TRIPLE MURDERER

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 122, 16 February 1935, Page 18

TRIPLE MURDERER

Strange Confession in Court

Hyacinthe Danse, clown, singer, and “magician,” was found guilty, at Liege the other day, of the murder of a priest, after he had described how he committed three murders in three days, He was condemned to death, but as there is no death penalty in Belgium, the sentence was automatically commuted to one of imprisonment for life. It was this fact, the prosecution alleged, that led him to kill the priest, Father Haut, who was at one time his teacher, because ’ the other two murders, that of his mother and mistress, were committed in France, and if he wree convicted in Belgium, he would not be extradited to France, where he might have been sentenced to die by the guillotine. The prosecution used this argument to prove that Danse was sane. Immediately the case opened Danse began his recital of his three crimes In an effort to bolster up his claim to mental instability Danse made a virulent attack upon his father and mother.

“My father,” he declared, "wrenched from the ranks of small industrialists, was a violent man, always drunk and always brutal. My mother was a megalomaniac, who was proud and detested her social inferiors. With Such parents it is evident I had to be a degenerate, a victim of transmitted tendencies.” -

In May, 1933, he murdered his mistress, Armande Comtat, and his mother, aged 82, in a villa at the village of Boullay-les-Troux, in the Seine-et-Oise Department of France. f He said that Armande Comtat wished him to marry her, and then he went on: “We lay down side by side. All at once I saw her staring eyes, and she cried, ‘Someone is watching us.’ It was

a night of black magic, and she stared at the black shadows beyond the window. I took a hammer and struck her. The hammer was there because they had been fixing the shutters the previous evening.” “When I found that Armande was dead,” he continued, “I called to my mother to make me §pme herb tea. She came into the room. I struck her with the hammer and killed her. Then I abandoned myself to the beast within me.”

Asked why he arranged a crucifix, masks of Beethoven and Baudelaire, and a horribly-grimacing Chinese mask around the bodies, Danse replied :—

“It was not a '•premeditated scene. The mask of Beethoven looked like me, and that of Baudelaire suggested the profile of my mother. The truth is that I always had perverted and macabre Instincts.”

Dance declared that he confessed to these two crimes to Father Haut, and was horrified by the calm way in which the priest had received the confession. He described how he shot the priest. When Danse told the Belgian police about the murder of the priest the death of his mother and mistress had not been discovered. The villa at Boul-lay-les-Troux was a lonely one. The windows were kept closed and local people avoided the place because Danse posed as a professor of occult science. He had edited an occult review, praising himself as the “Sage of Boullay,” and the villagers were enraged at the presence of a “magician” in the midst of them. Armande Comtat his mistress, was said to spend the greater part of the week in Paris, and it was alleged that Danse lived on the proceeds of her visits.