Weber, Jeanne (1875–1910)

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Weber, Jeanne (1875–1910)

Infamous murderer responsible for the strangling deaths of 8 children in France (1905–08), who may have killed as many as 20 . Name variations: Ogre de la Goutte d'Or; Madame Moulinet; Marie Lemoine. Born in 1875 in northern France; died in 1910 in Mareville, France; married, in 1893.

Jeanne Weber holds the dubious honor of being one of the most heinous murderers in French history. She managed to elude conviction for a series of child killings between 1905 and 1908, despite convincing evidence that the children in her charge had been strangled. Local doctors who misdiagnosed the cause of the deaths, and misguided sympathizers who won her release from prison not once, but twice, allowed her killing spree to continue until she was finally caught in the act and declared insane in 1908.

Jeanne Weber was born in northern France in 1875, and made her way to Paris at age 14. In 1893, she married an alcoholic, and the couple had three children, two of whom died. Weber, her husband, and her remaining child lived in a tenement area known as Passage Goutte d'Or. Weber's first known murders occurred in March 1905, and began with children in her own extended family. While babysitting her sister-inlaw's two toddlers on March 2, 1905, she choked the youngest, a murder interrupted by the mother's premature return. Not suspecting that Weber was to blame for her daughter's choking fit, the mother left the child in Weber's care after she started breathing normally again, only to find her dead when she returned three hours later. Despite the black-and-blue marks on the baby's neck, Weber was so completely clear of suspicion that the mother asked her to babysit the remaining child a little over a week later. That child, too, died in Weber's care, but the cause of her death was ruled as convulsions.

Two weeks after the second death, Weber struck again when she babysat her brother's seven-month-old daughter. As with the first murder, the baby was initially saved when her grandmother, who lived below the family flat, twice came to investigate the child's cries and found the infant choking. The young girl's breathing returned to normal, and the grandmother did not suspect that Weber was to blame for the strange red marks on the child's neck. Weber returned the next day to offer her babysitting services, and her brother and his wife left their daughter in her care. The child was dead before they returned home, a victim of diphtheria according to the doctor who examined the body. Three days later, Weber's own remaining son died of what the doctors determined to be the same illness, although the red marks on his throat could not be explained.

No one suspected that Weber's sudden interest in her large extended family had a murderous motive, so when she invited two more sisters-inlaw to dinner on April 5, one of them brought her ten-year-old son. At Weber's suggestion, the two women left the boy with Weber while they ran errands. This time, however, when the mother returned early and found the boy unconscious with suspicious marks on his neck, she accused Weber of attempting to strangle him, setting off a frenzy of public outrage against the suspected child-killer. Weber's presumed guilt in the public mind attracted a prominent defense lawyer, Henri Robert, to her cause.

In the course of the nine-day trial, the prosecution drew a convincing picture of a mass murderer as they detailed the number of children who died in Weber's care, including all three of Weber's own offspring, the three children of her sisters-inlaw, plus two other children. Yet Robert proved brilliant in Weber's defense, relying solely on the convincing testimony of Dr. Leon Henry Thoinot, a leading forensic scientist of the day, that the children had died of natural causes. Robert's emotional speech at the close of the trial also made a tremendous impact on the jury. The mob outside the courthouse suddenly converted to Weber's side in jubilant celebration when she was declared not guilty of the charges on February 7, 1906. The woman who had become known as the "Ogre de la Goutte d'Or" was free to kill again. Thoinot collaborated with his mentor, Dr. Paul Camille Hippolyte Brouardel, and published a medical report on the affair that essentially credited them for their unerring medical decisions.

Although Weber had won her freedom, life after the trial proved to be difficult. Her husband deserted her shortly after her acquittal, neighbors who believed her guilty hounded her, and she was generally shunned. After complaining about being persecuted, she disappeared for 15 months, only to resurface in the French province of Indre, where she took a position as housekeeper and mistress under the assumed name "Madame Moulinet" sometime in 1907. On April 17 of that year, she strangled the nine-year-old son of her employer. Unlike the other physicians who had examined Weber's victims, the attending doctor became immediately suspicious of the discoloration on the boy's neck, as well as the odd behavior of "Moulinet," who had scrubbed and dressed the boy in his best clothes after he died. He took the matter to the local police, but the police-appointed doctor ruled that the boy's death had stemmed from convulsions. However, the older sister of the dead boy discovered newspaper clippings from Weber's first trial—some of which had photos proving that Madame Moulinet and Weber were the same person—among Weber's personal belongings, and took them as evidence of her guilt to the police. A doctor performing a second autopsy on the dead boy reached the conclusion that the boy had indeed been strangled, possibly by a handkerchief wrapped around his neck.

Weber's arrest on May 4, 1907, incited another public outcry, as the public had not forgotten the trial less than a year before. Still believing her innocent, Henri Robert took up Weber's cause again for the second trial and attacked the local authorities as inept and backward in their investigation. Dr. Thoinot made another appearance as an expert medical witness and declared, after examining the boy's badly decomposed body, that the child had died of typhoid fever.

Once again the defense team of Robert and Thoinot proved potent in the courtroom as Weber won her release in December of that year. Robert hailed the trial as a victory of forensic science over public emotion before the distinguished Paris Society of Forensic Medicine on January 13, 1908. Robert's and Thoinot's influence was such that the president of the Society for the Protection of Children provided Weber with a job in his Children's Home in Orgeville to offset the injustice of her "persecution." Now known as "Marie Lemoine," Weber was caught choking a sick child only a few days after starting work. The president quietly fired her. Too embarrassed by his lapse in judgment, he did not report her to the authorities.

Weber returned to Paris and was arrested as a vagrant. After declaring to local police that she was the woman behind the child-killings in the Goutte d'Or (although she later denied it), she was sent to a mental asylum where she was declared sane. After this, Weber rapidly spiraled downward, becoming the mistress of one man, turning to full-scale prostitution, and finally running away with a railway worker named Emile Bouchery. On May 8, 1908, they took a room at an inn run by the Poirot family and Weber helped Madame Poirot around the inn with chores. Complaining that her "husband" beat her, Weber asked Madame Poirot if Poirot's ten-year-old son could sleep in her bed as an assurance against future violence. However, the household was awakened in the night by the sound of a struggle coming from Weber's bedroom, and a guest, Madame Curlet , arrived to find Weber in a frenzied state, straddling the boy and strangling him with a handkerchief. He was to be her last victim.

Any doubt regarding Weber's guilt vanished, and a final trial found her to be insane on October 25, 1908. Her conviction and placement in a mental hospital in Mareville inspired waves of indignation throughout France, although one of her chief defenders—Thoinot—never assumed responsibility for twice setting her free to kill again. Doctors made periodic visits to her cell at the mental hospital to study her as she experienced fits of frenzy and sexual fantasy, which they suspected might have been the driving force behind the murders. Although Weber murdered 8 children for certain, she may have been responsible for as many as 20 deaths. In 1910, Weber was discovered dead in her cell. One account reports that she was found with her own hands gripped around her throat, nails piercing the skin in a death lock.