The trunk was set down in a field, and the château receded once more. From Lyon, Marie Pichon had followed a man who promised her a respectable place; every detour was supposed to bring them nearer to the house, every delay received its ready explanation, and now her clothes, her hard-won store of linen, everything a servant carries when she sets out to change her life, lay abandoned in the midst of the tilled fields. The supposed gardener would return for the luggage with a cart, he assured her. They must press on.
Night had fallen over the outskirts of Montluel. Marie had already accepted the railway journey, then the lonely byways; refusing became all the harder as her sense of where she stood grew dimmer. Her guide knew the paths. She knew only him.
It was precisely what he had intended.
A Place at Two Hundred and Fifty Francs
The bill of indictment, read before the Assize Court of the Ain in January 1862 and preserved in an early scholarly study, allows one to trace the progression of the snare. In May 1861, Marie Pichon, widow Bertin, was working as a domestic servant in Lyon. On the Pont de la Guillotière, a man first accosted her to ask the address of an employment bureau. The conversation thus took shape around a plausible need: he was seeking a maidservant on behalf of his masters, at a château near Montluel.
He held out the prospect of two hundred and fifty francs in wages, New Year’s gifts, light duties, and a few animals to tend. The very precision of these promises lent them substance. He did not dangle a fabulous fortune; he offered an advancement modest enough for Marie to believe, yet sensible enough that she dreaded letting it slip away. A single condition pressed upon her: they must depart without delay.
The man assisted her in fetching her trunk and escorted her to the railway. He wore a peasant’s smock, walked with a slight stoop, and bore a noticeable deformity upon his upper lip. These features, to which Marie could then attach no greater importance than that of an ordinary description, would later serve to run him to ground. His name was Martin Dumollard.
At the station in Montluel, he hoisted the luggage upon his shoulders. This apparent service entitled him to choose their road. In this manner, he carried Marie’s possessions to the spot where he deemed it safe to abandon them, even as he drew their owner ever farther from all possible succour.
The Torn Bonnet
Upon a deserted rise, Marie grew uneasy at her companion’s movements. He sought to make her walk ahead of him; he had stooped toward the ground and thrust his hands beneath his smock. The judicial record relates that she finally refused to advance another step. He replied that they had arrived.
The promised château was nowhere to be seen. A cord appeared.
Marie threw up her hands, let fall what she carried, and thrust her assailant back. The noose carried away nothing but her bonnet. She fled. Her fall tore her face and bruised her wrist; behind her, running footsteps gave chase. Scrambling to her feet, she scrambled over fences near the railway line and reached a dwelling whose light at last offered her a beacon. Toward the close of the evening, she begged for shelter at the home of the Joly family, in Balan.
This was no longer the case of a servant disgruntled by a deceitful offer. Her wounds, the state of her garments, and her tale compelled immediate action. Taken to the gendarmerie, she recounted the journey and described the man. The initial searches failed to recover her effects at once: someone had already removed them from the scene. That someone had to dwell near enough to move swiftly through a countryside whose every winding path he knew by heart.
A survivor had just provided the thread that would unite cases hitherto scattered and adrift.
Inside the House at Dagneux
Suspicion pointed directly toward the Dumollards. The husband answered the description; his explanations and those of his wife failed to agree. The search of the premises brought to light articles whose presence demanded far more than an evasive reply. Arrested and conveyed to Trévoux, Dumollard was confronted with Marie Pichon. She recognised him instantly. Other witnesses had seen him in her company in Lyon.
Then the house yielded up an astonishing quantity of women’s apparel, linens, chests, and remnants of clothing. This was no mere plunder: every gown might prove to be the lingering trace of a woman of whom no word had since been heard. The investigators sought out the former owners. Surviving victims recognised the man; grieving kin recognised the garments.
Marie Baday, whose corpse had been discovered in 1855 in the forest of Montaverne, thus re-emerged within the inquiry. She, too, had departed Lyon upon the promise of a situation. Garments discovered at Dumollard’s were identified as hers. Beside the murders, aborted attempts began to take shape: Olympe Alubert, Josephte Charléty, and Jeanne-Marie Bourgeois had broken off their march and found refuge; other women had escaped the man only by leaving their savings and bundles behind.
The stratagem varied little. An offer of employment drew the victim from her customary surroundings; her luggage rendered her dependent upon her guide; the night and the unfamiliar roads completed her isolation. The sheer repetition, once it could at last be viewed as a whole, was crushing.
The Effects of the Dead
A pocketbook containing a document in the name of Marie-Eulalie Bussod set the inquiry upon a new track. Her sisters were well acquainted with the offer that had lured her away; one of them had even received the man in her home when he came to fetch her. Eulalie had never returned. Her clothes, however, lay among the seized exhibits.
Dumollard’s wife furnished directions to several burial sites. Excavations brought human remains to light, among them those of Eulalie. The prosecution’s narrative, crafted to convince, piled horror upon horror; it must be allowed its proper place as a judicial instrument without adopting each of its deductions as an unassailable certainty. Yet the convergence of identifications, material objects, and unearthed remains could hardly be dismissed as mere village gossip.
Dumollard thereupon altered not so much his line of defence as the degree of his admissions. He conceded certain journeys, certain encounters, sometimes his presence alongside the victims; the acts of violence he attributed to mysterious confederates whose verifiable names or lodgings he never provided. He claimed to have been merely their guide or purveyor. Even Marie Pichon’s escape became, in his telling, a deliverance he had deliberately contrived on her behalf.
Yet the survivor had been forced to beat back a cord and flee for her life before him. The tale of the benevolent protector stood up poorly against the testimony of the woman who had slipped through his fingers.
What the Jury Retained
The trial opened at Bourg-en-Bresse in 1862. Dumollard stood in the dock beside his wife. She had received and worn stolen garments, washed linen, and helped conceal various articles; yet her complicity was not to be confounded with the acts of the murderer himself. Justice was bound to assign specific deeds to each prisoner, not to cast a pall of indiscriminate infamy over both alike.
Another point demands similar precision: notwithstanding the accusations of a sexual nature and the certitudes proclaimed by sundry commentators, the jury did not sustain the charge of rape. The medical evidence did not permit such a conclusion. A chronicle that restores this boundary does not soften the gravity of the murders; it merely reinstates what the judgment distinguished, and what a taste for the monstrous tends to confound.
Dumollard was condemned to death and executed at Montluel in March 1862. His wife received twenty years of hard labour. The total tally of his victims remained beyond what the inquiry had been able to establish; multiplying hypothetical deaths would do no greater justice to the women who were definitively identified.
There remains, at the beginning of the end, a servant-girl who refused to go on. Marie Pichon had neither weapon, nor nearby help, nor any certainty of finding her way. She had lost her bonnet, her worldly goods, and the illusion of a comfortable place. She retained enough strength to reach a doorway, enough clarity of mind to describe a man, and her word at last compelled the garments of the other women to emerge from the house where it was believed they had been silenced forever.