DIABOLICAL CRIME

Evening Star, Issue 21689, 7 April 1934, Page 18

DIABOLICAL CRIME

FRENCH GIRL'S HATRED in the women's prison of La Petite Roquette, Paris, sits a pretty, quiet, eighteen-ycar-old girl who spends her time hemming sheets for the big Parisian stores. But the mere mention of her name sends a shudder through those who hear it. For. she is Violette Nozieres, the girl poisoner, self-con-fessed murderess, of her father. Another two months and Violette Nozieres will be the central figure in one of the most dramatic trials ever heard in France. Yet Violette Nozieres is completely indifferent to her fate. Her lawyer. M. Henri Geraud, the veteran French advocate, who defended Gorguloff, President Doumer’s assassin, said: “ Violette is perfectly calm and collected. She seems quite resigned. Indeed, she is very well, and has even put on weight in prison. I don’t know if she feels any qualms about the trial. She never mentions it.” But Violette must sometimes dream over again those dreadful deeds to which confessed before the examining magistrate. In the long prison nights she must remember how, after putting poison in her parents’ food, she put on her evening gown and went to dance all night in a Paris cabaret with her student lover, Jean Dabin. Returning from the dance in the small hours of the morning, V iolette called in neighbours to her parents. No suspicion fell on her at first. MVith a premeditation, diabolical in its thoroughness, the, sobbing girl had planned every detail. Only when she saw that she had failed to kill her mother and that the police were becoming suspicious, did her nerve fail. , . ■ She disappeared. For’nearly a week M'iolette wandered from one Pans underworld haunt to another. . Once under arrest she calmly supplied .the examining magistrate' with every detail he desired, and more. : To poison her father, she said, had been her obsessiqn for years. She had no wish to harm her mother, but as she could not kill her father alone she did. riot hesitate to put poison in her mother’s food, too. . , She put less poison in her mother s dish that in her father’s. It is due to this alone that Mine. Nozieres is alive to-day. For her father Vjolette had a cold, implacable hatred. . , M 7 iolette admitted that she had tried on a previous occasion to poison her parents, and had set fire to the flat. Her last attempt was more carefully planned. After helping her mother to prepare their meal, she put rat poison in her parents’ dishes. Immediately afterwards she went to a cafe, from w hich she sent home an express letter sayinwg she would return late that night. Then she calmly visited a coiffeur to have her hair waved and her hands manicured. Returning Irom the hairdresser’s, she found her father and mother lying unconscious on their beds. Quite selfpossessed, she put on her evening gown and prepared tp go out again.' As a final touch, before tip-toeing from the room, she turned on the gas jet.