BESSARABO TRIAL.

Press, Volume LVIII, Issue 17488, 23 June 1922, Page 7

BESSARABO TRIAL.

MOTHER FOUND GUILTY. THE DAUGHTER'S CONFESSION. "Bj Cable— Prose Association—Copyright.) lAustrmlian and N.Z. Cab> Association.) PARIS, June 21. Madame Bessarabo was found guilty of murdering her second husband under extenuating circumstances. Her daughter was acquitted. Madame B:-ssarabo was sentenced to twenty years-' penal servitude. A sensation was caused when the daughter declared that her mother killed Bessarabo. The mother feigned nadness, and denied all knowledge of the crime. The girl's confession followed a dramatic speech by her counsel, who was overcome bv emotion at the close of his oration and collapsed. The daughter turned her back on her mother and shielding her face with her hands amid agonised sobs she said: "I will tell everything. I heard a shot and ran to the door of my bedroom and found it locked. 1 shouted 'Mother! Mother!' My mother replied: 'lt is nothing. The gevser has exploded in the bathroom.' " When the door was opened she saw the body of her step-father, and said to her mother: "You did it." Her mother replied: "It was his life or mine." She described how she felt afraid she would not be able to halp her mother dispose of the body. Thev pushed it into a trunk. The trunk would not lock, so they roped it firmly, hired a car and sent it to Nancy. The excitement over the girl's confession was increased by the mother's cries of protest, though at the end the mother still maintained her . innocence. Bessarabo's first husband was found dead in 1914 with a bullet in his head, and at the inquest it was decided to be a. case of suicide. LONDON, June 14. The Paris correspondent of the "Daily Mail" says that there were many references made during the Bessarabo trial to-day to the Mexican oil property, on which M. Bessarabo had an option. The property was reputed to have been cursed by a tribe of Mexican Indians to whom it once belonged. The curse was that the first three whites operating it would die violent deaths. The prophecy has come true. Bessarabo was found dead in a trunk at Nancy. Eight days later his partner, Necker, hanged himself in the Bois de Boulogne. The third person concerned, M. Leon, was killed by a lunatic while walking on the Paris boulevards a month ago.