by Tori Telfer
When Marie was arrested, a sheaf of papers had been discovered in her room—a written confession. Like her lover, Marie had been desperate to unburden her conscience. In the document, she indicts herself of “bizarre and monstrous crimes”: killing her father, murdering her brothers, letting La Chausée be broken on the wheel because of her crimes, attempting to poison one of her children, thinking about killing herself, burning down a barn, plotting to kill her sister, and trying to poison her husband. In fact, she more or less recants her whole life. “I accuse myself of having created general scandal,” she writes. “I accuse myself that I did not honor my father, and that I did not render to him the respect I owed him.” She confesses to having two children with Sainte-Croix and a third child with a cousin, to losing her virginity at age seven to a brother, and to committing incest “three times a week, perhaps three hundred times in all.” She also declares that, in giving herself to Sainte-Croix, she caused her own ruin.
Of course, in one fell swoop, Marie distracts us all from murder with her extreme claims of incest, which at least one historian has speculated could be code for childhood abuse. At the time, they merely fueled her reputation as a voraciously lustful woman. But upon reading her confession today, we’re confronted with a portrait of a desperate, desolate woman, saturated with regret and exhaustive in her self-immolation: she moves from not honoring her father to killing him, from killing her brothers to sleeping with them, from creating “general scandal” to causing the torture and death of an unfortunate petty criminal. In court, she denied the whole thing, claiming she was out of her mind when she wrote it: feverish, confused, alone in a foreign country.
Since she was a woman of high social standing, the court needed substantial evidence to prove her guilt—and the incriminating “confession” wasn’t enough. Many witnesses took the stand against her, and one theme that emerged was that La Brinvilliers had been obsessed with poison. One woman testified that Marie had gotten drunk at a dinner party and flaunted Sainte-Croix’s box of poisons, laughing, “Here is vengeance on one’s enemies; this box is small, but is full of inheritances!” Another man heard that Marie told Briancourt (ah, the Parisian gossip machine!) that there were “ways to make away with people that displeased her.” Still, none of these testimonies were quite enough to convict her, until the court brought in the one person who knew all about her crimes: Briancourt himself.
Marie listened to her former lover testify against her for a total of eighteen hours. He told the court everything: how she and Sainte-Croix killed her father and brothers, how she asked him for help with the murder of her sister and sister-in-law, how she plotted to murder him with Sainte-Croix in the closet. Marie listened with frightening hauteur, responding that Briancourt was a drunkard and a liar. When Briancourt began to weep on the witness stand, saying, “I warned you many a time, madam, about your disorders and your cruelty, and that your crimes would ruin you,” Marie called him a coward. The court was stunned by her eerie, unfeeling composure, but Briancourt’s testimony was exactly what they needed to convict her.
Marie really was a vision in the courtroom: calm, cold, proud. She denied everything, over and over, even as her life was “remorselessly dissected” in front of her. The horrible nature of her crimes made everyone else highly emotional—at one point, even the judges were crying—but Marie “kept her head proudly erect, and preserved undimmed the stony clearness of her blue eyes.”
On July 16, 1676, the judges declared her guilty, and sentenced her to the ordinary and extraordinary questions, hoping she’d spill the names of any accomplices during the torture. After the questions, she would be beheaded. In a way, this sentence was merciful. They could have had her burned alive.
De Profundis
Marie was given a confessor, a Jesuit priest named Edmé Pirot, who was every bit as sensitive and empathetic as Marie was proud and cold. Pirot was such a delicate soul, in fact, that he claimed to faint at the sight of blood. The sight of Marie—who was by that point very thin, and of course very doomed—immediately tugged at his heart.
Like Briancourt before him, Pirot desperately wanted Marie to repent, and miraculously, Marie was now willing to do so. After spending some time with him, she declared that she was ready to make a full confession to the court. There, in front of everyone, she finally admitted that she’d killed her father and brothers. Perhaps she was hoping to avoid torture.
Unfortunately, she didn’t tell the court anything they didn’t already know; they were hoping for accomplices, dark secrets, important names. Poisoning paranoia had begun to creep through the city, and authorities were already panicking about the terrifying subtlety of these sorts of crimes. They feared that after Marie’s death, her poisons would somehow kill again. After all, in her written confession, she mentioned selling poison to another woman who wanted to kill her husband. Who knew where this web of feminine evil would spread next?
So the torture began. Marie was stripped naked and bent backward over a wooden trestle, with her ankles tied to the floor and her hands tied to the wall behind her. The torturer began to funnel water down her throat, and after she came up from each dose, coughing and gasping, she was questioned.
“My God! You are killing me!” she wept. “And I only spoke the truth.” More water was funneled down her throat. “You are killing me!” she cried again. The trestle was raised, her body stretched even farther, and the extraordinary question began. “O God, you tear me to pieces!” she screamed. “Lord, pardon me! Lord, have mercy upon me!” Her ankles and wrists began to bleed, and the water kept pouring down her throat, but still La Brinvilliers refused to confess any more than she already had, groaning that she would not tell a lie “that would destroy her soul.”
After four and a half hours of torture, the men realized that if Marie carried any dark secrets with her, she was taking them to the grave. So they told her to prepare herself for death, and sent her back to her confessor.
Apparently the indignity and horror of the torture had awoken some of Marie’s old fire. She’d been humble and penitent in front of Pirot the night before, but now she was incensed at the humiliation she’d endured as well as the humiliation she was about to endure. She would have to do public penance on her way to the scaffold and then, after her death, her ashes would be scattered to the winds—an unthinkable ending for the haughty marquise. Pirot tried so hard to bring her back to a repentant state that he began to weep. Finally, after an hour of his pleading and tears, Marie began crying, too.
The execution of the scandalous La Brinvilliers was quite the happening event, and many Parisian nobles turned out to see her inglorious processional. A tiny, dirty tumbril arrived to carry her to the scaffold. On her way to the cart, Marie had to walk past a group of nobles who’d weaseled their way into the jail to catch a glimpse of the infamous woman, curious if she was still the same girl that they’d danced with, gambled with, and toasted with iced champagne. Now she was barefoot, wearing a coarse white shift with a noose slung symbolically around her neck.
The ride through Paris—with even more nobles gaping at her and everyone yelling that she deserved to die—was an incredibly demeaning ordeal for a woman of status. Pirot, watching her closely, saw her literally convulse with rage and humiliation: “Her face contracted, her brows were knitted, her eyes flashed, her mouth was distorted, and her whole aspect was embittered.” A sketch of this awful moment, immortalized by Charles Le Brun, hangs in the Louvre today. It’s a grim portrait of cyclical human brokenness—the killer on her way to be slaughtered.
The procession edged toward Notre Dame, where Marie was forced to get out of the cart to perform a public penance. She knelt, holding a lit torch, and proclaimed, “I confess that, wickedly and for revenge, I poisoned my father and my brothers, and attempted to poison my sister, to obtain possession of their goods, and I ask pardon of God, of the king, and of my country’s laws.” Later, Pirot wrote, “Some people say that she hesitated in saying her father’s name—bu
t I noticed nothing of the sort.”
On the scaffold, the executioner shaved Marie’s hair and ripped open her shirt to expose her neck and shoulders. Pirot whispered prayers in her ear to calm her, while the snarls of the crowd rose and fell around them like waves. The executioner covered her eyes, and she began to obediently repeat a prayer after Pirot, when a long sword flashed through the air. Marie fell silent.
Suddenly nauseated, Pirot assumed that the executioner had missed her head entirely, because though Marie was no longer speaking, she still knelt upright, with her head on her shoulders. Moments later, though, her head slid off her neck and her body fell forward. The executioner asked Pirot, “Was that not a good stroke?” and immediately drank a mouthful of wine. As Marie had requested, Pirot began to recite a de profundis, the Catholic prayer for the dead, over her bleeding body: Out of the depths I cry to You, O Lord.
“We Shall Breathe Her”
La Brinvilliers was dead, and Paris was terrified, scandalized, thrilled. “The affair of Mme de Brinvilliers is frightful, and it has been a long time since one heard talk of a woman as evil as she,” wrote one Parisian gossip to another. “The source of all her crimes was love.” Since Marie had made no secret of her sexual appetite, flaunting her affair with Sainte-Croix all around Paris, the narrative of the beautiful marquise poisoning for love was a natural one for her peers to latch onto.
Love and its close cousins, lust and obsession, have been identified as the “source” of female crimes since the beginning of time, in a host of archetypal ways: the jealous mistress, the spurned lover, the mad Ophelia, the brainwashed Manson girl. Love makes for a story that’s not just romantic, but pleasant. It’s a clean-burning fire, after all; love may destroy things, but at its core, love is supposed to be true and noble, kind of like how at their core, French nobles were assumed to be good. If the source of Marie’s crimes was love, it would seem to negate the worst part of her wickedness, or at least make it more socially acceptable. A good noblewoman was allowed to go a little bit crazy when it came to love, especially a noblewoman in love with a man like Sainte-Croix, who swaggered around boasting about his pseudosciences and attempting to transform base matter into gold.
Today, we can see that love wasn’t what drove the marquise to kill, despite what the gossips insisted. She loved, and was loved, and perhaps love led to her downfall, but she was also furious, vengeful, and fixated on her box of “inheritances.” (“One should never annoy anybody!”) But money was prosaic, and revenge was distasteful in a noblewoman, so the narrative of love was the one that stuck.
Even with its romantic allure, her story left Paris traumatized—and paranoid about the use of poison. If a lovely, wealthy woman could poison the men closest to her, then who wouldn’t poison? If nobility could turn evil, then who was safe?
“Well, it’s all over and done with, Brinvilliers is in the air,” wrote Madame de Sévigné to a friend. “Her poor little body was thrown after the execution into a very big fire and the ashes to the winds, so that we shall breathe her, and through the communication of the subtle spirits we shall develop some poisoning urge which will astonish us all . . . Never has such a crowd been seen, nor Paris so excited and attentive.”
In fact, some of Paris was so attentive that they watched the burning of Marie’s body till the very end. They wanted to see where her ashes would land. The people who stood closest to the scaffold reported that her face was illuminated by a halo just before the beheading. Death had made her a saint, they said, and went searching through the cinders for bits of bone.
Conclusion
Horror
The half-life of murder is forever. The pull of a detective story is strong. And so there are about a million things to wonder about serial killers, a million angles to examine, a million stones to turn over. This in and of itself is kind of a freaky fact. Why is it possible to theorize so extensively about these people? Shouldn’t we just wash our hands and be done with ’em? Why are we so obsessed? Why did that one friend scoot her chair away from me when I told her I “empathized but didn’t sympathize” with every woman in this book?
People typically have one of two reactions when I mention that I’m writing about female serial killers: a frenetic, “That’s hilarious!” or an aghast, “That’s horrible.” (Secret option number three: a nervous chuckle, accompanied by a tiny step backward.) I understand all of these approaches, but taken alone, each one is a fallacy. I believe we have to laugh and shudder in order to understand our own human history, which is partially an inheritance of death.
Recoiling from crime is natural, but recoil too far and it becomes a delusion. Psychologists have theorized that we love separating ourselves from “evil” because it makes us feel good about ourselves: “Locating evil within selected individuals or groups carries with it the ‘social virtue’ of taking society ‘off the hook’ as blameworthy.” And being blameless certainly sounds lovely. But as Aleksandr Solženicyn wrote after undergoing a series of terrible experiences (prison, forced-labor camp, exile), “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” I also love the way Joyce Carol Oates puts it: “To examine the mind of the serial killer is to examine the human mind in extremis, and should anything ‘human’ be alien to us? Where the ‘human’ crosses over into the ‘monstrous’ is after all a matter of law, theology, or aesthetic taste.”
Ladies
Female serial killers often go undetected for a long time, yes. But just for the record, a lot of the rhetoric about how “nobody even realizes that there are female serial killers” can quickly veer into the realm of the ridiculous. Lady killers exist, but underestimating that reality does not mean we are literally putting our own lives at risk every time we talk to a woman. One otherwise-great book on the subject includes a line implying that the “cute girl behind the deli counter slicing our bread” could actually be a heartless murderess. Dude, just order the sandwich, you’re going to be fine.
Still, female serial killers haven’t been studied very extensively, and when they are, the studies are far from exhaustive: they often focus solely on killers in the United States, or killers over the past hundred years, etc. Because of this, I haven’t included very many stats in this book; they frequently seem either limited or unreliable. Here’s a stat you may enjoy, though: in the United States, the chances that you will be murdered by a female serial killer could be as low as one in ninety million.
The odds that you will be murdered by a woman in this book, of course, are zero. The choice to keep these lady killers fairly “vintage” (Nannie Doss is the most recent killer, and she hung around in the 1950s) was largely an aesthetic one; with victims and perpetrators long dead, the stories hopefully err on the side of spooky and mesmerizing rather than simply . . . depressing. Today’s serial killers are certainly worthy of study, but there’s a heaviness and a sadness to modern crimes that history tends to erase, for better or for worse. Anyway, today is not the era of the serial killer. Those sorts of murderers are a rare breed now, an endangered species, unlike during the 1970s and 80s when they roamed the streets in seemingly unstoppable numbers. If crimes reflect the anxieties of our time, then today is the era of the mass murderer, the terrorist. Our violent delights still lead to violent ends, but the ends change as the decades ebb and flow.
One stat that does get confirmed again and again in various studies is that the majority of serial killers, both male and female, are white. (Are we surprised?) Of course, stats come with their own sets of biases. I would say the majority of serial killers who are written about in the media, who appear in the historical record, are white. When it comes to the “pre-1950s female serial killer of color” category, the information is slim, inaccessible, or else was seemingly never documented at all. Plus, there’s
a lot of misinformation; if you manage to find a list of historical female serial killers broken down by race, you’ll notice many of the women of color who are listed as early “serial killers” are actually mythical figures, bandits, or evil queens. My own research, of course, can’t help but be flawed and incomplete, but I’ll tell you who I was hoping to include: Clementine Barnabet, a young black girl from New Orleans, and Miyuki Ishikawa, a Japanese midwife. Unfortunately, little has been preserved about them beyond the facts of the crimes themselves, even (for Miyuki) in Japanese, and I was unable to find the degree of detail required to make them fully come alive.
In general, I wonder if female serial killers haven’t been studied extensively because at the end of the day, in our heart of hearts, we don’t consider them worthy antagonists. Let them slice the bread; let them glare at us from behind the deli counter. We are simply not afraid of them.
Heartache
Being a lady killer is quite lonely, it turns out. Not a single woman in this book appears to have had any close friends. Tillie had her cousin Nellie, Raya had Sakina, Anna and Alice had their beloved sons. That was about it. Marriage and children weren’t sources of comfort for most of these women, for obvious reasons. And as far as I can tell, the only people who really reached out to them or tried to understand them were pastors, journalists, and the occasional doctor or defense lawyer—in other words, people who were sent to them after they’d been locked up, when it was too late to save them from themselves.
Speaking of loneliness, the term “mise en abyme,” which literally means “placed into abyss,” has started to remind me of these women. The phrase evokes the feeling of a hall of mirrors: an image of an image, something multiplying into infinity. I hear it and I see Erzsébet Báthory standing in her cavernous halls, jangling in the abyss, no one there to reflect anything back at her other than her own twisted reality. I see Mary Ann Cotton, doomed to repeat herself over and over again, forever playing out a dark parody of marriage and motherhood. I see the peasants of Nagyrév, with each of their murders like the play within a play of Hamlet, a tiny story reflecting back on the larger one, contributing to the idea that what had happened and what was about to happen was all totally inescapable.