GLOATED OVER AGONY

Evening Star, Issue 19274, 12 June 1926, Page 23

GLOATED OVER AGONY

A NURSE'S GRIMES SIX VICTIMS Franco lias been horrified by the disclosure of tiro murder of six sick persons by the nurse who had been engaged to attend them. "While the crimes yielded small sums, it would seem that she poisoned her victims—one of whom was her lover —for the sheer lust of lading. PARIS, March 1. A murder trial which has had no parallel in the annals of French justice has just ended at Nimes in the sentence of death passed on a nurse who, charged with having murdered twelve people by poison, confessed to three murders, and was found guilty of six. The nurse, Antoinette Scierri, of Italian extraction, went to the little town of Saint Gilles in 1924, and soon found plenty of work. But she seemed to carry death rather than healing to her patients, for she has been found guilty of six murders by poison committed within live months. In December, 1924, three of her patients died in rapid _ succession, poisoned by arsenic, as it has since been discovered. The nurse then stopped her murderous work for a couple of months, but in March, 1925, she added two more victims to her list, and in April a third. The fourth of her victims was her lover, of whom she had grown tired. LUST OF KILLING.

Scierri’s method was to mix in the food df her intended victims small quantities of “ pyralibn,” an arsenical compound which is much used in country districts for destroying blight among the vines. She kept a bottle ol the stuff among her personal belongings, and carried it with her from one patient’s house to another. One of the most astonishing features of the case is that this so-called nurse, who was rather a handmaid of death, seems to have poisoned her victims not so much for gain as for. the sheer lust of killing. It was related how, while tending a dying patient, she would smooth out the pillows and make a great pretence of tenderness, and yet the next moment pour a little more pyralion into tlie medicine glass, and then calmly watch her victim’s agony. FOR 100 FRANCS. She got very little from any of. her victims." When a patient died, Scierri promptly seized all the ready money she could find, but it was in no case very much. She has herself confessed that the product of at any rate two of her murders was spent within twentyfour hours in the wineshop. One of these murders yielded her only a little over 100 francs. For this sura she had held the dying, woman in her arms, watching the poison work, and saying at the same, time: “ Now, don’t be afraid or worried; just drink a little more.” She killed lor the morbid sensation of watching people die. The only defence that the murderess attempted was that she had been influenced by a friend, Rosalie Giro, who, she alleged, told her how to use the poison and shared the drunken orgies on which the proceeds of the cranes were spent. Rosalie Gire has been acquitted of the. charge of complicity, however, and it was the murderous nurse alone who had to listen to the demand of the public prosecutor that she should pay with her life tor the six lives she had taken. ■ THE COLD SMILE. . Throughout the trial she maintained an attitude of half-amused contempt alike for life and for human justice. Even when the jury after twenty minutes of deliberation returned a verdict of guilty, declining to admit any extenuating circumstances, the hard glance never faltered. When the president of the court, having announced that tho only possible sentence was death, added, “ And tins law decrees that all condemned to death shall be beheaded,” the prisoner simply raised her head a little and looked straight. at him with a smile of cold indifference. Perhaps she knows that sho is not very likely to go to tho guillotine in spite of her six. murders, for it is over twenty years since tho death penalty was inflicted in Franco upon a woman.