Fatal Families - Unleashing the evil within (Infamous Murderers) by Rodney Castleden Read Free Book Online Page A

about the killing, it emerged that she had no knowledge whatever of the difference between good and evil. This was, at the time, put down to ‘extreme ignorance’, but in more recent times Elizabeth Marsh might well have been declared insane under the McNaghten Rule. As it was, she was condemned as not only ignorant but malicious, and found guilty of wilful murder.
    At Dorchester Assizes in March 1794, Elizabeth Marsh was sentenced to death and ordered to be executed forty-eight hours later.

The Duc de Praslin
    ‘wife-murder in Paris’

     
     
     
    Charles-Louis ThÉobald de Choiseul, the Duc de Praslin, was at the centre of one of the greatest sex and murder scandals in nineteenth century France. The story has an enduring fascination and was the basis of a powerful Anatole Litvak film, All This and Heaven Too, starring Charles Boyer as the duke and Bette Davis as Henriette.
    The duke was born in Paris in June 1805. When he was nineteen, he made his first and perhaps biggest mistake in marrying Fanny, Françoise Sebastiani-Porta, who was sixteen and had been born in Constantinople in 1807. Fanny, the new duchess, was a choice Théo must soon have come to regret. She was a woman of fiery temperament, lesbian inclinations and fanatical obsessions; she was neurotically possessive and overbearing.
    By the time she had reached the age of thirty-four, and had given birth to nine children, she had lost her youthful charm. She had become fat and wrinkled. The duke was a self-contained, withdrawn, introverted man, and he increasingly found his wife’s charmless, domineering ways insufferable. He no longer sought out her bed. At the same time there is no doubt that the duchess continued to love him in her neurotic, overpossessive way. The marriage was strained almost to breaking-point.
    Then Henriette Deluzy arrived. She was engaged as the children’s governess. It was soon very obvious that the duke was strongly attracted to her. The duchess assumed the worst – that the governess had become her husband’s mistress. She told her husband to dismiss the young woman. He replied that if Henriette went he would go too. He had enough of being told what to do by the duchess.
    Normal communication between husband and wife seems to have come to a halt, as the duchess was reduced to writing him letters. They were pathetic in tone, and made it clear that this was not the first time Thæo had shown an interest in other women. In spite of all the problems she still loved him.
    In the end the duchess got her way and the governess was dismissed, and without a reference. The duke had not abandoned her, though. He went on calling on her. His affair with Henriette became a great Paris scandal. In 1847, the duchess announced that she was going to seek a divorce. Théo’s adultery with Henriette was common knowledge in Parisian high society and she could take the humiliation no longer. The duke was not relieved at the prospect of being rid of his wife at last, as might have been expected; instead he was absolutely furious. Divorced by his wife, he would lose his social status – and his children too.
    On the evening of 17 August, Théo went to see Henriette Deluzy, and did not return home, to his house in the Rue Faubourg St Honoré, until the small hours of the next morning. At dawn on 18 August, the servants were alarmed to hear a piercing scream. The bell connected to the Duchess’s room began to ring. Evidently she needed help. There was another piercing scream. The duke’s manservant and the duchess’s maid crept discreetly to the duchess’s door and heard the noise of furniture falling over. It sounded as if there were burglars in the duchess’s bedroom. They knocked and called. There was no answer. They tried another door, but that seemed to have been wedged shut.
    Several servants went out into the garden to see what they could see from there. They looked up at the bedroom window and several of them saw a man they recognized