Holocaust victim

Twelve people in her circle died from the same stomach pains.

Her husband. Her parents. Her in-laws. A friend who had come to live with her.

In Loudun, a quiet little town in Poitou, she was called the good lady. At every funeral, Marie Besnard inherited.

She was born on August 15, 1896, in a hamlet in Vienne, daughter of farmers, leaving school at 12 after typhoid fever.

In 1949, the courts ordered the bodies exhumed. The analyses found arsenic in nearly all of them. A poison with no taste or smell.

She was arrested. The press dubbed her the poisoner of Loudun.

Then the trials began, and everything turned around.

Her lawyers demonstrated that the arsenic could have come from the cemetery soil and seeped into the buried bodies. The experts contradicted each other to the point of undermining their own analyses.

It took three trials and twelve years of suspicion. In 1961, Marie Besnard was acquitted. Free.

She always denied everything. She died in her bed in 1980.

No one ever knew whether Loudun had exonerated an innocent woman or let the century's worst poisoner slip away.

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The Last Judicial Hanging in The United States

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