How the disappearance of a bailiff eclipsed the Eiffel Tower: A Detective Written by Life

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The Guffe case is like a detective story written by life itself. The events that took place in 1889-1890 in Paris and Lyon now resemble either a play or a police novel, which takes place in an era when horse-drawn carriages still rode on the pavements and cocottes wore long dresses, but the power of the printed word was already becoming very impressive. Readers of France, and other countries as well, followed the investigation into the disappearance of the bailiff Guffe with great interest.

How the murder of a bailiff eclipsed the World's Fair with the world's first car

In those days, the attention of the reading public was riveted on the newspapers reporting on the World's Fair in Paris; it began on May 6, 1889 and was to last until the end of October. Daimler and Benz's "motorized carriages" - cars with an internal combustion engine, were shown to the public for the first time, a photo booth was demonstrated, and most importantly - the Eiffel Tower appeared on the Champ de Mars, for some - a miracle of engineering, for others - a useless and monstrous iron structure.

But the investigation into the disappearance of a bailiff named Toussaint Auguste Gouffe, forty-nine years old, a widower who lived with his daughters on Rue Rougemont in Paris, nevertheless became a sensation. Guffe was quite wealthy, he showed himself well in his work, perhaps his only drawback was his excessive passion for women - in the final analysis, which served as one of the reasons for his death.

On July 27, 1889, Guffe's brother-in-law turned to the police, he said that the last time the bailiff was seen the day before, and the concierge at the house in Montmartre, where Guffe's office was located, said that at night a certain unfamiliar man went up to the already empty office. There were indeed traces of someone's presence in the room, things were in disarray, but the safe was intact. On the floor, police found a dozen burnt matches, and the Commissioner of the Parisian Surté Marie-François Goron, who was convinced from the outset that he was dealing with a murder, took over to investigate the disappearance of Gouffe. But little was established - among the information received there was evidence that Guffe, shortly before his disappearance, was seen in the company of a certain young woman. Goron was waiting for new news.

On August 15, three weeks later, the investigator received them. In the village of Millieri, ten miles from Lyon, a badly decomposed human corpse was found packed in a jute sack. A key was found near the body. A couple of days later, near the village of Saint-Genis-Laval, next to Millieri, a broken chest was found, on which a partially erased postage stamp was found - "July 27, 188 …". The check showed that the chest was sent from Paris to Lyon on July 27, 1889, the weight of the parcel was 105 kilograms. The key found next to the body matched the lock of the chest. The Lyon prosecutor's office handed over the investigation to Parisian colleagues. Goron immediately put forward a hypothesis that the found body belonged to Guffe, but who arrived in Lyon to identify the missing man's brother-in-law could not recognize it from the remains. Then they turned to a local physician.

Investigation of crimes by the "contemporaries" of Sherlock Holmes

It should be borne in mind that forensic examination in the now familiar understanding of the term did not exist at that time, doctors were engaged in the study of corpses, by and large, only obeying their own curiosity and enthusiasm. Thanks to them, forensic medicine will subsequently emerge as a system of scientific knowledge. In the procedure for establishing the identity of the one who was found in the bag at Millieri, a doctor took part, who acted only intuitively. He very approximately established the height of the victim - it did not coincide with the height of Guffe, the color of the victim's hair turned out to be much darker than the hair color of the missing bailiff. The body was buried as unidentified.

And only in November, when, thanks to the perseverance and meticulousness of Commissioner Goron, the doctor himself, Alexander Lacassagne, the founder of the French school of forensic medicine, became interested in the case, much more interesting information appeared. Dr. Lacassagne, working without an X-ray (there were still six years left before the invention of the X-ray apparatus), without a refrigerator, even without the now familiar latex gloves, guided by his own rules and observations, made a thorough examination of the exhumed remains - as much as possible.

The killed, after Lakassagne made measurements, turned out to be exactly the same height as Guffe, during his life, according to the physician, he suffered from a slight limp - and this was also confirmed by the relatives of the disappeared. The doctor named the cause of death as strangulation. The investigation revealed that the girl with whom Guffe was seen was twenty-year-old Gabrielle Bompard, a girl of easy virtue, and in addition, the mistress of a certain Michel Eyraud, an adventurer and fraudster who was engaged in acquiring companies and carrying them through a fictitious bankruptcy procedure. During the auction for the property of one of them, he apparently met Guffe.

The found chest was put on public display in the Paris morgue - the authorities announced a reward of 500 francs to anyone who identifies this item. After some time, it was established that the chest was made in the English capital. The agents sent there found out that on July 12 it was bought by a man and a woman, according to descriptions similar to Eiro and Bompard. Both were put on the wanted list, including the international one. The progress of the investigation was described in detail in the newspapers, journalists published photos of the persons involved in the case, artists recreated the scenes of the crime. On January 21, 1890, Goron suddenly received a letter from New York, signed by none other than Michel Eyraud, a suspect. The text stated that Eiro did not commit the crime, and Gabrielle Bompard was guilty of the murder. Agents were immediately sent to the United States to establish surveillance of Ayro.

The next day, Gabrielle herself came to the police. Being aware of what was happening thanks to the press coverage, she understood that she was in danger of being accused of what happened, while she denied her involvement in the murder. Bompard was accompanied by a young American businessman who met the girl on a boat trip to America, where she and Eiro (who portrayed Gabriel's father) fled from French justice. Bompard was arrested, and in May 1890 in Havana, Eiro was also detained - he was identified thanks to the newspapers a Frenchman who lived in Cuba. Both were brought before French justice, which managed to restore the picture of what happened.

Exposure and punishment

According to Michel Eyro's plan, Gabrielle was to seduce Guffe, who is greedy for women, by luring him into an apartment rented by criminals. There she threw a silk cord around the victim's neck, and Eiro, who jumped out of hiding, finished the job, strangling Guffe. After that, discovering that the murdered man had only 150 francs and the key to the office with him, he went there to open the safe. Eiro failed to do this. There was no doubt that the murder was planned in advance, the proof was the advance purchase of the chest. The corpse was sent to Lyon, where it was then received by Eiro and transported by cab to the village of Milieri. The accomplices drowned Guffe's clothes and shoes at sea in Marseilles when they were heading for the American continent.

During the investigation, Eiro and Bompard tried to shift the blame on each other, but the sympathy of the public, which continued to follow the progress with interest, was on Gabrielle's side. This was facilitated by stories about her difficult life - according to the girl, she was forced to choose the street as a way of earning money after her father kicked her out of the house at the age of sixteen. And besides, according to Bompard, she was not aware of the events that were taking place, because she was under the influence of hypnosis.

Now such a version would only cause a grin, but the end of the 19th century was not only the time of formation of detective literature and forensic medicine - the possibilities in the field of hypnosis and the use of "animal magnetism" aroused great interest. During the trial of Ayrault and Bompard, two psychiatric schools clashed in earnest, one of which denied the likelihood that a person could be "hypnotized to murder", while the other admitted it. The version of the latter was skillfully used by the girl's lawyer Henri Robert. The result of the trial was a sentence according to which Michel Eyraud was sentenced to death, and Gabrielle Bompard was sentenced to 20 years of hard labor.

She had been released earlier, in 1905, having got a job as a ticket clerk in a cinema. Gabrielle Bompard died in 1920.

Goron retired at 48, taking up writing memoirs like the once famous Eugene Francois Vidocq. The detective story, invented by life itself, was completed, it contained a victim and villains, a girl with a ruined fate and a villainous murderer, a stubborn investigator and a talented doctor, there were minor characters - like an honest cabman who told about a chest from the Gare de Lyon, and a merchant who sold this very chest, and a deceived American fan of the criminal. There was also another mysterious character who captured part of the public's attention - Madame Afinger, a fortune teller, whom his relatives turned to immediately after Guffe's disappearance. Falling into a trance, she said that the missing person had been strangled - so they told after the newspaper, however, it can be assumed that in creating his detective, life still resorted to a little fiction.