REPRIEVE GRANTED

Evening Star, Issue 19773, 25 January 1928, Page 5

REPRIEVE GRANTED

PRESIDENT’S PRIVILEGE EXERCISED FRENCH MURDER CASE. Press Association —By Telegraph—Copyright. PARIS, January 24. (Received January 25, at 1 a.m.) President Doumergue, exercising the President’s privilege, has reprieved Gaston Guyot.—A. and N.Z. and fe.S. Cable. The Assizes Court at Melun (a town on the Seine) was besieged on July 21 last, when a millionaire' stockbroker, named Gaston Guyot, gave his own version of the death of Marie Louise BeauJageut, known as “ Malou the telephone girl with the green eyes,” whom ho was accused of having strangled. Guyot strenuously maintained that Malou’s death was accidental, and, bursting into tears, exclaimed: “Why should 1 have killed her? It is so easy to get rid of a mistress.” Accused averred that Malou was of a violent, jealous disposition, and explained that, while they were motoring, he fastened a fatal clutch on her throat with his right hand in a fit of uncontrollable exasperation, while steering with his left hand. The judge refused to accept this version, and said that the evidence showed -lhat Guyot was determined to make an end of an embarrassing mistress, and deliberately strangled her, not in the motor car, but at the side of a hayrick, among the charred remains of which Maiou’s half-burned body was found.

Guyot confessed that he set fire to ihe rick, and said that on seeing the poor girl dead he thought only of getting rid of the body. Questions revealed that Guyot was twice married, amUthat both wives had committed suicide. Doctors declared that life was not extinct when the girl was thrown on the hayrick, as fumes were found in her lungs.