It was bolted doors, first of all, that troubled Philippe Cayrel. Returning alone from the parish festival toward midnight on 14 October 1877, he sought to pass through the barn and stable to reach his dwelling in Benne, a hamlet in the commune of Camburat. This passage was familiar to him; on that night, however, the keys were nowhere to be found. He walked around the building, found the living quarters open, and called for his mother-in-law. The widow Cajarc, left to keep watch over the house while the family went to the festivities, did not reply. Cayrel borrowed a light from a neighbour. In the winepress room, he discovered her body.
The dead woman was fifty-three years old. The wounds to her head bore witness to a ferocity the first onlooker struggled to comprehend: upon shouting his discovery to the neighbours, he believed her face had been savaged by an animal. Those who went in with him found an extinguished, half-broken lantern, blood upon her hands, and the marks of the assault splattered against the wall. The signs of violence were confined to the immediate vicinity of the corpse. In the remainder of the house, the inquest discovered neither signs of searching nor missing goods. Justice would have to account for a death that theft did not appear to explain.
The village’s suspicions fell immediately upon Jean Orlivie. This forty-six-year-old native of Corrèze worked as a day labourer, mending umbrellas as he travelled from place to place. He had spent roughly a week in Cayrel’s employ, leaving his service three days before the crime. Neighbours reported his lewd talk, his conduct toward the widow, and his dissatisfaction with the wages he had received. The prosecution entered these observations into the dossier. They bore witness to the community’s opinion of him; they did not yet demonstrate what had transpired in the winepress room.
A detail of the farmhouse then assumed considerable importance in the investigation. The mattock used in the assault was customarily kept in a corner near the winepress. As for the barn and stable, the inhabitants of Benne routinely walked through them when travelling to or from Camburat. Securing this passage could thus prevent anyone from passing alongside the house at an inopportune moment. In the eyes of the prosecution, both the choice of weapon and this precaution pointed to an intimate knowledge of the premises, which Orlivie’s recent stay readily explained. The door before which Cayrel had halted upon his return thus became a linchpin of the judicial argument.
It remained necessary to place the accused upon the road and at the hour of the crime. Two witnesses stated that toward a quarter to nine, they had heard a cry coming from the direction of the house. The post-mortem examination placed the death a few hours after the evening meal. For his part, Orlivie acknowledged having set out from Ceint-d’Eau, in the commune of Figeac, between half past seven and eight o’clock that evening to walk to Camburat. Persons encountered along the road had asked him where he intended to sleep. According to the court report, he had stated that he was going to the widow Cajarc’s, where the two of them would be alone. He was aware of the children’s departure for the festival, the invitation having been extended in his presence.
Orlivie admitted to having passed near the house, though this admission was by no means a confession to murder. The magistrate had him retrace his route. It took one hour and five minutes to walk from Ceint-d’Eau to the dwelling. The prosecution set this finding against his declared time of departure and the cry heard by the witnesses: Orlivie could well have been in the vicinity between half past eight and nine o’clock. A path walked by a man in search of day labour became an instrument of measurement, and this measurement served to tighten the sequence of events about him.
On the following day, village chatter provided him with interlocutors whose words were in turn recorded. Near the mayor’s house, locals were discussing the widow’s death. A witness caught sight of Orlivie seated upon a stone, scraping his feet along the ground and rolling down the hems of his trousers. When informed of the crime, he made no request to view the scene. The testimony depicted him as impatient to depart; yet the papers he required for travel could not be issued in the mayor’s absence. Above all, he disputed the notion of a robbery, insisting that the widow had been slain out of a grudge.
These utterances took on particular significance for the investigators once the absence of theft from the dwelling was confirmed. They were compared with statements Orlivie made shortly thereafter in Cardaillac. He was seeking the means to continue his journey and, according to the report, possessed no more than fifteen centimes. When someone suggested he return that evening to mend an umbrella, he replied that he might well be arrested before then. He nevertheless found work at an inn. There, witnesses reported seeing his hands tremble as he worked and hearing him announce the murder from the previous night.
He explained that he had slept out of doors in Camburat after passing the house. He drank wine and spoke of his clothes, remarking that no one could reproach him for the presence of blood, since none would be found upon him. He returned to the absence of robbery, asserting that he was not fleeing and that flight would only invite suspicion. The prosecution’s account treated these words as the mark of a betraying anxiety. It noted as well that when the arrival of the gendarmes was announced, Orlivie cried out that they had come to take him. This anticipation of his arrest became one more brick in the case; it replaced neither the physical findings of the house nor the reconstruction of his route.
The case was heard over three sessions, on 15, 16, and 17 May 1878, before the Lot Court of Assizes. Forty-eight witnesses were examined, and the interrogation of the accused lasted nearly six hours. The newspaper correspondent described him as calm and composed in his replies. Orlivie maintained his denial of the murder. He did, however, confess to separate thefts of property found in his possession, committed, according to the records, by night in inhabited houses. The court was thus obliged to consider distinct offences; nothing had been stolen from the widow Cajarc, and it was essential not to confound these other thefts with the motive for her death.
This motive, which the preliminary investigation had not elucidated, became the focus of two depositions at the trial. One witness testified that on the eve of the crime, Orlivie had threatened the Cayrel family and the widow because they had allegedly wronged him out of thirty sous. Another declared having heard him reiterate this grievance an hour and a half before the murder, accompanying his words with a gesture toward the house. The report records the impression produced by these depositions and adopted the wage dispute as the explanation for his vengeance. It was these reported words that gave the thirty sous their weight in the affair: a trifling sum, made the purported pretext of a mortal threat.
The jury found Orlivie guilty of murder with premeditation, with mitigating circumstances. He was sentenced to hard labour for life. The journal recounts neither his destination nor his life after the trial. It preserves the process whereby justice moved from a locked door and a body discovered in the winepress room to verified timetables, recorded utterances, and reported threats. Cayrel had set out for the festival, entrusting the house to his mother-in-law. Upon his return, he had been forced to seek out keys, and then a light; the investigation was forced, in its turn, to seek out what could have made a contested wage the reason for a death.