Radio play “The poison woman” – the greed of the fine lady

Before I write a new radio play, I always go to a phase of introspection: Why do I write this text? So why again a criminal play? Because I am writing about actual cases and actual people – and because I have been with everything invented for years, which is why I am writing more and more radio features and less and less prose.

And why this text, i.e. a crime play about a French poison murderer? Because I have always had male protagonists of my crime radio plays about historical cases, most recently Fritz Haarmann in my radio play »Vampir Haarmann«. I would like to write against the cliché that women are the worse murderers.

I became aware of the French poison murderer Marie Besnard by chance. My research on her is now eruptive: Since books for your case are only available in French and my school French is not very resilient, the Internet becomes my main research source. I now immerse yourself in this world, and there you will find countless metardic portraits on the websites of crime -podcasters and -Nerds, historical newspaper articles for their case from German, English, French leaves, film recordings in the German and French national film databases, photographs from the three judicial processes against you, even a whole big novel about your case.

Everyone in the Département Vienne and all over France is now talking about the “poison woman”, the “black widow of Loudun”, the “Queen of the Poison Murderer”.

I then bring the case into a raw shape, tell it once chronologically orderly and enrich it with first aesthetic ideas. Before that, I still work into the exciting matter of female crime and poison murders. The French criminologist Catherine Ménabé, who appeared in her paper “La Violence of the Femmes Judiciarisées”, appeared in the “Revue Québécoise de Psychology” in her paper “La Violence of the Femmes, was examined in detail how women are murdered. As she describes, the number of convicted violent perpetrators is less than the convicted violent offenders, but their share of convicted criminals are identical to men, and their acts of violence are just as diverse: they include murder, intentional violence and even sexual violence.

Poison murders are particularly quiet, meticulously planned, very efficient and insidious murders that run through the history of mankind – committed by men and women.

Léon and Marie Besnard, farmers and large -scale pensioners in the town of Loudun, located in the heart of France near the Vienne River in August 1929. When two great aunties of Léon died in 1938, his parents inherited most of their stately assets, although one of the two Louise Lecomte, the grand nephew Léon, also generously in her test. Interestingly, there are later traces of arsenic in Louise’s body. For the young couple, this division of assets is a humiliation, as it lives in modest conditions in contrast to Léon’s parents.

Then there are further deaths in their environment: in 1939 a neighbor of the Besnards, the confectioner Toussaint Rivet, and in May 1940 Marie’s father Pierre Davaillaud; And again you later come across the traces of arsenic in her bodies. In September 1940, Léon’s grandmother is suddenly dead, now he is the sole heir. And shortly after the Besnards invited Léon’s parents to live with them this autumn, his father also dies, supposedly by eating a toxic mushroom. The couple inherits another 227,000 francs.

Three months later, Léon’s mother is also dead, again they inherit a six -figure amount, and the neighbors are now talking about a family curse for the first time. The legacy of the parents was logically divided between Léon and his sister Lucie. Unsurprisingly, the recently wealthy Lucie dies shortly afterwards in March 1941. It is found hanged in the attic, which somehow does not seem to fit the believing Catholic.

Quiet does not return to it, as early as May 1941 there is the next poison murders: Pauline and Virginie Lallerone, two cousins ​​who were looking for refuge in front of the German troops during their kinship, die every week after they have made Marie sole heir. Both, they claim, accidentally eaten bleach powder. The couple’s money needs are far from satisfied: Blanche Rivet, the wife of the poisoned confectioner, which they had taken up in their house after his death as a sub -tenant, left life in December 1941, before that she had overwritten the Besnards against a small pension.

When Marie, who remains childless, fell in love with an attractive Hamburger in 1947 in the former German prisoners of war Alfred Dietz, who works as a auxiliary worker in Léon’s rope, which Marie lovingly calls Ady, her own husband became the next victim of the poison woman.

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Now, however, it is too late for Marie, Léon said shortly before his death towards Madame Pintou, the post holder of Loudun, the terrible guess that his wife could have poisoned him. After Madame Pintou has registered with the police, there is an investigation of the enigmatic deaths in the area of ​​Marie Besnard.

During this investigation, her mother died in January 1949, who had lived in the Besnards house for nine years, only there is a flu epidemic in Loudun, which is why the doctor accepts that the 87-year-old died of a natural death. This Marie-Louise Davaillaud is the 13th and last victim of the series of murder, which started in 1927 with Auguste Antigny and until 1949, with breaks of eleven and six years, cost twelve other people.

Everyone in the Département Vienne and all over France now speaks of the “poison woman”, the “black widow of Loudun”, the “queen of the poison murderer” and – because the woman always appears over the head and shoulders with a black lace almond in the trial against her – from the “fine lady from Loudun”.

But the first trial of her in 1952 in Poitiers leads nothing: there are no witnesses to the deeds, when buying the arsen, Marie Besnard was seen by nobody, and none of the dead had typical symptoms of arsenic poisoning. The accused, now very wealthy, also hired four defenders, including a star lawyer from Paris, who successfully sow doubts about the correctness of the toxicological reports – it is actually being condemned for none of the murders.

1954 The same picture in the second process in Bordeaux: In the end, the court only demands a new toxicological report and releases Marie into freedom to a third crucial trial against a deposit of 1.2 million francs, which she can easily raise.

The third trial begins in November 1961, and even the nuclear physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie was appointed as an expert for the public prosecutor. He can prove that the hair of the dead of Loudun contained fatal amounts of arsenic. But star lawyer Gautrat and his colleagues again manage to discredit this report. Nine years after the beginning of the first process, Marie Besnard was acquitted in December 1961 due to the lack of evidence of twelve -fold poison murder – so little arsenic had been found in the remains of Léon’s grandmother that it had not been enough for a murder position.

My true crime radio play “Die Giftfrau” tells this bizarre series of murder, one of the most famous criminal cases of France, with radio fones and explores the psyche of a female culprit. And it draws the moral image of a rural France, in which tradition, complex inheritance relationships, agriculture, craft, village life, wine, food and gossip determine everyday life and which just begins to shake off the horrors of the Second World War. To date, Besnard is one of the most famous serial murderers worldwide.

Radiation “The poison woman”: June 21, 7.04 p.m., SWR Kultur; Also available in the ARD audio.