A Series of Horrible murdered in France.
The trial of a case, almost unequalled in the annuals of crime, has just been concluded at
Bourg, near
Lyons, France.
A man named Dumollard was charged with a number of murders, and his wife with being accessory to them.
He lived near
Lyons, and his practice for several years past, it appears, has been to go to the city frequently and secure his victims in the following manner: Meeting a girl who looked like a servant, he would inquire of her the way to an intelligence office and, getting into conversation with her, would state that he was employed at a chateau a few miles in the country, and that he was in search of a servant girl, to whom very superior wages would be paid.
It the girl whom he accested was looking for a place she would generally accept his offer, and they would start out on the cars together.
Dumollard so contrived it that they should reach the station at which they were to descend after dark, when he would shoulder the girl's truck or box, and start with her across the fields.
Arrived at a convenient spot he would violate her, kill her, and bury her, and take the trunk to his house.
Finally, a girl becoming frightened, asked him, as they were walking through the woods, if they were not nearly arrived at the chateau.
Dumollard replied they were, but that he would hide the truck among the trees, as it was very heavy, and would come for it in the morning.
He put down the trunk, and as the girl started to run, he threw a sort of running noose over her head.
She succeeded in escaping, however, and giving information to the police authorities.
Dumollard was watched, and finally his house was searched, when the following articles of female clothing were found Thirty-five pairs of gaiters, sixty-seven pairs of stockings, thirty-eight caps, ten pairs of stays, seventy-one handkerchiefs, a number of collars, chemisettes; etc., amounting to eleven hundred articles--five hundred and forty-six of which were recognized by girls who had been enticed in the manner above stated, but who, becoming frightened, had escaped, and by the friends of others who had been killed.
Three or four skelstons and bodies of females were discovered in the woods between the station and Dumollard's house, and before the examing magistrate the prisoner acknowledged that within the last eight years he had murdered six young women, and had made attempts upon nine others, who escaped with the loss of their clothing.
It is supposed that one of the young women killed by this fiend was buried alive, as when found her clenched hands were filled with earth, which she had probably seized in her dying agonies.
During the trial
Dumollard declared that the witnesses had formed a conspiracy to ruin him, and manifested the utmost indifference, and ate heartily and slept well.
He was found guilty and sentenced, to death, and his wife to twenty years imprisonment at hard labor.