Authors: Steven Levingston
Landry and Soudais arrived at the morgue after nightfall. What would have been a ghastly viewing in daylight was a horror in the dark. The morgue sat on a barge in the Rhône and was reached by a wooden gangplank. The visitors were met by a filthy attendant with an untamed beard and hair hanging down almost to his waist. Père
Delaignue guided them over the gangplank by the light of his swaying lantern, his pipe smoke slightly mellowing the thick odor of rotting flesh.
Inside, Delaignue pointed out which of three nude bodies lying on the stone floor was the Millery corpse. Landry, with a handkerchief pressed to his nose, glanced at the wretched remains, which flickered in the reddish beam of the lantern. He gazed just long enough to convince himself that the putrid flesh on the floor was not that of his brother-in-law. It looked barely human. And the hair, as expected, was as black as the dismal night. If Landry’s verdict was hasty, it was, he believed, the best he could have done under the circumstances. As he explained later to Goron,
“If you are in a sinister place like this your single preoccupation is to get out of there as quickly as possible.”
By the next morning, Goron had Soudais’s telegram in his hand and frustration in his breast. The Millery corpse was slipping out of reach. On August 24,
Le Petit Journal
resolved the matter, announcing that the body had been identified as that of a Monsieur Peillon, an architect in Lyon. Three days later, however, the question apparently was still open as the same newspaper reported that the corpse was not that of Monsieur Peillon but rather that of a Monsieur Martin, the long-missing husband of a Madame Martin.
Whoever the unfortunate soul was, it wasn’t the missing Parisian.
“It is at present established that the cadaver in Millery is not that of the bailiff Gouffé who, it is believed, has been spotted in good health in London,” reported
L’Éclair.
“M. Goron has vainly invoked the gods, including the god of luck who is often so amiable to the police but who does not know anymore what murder to devote himself to.”
Michel Eyraud was on his way back to the murder scene—and no appeal to reason could dissuade him. His obsession with his hat was just the latest example of the crazy ideas that filled his head. His wrecked life was a testament to his blind pursuit of ill-advised schemes. In the early 1860s, when he was with the French army in Mexico, he became enamored of a local young woman. Fluent in Spanish and glib of tongue, he considered himself quite a ladies’ man—as the French put it, a
coureur de jupons
, a skirt chaser. One day he used his charm and language skills to set up a date with the girl. But his commanding officer nixed the rendezvous and ordered him to stay in camp. So Eyraud plotted his escape. On the appointed evening, he slipped away on a stolen army horse.
His fool idea got him charged with desertion and suddenly he was in legal limbo. If he returned to France, he risked arrest. So he roamed South America, careful to evade French troops, who along with the British and Spanish armies had invaded Mexico in response to the country’s delinquent debt payments. In 1869, Eyraud got lucky when the French government offered a general amnesty for military deserters. He returned to Paris long enough to marry a woman from a respected family in 1870, and soon he and his wife, Louise-Laure, had a daughter. But ever restless, Eyraud helped himself to his wife’s dowry of forty thousand francs and deserted mother and baby to resume a life of adventure.
By 1872 he was in Córdoba, Argentina, where he passed himself off as the personal business emissary of Napoleon III. By then, Napoleon III was in exile in the British village of Chislehurst after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Nonetheless, the fraudulent use of his name allowed Eyraud to attract thousands of francs for
nonexistent business opportunities until the Argentine deputies and senators he duped realized his deception. Eyraud vanished and next appeared in the Paris suburb of Aubervilliers where he represented a London glassworks company in 1875 and 1876. The following five years found him back in South America in the employ of the English fabric manufacturer Thomas Adams & Cie, until he was dismissed in the early 1880s for what the company characterized as dishonesty.
Now he was running again, this time from his most serious crime yet. He and Gabrielle Bompard arrived in Paris from Marseille as the newspapers were reporting the discovery of the corpse near Lyon. They enjoyed a moment of relief when the press declared that the remains were not those of Gouffé, the slow progress in the case giving the fugitives some breathing room. Neither Eyraud nor Gabrielle had surfaced in the press. Nearly a month after the crime still no one had any idea they had played a role. It seemed a remote possibility that the apartment at 3, rue Tronson du Coudray had figured at all in the police investigation. Indeed, when Eyraud arrived at the building he found no detectives staking out the place—no sign of any activity at all. The block was as quiet as when he had left it. Inside the apartment nothing had been disturbed. His hat awaited him.
Cocky as ever, with his own hat now back on his head, Eyraud set off to visit his wife’s brother, Léon-Guisbert Choteau, a shirtmaker, and walked away with two thousand francs in loans. Now he had enough money to flee Paris with his mistress and start a new life far beyond the clutches of French justice.
Before setting off, however, he took some precautions: With a pair of scissors and a new wardrobe, the middle-aged man and his mistress transformed themselves into father and teenage son. Gabrielle chopped her hair as short as a boy’s, put on a pair of pants and a shirt, and the murderers headed for England under the name Labordère, the same name they had used to rent the apartment at 3, rue Tronson du Coudray.
At just four feet eight inches, Gabrielle could pass convincingly as a teenage boy. As doctors examining her later noted, she had a childlike physique, with narrow hips and rudimentary breasts.
“One can understand,” the doctors wrote in their report, “how easily she was able to be taken for a young boy of about fifteen.”
Eyraud and his son took a steamer across the Channel to Dover
and went from there to London and then on to Liverpool. On the train, Eyraud bunched into his hand a gold watch and chain he had stripped from the corpse and tossed them out the window. After a wait of several days in Liverpool, the travelers set sail for Quebec, Canada, aboard a transatlantic steamer, plowing across the sea at about seventeen knots. It was time now for the duo to cast off one fake identity—the name Labordère—for a new one—Vanaerd. Gabrielle discarded her role of the Labordère teenage son and transformed herself into a blond-haired girl, Berthe, the daughter of Monsieur E. B. Vanaerd. To cover their villainy as international fugitives, Eyraud had appropriated the name of Gabrielle’s uncle, Émile Vanaerd, the kindhearted dental surgeon who had looked after her for eight years in Belgium.
Eyraud had several options for his new sham life in North America. He could present himself as a Paris businessman involved in international trade; his facility with Spanish and Portuguese and his experiences in South America provided him with good cover. Or he could pretend to be a sophisticated French vintner. Although the management of his family’s vineyards ended in failure, he had gained a textbook education in wine and winemaking. He was at his best on the move, relying on his wiles and quick wits. He was a garrulous storyteller, a showman, a man of easy impersonations and no scruples. His repartee suggested a successful businessman, an honest Frenchman with an admirable command of English. With Gabrielle at his side, he was the picture of the doting father.
After nearly three weeks at sea, the steamer landed at the Port of Quebec on September 7. Eyraud and Gabrielle checked into the Hotel Richelieu in Montreal where, according to one report,
“they lived riotously” for a couple of weeks. Eyraud surprised Gabrielle with a pair of earrings he’d had made in Paris using diamonds from Gouffé’s pinkie ring.
Posing as E. B. Vanaerd, international trader, Eyraud inserted himself into Montreal society.
“Vanaerd was a hail fellow well met,” one newspaper said, “and made several friends, to whom he introduced the woman who was traveling with him simply as ‘my daughter.’ ” He was on his way, he said, from Paris to Vancouver where he planned to establish a branch of his company.
The couple boarded the Canadian Pacific Railroad and rode across the continent, reaching Vancouver in the latter part of September.
There, they met a French adventurer and businessman, Georges Garanger, who was just back from the Far East and who was destined to play a decisive role in their lives. He was tall and blond, with
“blue eyes of incomparable softness,” as one report put it. Forty-nine years old, he was still youthful and handsome,
“one of those men who didn’t seem to age.” His family had made a fortune in jewelry, particularly diamonds, then lost a substantial portion of it during hard times in the mid-1880s. Garanger then spent time in the Far East and Africa, becoming a wealthy man again thanks to lucrative new businesses he established in Algeria and Burma.
Eyraud boasted to his new acquaintance of his own success in the cognac business and of his plans to establish a distillery in California. He and his daughter, in fact, were on their way to San Francisco. Was Garanger aware of the fortune that could be made by exporting cognac from the Napa Valley to France? Why not join them in San Francisco? Sensing he’d found a potential dupe, Eyraud invited Garanger to invest in his new distillery project. The wealthy adventurer was intrigued but noncommittal, saying he regretted he couldn’t go on to San Francisco just then; he had business to attend to in Vancouver.
This brief encounter ignited an explosion of passions in all parties and set in motion a chain of events that would shape the outcome of the Gouffé case. For his part, Eyraud, reckless and greedy, had designs on Garanger’s fortune, whatever violence was required to get it. By now, Gabrielle had begun to despise Eyraud and longed to escape; in Garanger she saw her savior. And Garanger, unattached and trusting, had an eye for Monsieur Vanaerd’s lovely daughter. He promised to meet up with the family in San Francisco in a few days.
Étienne Laforge was a twenty-one-year-old coachman who had been jailed for attempted fraud in 1885 and now, to stay in the good graces of the Lyon police, served as an informant. He was a large, dim-witted peasant but also just smart enough to recognize a golden opportunity when it presented itself. Like everyone in town he’d heard the stories of the mysterious body and trunk that turned up on a riverbank in Millery. He also knew that the case baffled police.
Thinking he could help, he went to police headquarters and started talking. He revealed that on the night of July 6 he had picked up three men with a trunk and took them in the direction of Millery. On a deserted road along the river he agreed to wait in his cab while the men carried the trunk off into the distance. He shut down his lanterns, as they demanded, and lazed in the dark for an hour and a half until the men finally reappeared, still carrying the trunk. After they loaded it onto the coach Laforge took them back to Lyon, arriving at about 10:00 p.m. And he hadn’t seen the trio since.
The large peasant obviously hadn’t read the newspapers carefully enough, if he could read them at all. Had he paid attention, he’d have known that the trunk did not come back to Lyon with the murderers but was left in a shattered state on the banks of the Rhône. But he got the story almost right, and Commissioner Ramonencq, whose chief concern was simply to wrap things up as quickly as possible, helpfully nudged Laforge in the right direction. The commissioner suggested a few convincing details to fill out the tale—such as the exact condition of the trunk—and in his corrupt mind justice crept closer to being served.
Soon Laforge had refashioned his story. In its latest telling, he transported the men and their trunk nearly to the spot where the body
was found; the men still lugged the trunk down the road, and Laforge still waited in the dark, but when the men came back, this time they were empty-handed. Now Laforge’s memory conformed to the published realities. The peasant also embellished for the sake of drama. Before climbing out of the coach back in Lyon, he recalled, one of the men warned him:
“You tell anyone where we got rid of the trunk and I’ll break your neck. I have a habit of doing that, you know.” And the thug flashed a set of brass knuckles. The young toughs were between twenty and twenty-five, Laforge told police; the leader had a small, bronze-colored mustache and a scar above the right eye.
But what were the names of these suspects? Ramonencq wanted to know. Laforge hesitated, claiming the men never called each other by name. Ramonencq was not pleased and instructed Laforge to search his mind: One did not gain anything for oneself without divulging crucial information. No sooner was the warning issued than three names flew off the peasant’s lips: François Revol, Paul Michel Chatin, and Adrien Apollinaire Boubanin. All were underworld figures who were in jail for stabbing a restaurant manager to death just three days after Laforge said he drove them to Millery. If Laforge were to be believed, these young men were very busy murderers.
Laforge’s testimony set the police into action. They visited the killers’ landlady, who affirmed that her three tenants were out all night on July 6, the day Laforge claimed to have transported them in his cab.
Laforge’s interrogation made its way to Chief Goron in Paris. A witness? It was the last thing he wanted to hear. And this witness fingered three suspects? Impossible. One report portrayed Goron as receiving the report from Lyon
“with bad grace,” adding that “with his peculiar type of obstinacy, he refused to let it alter his opinion.” A look at the calendar, Goron insisted, destroyed Laforge’s time frame. He could not possibly have met the three mysterious men on the date he claimed. If the men dumped the body on July 6, then the stench of its decomposition should have swamped Millery around the middle of the month. But the odor didn’t surface until late in the month or even into early August. So Laforge’s timing was off, making his testimony, in Goron’s view, a despicable lie.