Marilyn Z. Tomlins

Marilyn Z. Tomlins is a journalist based in Paris, France. She has written for various British, Australian and South African publications. She specializes in unusual human interest stories, European Royal Families and showbiz personalities. Her special interest, though, is murder and murderers, and she has recently completed a book on Dr. Marcel Petiot, the World War Two serial-killer. She is currently researching for a book on the guillotine. She can be contacted at marilyn.tomlins @wanadoo.fr.

Beauty, Wealth and a Dead Bride Sticky

Jan. 10, 2011 Updated April 1, 2012

Shrien and Anni Dewani on their wedding day

Shrien and Anni Dewani on their wedding day. (Photo was handed out to the media.)

Both brilliant and beautiful, Anni Dewani was shot to death on her honeymoon outside Cape Town, South Africa during a carjacking that her millionaire husband, Shrien Dewani, survived. The three men convicted of the murder say the young husband hired them to kill his wife. London-based Dewani is fighting extradition.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

The names of the places sounded exotic: Gugulethu. Lingelethu. Khayelitsha. Chitwa Chitwa. They created images of beautiful people dancing to the beat of drums on a hot summer night.

To the cops in their dark blue uniforms, who stood around the white Volkswagen Sharan, abandoned in the place that bore the name Lingelethu, there was nothing exotic though about the young woman who lay sprawled across the vehicle’s rear seat. Two holes between her shoulders and another in her neck from which her blood had flowed freely so that most of the inside of the car was covered in blood, told them that the young woman was dead.

They knew her name: Anni Dewani.

They were wondering how they were going to tell her husband Shrien, who had in the first hour of that morning reported her missing and was anxiously waiting at a nearby luxury hotel, what they had found.

Princess Diana’s Death Sticky

April 11, 2010

Princess Diana

Was her death really an accident, or was there a hidden hand at work? Many still say that she was assassinated. Not long before her tragic end, she predicted in a letter to her loyal butler that she would be murdered in a car accident.

By Marilyn Z. Tomlins

The telephones started ringing in the homes of Paris’s foreign correspondents soon after 1 a.m. on Sunday, August 31, 1997.

It had been a dull Saturday. After a very hot summer when the temperature in Paris had risen to the high 80s Fahrenheit, the sun had that day disappeared behind thick clouds and the city had turned cool so that the Parisians had to wear warm clothing. There had also been a degree of languor in the city; the summer vacation was over but no one as yet felt like returning to work, school or university.

The journalists shared the Parisians’ languor; what they called the “silly season” was ending and with the rentrée – the return or reopening – would arrive new political shenanigans, disasters and wars to report.

The callers were editors from the world over. All asked the same question of their correspondents: “We hear Di’s been in an accident in a tunnel. Can we have a story in the next half an hour for our first edition this morning?”

Not one of the journalists would be able to sleep on what was left of the hours of darkness, or indeed for the next couple of days. They knew that they were working on the biggest story there had been for a long time and would probably be for some time. Later, some of the most hardened among those who worked as freelancers would admit that they had earned so much money that night that they had been able to set off on a luxury vacation afterwards.

For that August night, Diana, Princess of Wales, died from injuries she had sustained in a car crash in a Paris tunnel.

If before that night, you had asked anyone – man or woman – who was the most beautiful, most elegant, most compassionate woman in the world, the one they would love to have dinner with, they would have replied: Princess Di.

But that night she lay dead in Paris aged just 36.

Murder in Versailles Sticky

May 19, 2009

the Palace of Versailles

It took the French government 14 years to bring American expatriate Barrie Taylor to justice for the 1993 murder of her lover's estranged wife. After three trials and three convictions in France for the murder, Taylor continues her fight to be allowed to live freely in the United States.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

Thursday, September 30, 1993. It was going to be a quiet day in Versailles, France's "City of Kings." Or so the cops at the local station house told themselves. The trains pulling in from nearby Paris would not be bringing hordes of day trippers to the chateau of Marie Antoinette, France's last queen, as they do at the height of summer. Not that the tourists brought crime to the town, but their coaches did snarl up traffic, and pickpockets were prone to try their luck in front of the palace. It was also a cool, rainy day and the town's street markets would not attract many shoppers. There would therefore be few rogue street vendors to round up.

Boulevard de la République, a street lined with trees and elegant Belle Époque era townhouses, and only a few blocks from the magnificent chateau, was indeed quiet as a small white police automobile, its siren silent, drove up to Number 20, one of six three-storied brick and stone terraced houses. The automobile had four passengers; three uniformed cops and a young man. For the young man, Marc Pavageau, it was his second visit to the house in as many days.

One of the cops knocked at the house’s front door; in France cops and firefighters know never to ring a doorbell, but always to knock in case there is a gas leak inside the property.

Stealing the Mona Lisa: The World’s Greatest Art Heist

June 11, 2012

The Mona Lisa

The Mona Lisa was the world’s most famous and valuable painting, yet its security depended on four ordinary hooks and the locked door of the museum – the Louvre in Paris – where it was on display. All that would be needed to take it down from the wall and to carry it off was a pair of strong arms.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

The streets of Paris were already hot but still silent on this summer morning just before eight. It was Monday, August 21. The year was 1911.

A few drunk revelers – men, their handlebar mustaches wet with perspiration, and women of low repute, necklaces of fake rubies and emeralds adorning their half-exposed ample bosoms – stood on the sidewalks outside the Folies Bergère music hall and the Moulin Rouge cabaret waiting for taxicabs – horse-drawn carriages – to come by and to take them home.

Elsewhere in Paris, burly concierges were sweeping the sidewalks in front of the buildings in their charge. Halting for a few minutes, they lit foul-smelling Gaullois cigarettes and shouted greetings across the streets to one another.

Mondays were closing days for small family-owned shops, those which were open on Sundays, but the big stores of La Samaritaine, Galaries Lafayette and Le Bon Marché would be opening and pretty salesgirls were already at that hour emerging from Métro (the underground rail system) stations for a 10-hour working day.

The Louvre museum was also closed. Always open on a Sunday, Monday was the day the museum was being cleaned. Cleaners would polish its wooden floors, delicately dust the paintings hanging on the walls and wipe off the oily finger marks which had been left by admiring visitors on the glass display cases. It was also a day for repairs when the maintenance staff, dressed in white smocks so that they could be told apart from the lowly cleaners, who wore blue aprons, would change light bulbs, repair leaking faucets, or replace hooks on a painting. There would also be banging both inside and outside the building because an elevator, a new element in the capital’s Haussmannian buildings, was being installed and scaffolding covered part of the building.

Monday was also the day the Louvre’s official photographers, also dressed in white smocks, took paintings down from the walls to carry them to a studio elsewhere on the premises in order to photograph them for the museum’s archives.

It was, in fact, a busy day in the Louvre, once a residence of France’s monarchs but for the previous 117 years a museum visited each day by several hundred people, not all of them Parisians or even French, but foreign art lovers who had come to Paris on slow trains or slow ships. Air travel was still something of the future.

Ruth Ellis: Love, Lust and Death on the Gallows

Feb. 29, 2012

Ruth Ellis

Ruth Ellis

It was a time of “no sex please, we’re British.” Women, if they had to mention the three-letter word, preferred to spell it out in a whisper. As for men, they hypocritically joined private men’s clubs where sex was on the menu along with beer and French fries covered in salt and soaked in vinegar. The girls who provided the sex – models they called themselves and club owners called them hostesses – dreamed of meeting a sugar daddy. One such girl – Ruth Ellis – saw her dream end on the gallows, a rope around her neck.

By Marilyn Z. Tomlins

There is no sweet story to write about the childhood of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to hang in Britain.

Even the reminiscences of her sister, Muriel Jakubait, in her 2005 book, Ruth Ellis: My Sister’s Secret Life, could not pretend that the first years of the life of her little sister, six years her junior, were idyllic.

Describing Ruth as dark-haired, skinny and quiet and wearing second-hand clothes, Mrs. Jakubait wrote of how the 11-year-old pre-menstrual Ruth screamed when their father abused her sexually. Muriel, also abused by their father and having borne his child, wrote: “I heard her scream … I knew what he was doing… I encouraged her not to come home straight from school … Most of the time I’d stand in front of her, screaming for him to leave her alone … Nothing stopped him …”

Ruth was born in Rhyl on the northeast coast of Wales on October 9, 1926, her parents, Bertha and Arthur, having moved to the resort not long before. Arthur – Nelson Arthur Hornby – was a cellist, working when and where he could which meant that he either provided the accompanying music to a silent movie, or he played the cello in the band of an ocean liner sailing between England and America. Bertha was half-Belgian half-French: Catholic nuns had evacuated her with other orphans from Belgium to England during the First World War. As for Arthur, he used the surname Neilson for professional reasons. This meant that Bertha also some days said that her surname was Neilson. Thus, some of the couple’s children were given the surname Neilson instead of Hornby. So was Ruth.

A Loving Wife, a Cheating Husband, and a Torso in a Forest

Jan. 9, 2012

(Photo used by permission of BlueStar Forensic)

Extra-marital affairs are accepted in France. Wives and husband who indulge in them are even admired. It means that a woman, though married and probably a mother, is still attractive and desirable to the male of the species, and that despite marriage and fatherhood a man remains virile. Yet, occasionally, a spouse will cry “Stop!” and when the philandering continues, the result can be foul murder.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

On Wednesday, February 25, 2004, early in the morning, Florence Bourgade dialed the telephone number of her sister.

Yves and Florence

The sun was shining but it was bitterly cold – just 42° F – in Moigny-sur-École in the Department of Essonne, 36 miles south of Paris, and the 42-year-old’s news was as chilling. Her husband, Yves, 44, had only got back home in the early hours of that morning after a night of drinking and he’s being very abusive verbally and she did not want their children to witness such behavior. Could she therefore send them over for a couple of days? The next-door neighbor would be dropping them off on her way to work. It was the February school vacation.

That call was not the first that Florence made that morning.

Her first call had been at 6:45 a.m. She had called her husband’s employee to say that he would not be in that day. Her husband was a self-employed mason. “Yves has blown a fuse. He has left,” she told the man. What she had said in French was Yves a pétée les plombs for which “blowing a fuse” is a polite translation.

At 7 a.m. she had made a second call. She had called her neighbor to ask if she could bring over the children for her to look after for that day. “She wanted me to take the children, but I had to go to work which I told her,” the neighbor would later testify to the police.

Fifteen minutes later Florence had made yet again another call. She had again called her neighbor to ask if she could, on her way to work, drop the children off at her sister’s house. The neighbor had replied that she could do that, yes.

Florence’s sister lived 10 miles away in the town of Barbizon, so, as the neighbor had to go in that direction, dropping the children off would not make her late for work, but, all the same, within 15 minutes she was at the Bourgade house. The three children, two boys and a girl, aged respectively 12, 10 and 5, were still in bed and were told to get dressed immediately and quickly.

“I understood that Yves was not well,” the neighbor would also later say in her testimony. “I thought of the alcohol.”

She knew that Yves Bourgade drank. In 2004 there were only about 500 houses in Moigny-sur-École and not even 1,500 people lived there, so it was not easy to hide that a spouse habitually returned home in the early hours of the morning and in an inebriated state.

Florence’s family and friends, although they did not live in the village, were also aware of the drinking. They also knew that Yves was a womanizer. And it had not been necessary to stick their noses into the couple’s life to have known about the women because Yves bragged about his exploits. He even made it his dinner conversation. He did not appear to care that his wife was at the table tending to their guests for whom she had prepared a splendid meal.

The two had been married since 1997 but they had been partners for more than 14 years and Yves had not ever been faithful.

Marie Besnard: The Undertaker’s Best Friend

Nov. 14, 2011

Marie Besnard

In France, in the 17^th Century, alchemists became wealthy grinding arsenic rock into a colorless and odorless powder and selling the powder to their countrymen who wanted to do away with a wealthy old parent, grandparent, uncle or aunt. There was even an “epidemic” of arsenic poisonings in the year 1670 so that the substance became known as the “succession powder.” Three centuries later, kind and homely Marie Besnard amazed her female friends when she described arsenic as an excellent substitute for divorce. They thought she was joking. But was she?

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

Illness and death were no strangers to Marie Antigny, yet, cradling Auguste, her dead husband, in her arms she sobbed uncontrollably.

Marie was 31 years old and she and Auguste, who was two years her senior, had been married for seven years. The two were first cousins – her mother was his father’s sister – and Marie had fancied Auguste since she was 17 years old, but it was not until she was 18 that her parents allowed the two to step out together, and another six years had to pass before they’d given their consent for the two to walk down the aisle. By then Marie was 24 and Auguste 26, and what doctors had described previously as his weak constitution had been diagnosed as tuberculosis. It was 1920 and tuberculosis was an incurable, even untreatable illness, but in Marie’s own words, “We were in love!”

Marie was born Marie Josephine Philippine Davaillaud in the village of Saint-Pierre-de-Maillé, 200 miles south-west of Paris, in the Vienne department close to the beautiful Loire valley. Her parents, well-to-do farmers, adored her because before she arrived, they lost two infant sons to long illnesses. Her father Pierre Eugène used to cuddle her when he came in from working his fields, and her mother Marie-Louise never failed to tell her that she loved her “for three,” including the girl’s two dead brothers in her affection.