CRIME OF CATACOMBS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19846, 21 May 1927, Page 17 (Supplement)

CRIME OF CATACOMBS

FRENCHMAN’S DEED BANK MESSENGER MURDERED. After 30 years spent in a French prison for women, Julio Carrara has just been released. The guillotine made 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 boon cared for by friends. In 1897 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 and the weaving together of the gruesome facts so that the female accessory 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 Thousands Loves.” Bank Messenger Disappears. A drearily miserable November evening was settling into a wet night in 1897, when the chief 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 Lamarre, one of the most trusted collector-messengers, had disappeared. Subsequent inquiries at the man’s house revealed that, with a large sum of money in his possession, Lamarre had made a call at Gcntilly, a peculiar district, noted for the subterranean caverns and winding tunnels still evid-

cncing 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.

The detective probed the history of Scpo Carra, 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 Underground. 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 tunnels and passages and queer grottoes where the mushrooms grew. At the bottom of the air vent was a huge coke furnace to maintain a warm temperature. M. Magniez 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. Clue of a Collar Stud. While so doing ho stooped and picked up some tiny object. It was a collarstud, and Carra never wore 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 and 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 into tne kitchen and conccnlod 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 wore no workers in the catacombs, charged the furnace until it roared; and cast the corpse into it. He then burned his own bloodstained clothes. The Poor Little Thing. “Dinner will be ready punctually a 1 one-thirty, dear,” said Mrs Newlywed one Saturday morning, “so pleaso don’t be late. ’ ’ Her husband promised to be homo, in time and went off to business. His •wife busied herself with a cookery book and sot to work in the kitchen. At the stroke of one-thirty the husband slipped his key in the door and entered. He found his wife in tears. “Dear, dear!” ho exclaimed. “What has happened?” “Jack,” she said sadly, “I’m afraid dinner’ll be ever so late. Here I’ve been plucking this rabbit for three hours and I haven’t finished vet!” Plain Enough. The employer was instructing his now office boy in the use of the telephone. “When the bell rings,” he said, “you take up the receiver, place it to your car, and you will hoar a voice saying: ‘Hello! Hello! Are you there? —which you will answer ‘Yes,’ or ‘No ’ as the case may be!”