FOIL OF CROOKS SHOT.

Thames Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 17764, 11 December 1929, Page 7

FOIL OF CROOKS SHOT.

ASSASSINATION OF A “SHERLOCK HOLMES.”

One of the ifiost skilful criminologists of modern times—the “Sherlock Holmes” of i France —fell the victim to an assassin’s bullets. This fate overtook M. Gaston Bayle, 50,-director of the French Judicial Identification Department, on the morning that he was returning to work after his sum-

mer holiday. M. Bayle was shot dead on the steps of the Paris detective

headquarters at the Palais de Justice by Jean Emile Philiponnet, a commercial traveller, who is in custody charged with murder. Early that morning Philiponnet, a tall, broad shouldered man of middle age, called at the police headquarters s and asked for M. Bayle. When told that the chief of the identification' service had not yet arrived, he said he would wait. He did so, and as M. Bayle mounted the stairs leading to his office, the visitor stepped forward and called him by name. M. Bayle stopped and turned round—and

the strangei immediately fired three shots from a revolver. The first bullet struck M. Bayle in the face, breaking hi? /eye-glass* and the second penetrated his heart, killing him instantly. The third apparently missed. As the stricken man fell, the assassin

topic flight, but he was overtaken and captured before he had left the Prefecture building. He was -then s+ill in possession of his revolver. “I have just killed a dishonest man,” was all the comment that Phi-

liponnet made. For his unerring sagacity in unravelling the most complex crime mysteries, M. Bayle was more feared than perhaps any other police official on the Continent. It was his science, apparently, that cost

him his life. He came intt> contact with Philiponnet some months ago, when he made an expert examination of Philiponnet’s flat in connection with a lawsuit, in which the ]atter was engaged with his landlord. According to police allegations, Philiponnet, in letting a flat he owned, had insisted on the new tenant taking over furniture valued at £240. He produced a receipt purporting to show that he had paid this sum for the furniture in question, but the new tenant was not satisfied and caused a judicial inquiry to be made. M. Bayle, to whom the receipt was submitted, reported that it was false, since the figure had been altered from 3000 francs to 30,000. The extra cypher which made so great' a difference in the price could not escape the notice of his microscopic and chemical tests.