Celebrated mystery writer Howard Engel traces the history of the crime of passion through France, England, Canada, and the United States in his first nonfiction book. The story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in England, is explored along with more familiar, modern cases, such as those of O. J. Simpson and Lorena Bobbitt. With each sordid tale, Engel explores the legal codes and moral implications surrounding crimes of passion throughout history. Careful research and a novelist’s eye for detail and dramatization bring each grisly case into chilling clarity.
Crimes of Passion is a must-read for true crime enthusiasts, armchair historians, and fans of the macabre.
Celebrated mystery writer Howard Engel traces the history of the crime of passion through France, England, Canada, and the United States in his first nonfiction book. The story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in England, is explored along with more familiar, modern cases, such as those of O. J. Simpson and Lorena Bobbitt. With each sordid tale, Engel explores the legal codes and moral implications surrounding crimes of passion throughout history. Careful research and a novelist’s eye for detail and dramatization bring each grisly case into chilling clarity.
Crimes of Passion is a must-read for true crime enthusiasts, armchair historians, and fans of the macabre.
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Overview
Celebrated mystery writer Howard Engel traces the history of the crime of passion through France, England, Canada, and the United States in his first nonfiction book. The story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in England, is explored along with more familiar, modern cases, such as those of O. J. Simpson and Lorena Bobbitt. With each sordid tale, Engel explores the legal codes and moral implications surrounding crimes of passion throughout history. Careful research and a novelist’s eye for detail and dramatization bring each grisly case into chilling clarity.
Crimes of Passion is a must-read for true crime enthusiasts, armchair historians, and fans of the macabre.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504031486 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 239 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Crimes of Passion
An Unblinking Look at Murderous Love
By Howard Engel
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2001 Howard EngelAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3148-6
CHAPTER 1
The French Have a Word for It: Crime Passionnel
Yvonne Chevallier
France is the only country that effectively recognizes crime passionnel. Yvonne Chevallier's murder of her war-hero husband is a classic example. It happened in the great city of Orléans on the Loire River, the city that still celebrates its delivery from an English siege by St. Joan in 1429, holding an annual "Fête Nationale de la Pucelle d'Orléans." In this story public and private lives become confused. Here public officials and private ambitions are entangled, and the use married people make of one another is mixed with an ample portion of melodrama, politics and a fair measure of irony. It is also a useful example of timing in a murder story: if things had not happened exactly when they did, they might not have happened at all.
Dr. Pierre Chevallier was a French war hero. He earned his reputation not at the front, but in the underground Resistance or "maquis," during the German occupation. His exploits were the stuff of the sort of movies that came out during and just after the war: L'Arc de Triomphe, Joan of Lorraine, Casablanca, Odette, Paris Underground. When the forces of General Jacques Leclerc's Second Armored Division and the U.S. Fourth Infantry Division broke into Paris, they found that the City of Light was largely in the hands of the Resistance. It was a similar story in cities like Orléans, seventy miles to the south. It was heroes of the Resistance who supplied the politicians for the reborn republic: men like Pierre Mendès-France and Dr. Pierre Chevallier. The doctor was awarded the Croix de Guerre and, in 1945, elected mayor of Orléans on a wave of euphoria. He proved to be a born politician, as he shouldered the huge job of rebuilding his war-ravaged city. So able was Chevallier that he was elected to the National Assembly the following year and re-elected mayor the year after that, to continue his restoration of Orléans to a peacetime economy. His local popularity recommended him in higher places. When in August 1951 France's fourteenth government since the war was being formed by the former minister of defense, who was a friend and colleague of Chevallier's, the doctor was able to help select members of the fledgling cabinet. He even was given a junior portfolio himself. At forty-two, in a country usually governed by much older men, he was young for such responsibility; Pierre Chevallier's future was assured. He was bound to succeed in politics; he seemed to have both the talent and the energy to make himself noticed.
Back in 1935, when he was a twenty-six-year-old medical student, Pierre had fallen in love with, and lived with, a young midwife, Yvonne Rousseau, the daughter of a well-to-do farmer. She was shy, stolid and, except for attractive green eyes, rather homely. Her young man, on the other hand, was attractive and outgoing enough for both of them, and in addition, he came from an old and socially prominent family in Orléans. Living together without benefit of clergy was rarer in provincial France then than it is now, but, after a rather bohemian beginning, Pierre made an honest woman of Yvonne. In the early days of their marriage, society and the greater world beyond Orléans seemed unimportant. Pierre worked hard at the hospital, completing his internship; Yvonne made him a happy home, which in due time included a bright, bustling nursery.
Then came the war and the Occupation, during which Pierre's unforeseen avocation came to the fore: he found that he had a talent for espionage and organizing guerrilla warfare. This was the beginning of Pierre's hegira from the routine career of a provincial doctor. Yvonne remained the homemaker and mother; she was happy to see Pierre's horizons widening, but when he entered politics after the war, she was left behind. She didn't think she belonged in this world. She knew little of fashion, possessed a practical but not wide education and was largely uncultured. She was, frankly, gauche and uncultivated. She retained her initial shyness, feeling uncomfortable, embarrassed and unwanted in the bigger world Pierre was discovering. As Pierre spent more and more time away from the family home — weeks at a time, when he was helping to build René Pleven's government — Yvonne became more and more despondent. She received anonymous poison pen letters saying that Pierre was not totally immersed in political activities, he had other interests and someone to share them with. One day, Pierre's office contacted her, telling her to get dressed for a major diplomatic evening party. She did as she was told and waited. Pierre forgot to fetch her. Then, a month before the fatal event, Yvonne discovered a crumpled letter in a pocket of one of her husband's suits. Like the wife in Truffaut's film La Peau Douce, she found what she'd feared she'd find. "Without you, life would have no beauty or meaning for me," it read in part. The letter began "Dear Pierre," and concluded, "Jeannette." She suspected that she knew who Jeannette might be: not a Parisian coquette or typist at the ministry, but Jeanne Perreau, the wife of an Orléans department store owner, who was several years younger than Mme Chevallier.
One can imagine Yvonne Chevallier's state of mind at this point. Like the backstage wife of a matinee idol, Yvonne found her self-worth sorely challenged. Her telephone calls to the National Assembly went unreturned. A secretary treated her calls with indifference bordering on hostility. Or so it seemed to her. She took the train northeast to Paris, but even there she could not get word through to her husband in his endless meetings that seemingly dragged on through the night, nor could she find him at the Assembly. Yvonne waited for him all night at their Paris apartment but Pierre did not come back. She returned home unsatisfied, feeling desperate. She reported to one of her maids that she had suspected that her husband was with another woman, but "I know it now," she said.
It was shortly after this incident that Yvonne applied for and got a gun permit. She explained since her husband's political success she had felt unsafe; there had been some disturbing threats both in the mail and over the telephone. She felt that their lives were at risk. Taking the permit with her to a sporting goods store, she looked at several handguns, asking which was the most dangerous, "the one which kills without any doubt." M. Meunier, the proprietor, picked out a 7.65 mm Mab automatic, a gun with a lot of stopping power. Mme Chevallier left the store undecided. The following morning, she returned to the shop and bought the "most dangerous" handgun in the store, explaining, "I'm very frightened. Who knows what may happen now that my husband is an important political figure."
Less than twenty-four hours after being given his cabinet post, on the morning of 12 August 1951, Dr. Chevallier was driven to an agricultural fair at Châtillon-sur-Loire. He stopped en route at Orléans, meaning only to change his clothes upstairs and continue on immediately. But his wife was waiting for him in the bedroom. She lit into him with a catalogue of his recent bad treatment of her and the children. She upbraided him for his neglect, his discourtesy and worst of all, his unfaithfulness. She told him that she had gone to the Chamber of Deputies and had been turned away by an usher. He continued to change his clothes, getting angrier and angrier as he went on unbuttoning. "You are always busy," Yvonne said. "You seem to have forgotten that I'm your wife."
Anger gripped both of them, mounting higher and higher. Sensing that the moment had arrived, Pierre looked at the plain forty-year-old woman; she was standing in his way, heavy in gesture and speech, an anchor dragging him down. He announced that he was going to sue for divorce. She said that she was going to shoot herself, and showed him the gun. "Good!" he said, or words to that effect. "I dare you! But wait until I get out of here." It was shortly after that that young Mathieu, their four-year-old son, and others downstairs heard four loud shots. Mathieu ran into the bedroom, where his mother stood holding a smoking gun. His father had slumped to the floor.
"Papa! Papa!" he cried, "what's the matter with your chest?" Chevallier was unable to answer. Yvonne took her son's hand and took him downstairs to a servant.
"Look after Mathieu," she said. "Let him play with your child."
"What's happening?" asked the servant.
"Nothing at all," Mme Chevallier replied calmly. She climbed the stairs again. After an interval, a fifth shot rang out. Mme Chevallier had killed her husband "without any doubt," shooting him twice in the head and three times in the body.
When she was sure that he was dead, she called a family friend in the Orléans police station. She told Commissaire Gazano to please come at once. "My husband needs you urgently." Within two hours of the shooting Mme Chevallier, wearing a black dress, was sitting in a jail cell.
When news of the death of the popular hero, mayor and deputy was published, the city of Orléans went wild with revulsion and anger. The papers of the day before were full of the triumph of Dr. Pierre Chevallier. The city had lost its favorite son. The papers called Yvonne murderess, without any mitigation or hedging of language. (French libel laws are more lax than they are in Britain and North America.) Local opinion supported the view that Pierre's political enemies had invented Chevallier's affaire to discredit him. They said that Yvonne had been brooding and morose before Pierre's elevation to government office. They said that it wasn't Pierre who failed to invite Yvonne to socially prominent functions, it was Yvonne who refused to go, in a marital push-me-pull-you that had eroded relations between them to a stand-off. They added, further, that irrational jealousy was stamped on her character. It was a class thing: you can take the peasant girl out of the barnyard, but you can't take the barnyard out of the girl. There didn't have to be grounds for her suspicions; she didn't need any; she was suspicious by nature. It came with her background. Public feeling against Yvonne ran so high in the area that it was decided to hold the trial in faraway Reims, in the champagne country to the northeast.
In the original police investigation and in the assembling of the case by the examining magistrate, there was no mention of another woman in Yvonne's statements. Mme Chevallier's desperate act was triggered, so she said, by Pierre's out-of-the-blue announcement that he wanted a divorce. But it was known that she had confronted Jeannette's husband, Roger Perreau, with the accusation that her husband and his wife were having an affair. At that time she had said, according to M. Perreau, that she was going to kill her husband. He added that she knew that she could get away with it. She boasted about it to him in his own house. M. Perreau may have been speaking the truth, but he was the cuckold, after all, and he did have an axe to grind. Where would he find another friend in so high a place?
The Palais de Justice in Reims was as packed on the first day of the trial as though the venue had not been changed. It was impossible to get a hotel room. The murder of a national hero was a national concern. Everybody wanted to see, and the newspaper photographers popped their flashguns until the judge, Raymond Jadin, told them "Enough!"
The papers maintained their stance against Mme Chevallier at the beginning of the trial. She had murdered a national treasure, after all. His dalliance with Mme Perreau was either invented or exaggerated, they maintained. And, even if it was true, so what? Men will be men; you can't fight nature. They called Yvonne Chevallier "the Shrew," and "the Woman Who Felt Herself Inferior."
First, the judges tried to clear up the discrepancies in Mme Chevallier's statements to the examining magistrate. If she had told M. Perreau, at the time of her confrontation with him, that she intended to kill her husband, then the killing was simple murder, not a crime of passion. (She also claimed that "the gun went off by accident.") In a crime passionnel there can be no premeditation, no intent to kill before the fact.
When she entered the dock on Wednesday morning, 5 November 1952, Yvonne was wearing a simple light suit with a high-necked top. Her face was pale and haggard. "You are accused of murder," Judge Jadin told her. "If you are found guilty, you are liable to penal servitude for life." He then quizzed her on various points contained in the "act of accusation," which contained the case for the prosecution. The role of this judge, the juge d'instruction, might seem to North American or British viewers to be surprisingly prosecutorial, but this stage in the proceedings is not the trial proper, but a sort of pre-trial. This peculiarity of French procedure has led to the mistaken view that in France the prisoner is presumed guilty until he is proven innocent. However, this is no truer in France that the opposite is true in other countries, and since 1952, changes have been made to correct this impression of partiality on the part of the judge. In the case before Judge Raymond Jadin on 5 November 1952, he stated that the accused had "an animal passion" for her husband. "This passion overwhelmed your whole way of life — without your attempting to control it. I understand your Calvary, but I don't condone it."
According to David Rowan's account of the trial in his book Famous European Crimes (which I have relied on for much of my information about this case), early in the trial two things became clear: "Firstly, the public had so far heard only half the story, and secondly, the press had failed to realize the extent of popular sympathy for the accused."
It was from the judge that the courtroom heard first about the "other woman." Spectators heard about the finding of the letter signed "Jeannette," and learned that Yvonne had found further proof as to the identity of Jeannette in the Paris apartment: a railway timetable with the town where Mme Perreau was staying clearly marked by Pierre Chevallier. This was sensational news for the press. What case is not improved by the discovery of "an unknown woman"? The judge continued his examination of the accused. He wanted to know about her meeting with M. Perreau, the other woman's husband.
"You told M. Perreau that you were going to kill your husband."
"No," answered the accused.
"You added that it would be a crime passionnel and you would be acquitted."
"C'est faux! That's untrue," she said vehemently.
The judge, Raymond Jadin, then led her through what she had previously said about buying the handgun. It was a heavy-caliber weapon with a clip holding five rounds. She had purchased twenty-five rounds altogether. Here is David Rowan's account of what happened next:
Then came the fatal morning of his return home. "According to your story," the judge queried, "he said that he was going to sue for divorce and marry Jeanne Perreau?" But Mme Chevallier was now in such a state of nervous tension that she could not reply, and when Judge Jadin began to read the account of the shooting, she fell in the dock, half-fainting. The court was cleared for fifteen minutes until she had recovered.
It was a trial that needed no Otto Preminger to enhance it. One piece of testimony would move spectators to favor the accused, while the next had them pitying the martyred hero of the Resistance again. In the end, the trial turned on the question of whether the fifth bullet, the one that followed a long silence, was fired by accident or to make sure of the work advanced by the first four. Mme Chevallier said that she intended the last bullet for herself, but on seeing pictures of her children, all the wrongs of her husband flooded back into her consciousness and she fired again at the body of her already dying husband.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Crimes of Passion by Howard Engel. Copyright © 2001 Howard Engel. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Dedication
- Contents
- Epigraph
- Foreword
- Introduction
- One: The French Have a Word for it: Crime passionnel: Yvonne Chevallier
- Two: When Lovely Woman Stoops to Folly: Ruth Ellis; Jean Harris
- Three: Oh, beware, my lord, of jealousy. It is the green-eyed monster …: Alan Norman; John Sweeney, O.J. Simpson
- Four: Those Old Love Letters: Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters
- Five: The Media: The Mannings; Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray
- Six: When Newspaper Editors Were in Season: Henriette Caillaux
- Seven: Unhappy Valley and the Red Armchair: Noblesse Oblige: Lord Broughton; The Marquis De Bernardy De Sigoyer
- Eight: Disguises and Disappearances: Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen; Cyril Belshaw; Peter Hogg
- Nine: The Hunger of Love and a Slice of America: Jean Liger; Lorena Bobbitt
- Ten: By Love Obsessed. Hell Hath No Fury…: Pauline Dubuisson; Mary Eleanor Pearcey
- Eleven: Families, I Hate You!: Alpna Patel; Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme (Anne Perry); Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb; Lizzie Borden; Susan Smith
- Twelve: Provocation and Responsibility: Elizabeth Martha Brown; Elizabeth Workman; Violet Watkins; Ralph Klassen; Kenneth Peacock; Patricia Ann Hawkins
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
Introduction
Introduction
In all of the annals of criminal law, there is no record more fascinating, more intriguing, than that of crimes of passion. They are interesting for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that crimes of passion are offenses not normally committed by criminals, but by ordinary people, who are criminalized only by these acts. Both sexes and all classes and races commit these crimes. Their perpetrators are nonentities and celebrities, laborers and socialites, school-dropouts and Ph.D.'s. By ordinary people, I mean not some political abstraction, but rather all the rich and wide variety that people come in. The full diapason of mankind.
The study of crime offers a special tool to the social historian. Through a study of the offenses that societies, throughout history, have chosen to criminalize, prosecute and, at the end of the process, punish, we get some notion of how people behave in extremis. When the heat is on. Here is society caught at a disadvantage, with its hair in curlers, still in its bathrobe at eleven o'clock in the morning. The study of crime cuts a trench into the tumulus of human existence. While interesting enough in its own right, such a study allows a unique look at changing behavior. Here we can learn about the structure of the society, the classes, the power base and the mentality of not only the offenders, but also of those who judge them. just as the archaeologist digs a trench into a mound to turn up a slice of an ancient civilization, the study of a particular crime allows the criminologist and anyone else interested in looking to see a slice of a micro-civilization that existed surrounding apeculiar group of circumstances. It's like lifting up a single rock and studying the insect life beneath it. Such an investigation interrupts a series of events and exposes a drama that would otherwise be hidden from us.
Further, such a study crosses the barriers between disciplines. Crimes of passion have inspired not only legends and literature, including the plays of great playwrights, but also novels, symphonic works, operas and the graphic arts. Think of the murder of the king that fuels the action in Hamlet. Think of Carmen. Remember Agamemnon. In fact, it is difficult to imagine art, literature or music without the violent outpouring of passion and the stories of human struggles that gave them birth. Without crimes of passion, grand opera would be impossible, and the great art galleries of the world impoverished.
Anna Freud said "a crime of passion is an action committed without the benefit of ego activity. The term means that the passion, the impulse, is of such magnitude that every other consideration apart from its fulfillment is disregarded." In other words, a large part of what is regarded as normal mental functioning shuts down, becoming unavailable to the perpetrator.
The very term "crimes of passion" evokes deep-seated, atavistic responses in every reader's heart. These are the crimes that are born in the emotional core of men and women pushed to do the unthinkable. They are at the end of their tether, au bout de souffle. There is hardly ever any crass consideration of financial gain here, no taint of the marketplace, of reward: only release. These crimes are direct responses to unbearable betrayal, broken hearts, destroyed characters, ruined lives and injured pride. Jealousy, envy and the rest of the Seven Deadly Sins enter through this door, and, like as not, if you are looking at older records, end on the scaffold.
The passionate love of Francesca da Rimini and her tragic end have inspired artists as great as Dante, Leigh Hunt, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Ingres, George Frederick Watts, Riccardo Zandonai and Tchaikovsky to new creative heights. Shed of its thirteenth-century trapping, its aristocratic setting and well-born characters, it is story for the law courts: a murder case.
Francesca was the daughter of Guido da Polenta, lord of Ravenna, and the wife of Giovanni Malatesta, called Giovanni the Lame, an heir of Verruchio, the lord of Rimini. An arranged marriage, it quickly went sour, for Francesca was already in love with Paolo, called Paolo the Handsome, younger brother of her husband. Giovanni trusted his wife and brother to spend time in one another's company. At last Francesca and her brother-in-law betrayed that confidence. When Giovanni discovered the young couple in flagrante delicto, he killed both of them on the spot. Dante, who knew some of the people in this tale, wove the tragic story into his Inferno. The shades of the lovers whisper to the poet as he wanders down and around the circles of Hell with his guide, the Roman poet Virgil. After a fashion, Paolo and Francesca bless Dante because he pities their perversity. He pities their present suffering, their eternal torment:
... if you have such a desire to know
The first root of our love, then I will tell you ...One day, when we were reading, for distraction,
How Lancelot was overcome by love --
We were alone, without any suspicion;Several times, what we were reading forced
Our eyes to meet ...That day we got no further with our reading ...
The story might be taken as a paradigm of all crimes-of-passion cases. The love that they had fallen into was, in the cant phrase, "bigger than both of them." It undermined their sense of duty, loyalty and propriety. Passion undid their marriage vows and they threw caution to the winds. Dante sees their tragedy partly as the crime of allowing passion to override the dictates of reason. In the story of the opera Carmen, the gypsy girl goes to her doom relentlessly as she continues to spurn the love of the man she has ruined. Again, reason is the enemy. It is passion that fires and determines her short, violent life. A little more rational thought would have saved Carmen, but destroyed the story. It was passion in the loins of Paris for Helen, the wife of Menelaus, that fed the flames of the Trojan War. And while he and his brother Agamemnon were away on the battlefields of windy Troy, Agamemnon's wife succumbed to the blandishments of Aegisthus. When the warrior returned, victorious, to Argos, Aegisthus and Clytemnestra murdered him in order to continue their torrid affair.
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Clytemnestra should have been wary of taking up with the murderer of Atreus, her father-in-law. And he, Aegisthus, should have thought twice about bedding anyone whose father was a bird.
We are all of us to a greater or lesser degree fascinated by crimes of passion. Our interest feeds the media, which produce prodigious amounts of material to satisfy our insatiable need to know more and more. The case of 0. J. Simpson is still fresh in our minds. This was a sensational glimpse of the lives of the rich and famous. Millions of people sat glued to their television sets watching a slow-speed chase: a white Bronco moving sedately down the freeway as though it were the Grand Prix. Such an ecstasy of power, abuse and control is rarely seen. But sensationalism was not invented with television and the Internet: in 1849, on a cold November morning, a crowd of over thirty thousand people stayed up all night as the gallows was built on the roof of the jail, waiting to see Marie and Frederick Manning hanged at Horsemongers' Lane Gaol for the murder of Marie's lover. The hanging of a husband and wife was a novelty not to be missed, especially when it was the ending to a sensational crime of passion that had been widely covered in the newspapers. During the 1920s, hundreds of thousands of words were written about the Ruth Snyder-Judd Gray case in which a pair of lovers murdered the spouse of one of them. Crimes of passion gave birth to and fed the tabloid newspapers that arose in the 1800s, just as more recent crimes nourish the evening news on television. Crimes of passion now have a great following on the Internet.
Everybody knows what a "crime of passion" is, but when it comes to defining exactly why one crime is and another isn't a crime of passion, the vision becomes blurred, the whole field gets murky. From a distance, nothing could be clearer, but up close the borders begin to overlap and distinctions become obscured. For instance, when two lovers quarrel and one ends the discussion, and the life of the other, with a letter-opener thrust into the heart, we can readily see both the passion and the crime it led to, but when two lovers plot to kill the spouse of one of the partners, as Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray did, a degree of premeditation is introduced as the couple plan, prepare and spring a trap to eliminate the unwanted third person. The passion that led to the murder was real enough, but it didn't blind Gray and Snyder to the need to establish alibis.
Evidently, heightened passions can lead to a well-plotted crime just as inexorably as a shouting match over a trifle in a bar or at a football game can lead to a sudden, unpremeditated one. The Mannings, mentioned above, sent several dinner invitations around to their intended victim and when he finally appeared, murdered him, a sequence of events that shouts "premeditation" in a loud voice. But must the violence always flare up immediately after the incident that provoked it? Can there be a crime of passion that contains elements of entrapment or premeditation? Could a case be made for cold-blooded passion? The Italians have a proverb that says "revenge is a dish that the man of taste prefers to enjoy cold." Is revenge a legitimate partner of passion? Might the "man of taste" also be female? The research suggests that revenge murders are a different category, related to crime passionnel in many ways, but not very helpful in exploring its passionate side. Significantly, the time between the provoking act and the commission of the crime is an important factor. The murderer who hears of his spouse's infidelity and catches the next available flight back home is treated differently from the murderer who books on a freighter and then takes a train from Halifax to Vancouver.
While the typical criminelle passionnelle is not a long-suffering wife or mistress who has finally had a bellyful and wins her release by an act of violence, this is a related category, which will be considered in the chapters ahead. Closer to the center of this category of crime is the young woman who, having been wooed and seduced by her lover, is subsequently abandoned by him, either because of family pressure or through his own irresponsibility, until the poor creature, usually with a child or at least pregnant at this stage, sees herself as a doomed heroine in a tragedy which can only be concluded with a gunshot under a street lamp, a stabbing in front of his front door, or at the very least, a flask of vitriol flung in the offender's faithless, uncaring face. I would like to test the evidence of some of these cases against the issue of provocation.
The concept of the crime passionnel is a romantic one. Precursors to the genre may be found in the Bible, in the plays of the Greek and Roman dramatists and poets. Hamlet says:
Give me that manYet in the battle between blood and judgment, reason and passion, passion wins: Hamlet himself is passion's slave. In modern times the crime of passion is rarely heard of before Byron and Scott. Giaour is a Turkish tale of love, adultery and revenge, published in 1813, six years before Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor, where Lucy Ashton stabs her new husband on the return of her betrothed. The romantics unbuttoned the collars and untied the tight waists of the enlightenment. Passion overruled reason. Operatic plots were played out in real life. Perhaps this came with the growing importance of the individual in society, as the calming effect of a close-knit collective society receded into history. It is a "me, me, ME!" thing. Shakespeare's Othello and a few other isolated cases in literature and in the courtrooms of Europe pioneered it, but it settled down to be a nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomenon (so far).
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core, aye, in my heart of heart ...
There are those who believe that crimes of passion have to do with nationality. For instance, there is a traditional notion that the French, with a kind of Gallic sophistication that extends to the law courts, understand such things, while the English, whose system of laws developed in a cold, unforgiving climate, do not. But these rigid stereotypes are easily broken down by examining enough cases. Still, le crime passionnel does have a special place in many legal codes. Someone who has suddenly or unexpectedly been betrayed by a loved and trusted partner, even in an illicit relationship, is rarely treated as a common murderer. Why the special interest? I said above that the criminelle passionnelle sees herself as the heroine of a dramatic tragedy; so do many of the onlookers at her trial. Without a doubt, there is more than an element of the theatrical about these cases.
In France, the only legal justification for a "crime of passion defense" is Article 324, line 2, of the penal code, which states that a husband who murders his wife or her lover when he discovers them inflagrante delicto has committed excusable murder. However, the law does not show any such leniency toward a wife who discovers her husband and his lover in a similar situation; if she kills one or both of them she has committed plain, unvarnished murder. She does not share in the entitlement awarded by French law to the male. In the pages that follow, I hope to explore not only the crime that the perpetrator was provoked to commit, but also the legal ramifications of the crime of passion defense, and the characteristic emotional tangle and deadlock of the relationship of perpetrator and victim.
Perpetrators of crimes of passion are not criminals in the ordinary sense, and a previous life of crime is not usually a factor. Their violent actions originate in unique circumstances. They are like gigantic waves, the result of winds whipping up seas to great heights, and they cause huge shipwrecks. The tales of chance survivors become legendary. Nor are such offenses ever likely to be repeated. The conditions that brought them about are not the sort that come again to the same individuals.
Just as the plot of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier would need few alterations to make it into a classic mystery novel, the plot of Verdi's La Traviata would need very little alteration to create a credible crime of passion: the father of the young man "of good family" convinces his son's mistress that she must do what is best for the young man's future: break off the relationship. This is only a variation on the often-used story of a father using every means, usually beginning with his pocketbook, to break up an unsuitable alliance that brings dishonor to the family. French fiction in particular is full of stories about such young men, who are sent off to the great wicked city with more money than experience, as though to be wet-nursed all over again, but this time in the demi-monde of the French capital. This is the steep, narrow back-stairs of an éducation sentimentale. Echoes of this will be heard in some of the following pages. In the same way, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire only needs the corpse of Stanley Kowalski to make it too a crime of passion. Stanley says to Blanche, just as he is about to rape her: "We had this date from the beginning." Elsewhere, she says, "The first time I laid eyes on him I thought to myself, that man is my executioner! That man will destroy me ..." I mention these cases to illustrate how closely crimes of passion resemble popular literature. Fiction takes its themes of passion from life; truth and invention are woven together.
In this book, I am more interested in crimes of love, sometimes familial love, where passion drives one or more of the people involved first to a deadlock and then to a deadly conclusion. Of necessity, the cases (with one exception) deal with homicide: murder, or at the very least manslaughter. My research has tried to seek out the Othellos and Desdemonas of the criminal courts, those who "loved not wisely but too well." I am interested in finding patterns in such cases. Is the eternal triangle always the same shape? Mathematically, since each point of the triangle may be occupied by a heterosexual or gay man or a straight or lesbian woman, there are sixty-four possibilities in the eternal triangle. When passion holds in thrall a married couple and the lover of one of them, how often is it the lover who comes to grief? And how often one or both of the two spouses?
In their 1975 book Crime of Passion: Murder and Murderer, the authors David and Gene Lester, both psychologists, come to the conclusion that most murderers, not simply those that are involved in a crime of passion, "are not ... motivated by any long-range plans or conscious desires. Most commonly, they kill during some trivial quarrel, or their acts are triggered by some apparently unimportant incident, while deep and unconscious emotional needs are their basic motivation. Most murders occur on sudden impulse and in the heat of passion, in situations where the killer's emotions overcome his ability to reason." Obviously, these killers have not been reading their Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell or P D. James. This is where crime fiction and true crime diverge.
While, as W S. Gilbert observed in Iolanthe, "the law is the true embodiment of everything that is excellent," it is a growing and changing moral yardstick. Not even the greatest supporters of our legal system would claim that "it has no kind of fault or flaw." Our laws have always reflected the texture of the times. Rough justice suited rough, unruly times. More settled times brought in reforms and subtleties of interpretation that would only have inflamed the prejudices of an older generation. In the past, women and men who committed the same crimes have been treated very differently, the women hanged and the men receiving light sentences only, without special comment by their contemporaries. The whole evolution of the theory of sentencing for crimes also comes into play here. Do you hang A for killing B because A killed B, or so that C will not kill D, there being otherwise no horrible example to stay Cs hand?
Further, the defenses offered in cases where a woman is the accused are often demeaning to women as a whole. This fact is generally ignored because such defenses are often the most successful. In French courtrooms, the concept of women as emotional creatures, given to hysteria when under stress, has won the hearts of hundreds of jurors over the years, and has not been criticized loudly or publicly very often because it is such a useful legal position. Should women chalk up a victory for feminism when, along with their brothers, they are treated to harsh sentences?
One commentator, Camille Granier in La Femme criminelle argues that French women perpetrators of crimes of passion show less imagination, less inventive subterfuge, in their crimes than their male counterparts. Women tend to murder their victims in public places and then make no attempt either to escape or to defend themselves from being taken into custody. The woman seems willing to sacrifice herself on the altar of her wrongs and at the feet of the slain author of her misfortunes. A more cynical interpretation is that she is more confident of getting acquitted in a French court of law than a man would be. Consider this after reading the strange cases of Yvonne Chevallier and Henriette Caillaux.
It is sometimes said that crimes of passion are essentially female crimes. Certainly there are plenty of examples of women who have committed what the press at least termed crimes of passion. But since only fifteen percent of all crimes are perpetrated by women, it stands to reason that most of the perpetrators of crimes of passion are men. Perhaps, within the category, the percentage of women involved in a criminal way is proportionately larger; in absolute numbers, the representation of women is low. One modern commentator observed recently that, in human society, the strong prey on those weaker than themselves: men prey on women, while women take it out on the kids.
Although both men and women have been the authors of crimes of passion, and men have statistically outnumbered women in successfully claiming this defense, it is women who have received most of the special attention given by the media to this curious branch of crime. I think the reason for this runs deeper than the peculiar, but very human, impulse that makes us unable to look away from the human fly climbing the outside of a skyscraper or the acrobat on his flying trapeze. A woman in trouble, in deep trouble, has fascinated both sexes for centuries, and of this fascination may come either a highly sensational account of a trial or, more rarely, great art. Vulnerability is the key. Women are expected by society to be meek and mild: non-physical, non-sexual, non-violent. Also kind and loving: protectors, not killers. Women commit far fewer crimes than men, and so when they do commit them the public's interest is a reaction to the rareness of the event as well as to the details of a particular crime. Kept without education and at home through the centuries, women throughout history learned little of the world beyond the management of a house. Hence their crimes tended to be domestic, involving spouses, rivals, lovers, close friends or interlopers into the family circle. Malice domestica.
In the thirty years from 1880 to 1910, the number of crimes of passion rose steadily in France. But so too did the total number of murders. In 1880, for instance, there were six crimes of passion committed by men, out of a total of thirty. By 1905 this total had grown to thirty-four out of ninety-six. By 1910, the figures were thirty-five out of one hundred. While crime passionnel never rose above a third of all murders committed by men, it was the dominant form for women: five out of six female murders in 1881, five of eight in 1895, nine of eleven in 1905; and all fourteen murders by women in 1910 were crimes of passion.
The acquittal for women was almost customary. Of the five in 1895, three women were acquitted, one received a year in gaol, while the fate of the third is unknown. In 1905 there were seven acquittals, one unknown, and one penalty of three years. In 1910 sentences were harsher, with one life sentence and three gaol sentences of six, two, and three years; none the less in that year there were still nine acquittals and one unknown ...
I owe these French statistics to Ruth Harris, whose book Murders and Madness, has proven to be a goldmine of information. Meticulous readers might find the record-keeping at the Archives de la Seine a bit shoddy, but that hardly blurs the image implicit in the statistics. Women who killed a spouse, rival or lover in a crime of passion outside France, though, very often had a stickier time of it. Their punishments were usually much more severe than those meted out to men found guilty of similar crimes. As Jay Robert Nash has noted about a London murder in 1726:
Husband-killer Catherine Hayes, for instance, instead of merely being hanged, was strangled and burned to death before a great throng as a public warning, a governmental caution to any woman who might momentarily run a finger down the sharp edge of a kitchen knife while eyeing the throat of an oppressive spouse. ...
When a usually sane and normal person is driven by panic, love or jealousy of an exaggerated or obsessive sort to kill a spouse, a rival or a lover, it is commonly called a crime of passion. It isn't exactly murder; but it isn't manslaughter either. Many believe that the law recognizes crimes of passion as a sub-category of murder, or at the very least an act whose motive deserves to be looked at more closely. But such a motive is a legal consideration only in France. In the British tradition there is no such thing as "the unwritten law" that allows a wronged spouse to take revenge; no slap on the wrist for the discarded lover who murders the abusive or neglectful former partner. The Canadian tradition, like those of other former British colonies, tends to favor gender-blind justice. In the United States, where each state has its own criminal law, traditions and practices vary. In Texas, as in some other southern states, the law has often shielded husbands who have murdered their unfaithful wives, just as it has favored a degree of vigilantism in its citizenry.
So, there it is. As you read on you will encounter, if not all aspects of passion or crimes of passion, at least a generous sample. The material collected in this book is eclectic, not systematic. It is a sampler, a potpourri, a medley, a tsimes of the many legends and legal cases of crimes of passion. In these stories, culled from a variety of sources (there are notes and a bibliography at the end of the book to guide readers who would like to know more), many aspects of the human soul in the grip of uncontrollable passion are to be seen. Read on.