FRENCH MURDER CASE

Southland Times, Issue 22296, 11 April 1934, Page 7

FRENCH MURDER CASE

CONVICTED MAN GUILLOTINED. (United Press Assn.—Telegraph Copyright ) (Rec. 9.50 p.m.) London, April 10. A message from Aix-en-Provence states that George Sarrett has been guillotined. The sensational murder trial begun at Aix-en-Provence on October 22 concluded on October 31. Charges were laid against Katherine and Philomene Schmidt, beautiful German sisters, who came to France before the war and married two Frenchmen, who mysteriously disappeared, and George Sarrett, a suave middle-aged Italian-born lawyer of Greek parentage, who has long been domiciled in France. It was alleged that they, with accomplices, defrauded insurance companies by taking policies on the lives of people who disappeared. .The three principals are said to have disposed of the bodies of two of their victims by dissolving them in a bath of sulphuric acid. The accused were convicted. Sarrett was sentenced to be guillotined in the public square of the town and the Schmidt sisters to ten years’ penal servitude. Sarrett, in 1925, rented a cottage at Aix, and invited there an unfrocked priest, Louis Chambon, and a woman friend, Madame Ballandroux, to whom Sarrett and the Schmidts were heavily indebted. The prosecution alleges that Sarrett shot Chambon and Ballandroux from behind a screen vzhile Katherine was showing them the promises. The sound of the shots was drowned by a motor cycle engine which had been specially installed in the garden. Sarrett and the sisters, in the presence of the corpses, during the night formulated plans in accordance with which they procured a bath of a quantity of sulphuric acid, in which they immersed the bodies for several days, eventually bailing out the solution and pouring it on some hot rocks in the garden, where it evaporated. A police inquiry was held, but it was futile and the trio would have escaped but for an incident when Katherine ostensibly died after insuring her life for £21,000 with five companies in her mother’s favour. Philomene, having carefully aged her face, represented the “mother” and secured the money, but Katherine foolishly reappeared in public, after which it was ascertained that the corpse was that of Madali Herbin, a young consumptive, whom the sisters allegedly assassinated with strong spirits and poisoned champagne. The brokers involved in the insurance transactions were charged with forgery and the doctor who issued Herbin’s death certificate with complicity together with Andree, daughter of Sarrett.