Branded Corsican Woman

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 750, 24 August 1929, Page 20

Branded Corsican Woman

Murdered Adventuress with Features of the Bonapartes

■■■BO OLLOWING on the receipt of information pjS2»)j pointing to a London clue in the murder of the mystery woman, Matilda the Corsican, who was found dead under strange circumstances at Toulon after her release from prison the Paris Surete has decided to seek the aid of Scotland Yard in tracking the murderer. The mystery of the death of Matilda is a baffling one and the woman herself was much of a mystery. There is reason to believe that she had for years had associations with the international drug traffic and was connected with one of the most notorious gangs operating from Paris, Bordeaux, Brussels, Berlin and London. Matilda herself is known to have shown considerable ingenuity in smuggling drugs into England, despite the vigilance of the customs authorities, and though the police had the strongest suspicion of the woman they were not able to get anything against her until some time ago when she was mixed up in the tragedy of a young student who was found dead after a drug orgy in a Toulon flat. Iu this case, however, the police were far from satisfied that they had the worst offender, but Matilda went to gaol without giving away the real culprit. • It is believed that the man she shielded was her lover, the head of the gang, and while she was in prison the police, so keen were they on getting the real culprit, resorted to an original third degree trick to surprise her into denouncing the man. They caused to be passed on to her information that her lover had rewarded her loyalty to him by consoling himself for her prison absence with a hated rival.

The woman was furious, and asked the prison authorities to advise the detective in the case that she was ready to make a full disclosure of the facts on her release. In some way this information reached the underworld, and. when Matilda got outside prison she was met by one of the gang, who whirled her off in a car before the arrival of the detective to interview her. She was taken to a house owned by the gang, and was there confronted with the proofs of her treason before being done to death and branded with the mysterious “S” symbol that is used by bandits of the underworld from Eastern Europe to brand traitors done to death by order of their band. This symbol figured in the murder of Beron, the French Jew, for whose death Stinie Morrison was convicted, and it is believed that the gang responsible for the death of Matilda w-as recruited from the same part of the world, and has Headquarters in the same region of London as that used by Morrison. The dead body pf the victim was found by the police where it had been thrown from an upper window by the murderers, but the whole of the gang had disappeared, and are now believed to be in hiding in the different capitals frequented by them. Matilda was well known iu Loudon as a denizen of the underworld associated with the drug traffic particularly. She belonged to an ancient Corsican family related closely to the Italo-Greek family that produced the Bonapartes, and she herself bore a strong family resemblance to the family of the great Emperor, so much so that she was recently engaged to appear in a film as one of the sisters of the Emperor.