A minute splinter of wood was wanting between the helve of the hatchet and the billet recovered from Heller’s lodgings. A trifling void, yet poised at the heart of an affair wherein a woman had been butchered, furniture forced open, and silver coin borne away. The appointed experts scrutinized the fibres, the core of the timber, down to the very clefts left by winter frost. They maintained they held two parts of a single bough. The inquiry would presently unearth further fragments; yet it would fail, with anything resembling equal certainty, to assemble all the elements necessary for a conviction.
The Apron He Returned to Fetch
On the evening of February 25, 1813, at about nine o’clock, Marcelin Dousse returned to his dwelling in the Rue de la Lingerie, in Paris. A partner in his parents’ butter trade, he mounted to the second floor to change his coat and resume his working apron. The chamber bore the unmistakable signs of a burglary. Descending at once to apprise his mother, who was tending the shop below, he returned upstairs in her company. Within the adjoining kitchen, they came upon such tokens of violence as caused them to recoil immediately and summon the authorities.
The police commissaire arrived accompanied by a physician and a surgeon. Cécile Normand, the family domestic, had been slain. A bloodied hatchet lay upon the tiles; no one in the household recognized the weapon. According to the observations later recorded by Champagnac, she appeared to have been taken unawares near the hearth, where it was her customary evening task to paste paper bags. Thus the kitchen preserved the chilling proximity of an interrupted chore and an alien weapon. The medical examiners pronounced death to have been recent. In the adjoining room, the intruder had left another manner of work half done.
A bureau had been forced, a wardrobe stood open, and a strongbox lay smashed. The Dousse family declared four hundred francs to be missing. Yet visible plate had not been carried away. The malefactor might easily have taken far more; he appeared to have been searching for something precise. It was noted, moreover, that the outer alley door opened by means of a secret latch. The regular habits of the house left Cécile solitary upon the upper floor each evening, while the men were abroad and the mother kept shop below. An intimate acquaintance with the premises became the first thread for justice to pursue.
The Secret of the Strongbox
Marcelin Dousse had formerly plied the joiner’s trade. His bench and tools remained within the kitchen; a chisel and a wooden mallet appeared to have served for the break-in. The strongbox was likewise the work of his own hands. He had fitted it with a mock keyhole and false hinges, whilst the genuine ironwork lay carefully concealed. The intruder who had attacked the chest had wasted no leisure upon the decoy. His violent efforts had fallen directly upon the vulnerable, operative part. It was tempting to deduce that he was already privy to that which the piece of cabinetry had been designed to hide.
This chest had formerly contained six thousand francs, withdrawn but a short while before the tragedy to be advanced to the father. The sum anticipated by the thief was therefore no longer that which was to be found within. Such a discrepancy fortified the presumption of a knowledgeable visitor, but one whose intelligence had grown stale. Four of Dousse’s former workshop comrades were wont to frequent the apartment: Chevalier, Guenot, Prudhomme, and Heller. All four were arrested on the very morrow of the crime. The first three established their whereabouts on that fatal evening and were promptly set at liberty, the magistracy retaining no charges against them. Heller alone remained under suspicion.
He was upon terms of close familiarity with Dousse and had in the past made remarks concerning the contrivance of the chest. A few days prior to the murder, he had called at the house; on the eve of the deed, he had presented himself again to borrow an implement. The mother had permitted him to go upstairs alone to seek it. That liberty, the mark of ordinary domestic trust, now took on the darker complexion of a reconnaissance. It was learned, furthermore, that a protracted illness had consumed his worldly resources. His desperate indigence furnished the prosecution with a motive. It did not, however, reveal where he had stood when Cécile was struck down.
A Workshop in the Shavings
On March 17, two edge-tool makers were summoned to inspect the hatchet. They determined that the haft had been fitted quite recently, and they sought to discern the hand of the workman who had shaped it. In their judgment, it had been fashioned by a joiner rather than by an artisan accustomed to hafting tools of that nature. Two days afterward, a search of Heller’s quarters brought to light a piece of beechwood freshly sawn. It was set against the handle of the weapon. Two successive panels of sworn experts concluded that the fragments had originally formed part of the very same bough, despite the minute length wanting between them.
On April 6, a further search yielded shavings and four splintered chips. When reassembled, according to the examiners, they corresponded precisely to the butt-end of the handle. Comparison was likewise instituted between the gouges left by a chisel found on the premises and an indentation ascribed to the blow of a hammer. The material reconstruction grew formidable: the weapon, it was argued, had been hafted in that very room, and its handle subsequently shortened. Yet this sequence of mechanical acts was deduced solely from inert objects; no witness came forward to testify that he had seen Heller fashioning the instrument destined for the slaughter.
The accused had at first denied that the handle derived from his own timber. Following the second search, he admitted that it had been sawn and shaped beneath his roof. He attributed the handiwork, however, to a journeyman joiner whom he believed to be named, or nicknamed, Picard. This man, he claimed, had begged of him wood sufficient to make a haft, and had then mounted to his room to fit it. Heller protested that he had clean forgotten these circumstances during his initial interrogations. The shifting of ground weighed grievously against him: an explanation tendered late in the day must not merely answer to the physical exhibits, but must also account for why it was not offered at the first.
The magistrates objected that a handle could scarcely be shaped without the iron head for which it was intended. He rejoined that his comrade had taken its measure beforehand. As for the mark interpreted as that of a hammer, it might well, he insisted, have proceeded from some other tool. Every effort to trace Picard proved fruitless. In the eyes of the investigators, the man might well exist nowhere save in the prisoner’s fabrications. Yet the failure to find a fugitive and the legal proof that he was an invention were not entirely identical things. The prosecution picked its way through these precarious distinctions.
The Hours the Doorway Contradicted
Heller’s movements on the evening of the crime presented an equally thorny problem. He had parted from his companions around four in the afternoon under the pretext of an urgent commission for work, promising to rejoin them at a tavern in La Courtille. They had waited for him in vain. He explained that he had returned home, walked abroad upon the boulevard, and then attempted, too late, to find his friends. In a subsequent deposition, he added that he had paid a visit to his brother-in-law, Delamotte. The latter duly confirmed the visit. The doorkeepers of his residence, conversely, failed to substantiate his alleged comings and goings.
The street portal was bolted at nightfall. To have entered at the hours he designated, the porters asserted, the latch-cord must needs have been pulled for him, and they could not have failed to observe him. Heller conceded, moreover, that the order for work he had pleaded before his friends was a pure fiction, invented solely to evade an expense at the tavern he could ill afford. The falsehood was avowed; its true object remained in dispute. Had it served to cloak a bloody deed, or merely an empty purse? The confession of an untruth did not relieve the prosecution of demonstrating what it had truly been intended to conceal.
Certain red stains upon his garments were submitted to scrutiny. One, upon the sleeve of his frock-coat, was judged incompatible with a spurt of arterial blood; he accounted for it by a cut upon his finger. Such an outcome did not efface the wooden chips or the irreconcilable hours, but it forbade the court from unreservedly adding one more link to the chain. Before the Seine Assizes, his advocate, Gohier Duplessis, pleaded the cause of a man against whom the authorities had amassed considerable circumstantial tokens, but not a single complete and witnessed act.
The jury returned a verdict of guilty by seven votes to five. The bench, however, adopted the opinion of the minority, and Heller was acquitted. Champagnac dwells upon the astonishment excited by this denouement; he concedes, likewise, that the weight of the charges had not sufficed for a capital sentence. The historical record permits neither the transforming of this decree into established innocence, nor its overthrow by private certainty. The severed pieces of wood had found their match. In the murder of Cécile Normand, there remained one place which the judgment of the court assigned to no living soul: that of the assassin.