Authors: Steven Levingston
London was in the throes of its own grisly murder mystery. A vicious killer was stalking prostitutes and slashing their throats, so violently their heads were nearly severed from their bodies. Women were dying in Whitechapel, Spitalfields, and Stepney, and though Scotland Yard was out in force, the killer remained at large. The count so far: nine women dead.
Before leaving London, Goron got a firsthand look at the crime scenes. Robert Anderson, a brilliant barrister who was head of the Criminal Investigation Department, escorted the Paris detective around Whitechapel as the two men traded theories about who might have been Jacques l’Éventreur, or as the British called him, Jack the Ripper.
London provided amusement both high and low. Inspector Jaume was especially enamored of his Charing Cross hotel, which reminded him of a feudal castle minus the knights and pages. Since he kept the trunk in his room, the hotel staff would enter, he said, with a
“dreadful expression.” Noting their discomfort in his diary, he recorded: “They appear flabbergasted by my audacity: I dare sleep in my room, alone, together with the bloody trunk.” But Jaume wasn’t spooked by it in the least: The trunk, after all, no longer contained a cadaver. It was simply extraordinary evidence in a criminal case unlike any he’d ever pursued. He confided:
“I’m living the most fantastic macabre tale that is offered to the imagination of man.”
One day in December, Michel Eyraud came to his new business partner Georges Garanger with some bad news. His daughter’s extremely rich aunt had died and now Berthe had to return to France immediately. The timing of the death couldn’t have been worse, Monsieur Vanaerd explained, for he was needed in California to work out details of the distillery. Would Garanger, by chance, be willing to escort Berthe back to France in his place?
How it would sadden him to be alone without his daughter, Eyraud said, but he would find a way to bear it. And if there was one man he could entrust her to, it was the estimable Monsieur Garanger.
The wealthy Frenchman had taken a fancy to the young woman—a weakness Eyraud had noticed and intended to exploit—and to be offered the chance to spend weeks alone with her seemed a delightful prospect. Garanger happily consented. Eyraud then had one other request. Having learned that Garanger had considerable money available at a bank in Canada, Eyraud wondered whether his partner might not stop there to collect the loan he’d promised for the distillery and transmit the funds to Eyraud before setting off for France. Once the money was safely in San Francisco, Eyraud said, Garanger and Berthe could head out to New York to catch the transatlantic steamer.
If Garanger wished to collect on the loan, at least in part, Eyraud encouraged him to visit his brother-in-law in Paris, who would willingly provide some repayment. Eyraud put on such a good show, he was so sincere in his deception, that Garanger had no reason to doubt him.
When it came time to go, Monsieur Vanaerd escorted the travelers to the train station and as they boarded he burst into tears, like
any good father would, wishing them well and declaring he’d miss his girl. At the last minute he asked Garanger for another $200 loan, which he pocketed with profuse thanks.
Eyraud’s plot was unfolding just as he intended. It was a bold ruse—if all went as Eyraud wished, Garanger would never make it to Paris, would never have the opportunity to seek repayment, would in fact never leave New York. Gabrielle was to travel with him, first to Canada, then to New York, where Eyraud—having hopped aboard the transcontinental railway—would be waiting. In New York Gabrielle was to lead the unsuspecting Garanger into Eyraud’s clutches. Then Garanger would disappear just like Gouffé.
Success, of course, depended on perfect obedience from Gabrielle. Eyraud took for granted that she was under his command, faithful to him without question, that she would again blindly play the role of sexual bait to trap a rich man. One thing he hadn’t reckoned on was her turning on him. But not only did she despise Eyraud, she had fallen hard for Garanger, this tall, blond, blue-eyed aristocrat whom she’d grown to trust. With him, she was safe from Eyraud’s bullying and beatings; she felt free. And aboard the train she was soon warning Garanger about his new business partner. Monsieur Vanaerd, she told him, was a brutal con man. The distillery operation: a sham. Vanaerd’s investment in it: laughable. Beware, Georges. Monsieur Vanaerd is following us to New York—he’ll trick you out of thousands of dollars and even kill you.
Garanger took swift action. There would be no stop in Canada; no withdrawal of funds—nothing sent to San Francisco. They would bypass New York and go instead to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where they would depart for Liverpool and from there go on to Paris.
Gabrielle confessed that E. B. Vanaerd was a phony name, and she was not Berthe. Her next admission was a delicate one: Would Garanger recognize their real names? Had he read any news? Did he know anything of the Gouffé case? When she revealed that she was not Vanaerd’s daughter but Gabrielle Bompard and that Vanaerd was not her father but in fact Michel Eyraud, she was relieved to see that Garanger did not react to their notoriety. He’d been traveling in the Far East and Africa, shielded from news about the fugitives. His concern was the deceit that both she and Eyraud had played on him—what else did Gabrielle have to reveal? He suspected there was
more, and she wanted to divulge everything—but later. Later she would confess all.
On the cross-country journey they became lovers. Gabrielle told investigators later that she cared for Garanger and wanted to protect him from Eyraud. And Garanger was charmed by her. He was an intrepid businessman who had roamed exotic lands; he was drawn to the darkness that haunted the young woman, to her tangle of anguish and lightheartedness. Inspector Jaume liked Garanger the moment he met him months later. Gabrielle’s newest amour was
“an intelligent, honest, ingenuous man,” in Jaume’s estimation, but he was “in love with an adroit and audacious woman.”
While the new lovers snuggled, Eyraud was making his way to New York, unaware of his fatal miscalculation. Had he not been so vain he might have sensed Gabrielle’s faithlessness. As she would tell investigators,
“I am not aware of any sentiment that Eyraud inspired in me. It was fear—that’s all. He disgusted me.”
Arriving in New York on December 26, Eyraud became furious when he was unable to locate his mistress. Gradually it dawned on him that he was the dupe. Indeed, two days later, on December 28, Gabrielle and Garanger departed from Halifax for Liverpool. In a crazed fit, Eyraud scrawled out a letter to her on December 29 but had nowhere to send it. He began on a note of concern for her, then moved into self-pity, and at the close issued a subtle threat.
“My dear Berthe,” he wrote, still imagining their aliases were in play. “What could have happened? Leaving you at the station [in San Francisco] you held my hand and you said to me: ‘Do not be sad, we will see each other again.’ Alas! There is nothing … What misfortune could have come to you? … I no longer sleep, nor eat. Are you sick? Are you dead? Have you disappeared? … M. Garanger, has he mistreated you? I must know! Ah! Berthe, don’t let me die of despair. I am crazy. You do much evil to your benefactor. If you return I will pardon you.”
Two days later, in a second letter, he raged at Garanger.
“You do not have the right to keep this woman,” he warned his rival. “While I did not think of you as a coward you have acted as one. This woman, she is mine, I gave her my fortune and my honor … She does not have the right to be happy while I suffer … She is lost … I promise you … you will lose her and perhaps yourself. I am not making any threat. I pose conditions. Return Berthe and I will pardon her.”
While Eyraud fumed in New York, Gabrielle and Garanger steamed across the Atlantic on a two-week passage to Britain. She pondered what more to tell her new lover but realized she couldn’t speak of her darkest secrets just yet. For now she wanted to enjoy the gracious Garanger and the tranquillity at sea.
But there were hints of the turbulence ahead. Garanger, himself an amateur hypnotist, was eager to see if Gabrielle was as easy a subject as she claimed. He hoped to understand her better through hypnosis and possibly unlock some morbid truths he suspected lurked within her. She went quickly into a trance and the session was unspectacular, revealing little, until Gabrielle became agitated and cried out:
“Murderer! Murderer!” Garanger was surprised by the outburst but chose not to attach great significance to it. By now, he knew Gabrielle’s flair for the dramatic—and hypnosis was an invitation to the actress in her. So he tucked her shriek into the back of his mind. But after their arrival in Paris its meaning would become shockingly clear.
Goron returned from London, still in the grip of the flu. It was a nasty strain that attacked the body, the mind, and, in Goron’s case, also the eyes. He had been in so much discomfort in London that he consulted an English doctor who clumsily probed his left eye with a pointed instrument, causing a serious threat to his vision. From the train station in Paris, Goron headed directly to his own doctor.
“Without doubt I would have lost my sight if it weren’t for the good care of my eye specialist, the kind Dr. Dehenne,” he wrote in his memoir. There were other dangers from the flu. Some patients succumbed to crippling psychosis. The following year, 1890, the number of suicides in Paris attributed to influenza shot up 25 percent.
Although he badly needed to convalesce, Goron refused to take to his bed and pursued Eyraud even though all traces of the man had vanished. Others around town were less concerned with justice than with financial gain. In early January 1890, Goron was visited by an ambitious trunk maker who wanted to manufacture small replicas of the murder trunk, stuff them with chocolate, and sell them as mementos. The craftsman wished to know if Goron thought that there was anything illegal in the enterprise. The chief brusquely dismissed the man, saying he had no authority in the matter. Not long afterward, sightseers along the boulevards were tempted by tiny Gouffé trunks stuffed not with a replica cadaver but with sweets.
Eyraud’s wife, Louise-Laure, was deeply distressed by the incriminating details that had emerged at the London inquest. How much more could she take? Having stood by her absent husband for six months, she’d finally had enough. In early January she marched down to the Palais de Justice to file for divorce. Her reason, she said, was
“family considerations,” and although she was breaking her marital
ties to her husband, she reiterated that she still had absolute faith in his innocence.
Goron had found no one in Paris who had any contact with the fugitives since they had disappeared months ago. They had vanished without a trace—until one day a bizarre letter appeared at Sûreté headquarters. It landed on Goron’s desk on January 16, addressed to
M. Gorron
, the name misspelled; the chief’s assistant had to pay forty centimes to take delivery because the envelope lacked sufficient postage. Inside Goron found a twenty-page ramble dated January 7. He thumbed through it quickly, stopping now and then until he came to the signature on the last page:
M. Eyraud
, underscored by a confident upward slash at the letter
d.
Initially Goron was skeptical; so extraordinary was this thunderbolt—and so full of crank leads was this case—that his impulse was to dismiss the letter out of hand:
“I thought I had before my eyes the flights of fancy of a farceur.” After reading the letter page by page with care, he was intrigued. It had the markings of a desperate man on the run. Eyraud was outraged at what was reported in the Paris newspapers, how the press had misrepresented him. Monsieur Gouffé, he insisted, was his friend and his bailiff.
“To think that I murdered him? But why?” Eyraud wrote. “I was neither accomplice nor murderer and know nothing of the affair except what I read in the papers, I swear to you.” His family, he complained, had to be devastated by the lies printed in the newspapers. He acknowledged that he and Gabrielle traveled together to Canada and then to San Francisco before he wound up in New York. But he was as surprised as anyone to discover that he had left Paris the same day as his friend Gouffé. He assured Goron that it was nothing but a coincidence.
“Ah! Monsieur, how I suffer—and such sadness for my family,” he wrote. When he read that he was a suspect in a murder, he said,
“I cried like a baby, day and night. I thought of my daughter, my wife, my whole family.”
He described his trip to London prior to Gouffé’s disappearance as a way to escape his troubles at the trading company Fribourg & Cie. He had been unjustly accused of pilfering funds, he said, and could not stay in Paris to face punishment at the hands of the Jew Fribourg. The night before he left Paris, he slept soundly. In the morning he told his wife:
“I am lost. I must go—I don’t know where—but the
Jews have ruined me.” His wife packed a small trunk for him and he left on the 9:00 a.m. train for London. Yes, he admitted, he’d made big mistakes in his life—but murder, never!
“I have deserted my home, and yet my wife is an angel. Ah, how I suffer.”
If Eyraud was, as he depicted himself, just a thoughtless but well-meaning rascal who was incapable of murder, who then was to blame for Gouffé’s death? The fugitive had a ready answer. He explained that after he had been in London a few days Gabrielle showed up with no baggage, no travel clothes—nothing. He took her out to buy her a few things but soon he’d had enough of her and ordered her to leave. First she demanded that Eyraud buy her a trunk. Then at last she was off, back to Paris with her new luggage.
“I never saw that trunk again,” Eyraud wrote.
Soon Gabrielle wrote to Eyraud whimpering that she missed him and was on her way back to London. Somehow she had managed to rustle up two thousand francs. By Eyraud’s reckoning, she arrived in London around August 20, without the large trunk. She claimed she had sold it for nearly as much as he had paid for it. The couple then set sail for Canada and from there went to San Francisco.
So who killed Gouffé? Was laughter a sign of guilt? In San Francisco they saw a French newspaper in which Eyraud was described as a suspect.
“She burst into laughter,” he scoffed. Then he bought another paper,
Le Petit Journal
, and there again was his name. “I was crazy with anguish,” Eyraud wrote, “and she laughed. What does that say?”