JUSTICE FOR JONIAUX.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1204, 29 March 1895, Page 27

JUSTICE FOR JONIAUX.

END OF THE GREAT BELGIAN POISONING CASE. GUILTY ON ALL COUNTS. From Our Special Correspondent. London, February 8. The great Belgian poisoning trial, with its accompanying duel of wits between the presiding Judge and the desperate woman fighting like a captured tigress for life and liberty, came to an expected end on Saturday. In all probability Madame Joniaux is the greatest poisoner of modern times. Beside her our good Mrs May brick seems a bungling amateur. The latter merely got rid of an inconvenient husband, whereas the mature Belgian morphined at least three near relatives, probably four, and very possibly even five or six. She has been convicted of poisoning first her sister, Mdlle Leonie D'Ablay, then her uncle, M. Van der Kerckhove, an ex-senator and wealthy manufacturer, and lastly her brother, Alfred Ablay. The first and the last she insured for large sums, and killed them off to get the money; the uncle she ended hoping to inherit his large fortune. A bolder and astuter feminine criminal has seldom stood in the dock. Her tenacity, her ingenuity and her sang froid baffled the Court again and again, but, try as she might, she failed to get at the jury. That there might be sentimentalists amongst the twelve good men and true who would save her was her evident hope, and again and again she ignored the President and "went for" them. Madame Joniaux comes of a good military stock. She is, says a summarist of the trial, the daughter of a general and the niece of a former aide-de-camp to King Leopold. Her present husband holds a high official position as an engineer. She lived in a style befitting her position rather than her means. She was in constant embarrassment for money, and hard pressed by her creditors, until she promised to satisfy them, if they would only wait. She was as good as her word, for, by the day appointed, one of the victims had died. Although deeply involved in this way she undertook to pay the premiums on policies for 70,U00 J francs effected on the life of her maiden J sister. These policies were made out in j favour of her daughter by the first hus- J baud, Mdlle. Faber, over whom her influence was described by one of the j witnesses an "f.ome-tMng frightful." The \

i 1 last of the policies was signed in January, t 1892. On the sth February, Mdlle Ablay i died somewhat suddenly in Madame i Joniaux's house in Antwerp, ia March, i IBo3 y M, Van der Kerckhove died suddenly : from what was described as an attack of apoplexy, immediately after a dinner party . at Madame Joniaux's house. In February, j 1894, M. Alfred Ablay, a ne'er-do-weel of . the family, who had come to Belgium from L Paris to sue one of hfc sons for means of? , support, also died suddenly in the same i house. His life was insured for 100,000 i francs with the Gresham which, i like other English insurance companies, does a large business abroad, Madame Joniaux paying the premium. Each new death occasioned fresh rumours? of foul play, and at length, at the instance of the Gresham Company, the .Belgian authorities took the matter up. The three bodies were exhumed. No traces cf poison, were found in the remains of Leonie Ablay , or of M. Van der Kerckhove. But, in the case of Alfred Ablay, the analysis yielded morphine, and it was known that the prisoner had bought a dose of that drug; the night before his death. She was a* frequent purchaser of this drug, on the ground, as she alleged, that it was used! for maladies from which she and her husband suffered. She had prescriptions for this purpose, but she managed to obtain, larger quantities by altering the figures. "Where 1 centigramme was written, she turned the 1 into a 4. On another occasion, she turned a 4 into an 8. On the eve of her brother's death she had as much as 4S centigrammes in her possession. The poison was supposed to have heen administered to M. Van der Kerckhove in his coffee. Madame Joniaux declared that she had never touched his coffee, but that it was poured out by the maid. But when the maid was called she positively swore that it was poured out by th« prisoner. She had caused her brother to be attended, after his seizure, by a strange doctor, who admitted that he had, to some extent, adopted her suggestions as to a natural cause of death. M. Van der Kerckhove, whose death was attributed to apoplexy, or to meningitis, exhibited many of the symptoms of morphine poisoning. The eyes were wide open, the limbs rigid, the mouth covered with foam. There was, however, the greatest possible conflict of medical evidence. One witness declared that the remains of the prisoner's sister showed alt the symptoms of typhoid, which was certified as the cause of death. Another thought? it extremely probable that M. Kerckhove had died of apoplexy. A third asserted with great confidence, and in the mosts solemn manner, that Alfred Ablay had nou died of poisoning. The quantity of morphine required to poison a man had nob been found in his remains. The indirect evidence as to the prisoner's character took up far too much of the trial. Her impecuniosity was proved up to the hilt ; but, after all, as she acutely remarked, the point was not whether she was needy, but whether she had poisoned her relations. She owed money everywhere ; she borrowed money everywhere some of it during her second honeymoon. Her almost invariable excuse for borrowing it was that she had to save the familvhonour. This, too, was all the excuse she had to offer for effecting the insurances At one time she said that her brother had incurred gambling debts that must be paid ; at another, that he had to be saved from prosecution for forgery. At another time her mother's memory was vao-uelv connected with these obligations. ° Buy thus had to to taken entirely on her-tford.

She never condescended, to particulars or gave the slightest proof. " What is this famous family secret ?" asked the bewildered President of the Court. "It is a secret that I do not know myself/' she said ; " and, if I did, I w ould not divulge it. It is not for holding such sentiments that the jury will convict me. r lhey have mothers, and I do not think they would reveal a secret which their mothers on their deathbeds asked them to keep." Her own personal need of money was shown to have been very pressing at times, and she had shrunk from no means of supplying it. She had been turned out of the rooms at Spa for cheating at the public tables. She iiad bribed the attendants to furnish her ■with special cards. She had cheated at private tables, and, on one occasion, several persons who had detected her drew up a written statement of the circumstances, "which was produced in court. She declared with much warmth that all the charges ■were due to the malice of a rival. The whole case turned on the charge concerning the death of her brother. In 'regard to the others, it was necessarily difficult to convict of poisoning when no traces of poison were found. It is hardly likely that the jury would have convicted her of the murder of her sister and uncle, if they had not been fully satisfied that she murdered her brother. The general circumstances of suspicion were identical in all three cases, bub in the last-named the poison was found in the body. The jury probably argued that it would also have been found in the remafns of the others, but for the fact that the drug used was one whose traces very soon disappear. While no single circumstance in the brother's case seems absolutely conclusive—for it was asserted that he had himself been addicted to the use of morphine—a great number of them taken together have proved sufficient to condemn this woman to a murderer's doom.