Authors: Steven Levingston
Back at Dopffer’s home, Jaume felt the weight of the moment. Presenting Gabrielle would be no ordinary introduction. Here was the young fugitive detectives had chased for six months, the woman who had run from Paris to America and back and who stood at the center of an abominable crime that had shocked all of France and a good part of the world.
When Dopffer entered the room, Jaume was concise—no preamble, no narrative. He simply announced:
“La belle Gabrielle.”
As if already acquainted with her, Dopffer turned his eye on the accused and uttered:
“Voilà, voilà, petite menteuse!”
(There she is, the little liar!)
Jaume was taken aback. He knew Gabrielle was slippery; he knew she was likely to color the truth. “But she hadn’t said a word yet,” he observed. “No one had asked her a question. How the devil did Monsieur Dopffer already size her up as a liar?”
The judge ordered Gabrielle to his office at the Palais de Justice, and there over the next five hours she withstood his aggressive questioning. Throughout it all she remained calm. Sometimes she delivered the truth, and at other times she lived up to her nickname,
petite menteuse
, little liar. When she spoke accurately she merely confirmed what police already knew: that she had been Eyraud’s mistress, that his money had run out, that they had bought a trunk in London. And then she revealed something new: that she and her lover had rented an apartment at 3, rue Tronson du Coudray. When the address hit the newspapers, hordes flocked to the quiet, one-block-long side street to gawk at the scene of the crime. Some fanatics were not satisfied just to look; they put their hands on the building, and they reached up to touch the apartment’s shutters. Neighbors debated how a murder could have taken place on a warm summer evening when the windows were open and
“the least cry, the lightest noise” would have been heard. “All the neighbors shake their heads with an air of incredulity,”
Le Petit Journal
reported. The number of pilgrims grew daily, congesting traffic in the intersecting streets and forcing police to maintain order.
When Gabrielle first told Dopffer about the events on the night of July 26, she lied: She concocted a story featuring a new accomplice. She said she’d gone out to run some errands and when she returned Eyraud was inside the apartment with a tall man with a red mustache.
Eyraud announced that their financial troubles were now over, though he didn’t explain why, and Gabrielle had no idea what he meant. She noticed, however, that the trunk, which had been in the kitchen, was now against the wall in the sitting room. According to her story, Eyraud told her that he and the man had to go out for a while and off they went carrying a set of keys she’d never seen before. Sometime later he came back alone in a manic state. When she asked what was the matter, he just rambled. Nothing he said made any sense. Then he started drinking and at eleven he went home to spend the night with his wife.
The next morning at eight o’clock he arrived at the apartment in a cab with two horses. They had to flee, he told her, then Eyraud and the coachman loaded the trunk onto the cab for the trip to Gare de Lyon, where they boarded a train for the south. In Lyon, they stayed at a hotel next to the train station, and the trunk leaked what looked like blood, leaving a large red stain on the floor. As Eyraud mopped up the mess with his jacket, Gabrielle told Dopffer, she began to suspect the worst. In the morning they rented a horse-drawn cart and took the trunk into the countryside. All the while, Gabrielle tried to get Eyraud to tell her the truth but he just waved his revolver in her face until she stopped nagging him. At a deserted spot along the Rhône River, they came upon another carriage—and there, to her surprise, was the man with the red mustache. She was ordered to wait at the side of the road while the two men carried the trunk off in the second carriage. About half an hour later they returned without the trunk, and they told her nothing.
Gabrielle, Dopffer realized, was manufacturing her innocence: She wanted him to believe she couldn’t have had a hand in a crime she didn’t even know existed. Eyraud and the man with the red mustache were responsible for everything, and they kept her in the dark. In Gabrielle’s imagining, she had a whiff of some terrible deed but she had no idea what exactly had taken place. Frustrated by her storytelling, Dopffer called an end to the first day’s session.
Gabrielle was sent off to a dusty corner of the prefecture of police for a meeting with Alphonse Bertillon, the slow-moving but meticulous cataloguer of criminals. Bertillon was a repellent genius, given to nosebleeds and crippling headaches, who created a revolutionary system for identifying lawbreakers by measuring their body parts.
Using his tape measure he noted the size of the head, feet, fingers—everything—and carefully cataloged the length and circumference of each part. He kept his anthropometric calculations of each criminal on a filing card, with mug shots attached, and stored the records in a massive cabinet. He was convinced that no two people had identical measurements. If he had a card, he could determine a criminal’s true identity; his cabinet could break the alias of anyone. His inventive system laid a cornerstone of modern criminal science.
Gabrielle endured the tedious process and, despite her long day, was cooperative throughout. She seemed unaware of the meaning of the experience. On command she raised her arms, and Bertillon noted the length of her extended reach. She tilted her head to allow her left ear to be measured. She put her middle finger on a ruler. She rolled up her sleeves and her forearms were measured. She removed her shoes so the tape measure could be extended along her foot.
She was a model prisoner, her composure exquisite, until it came time for her mug shot. She wanted to look her best and insisted on returning to her hotel for her favorite hat. Apparently she did not understand, or refused to accept, that she was under arrest and not free to come and go as she pleased. She had such a beautiful hat at the hotel, a grand thing festooned with feathers.
“I look spiffy in that,” she told the guards, striking a Sarah Bernhardt pose.
Of course it was a ludicrous request—she was going nowhere. Well, perhaps someone could go to the hotel for her. No, no one would be sent to pick up her hat.
Finally she crumbled. The despair of the past year and a half weighed on her: the murder, the fleeing, the beatings, the arrest, and now the obstinacy of the police. She sobbed hysterically. And no one offered her any sympathy. At last she pulled herself together and posed for the mug shot hatless.
Next, she was taken to the Dépôt, the prison at the Palais de Justice usually for criminals just passing through the legal system. In rare cases suspects took up residence there. Gabrielle was to be housed at the Dépôt throughout her interrogation so the judge and detectives could keep a close watch on her. She was deposited in a tomblike cell about twelve feet long and six feet wide with an eight-foot ceiling. Two louvered windows high on the wall at the front opened inward;
in the daytime, the slats let in a pale slanting light that died on the floor near the door while the rest of the room sat in shadowy half-light. On her arrival the cell was in a murky gloom. There was an iron bed, an oak stool, and a small board that served as a table—all fixed to the walls.
“One thus avoids a furious defendant who cannot use the furnishings as bludgeons,”
Le Petit Journal
explained. There was a small stove that brought heat in from the basement. Some prisoners occupied their time by rubbing the stove to a shine, adding a splash of brightness to the room; others filled the long hours by sweeping the floor with a handleless broom.
With Gabrielle’s capture, the press speculated that additional arrests were imminent: A major breakthrough was coming. At long last the pieces of this drawn-out saga were falling into place.
“The emotion was great yesterday in Paris when the public learned … that the Gouffé case was finally on the eve of being clarified,”
Le Petit Journal
reported.
Le Gil Blas
added its own optimism:
“It is thus now permitted to hope that we will soon have the solution to the mystery that has impassioned public opinion for so long now.”
But poor Goron, the man who drove the case through its darkest hours, watched the excitement unfold from his sickbed. He wanted badly to be in the center of the interrogation; he wanted to question the suspect himself and soak up some glory. But he remained, on doctor’s orders, recumbent in a dark room, contenting himself with reports delivered by his trusted aide, Inspector Jaume. Goron was pleased that Gabrielle was under arrest but his own frustrations ran deep, as
Le Petit Journal
noted:
“A man who should be quite unhappy right now is Monsieur Goron, who has an affliction of the eyes that stops him from all work.”
On the second day of questioning Judge Dopffer bore down on the
petite menteuse.
His patience grew thin, his manner severe, and Gabrielle teetered at the edge of a psychological abyss, laughing, then crying, and then laughing again. Gradually Dopffer coaxed out a new story, one that transformed her from a mere witness to an active participant.
What turned her, Goron later hypothesized, was the power of a night in jail. Behind bars, in the silence of the cell, she probably heard the judge’s first day of interrogation pounding in her head, and she lost her confidence. By day two, she realized she needed to cooperate. The first thing she recanted was the tale of the man with the red mustache. There was never any man with a red mustache in the apartment on rue Tronson du Coudray, nor did he reappear on the road outside Lyon. Some newspapers had been skeptical of the suspect’s storytelling from the start; now they patted themselves on the back:
“We were right yesterday when we said that it’s not necessary to accept all that Gabrielle Bompard says,”
Le Gil Blas
wrote.
Dopffer methodically peeled away the young woman’s lies and bit by bit brought to light a more credible scenario. At times, Gabrielle seemed distracted, uninterested, or simply lost, forcing her interrogator to swing between sternness and sympathy to maintain her attention and draw her out. Gabrielle took Dopffer back to the beginning of July when Michel Eyraud was running out of his plundered cash. With Fribourg & Cie on his back, Eyraud told Gabrielle they had to get out of Paris. But first he needed to strike a big blow, a robbery so lucrative it would set them up and send them on their way. He considered killing an elderly jeweler, and when that proved too risky he set his sights on Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé. Here was a man he
knew was vulnerable to the lure of sex, and Eyraud had Gabrielle to dangle before him. She insisted she had no choice but to take part in the tawdry scam. Eyraud had seized control of her; she no longer had any free will.
At first she believed Eyraud planned just to rob Gouffé, who, he had discovered, often carried a large amount of cash and wore a very expensive gold ring. But soon she realized Eyraud had something far worse in mind. With cold-blooded calculation, he planned to leave no trace of his crime; he had to eliminate any possibility his victim could point a finger at him. So Eyraud set about his task. For a man lazy in the traditional ways of work, he was a remarkably diligent schemer. The trap, he knew, had to be carefully laid. He learned Gouffé’s habits, discovering that the bailiff kept large sums of money in his office on Fridays after a week of collections. Gouffé also stayed out late on Friday night, usually in the arms of one of his many paramours. So no one would begin to miss him until the morning, giving the killers a cushion of time to make their escape.
On the afternoon of July 26, the day of the crime, Eyraud sprung the trap: He tricked Gouffé into believing that his own affair with Gabrielle was over, that she was free to entertain other men, and that she was looking for a new lover. And Gabrielle abetted the ruse by bumping into Gouffé on the street, at Eyraud’s direction, and inviting him to visit her that evening at 3, rue Tronson du Coudray.
At eight fifteen there was a rapping at the door.
Gabrielle greeted the visitor naked except for her dressing gown, which she’d tied closed with a red silk sash. The room had been prepared for romance: candles burned, and some biscuits and bottles of champagne and cognac were on a table. The trunk was out of sight in the kitchen. With her eye for fashion, Gabrielle admired Gouffé’s top hat, which he removed and placed on a side table.
“A beautiful hat,” she told Dopffer. “Shiny—not the hat of a bailiff!”
“So, little demon,” Gouffé began. “We have left Michel?”
She sensed that he didn’t believe it.
“Yes,” Gabrielle lied. “That’s over.”
“Not very big-hearted,” he said.
Gabrielle invited him to have a seat.
Looking around, Gouffé saw there was nowhere to sit. All the chairs had been removed, leaving only a chaise longue beside a curtained
alcove. And out of sight behind that curtain was Eyraud, seated on a wooden chair, lying in wait.
The room had been prepared for a hanging: In the ceiling of the alcove—hidden by the curtain—was a pulley, and running through the pulley was a length of rope. If all went as planned, Eyraud would soon yank down on the rope and feel the weight of Gouffé on the other end, his neck in a makeshift noose fashioned from the red sash around Gabrielle’s waist.
“Sit there,” Gabrielle said, indicating the chaise longue.
“Oh I’m not tired,” he said, adding suggestively: “On the contrary.”
“Sit down,” Gabrielle begged. “Please.” She had to get him onto the chaise longue.
“I wish you would sit down,” she repeated.
Gouffé remained on his feet.
Gabrielle offered him a glass of cognac. He declined.
Gouffé sensed her anxiety.
“Are you afraid of me?” he asked.
Gabrielle again begged him to sit on the chaise longue and at last he did. She climbed onto his lap, she told Dopffer, and chattered about her red silk sash. Eyraud had coached her in what to say. She told Gouffé that the sash was very expensive—didn’t he think it was lovely? And then she removed it from her waist, allowing her dressing gown to fall open. Gouffé began to fondle her breasts and kiss her neck.