Authors: Steven Levingston
Inside the train, Gabrielle charmed the battery of officials seeing her off. She handed a bouquet to the head of the gendarmes and announced:
“I am enchanted by the Lyonnais people. They have covered me with flowers. I have pockets filled with bouquets!” She asked to shake hands with the police chiefs and agents, and no one refused her. She left a strong impression on the special police commissioner Ramonencq, who in his long career, punctuated by many strange cases, had never encountered a woman as extraordinary as Gabrielle, a woman he described as both perverse and naïve.
“There is an unconsciousness so profound, an unawareness of remorse so absolute,” he said, “that one is left stupefied.”
Before departing, Gabrielle held a mini press conference aboard the train. She spoke candidly, providing a rare glimpse into her motivations in public.
“I did everything to be gracious and to present myself well,” she told
Le Lyon Républicain.
“But in my cell at night I cried very often. I thought I would falter during the confrontations in the judge’s office. If a tear had gushed from my eye, that would have been the end, my courage would have abandoned me.”
The papers printed her claims that she was little more than an unconscious instrument of Eyraud:
“I never loved him. But he dominated
me completely.” And: “I am unconscious.” And:
“I didn’t do anything. I was forced to do ill. I am more a victim than I am guilty.”
Jaume exploded at such statements—she was plainly duplicitous.
“Very skillful,” Jaume said. She cried that Eyraud robbed her of her free will, that she had no will left, that she was the irresponsible instrument of crime. But since her arrest, Jaume pointed out, she had miraculously “rediscovered her free will, her personality, her joie de vivre.”
The crowds, the flowers, the blown kisses—the case had become a vulgar spectacle. The Lyon press blamed Dopffer and the Sûreté for indulging Gabrielle just to obtain her confessions. Their lenience, complained
Le Lyon Républicain
, unleashed the public’s infatuation with
“this sad heroine. Enough is enough. It is time this stopped.”
Far more pressing, the newspapers agreed, was the question: Where was Eyraud?
Sûreté chief Marie-François Goron lay in a darkened room at home, frustrated and restless, recovering too slowly from his nasty bout with the flu and subsequent eye affliction. However powerful his resolve to direct the hunt for Michel Eyraud, his debility proved stronger.
“I was gravely ill,” he recalled in his memoir.
The search for Eyraud centered on New York. He had posted his letters from there, and reports had come from guests at hotels and boardinghouses who had encounters with a man fitting Eyraud’s description, and from New York City police who were doing their part to reel him in on behalf of the Paris Sûreté.
But where Eyraud was hiding now was anyone’s guess. American detectives had found traces of him in both New York and Montreal. But those trails led nowhere. Was he still in New York? Was he hiding in Canada? The anonymity of big cities could help protect him. Had he gone south to Mexico or farther, into Colombia or Argentina? His potential playground was vast. He spoke the languages of Europe and the Americas, and changed identities with the ease of a stage actor. There was another possibility: In his letter to Goron in January he had vowed to rush back to Paris to defend himself if Gabrielle ever showed up and accused him of the crime. Had he read Gabrielle’s testimony in the newspapers? Was he headed back to Paris? Taking no chances, French police put the nation’s ports on alert.
The press aided the dragnet: Eyraud’s photo was everywhere; police and the public across the world knew his face; his celebrity would make it impossible to hide.
“The truth is, Eyraud is very actively sought: be it in London or in America,”
Le Gil Blas
wrote. “It’s possible that in the coming days Gouffé’s assassin will be behind bars.”
The prefect of police, Henri-Auguste Loze, acting in Goron’s stead, dispatched two Sûreté agents to New York. Léon Soudais and Emil Houlier—the former balding, the latter with a walrus mustache—set sail on February 2 aboard
City of Paris
, the roomiest, most luxurious steamer on the seas. The vessel stretched 560 feet and accommodated 1,371 passengers on its four decks. The main saloon had a vaulting ceiling and stained glass, and was illuminated by incandescent lights. In the smoking room 200 passengers lounged in red leather chairs.
On February 12, as the agents docked at New York, news came from London that Eyraud’s arrest was imminent in a local pub. Parisians braced for a big break. But the following day,
Le Figaro
cooled expectations:
“Yesterday, rumors circulated of the arrest of Michel Eyraud in London. This information is wrong. One is still without news of Gouffé’s murderer.”
Meanwhile, Soudais and Houlier had checked into the Hotel Martin on University Place, signing the registry under the pseudonyms Léon Jolivet and John Johnson to avoid tipping off the press and alerting Eyraud. At the French consulate they introduced themselves to the consul general, Viscount Paul d’Abzac, who put his resources at their disposal. Next they climbed into a cab and went to police headquarters, where Chief Thomas Byrnes briefed them for an hour on his detectives’ work on the case. Among his efforts, the chief had stationed detectives incognito at the main post office and several branches where Eyraud was known to check for mail, and the clerks were told to give a signal if the suspect appeared. Byrnes handed Soudais and Houlier a large dossier and promised any assistance they needed during their stay.
The next day, the Sûreté detectives were alarmed when they opened
The New York Times
to discover that their cover had been blown. A reporter who had tailed them from place to place snidely commented that anyone could have picked out the French sleuths:
“They advertised their errand by their garb, appearance, language and luggage.” Although the reporter misidentified them as Inspector Jaume and an assistant, he still had the substance right: These were French detectives on the hunt for Eyraud. The writer apparently had sneaked a look at the Hotel Martin registry and then scoffed at the agents’ phony names. How could a Frenchman try to disguise himself as Johnson? It was as absurd for a French detective to hide behind
an Anglicized name, the reporter wrote, as it was for an ostrich to hide its body by poking its head into the sand. Now a game of cat and mouse ensued, with journalists chasing Soudais and Houlier as the men attempted to shake off their pursuit. By February 17, they assured Loze in a dispatch to Paris that they had tricked the newspapermen into believing they had left town, when in fact they were still lodged at the Hotel Martin:
“The journalists here no longer occupy themselves with us.”
The French detectives checked hotel rooms and whorehouses that Eyraud was believed to have frequented. Their search was complicated by the many names the fugitive used: Bertheir, Labordère, Vanaerd, Deporte, Avrarad, Moulié. A man fitting Eyraud’s description was remembered at various locations under these names.
“We do not yet have any indication of the hiding place of the individual we seek,” the French detectives wrote to Loze. But they said the search of his lodgings raised the hope that the rooms “could be precious help in providing us with a trail to follow.”
The agents were now fairly confident Eyraud had arrived in New York from San Francisco in the last week of December, expecting to meet up with Gabrielle and do in Garanger. But the couple had evaded him, leaving Halifax, Nova Scotia, on December 28 for Liverpool. By January 2, 1890, Eyraud had taken up residence at a boardinghouse at 28 Waverly Place posing as Miguel Garico, a wealthy planter from Mexico. The lodging was owned by a married woman named Susan Martin who soon became the lover of this exotic traveler.
Living upstairs was Florence Stout, a twenty-one-year-old actress, and her playwright husband, George Stout. One morning, the couple was going out when Garico called them into his room. Ever since he’d arrived, the Mexican, as he was known around the boardinghouse, seemed a troubled man: unshaven, restless, and overcome by some deep grief. He was often groaning and crying. He didn’t eat with the other boarders and didn’t seem to sleep.
“At night he was heard pacing to and fro until the people in the surrounding rooms were nearly driven to distraction,” George said. Sometime later, when Florence had discovered who he was, she said,
“Except for his eyes, he was not an evil-looking man.” That morning, he sat the couple down in his room and told them his story. He said he was traveling from Mexico
to Paris with his wife and a neighbor’s son. In Philadelphia, his wife and the young man deserted him, making off with a satchel containing $12,500. He was certain they had eloped together to Paris.
“My god!” the Mexican sobbed. “After twenty years!” Stout panicked when Garico pulled a revolver out of his pocket, shrieking:
“I will kill myself, but first I will kill that false woman!” Stout persuaded the Mexican to put the gun away but the man was still raving that he had to go back to Mexico—an impossible journey because he was now penniless.
“I have plenty of money in Mexico,” he told the couple.
“Why don’t you telegraph for money?” Stout asked.
The Mexican said his home was a four-day ride from the nearest telegraph station.
It was quicker just to go to Mexico and bring the money back himself. Right now he was so broke he had only twenty dollars in his pocket.
Stout offered to take him to Chief Byrnes, who could telegraph to Paris and have his wife and neighbor arrested. In this way, perhaps he could recover his money. Visiting Byrnes was the last thing Eyraud wanted. He told Stout the money didn’t trouble him as much as the disgrace. The Mexican’s tale moved Stout so much that he, too, began to cry. He asked how much Garico needed to get home. The distraught man gestured to the clothing scattered on his bed and all around the room, petite dresses of Gabrielle’s that he had hauled with him from San Francisco; Eyraud had been trying to sell them to anyone in the boardinghouse.
“Here are dresses that cost hundreds of dollars,” he told Stout. He offered to let Stout take the clothing as collateral for a seventy-dollar loan. The Mexican signed a receipt with a bold flourish, promising to return in a month and pay the lender back twofold.
As a playwright Stout appreciated a good performance, and when he learned later who the Mexican was, he declared:
“I never saw such a well worked-up scene in all my theatrical career. The detail was perfect and the stage business was worthy of a Booth.” He applauded Eyraud’s skill in eliciting emotion. “I look back upon the fellow’s acting with a feeling that closely approaches awe.”
Having acquired the murderess’s clothing, including a dainty hat and a small handbag, and the couple’s trunk, Stout had an inspiration.
When a reporter visited him a few months later, his little daughter skipped around the room with the hat atop her curly hair and the small handbag swinging at her side.
“I shall make the story of Eyraud’s crime into a drama,” the playwright said, proposing a theatrical tribute that never made it to the stage. “I shall play the strangler, and my wife will act Gabrielle Bompard in Gabrielle’s own dresses.”
Eyraud had disappeared from the boardinghouse on Waverly Place on January 12 after a ten-day stay, making off with a hat from one of the tenants. His next stop was a lodging at 54 Washington Place, a few blocks away in Greenwich Village, where the landlady took him in even though he refused to give his name. Just as he did on Waverly Place, Eyraud paced in his room throughout the night, sometimes erupting into sobs. Gesturing wildly, he raged over a man who had stolen his mistress and taken her to France. Day after day Eyraud made excuses for his failure to pay his rent, until finally the landlady lost her patience and threatened to call the police, causing the strange tenant to vanish.
At his next lodging, the Hotel America on Irving Place, Eyraud cast himself as a jovial Mexican merchant on a business trip. He delighted guests with his bonhomie, acting out wonderful tales, smoking the finest cigars, drinking an entire bottle of wine at dinner, and borrowing money freely from his new fans. Around this time he responded to a newspaper ad placed by a French piano teacher, telling her he wanted to arrange lessons for his daughter. Two days later he returned to say that his daughter had gone to Chicago but in the meantime he was interested himself in learning to play. Soon the teacher had become his lover. For Eyraud, women not only satisfied his lust but also gave him cover.
“This man finds himself in areas where there are women and he loses himself there,” wrote
L’Écho de Paris.
He was charming and skillful at seduction. After his capture, it was said, he
“had in his life an incalculable number of mistresses. He gloried in seducing many married women and even some virgins.”
He charmed the lodgers at the Hoffman House Hotel at Broadway and Twenty-Second Street, known for its glamorous bar and
posh clientele. Although he resided at the Hotel America, Eyraud was often found in the common rooms of the Hoffman, acting as though he was a resident. While hobnobbing there he learned that the Hoffman was Georges Garanger’s place of residence whenever he visited New York. Soon he had smooth-talked his way into Garanger’s room, number 46, where he discovered two black trunks, one with a nameplate that read g. garanger. Eyraud talked the staff into allowing him to move the trunks out of the Hoffman to his room at the Hotel America, where Soudais and Houlier found them; inside the trunks were a note signed by Gabrielle, three pairs of shoes, two shirts monogrammed with the letters G.G., and a baggage claim receipt for a San Francisco train journey under the name Vanaerd. Somehow, possibly by impersonating Garanger, Eyraud conned the Hoffman staff into handing over his mail, which contained checks that Eyraud cashed.
Pretending to live at the Hoffman House gave Eyraud entrée to the elite. He met two wealthy Frenchmen, Monsieur Potier and Monsieur Laffeit, who owned businesses in Honduras.
“With a top-flight address,” a newspaper explained, “he pussyfooted in the society of these gentlemen.” One evening, when Eyraud joined his new friends for dinner, he was introduced to a Turkish gentleman named Dr. Pardo who had just arrived from Constantinople. Eyraud posed as a wealthy businessman, rather free with his money, who was considering a business proposition in New Orleans. He told his dinner companions he was recently in San Francisco and was on his way to Europe. When Dr. Pardo described a beautiful Oriental robe he’d just acquired, Eyraud expressed interest in it after learning it was worth about five hundred francs.