What's Your Poison?

Everyone loves those Crime Lab On Wheels stories. Leave as much as one stray hair or a shirt button at the scene of an otherwise perfect crime, and Sherlock Holmes or one of the CSI gang will figure out the clue's provenance in minutes. Of course, it doesn't work like that. Not even the most skilled of forensic detectives can get a fingerprint from a puddle of water or a gust of wind, but here's something for light dinnertime talk...

In 1840, a woman named Marie Lafarge poisoned her husband with arsenic. Beside sympathy for the victim, the case is remembered chiefly for being among  the first poisoning cases in which detectives got help from a toxicological examination.

 Marie was born Marie Capelle in Paris in 1816, the daughter of a military officer. She was given a very good education, which was rarely the case for women in France at that time. She was said to be quite lovely, so I guess the person who drew this picture of her was related to the victim of her crime and therefore held a serious grudge.

At the age of 23, she met Charles Lafarge, who had already been married once, and was deeply in debt. His plan was to marry a rich woman, so he posed as a wealthy industrialist and pretended to have a high-class estate.

When Marie met Charles, it was not love at first sight; she found him "vulgar and repulsive," character traits that often lead to three bad marriages and election as president of the United States. But Marie got past her feelings when she heard about the estate. That was enough for her to assent to marrying the short-fingered vulgarian.

'Twas a short honeymoon. One look at his crummy ramshackle house surrounded by a rundown village was enough to convince Marie of the truth of William Congreve's line in "The Old Batchelour" (1693):  "Married in haste, we may repent at leisure."

What's more, the Lafarge family did not exactly roll the red carpet to welcome Marie to their crappy château, so she decided on Plan B. She played the part of a bride head over heels in love with this heel, and even wrote letters to friends and kin back home, talking about how happy she was being a Lafarge and all.

Shortly after their marriage, Lafarge talked his bride into writing him letters of recommendation and headed for Paris to use the letters to get loans. It was Christmastime, so she sent him letters expressing her undying love, and she had her mother-in-law bake some pies for him. These pastries were delivered to his room at the Univer Hotel. He helped himself to a nice slice of pie, which soon led him to him helping himself deal with convulsions, vomiting, and diarrhea. He lay abed for a day, and felt better, so he went on with his business, finally returning home on January 3, 1840, still a bit weak and ill.

Marie fixed him a dinner of game and truffles.  After dinner, he was back on the floor and remained ill until his merciful death on January 14.

There was widespread cholera in France at the time, and his passing might have been chalked up to that disease, but several of the Lafarges bore witness to seeing Marie adding white powder to his food.

And local purchases of arsenic on December 12 and January 2 were enough for the gendarmes to round her up.

This sort of detective work was certainly not common in those days, but chemical analysis of the contents of the victim's stomach showed arsenic residue. 

On this basis, on January 25, 1840, she was arrested. Toxicology, in its infancy then, was enough to convince a jury Marie was guilty of murder, and she was sentenced to "indefinite hard labor," and died ten years later of tuberculosis, having been recently released due to her terminal illness. 

I don't know about you, but I'm thinking of pitching this to Lifetime Movie Channel as a movie called "Fatal Powder: The Marie Lafarge Story," starring Courteney Cox and Ben Affleck.