On the evening of May 8, 1908, at a small cafe-hotel in Commercy in the Meuse, a woman lodging there asked the owner, Poirot, whether his little boy could sleep in her bed. Poirot did not know who she was and agreed. She went up to the child's room at about nine o'clock. When the family broke in they found Marcel Poirot dead, strangled, and beside him, unconscious or pretending to be, the woman they knew as Jeanne Moulinet. The police commissioner, Godard, arrested her that night. Within a day every national paper in France had her real name on its front page: Jeanne Weber, the Ogress of the Goutte d'Or, twice cleared of killing children on the word of the most eminent forensic physician in Paris.
She was born Jeanne Moulinet on October 7, 1874, in Kerity, a fishing village in Brittany that is now part of Paimpol, the eldest of five children. At fourteen she went to Paris to find work. In 1893 or 1894 she married Jean Weber, described in one account as a carter and in another as a coachman, a heavy drinker who was often away, and they settled in the Goutte d'Or, a working-class quarter in what is now the eighteenth arrondissement, at 38 rue Pujol. They had three children, and two of them died young. Relatives left their children with her readily.
The deaths began on March 2, 1905, while her sister-in-law was at the washhouse a few streets away and Jeanne was minding her two nieces. The mother came back to find her daughter Georgette choking, eyes rolled back, foam at her lips, still held tightly on Jeanne's lap; the child died. Days later Jeanne kept the surviving sister, Suzanne, who died within hours. Another niece, Germaine, and her own son Marcel, a sickly child, followed. No one suspected her. Then, on April 5, a nephew, Maurice Weber, was found in her care during his nap with red marks on his throat. He survived, and his family went to the police. She was held at the Saint-Lazare women's prison and the forensic examinations began with Maurice on April 10.
The case went to the Seine assizes on January 29, 1906, with crowds of women outside the Palais de Justice calling for her execution. She was accused, by one account, of eight killings. The medical evidence decided it. Leon Thoinot, a professor of legal medicine regarded as one of the princes of the Paris school, testified that the children had died of natural causes and the marks proved nothing, and the celebrated Paul Brouardel, who had not taken part in the autopsies, backed him. Her advocate, Henri-Robert, took the prosecution apart. She was acquitted to public applause, on January 30 by most accounts, and much of the press now treated her as a woman persecuted by suspicion.
After a suicide attempt she left Paris under another name and went to keep house for a widowed farmer named Bavouzet at Villedieu in the Indre, looking after his three children. On April 7 or April 17, 1907, the dates differ, his nine-year-old son Auguste was found dead in his cot with his throat badly bruised. The local doctor first wrote convulsions. The farmer, the only one who knew who she really was, told his daughters, and the day after the funeral one of them went to the police. Two provincial doctors found strangulation. Henri-Robert brought Thoinot back in, a second autopsy blamed typhoid, and the Paris experts carried the argument against what they called ignorant country doctors. On January 6, 1908, the indictment chamber of the court of appeal at Bourges dismissed the case and she was freed.
She was taken in by people who believed she had been wronged. For a time she worked at a children's home run by sympathizers, and was soon dismissed. In March 1908 she gave herself up to the police in Paris, confessed, retracted, and was released again. By spring she was living with a farmer in Meurthe-et-Moselle, and she left him for a young laborer from Sorcy named Bouchery, with whom she took the room at the Poirots' hotel two days before the boy died. The accounts give Marcel Poirot's age as six or seven.
This time the autopsy was unequivocal: the boy had been strangled and his organs showed no trace of disease. She was held at the prison at Saint-Mihiel to await trial at the Meuse assizes. The trial never came. Dr. Alexandre Paris, the expert appointed by the prosecution, examined her at Nancy and reported on October 30, 1908, and she was declared insane and not responsible for her acts. By an order of December 1908 she was confined to the departmental asylum at Fains, and she was moved there on March 20, 1909. She died at Fains-les-Sources, now Fains-Veel, on July 5, 1918. One widely repeated account says she strangled herself there; the French accounts give only the date. Whether she ever admitted any of it is also disputed. A contemporary account of the Commercy arrest says she confessed there; the Paris bar museum, which holds the Nancy report, says she never admitted a single one of her crimes.
Thoinot never conceded that he had been wrong. For the rest of his life he maintained that she had killed only once, at Commercy. In May 1908 the Paris advocate and several forensic physicians took the dispute to the Societe de medecine legale, seeking a ruling on the unfitness of the country experts. The two provincial doctors who had found strangulation in the Bavouzet case wrote on May 18 that they had refused, in spite of barely veiled threats, to go against their consciences.
Most accounts attribute ten child deaths to her, among them her own children. None was ever proved in court. The 1906 acquittal and the 1908 dismissal stand, and the Commercy case ended in a finding of insanity rather than a verdict.
October 7, 1874: Jeanne Weber is born Jeanne Moulinet in Kerity, Brittany.
1893 or 1894: she marries Jean Weber.
March 2, 1905: her niece Georgette dies while in her care; her sister Suzanne dies days later.
April 5, 1905: her nephew Maurice Weber is found in her care with red marks on his throat; he survives, and his family goes to the police.
January 29, 1906: her trial opens at the Seine assizes.
January 1906: she is acquitted, on January 30 by most accounts.
April 1907: Auguste Bavouzet, nine, is found dead at Villedieu with his throat badly bruised (April 7 or April 17).
January 6, 1908: the indictment chamber at Bourges dismisses the case and she is freed.
March 1908: she gives herself up to the police in Paris, confesses, retracts and is released.
May 8, 1908: Marcel Poirot is found strangled at Commercy, and she is arrested that night.
October 30, 1908: Dr. Alexandre Paris reports on her, and she is declared insane and not responsible for her acts.
March 20, 1909: she is moved to the departmental asylum at Fains.
July 5, 1918: she dies at Fains-les-Sources.