2 Lost in France
The dissolute life of Jeanne Weber
Jeanne was born in 1875 into a large impoverished family with the surname of Moulinet. Home was an overcrowded dwelling in a small fishing village in Northern France. Jeanne was plain, something which doubtless added to her childhood misery and she had no especial talents other than a native cunning and an innate acting ability.
Astrologers would later note that there was a complete absence of water in her birth chart, supposedly making her much harder and more ruthless than women born under a more balanced sign - but it’s more likely that the childhood struggle for food, clothing and affection is what made Jeanne hard.
Waterless signs apparently also find it easier to cut themselves off from their families, something that the teenage Jeanne certainly did. As soon as she turned fourteen she moved to the capital, Paris, hoping to gain her independence and to find work.
A bad marriage
In Paris, Jeanne drifted from job to job, each of them menial. She did this for four years, until she met an equally unhappy alcoholic called Weber. Soon she married him and started joining him in drinking large amounts of the local cheap red wine. Weber, a Parisian, had few prospects and even fewer ambitions, but Jeanne was glad to have him as she knew that she was a physically unattractive woman who held limited appeal for men.
The couple set up home in a tenement slum in the Passage de la Goutte d’Or in Montmartre. There Jeanne gave birth to three children. But two of them died whilst still babies, giving her a further excuse to down bottles of cheap drink. (She would eventually be suspected of killing both these children - only her son Marcel would live to age seven before she took his little life.)
Soon the persuasive Jeanne was babysitting for two children called Lucie Alexandre and Marcel Poyatos. Outwardly she looked like the ideal babysitter, always enquiring after her charges health. Yet both infants died suddenly in her care.
Meanwhile, her three brothers-in-law and their wives all lived in the same Montmartre passageway, for she had married into a family as large as the one she’d been born into. Her young relatives would provide perfect victims for her increasingly bloodthirsty bent.
In March 1905 she agreed to babysit for her eighteen-month-old niece Georgette and two-year-old niece Suzanne whilst their mother went out to do the laundry. Shortly afterwards, a neighbour passing the door heard choking noises and hurried to alert Georgette’s mother that her baby was ill. Madame Pierre raced home to find Jeanne massaging little Georgette’s chest whilst the child lay on the bed. The little girl had a blue-tinged pallor, foam around her mouth and a tell-tale red mark on her neck.
Madame Pierre tended to the child and she quickly recovered. The woman then returned to her laundering - and when she came home she found the baby dead. No one suspected the distraught Jeanne Weber for a moment so nine days later she was asked to babysit the luckless survivor Suzanne. A few hours later the parents returned to find her dying in circumstances remarkably similar to those of her sibling. The doctor found the devastated Jeanne entirely plausible and put both cases down to convulsions. Jeanne carried on with her babysitting tasks.
The death toll continues
Just two weeks later a further of her charges died. Germaine was the seven-month-old daughter of another of her sisters-in-law. This time the red marks around her throat were credited to diphtheria - and three days later when Jeanne’s seven-year-old son Marcel died his death was ascribed as the very same explanation. Other sources suggest that Marcel’s death was put down to accidental choking, but the salient point is that foul play was not suspected and Jeanne Weber was able to continue her killing spree. A magistrate would later suggest that Jeanne killed her own son at this stage to take any suspicion away from herself as it made her look as bereaved as her grieving relatives.
Six days passed and then Weber tried to strangle one of her ten-month-old nephews, Maurice. Thankfully his mother came home at that moment, saw Jeanne choking her son, and called the police. The hospital doctor agreed it looked like someone had tried to strangle the baby so Weber went to trial at the Seine Assizes, but succeeded in acting the part of a wronged woman who’d been recently bereaved. More importantly, the most famous expert witness in France, Dr Leon Thoinot, stated that none of the exhumed children’s bodies appeared to show marks of strangulation. Thoinot would later co-write a medical journal article about why he believed she was innocent. Seen as a victim of misfortune at a time when children often died of childhood diseases, she was acquitted by a jury in February 1906.
But Weber’s own husband believed she was guilty - as did the general public - and he left her. Changing her surname back to Moulinet, she moved to the village of Chambron, setting up home with a man called Sylvain Bavouzet and his three motherless children. He knew of her crimes but was described as a ‘sympathetic farmer’, albeit one who wanted a housekeeper and a woman to warm his bed.
Released again
He paid a heavy price for inviting Jeanne into his life, for soon she reverted to type and strangled his nine-year-old son Auguste to death. At first - despite the clear bruises on the child’s neck - the local doctor recorded the death as being due to convulsions, but when Jeanne Weber’s history became known the doctor contacted the police and an autopsy was performed. The medical establishment decided that the boy had died of diphtheria and she was released again.
After a few months of casual employment Jeanne was offered a post at a children’s home by a doctor who felt sorry for her. Soon she was choking one of her young charges. Discovered by her employers, she managed to persuade them that there was an innocent explanation for her actions and they dismissed her without reporting her actions to the police. It seems more likely that they wanted to avoid being involved in a scandal - a hospital would let killing nurse Genene Jones, profiled later, leave with a reference rather than risk her suing them for unfair dismissal.
The prostitute
Homeless and jobless, Jeanne now returned to Paris and began to earn money as a prostitute. It was a demeaning and destitute existence that saw her occasionally arrested for vagrancy. Soon she met up with a lime-burner called Emile Bouchery and the two of them rented a room at an inexpensive inn. Neither of them made much money and Emile would beat her during their drunken arguments.
To make extra cash, Jeanne offered to babysit the owner’s children. He was a busy man so readily agreed to this. She would take the little ones into bed with her for warmth and for company whilst Emile was away. The innkeeper was glad of her services - after all, Jeanne just seemed like a woman down on her luck and he had no inkling of her childkilling history.
But all that was about to change. Alerted by screams one night, he caught her strangling his ten-year-old son with a handkerchief. Weber was so caught up in the murder that he had to hit her several times before she released her manic grasp - she was in the throes of a desire that psychologists would later suggest was psycho-sexual. The object of her sadism, the child, who had bitten through his own tongue during the struggle, was dead.
This time she’d been caught in the act and was charged with murder - and found guilty. Judged to be insane, she was sent to an asylum in 1908 and found dead there two years later, having died of convulsions, her hands locked around her own throat. One French source claims she died during a ‘crisis of madness’ and suggests she contributed to her own death by self-strangulation. But it’s hard to know the truth as two French novels were written about Weber’s life, causing fiction to fuse with fact.
A sexual motive
The fact that she spent her last years in an asylum has caused some criminologists to put Weber into the ‘Question Of Sanity’ typology - but it seems more likely that she was only insane towards the end of her killing spree. After all, she was sane enough to wait until the parents had left the house before she assaulted their children. And she stopped and pretended to be reviving the children if an unexpected witness appeared. Even with the last case, when the
child’s father was elsewhere in the building, she took care to lock the door and isolate the child from its siblings. All of these actions suggest a rational and calculating mind.
Those criminologists who see her as a Question Of Sanity case state that there was no motive for her crimes. Others suggest that there may have been a sexual motive - witnesses reported that she was sometimes standing over the dying child in a frenzy. Sexual sadism does seem likely in many strangling cases, with killers half choking the victim, letting them breathe a little, then partly asphyxiating them again. In this way, the killer can play with her - or his - victim’s life whilst looking into their eyes for a cruelly long time.
A woman who just wanted to snuff out an infant’s life quickly, perhaps whilst denying the full implications of her own actions to herself, would suffocate their victim by pressing their head into a pillow. Strangling involves a much more intimate and overtly sadistic approach. It’s a power trip - and as an impoverished, unattractive and uneducated woman living in a slum area Jeanne Weber was a woman who would otherwise have had very little power.
Murder would have provided incredibly stimulating moments in an otherwise depressingly drab and uneventful life. It’s clear that she sought out many babysitting opportunities to enjoy it. The fact that she killed her relative’s children (and her own) and was able to continue to live with them without betraying any guilt or remorse suggests that she was also a psychopath, a person without a conscience. Psychopaths can be ruthless professionals or brilliant embezzlers. Most of them don’t kill - but if they do they feel little or no remorse.
Psychopaths also tend to be of above average intelligence, and if they are criminals they plan their murders carefully. They are usually plausible liars, so much so that guilty psychopaths can effortlessly pass lie detector tests. Jeanne seemed to fit the bill as she originally persuaded France’s top legal experts that she was innocent and sane so that they protested strongly in her favour. She was also given second and third chances by doctors, relatives and even strangers who knew her history.
In conclusion, it’s clear that Jeanne Weber had a bad start in life - born into poverty and with too many siblings around for her to be nurtured. Given her later cruel actions, it’s also likely that she was physically abused throughout her miserable childhood. She took to drink very quickly - and it’s known that alcoholism is often hereditary, so perhaps there was also the added abuse or neglect that alcoholic parents bring to the home. She left as soon as she could and became involved with a male alcoholic, who clearly had his own problems. Life shrank to an endless round of drinking cheap wine in a squalid baby-filled tenement until…
Partaking in that first murder clearly gave Jeanne Weber a satisfaction she hadn’t known before, and she soon plotted to repeat it. A damaged life went on to damage many others, a theme that will rebound throughout this book.
3 Mad about the boy
Myra Hindley’s life altering lover
Myra Hindley was born on 23rd July 1942 to a working class couple in Manchester, England. Her mother, Hettie, was a machinist and her father, Bob, an aircraft fitter, often away from home because of the war. She was three years old before he came home permanently - and he would later admit that he never took to her. He wasn’t the kind of father who hugged his children or took part in any of their games.
After the war Bob worked as a labourer and would take part in boxing matches to bring in a few more pounds. He spent most of this money in the pub, often going there after work and staying there for the evening. Sometimes Hettie’s widowed mother would come round and keep her daughter company, though the two women weren’t particularly close.
Bob would sometimes hit Hettie when he came home drunk, and little Myra would cling to his legs in a vain bid to make him stop the violence. Myra’s gran would also hit her son-in-law in an effort to stop him hurting Hettie during these wife-beating acts. Bob would also hit Myra during his drunken rages - and as he often worked on building sites he was a powerfully built man.
When Myra’s sister Maureen was born in the summer of 1946, Myra was sent to stay with her gran who only lived a few minutes walk away. Strangely, her parents didn’t ever take her home again and she was to live with Gran until she was arrested at the age of twenty-three. She wasn’t ostracised as there was lots of contact between the two houses, but it must have made the four-year-old feel different from her peers.
From an early age she learned to hide her feelings, and would later write to a journalist: ‘I refused to cry when my father was hitting me or when I drove my mother to hit me too.’ But she added that she’d cry alone afterwards in her room. She would remain close to her mother throughout her life but despised her distant father. After he was involved in an industrial accident he became even more taciturn and apparently bordered on being a recluse.
At five Myra went to junior school, where one report said she was not very sociable - hardly surprising given that she was living with an older lady. She was also allowed to skip school often as company for her grandmother. Her widowed gran was only in her fifties yet didn’t work and apparently didn’t see education as important so at home Myra was lacking a positive influence. Her mother, who has been described as delicate and overworked, also abdicated responsibility when it came to giving the questioning child any guidance and it was hard for Myra to learn anything good by watching her parents together as their relationship was so poor.
Myra would later say that she felt like a ‘fish out of water’ during these primary school years. Superficially she seemed mature for her age - and very soon started to mother younger children in the neighbourhood. She thought her baby sister Maureen, whose name she soon shortened to Mo, was great.
Maureen was waif-like but Myra herself was stockily built, a tomboy who did well at netball and rounders. She also loved writing poetry and her school essays were often praised. But her lack of attendance took its toll and she failed her eleven plus, which prevented her from going on to the superior schools at this time referred to as grammar schools. Instead she went to a Secondary Modern.
Myra’s IQ at this stage was deemed to be 109, which is only slightly above average. She’d grown up in a home where education wasn’t encouraged, a home without books. Years later she would earn a university degree in prison, for which you normally need an IQ of 120 or more.
By the time she was a teenager, Myra had taken to babysitting the local children and her young charges loved her. She was good at bathing them, playing with them and even teaching the youngest ones how to walk so their parents felt safe leaving her at the helm. She even considered becoming a full time childminder or nursery nurse, either of which could have been her passport to working abroad.
Myra talked about emigrating, a brave step for a working class girl from an area where people rarely travelled - indeed, some of her father’s relatives lived within walking distance. And even when offered a new house in a better area, her mother - by then having an affair with a local bus driver - would refuse to move away.
Just before her fifteenth birthday, one of Myra’s younger friends, Michael, asked her to go swimming with him. She declined as she was spending the day with another friend so Michael went swimming in the local reservoir alone. He drowned - and when Myra heard of the accident she was desolate. She cried for days and fell into a deep depression that touched his grieving mother and other witnesses. The maternal teenager blamed herself for not going swimming with him. She even collected money for his funeral wreath.
The only outward signs of a desire for control at this stage are reported in Jean Ritchie’s detailed book Myra Hindley: Inside The Mind Of A Murderess. Ritchie notes that Myra took judo lessons and would hold her opponents down after they begged her to stop. As a result some girls allegedly refused to practice the sport with her.
This unsportsmanlike trait aside, she was like many other teenagers, becoming passionate about religion, trying out the latest fashions, going to dances and dying her hair. She also dated boy
s, breaking off an engagement to one on the grounds that he was too immature for her. She continued to love children and animals, but felt increasingly, and understandably, bored. She changed her place of employment four times - being sacked from one typing job for poor attendance - and the man that she met at her fourth place of work would forever change her life.
A change of philosophy
By her late teens she was dissatisfied with living in the same drab area, doing the same type of uncreative work, socialising with the same unambitious people. She therefore began to daydream about Ian Brady, the clerk at her new workplace, writing in her diary that she wanted to look after him and that she was in love with him.
The other people who worked at Millwards Ltd, a chemical firm, were friendly but unexceptional. In contrast, Ian spoke German and dressed exotically in black and was well read. Admittedly his taste ran to studies of Nazism but Myra was more interested in nurturing him or marrying him than in more intellectual pursuits. She was an impressionable eighteen-year-old with love to give whilst he was an ostensibly more mature twenty-three.
The fact that she and her father were so estranged may explain her attraction to Ian Brady, at first impressions an aloof and distant man who alternately spoke to her and ignored her. Adults often recreate unsatisfactory childhood patterns, perhaps in the subconscious hope of improving them this time round. Ian was five years older than Myra - and Myra’s father had been seven years older than her mother. Ian was also very good looking, and slightly resembled Elvis Presley who Myra adored.
Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers Page 2