jeanne Weber was no longer an Ogress. She was a woman wronged by fate.
The people closest to Jeanne, however, her family and her neighbors, remained furious and unconvinced. Jeanne's husband abandoned her. Jeanne decided to leave Paris and lie low. She started calling herself Mme. Moulinet. By Spring of 1907, she was living in Chambon, a village in central France, with a peasant named A.M. Bavouzet, first as his housekeeper, then promptly as his mistress. One of her responsibilities: Taking care of the children, a boy and two girls.
On April 16, nine-year-old Auguste, an otherwise healthy lad, suddenly died. On Auguste's throat: red marks. The doctor was concerned enough to bring in the police. But in the end, they agreed: It was "typhoid."
The family stood together solemnly in black, weeping, as they lowered Auguste's casket into the ground: Bavouzet, his two daughters, and Mme. Moulinet.
His eldest daughter had hated the dour, brooding Mme. Moulinet almost from the start. There was just something off about her. But days after the funeral, the 12-year-old girl burst into the police station shaking with fear and rage. The gendarmes could barely calm her down to get her story out.
She admitted it: She'd been snooping around in Mme. Moulinet's things. In her handbag, she'd discovered a clipping from a newspaper, Le Petit Journal. On it, a vivid illustration sent a shock through her: There was the Ogress, her eyes wide and crazed, her mouth clenched with animal rage, her hands clutching the throat of a child.
"Mme. Moulinet is Jeanne Weber!" she said frantically. "She murdered my brother!" The police pathologist agreed. He noted the black marks on the boy's neck. "No question," he said. "Strangulation."
The infamous Ogress was once more under arrest. At last, she would be brought to justice. In a frenzy worthy of today's tabloids, the French press reveled in the story and fired up the populous once again.
Maitre Robert once again stepped up for Jeanne's defense. He was also defending his role in helping a child murderer remain free.
And yet again, he brought in Dr. Leon Thoinot, huffing with self-importance, eager to justify his previous diagnosis. But even in the face of this new murder, Thoinot doubled down. He conducted a post-mortem and declared with finality: "Auguste Bavouzet died of typhoid fever." He poured withering criticism on the doctors who said otherwise.
Maitre Robert piled on the expert witnesses, and lo: They all agreed with Thoinot. After all, who could contradict such a giant?
Robert and Thoinot may have had a vested interest in saving their reputations, but it worked. Jeanne Weber was free once more. And the fickle public turned again: She was now the tragic figure, plagued by unspeakable luck, a victim of gross injustice. Hearts poured out to her. What's an acquitted child murderer to do? Jeanne fell back on the only job she knew: childcare.
Moving to central France, she first worked as an orderly at a children's hospital in Fontgombault. For some reason, that career move quickly did not work out.
Fortunately for Jeanne, she still had true believers. Among them were friends who ran a children's home in Orgeville. They invited Jeanne, now calling herself Marie Lemoine, to join their staff. Barely a week later, they fired her, after catching her trying to choke a sick child.
It's bad for business to admit you hired a suspected child murderer who went on to attempt child murder. Especially in the childcare business. So the owners never told anyone about the incident, especially not the police.
Jeanne wandered back to Paris, a vagabond living from street to street. The police picked her up for vagrancy. The chief inspector of the Sureté, M. Hamard himself, questioned her. At last, Jeanne confessed to the murder of her nieces. However, M. Hamard questioned her sanity. They shipped her to the mental asylum in Nanterre.
One day, she simply walked out. For a while, she lived with another supporter, a man named Joly, in the town of Lay-St. Remy. Her charm and his sympathy wore off quickly. He showed her the door.
Haggard and homeless, Jeanne turned to sex work. There were thousands of railways workers camped in the area who weren't particularly choosy. Into this demi-monde, Jeanne Weber disappeared.
Then one night in May, in the town of Commercy in northeastern France, a Monsieur et Mme. Bouchery checked into an inn owned by the Poirot family. Mme. Bouchery took on a job as housekeeper. She also seemed to take a shine to the innkeeper's son, seven-year-old Marcel. How sweet: The innkeeper appreciated her affection for the boy.
Bouchery himself burned charcoal for a living. This gritty, primitive work meant spending long hours tending the kiln, often all night, maintaining just the right temperature. Always with a bottle to keep him company.
One night, that nice Mme. Bouchery came to the innkeeper with a request. "I'm terribly frightened. My husband sometimes beats me, but he wouldn't if a child were with me. Would it be all right if little Marcel slept with me for the night? He'd be such a comfort to me."
Who could refuse such a gentle, well-mannered lady in distress? Of course, M. Poirot replied. Marcel likes you.
The last lamps had long been extinguished and the guests gone to their beds when a terrifying scream came from the Bouchery's room. A neighboring lodger and M. Poirot rushed to see what was wrong. They hammered at the door but got no response. So M. Poirot forced open the door.
What they saw filled them with horror: Little Marcel lay, blue in the face, red marks on his throat, dead. He'd suffered so much pain, he'd bitten through his tongue. Blood was everywhere: on the boy, on the bed, on the rags on the floor, and all over Mme. Bouchery's nightgown. Especially all over her large hands.
Mme Bouchery herself was seething with an ugly excitement. She'd been so frenzied; strangulation alone didn't satisfy her. She'd attacked the boy with a savage fury, ripping his flesh. M. Poirot had to restrain her while they waited for the police.
The gendarmes searched her belongings, and found a letter from Maitre Henri Robert, addressed to Mme. Jeanne Weber.
Once again, Maitre Robert and Dr. Thoinot rose to her defense, or their own. They dug in their heels: Jeanne Weber was only guilty in one case, the murder of Marcel Poirot. All the previous deaths were still just a tragic jest of God. They said she was "animated by a frenzy at being accused and arraigned for crimes she did not commit."
In other words, she committed the very crime she'd been acquitted of (twice) because she'd been falsely accused of committing it.
Thoinot assembled a team of psychiatrists who termed her "unbalanced" and recommended the very sensible idea that she be kept under "close confinement." On the 25th of October, the court declared her insane.
It seemed beyond belief in 1906: a woman, a mother, who'd kill children. Yet the headlines keep showing us how tragically common it is.
Psychiatrists Susan Hatters Friedman and Philip J. Resnick note that "many mothers who do not attempt filicide experience thoughts of harming their child." For example, a colicky infant can often be a severe stressor. But they report that "a relatively high incidence of filicidal thoughts has been found in mentally ill women."
Friedman and Resnick identified five categories of Women Who Murder Their Children:
The altruistic murderer, a kindness killing, putting a child out of a perceived misery
The murder of an unwanted child
Spousal revenge
Fatal child abuse
And the acutely psychotic killer
Surely Jeanne Weber falls into that last group. It would take a moment of blinding psychosis, a total break with reality, to have the willpower to harm a child. But that alone doesn't help explain Jeanne Weber's behavior.
A surprising insight comes from a French study of 17 Women Who Kill Their Children, conducted by Doctors Clothilde Rougé-Maillart, Nathalie Jousset, Arnaud Gaudin, Brigette Bouju, and Michel Penneau.
They report: "Few of the mothers suffered from real psychiatric problems; however a variety of psychosocial stresses appears to have been a major factor... (including) lack of social or marital support, economic difficulties, family stress, and unrealistic expectations of motherhood."
Jeanne Weber certainly checked all those boxes.
Today, we're all too familiar with cases of Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy, where a mother deliberately harms her child to gain attention, admiration, sympathy and sometimes money.
Cases like serial child murderer Marybeth Tinning and child abuser DeDe Blanchard have become fodder for made-for-TV drama.
Does Munchausen's explain Jeanne Weber? She definitely thrived on the sympathy and leeched off her supporters. She probably thrived on the attention, witness the way she kept that incriminating page from Le Petit Journal in her purse.
But she also showed symptoms of Anti-Social Personality Disorder or ASPD. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders states that people with ASPD tend to be irresponsible and unable to hold a job. They're impulsive and reckless, but also highly manipulative. Above all, they have no regard for others.
Jeanne Weber took astonishing risks, over and over again. She was cunning: Look at the way she conned her sisters-in-law or coaxed Monsieur Poirot to give her Marcel for the night. As for lack of empathy, well, she's a multiple child murderer. That covers it.
Witnesses who caught Jeanne in the act described her as "frenzied" or "in a state of high excitement." The lurid press pushed the strong inference of a sexual component to her attacks. Was her behavior a form of paraphilia, an abnormal sexual desire rooted in childhood trauma?
We know that abused children turn into abusers of children. We also know that when victims turn into perpetrators, they frequently perpetrate the same kind of abuse. In the rough and tumble world of a fishing family, could someone have put their hands around young Jeanne's throat?
Jeanne Weber's final stop was the renowned psychiatric asylum at Mareville in eastern France. But it wouldn't be the end of the killing.
Mareville was famous for two things: First, the imposing stacks of bones and skulls in the ossuary of St. Hilaire, the final depository for 40,000 people. Second, the even more imposing mental asylum with its gothic cemetery.
Mental asylums had long been grim depositories for people with a wide range of socially unacceptable issues, including epilepsy and mental retardation. Women were even put away for having opinions that challenged the male hierarchy.
That, however, was changing. In mid-19th Century France, the famed neurologist Jean Marie Charcot had pioneered more humane approaches to treating mental illness. He conducted groundbreaking research into hysteria, hypnosis and Parkinson's disease. They called him the Napoleon of neuroses. Among his students was a young Sigmund Freud.
At the Mareville asylum, another Charcot disciple took a progressive approach to psychiatric treatment: Dr. Benedict Morel. Director of the hospital in the mid 19th Century, he decried the overuse of restraints. He developed comprehensive histories of his patients, probing for issues that could influence their illnesses, from the impact of poverty to their childhood diseases.
By the time Jeanne Weber arrived, the Mareville asylum was at the forefront of psychiatric medicine. She could anticipate care that was personalized, sympathetic and supportive.
Unfortunately, Jeanne Weber didn't appreciate it. She was alternately sullen or aggressive, picking fights and resisting rules. Her status as a celebrity patient may have given her a sense of entitlement. Evidently it did not endear her to the staff.
For ten years, Jeanne Weber and her demons remained locked away at Mareville. Then, on July 5th, 1918, orderlies went looking for their most difficult patient.
They found her, eyes bulging, hands around her throat, cinching a scarf so tight it shut off her last breath.
Jeanne Weber had strangled herself to death.
Editor's note: this article ran in Serial Killer Magazine and is reproduced as written. This archive records Jeanne Weber as one conviction, later quashed, with up to ten deaths disputed and most of them formally found natural, and that gap is the article's whole subject rather than a problem with it. What is settled: she was acquitted at Paris in 1906, cleared again over the death of Auguste Bavouzet in 1908 after Dr Leon Thoinot repeated his findings, and finally caught with the body of Marcel Poirot at Commercy, after which the court declared her insane on 25 October 1908 and committed her to Mareville. She was never convicted of murder by a jury that heard the evidence against her. The eight to ten deaths are attributions, several of them certified at the time as diphtheria, typhoid or convulsions, and Thoinot never withdrew a single one of those findings. The archive holds a separate piece, NINE DEATHS A DOCTOR CALLED NATURAL, which treats the same failure of certification. Marybeth Tinning, named near the end, is recorded here at two to nine with one conviction; Dee Dee Blanchard, whose forename is spelled DeDe here, was the abuser in that case and was herself killed in 2015. Jeanne Weber died at Mareville in 1918.