CRIME OF CATACOMBS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19608, 9 April 1927, Page 2 (Supplement)

CRIME OF CATACOMBS.

FRENCHMAN'S AWFUL DEED. BANK MESSENGER MURDERED. WOMAN'S 30 YEARS' IN GAOL. .AN. OLE* SENSATION RECALLED. After 30 years spent jtl a French prison for women, Julie Carrara has just been released. The guillotine madel her a widow her own testimony sending Her husband to his doom. Now ' she is . going to America to start a fresh life and rejoin her three children, who have been cared for by friends. ' In 189? all Paris—indeed all France — was discussing the " crime of the catacombs," by which a miserable, stunted, pallid little mushroom grower, carried out the dream of the designing murderer—to kill for gold and to cause the corpse of the victim to vanish. The Uncovering of this infamous crime to- . gether of 'letnale. atfcess.ory. confessed in an agony of remorse is also the story of a young detective's rise to fame.

The detective was M. Henri Magniez, whose genius earned him further laurels as a member of the Secret Service during the Great War. It was he who unravelled the tangled skein concerning Mata Hari, the famous woman spy, known as " the Red Dancer of a Thousand Loves." Bank Messenger Disappears.

A -"-drearily miserable November evening was settling into a wet night in 1897, when the chiei clerk of one of the leading banks telephoned to his chief, whose mansion was at the moment, the scene of a dinner party, to say that Jules Lamane, one of; the most trusted' collector-messeng-ers, bad disappeared. Subsequent inquiries, at the man's house revealed that, .with a large sum of mAney iii his possession, Lamarre had made a call at Gentuly, a peculiar district, noted for the subterranean caverns and finding tunnels still j evidencing memorials of the dead.- Certain | portions were rented for mushroom growing. ,/ '< " ■ ■ • Magniez,; then a young and almost unnoticed detective, took up the case with his characteristic thoroughness. .He had evidence that Lamarre was seen entering a very- peculiar-habitation near the catacombs.' iZZZZ £ The detective probed the history of Sopo Carrara, an Italian by birth, who had been brought to Paris as a child. He had married «a handsome blonde girl of 17, and when he settled down to a meagre living as a mushroom grower there was a family of three. An Uuderground Furnace. At the back of his habitation was a blank wall, and in front a courtyard containing a stable for his unkempt pony. There was also a well, and a circular vent that opened into an airshaft, down the iron ladder of which he descended into the funnels and passages and queer grottoes thoiVmushrooms grew. At the bottom;;JOf ;";thStair. vent .tfas a huge .coke furnace -tO''inaintanra; warm temper"atuie, . - '• ■ ;'fM; ' Magni'ez asked the mushroom grower a few simple questions. A search of Carrara's bedroom revealed notes, gold and silver—part of that collected, by the vanished messenger. • One afternoon Magniez was struck afresh by the appearance of the air vent leading to the catacombs. Investigating keenly he found a rope which was sent to Paris, and yielded the report that part had been in contact with human flesh. Magniez, accompanied by an expert, went below and minutely inspected the huge stove. V: Clue,- o? a Collar Stud. While so doing he picked up aowe tiny ,oßjep.tr, It : wak: a and Carrara never 1 woVje one; Police officers, of .justice called upon Carrara, who had been detained on suspicion within his own house, and when the Commissionaire de Police, who is half magistrate f-nd half detective, together with a legal assistant, charged Carrara there came a piercing shriek, and Mme. Julia fell on her knees. She would confess, she said. Her husband, she sobbed, had said they must do something out of the way to get money, and they decided to kill one of the bank messengers. Carrara, gliding behind him, dealt a smashing blow on his skull. He died almost immediately. The body was then dragged ;in to the kitchen and concealed beneath a .huge waste tub. The children, when they'returned from school, were told not to go into -the'kitchen. As soon as dusk came on the children were sent to bed, and Carrara, having ascertained that there were no workers in the catacombs, charged the furnace until it roared, and cast the corpse into it. He then burried his own bloodstained clothes.