Foreign Crimes

Jan. 10, 2011 Updated April 1, 2012

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.

June 19, 2010

The Papin sisters

The strange case of the Papin sisters is notable not only for its shocking violence but because the gender of both the perpetrators and victims was female. The case became a media sensation in France with its lurid undertones of lesbianism and incest; the motive for the crime was never quite clarified – was it simply raving madness or was it the calculated (and some would say righteous) revenge of two working-class girls against their oblivious employers?

by Jessica Mason

The Papin Family 

Even by the hardscrabble standards of early 20th century French peasant life, Christine and Léa Papin experienced a particularly dismal childhood. Their father Gustave was an abusive alcoholic and their mother Clémence was a flighty and promiscuous woman with little maternal instinct who, in 1901, was forced to marry their father only because she was pregnant with their first child, Émilia. After her second child Christine was born in 1905, Clémence decided that she could not handle two children and sent the baby off to live with Gustave’s sister. In 1911, Clémence bore a third child, Léa. Soon after the birth of Léa, Clémence discovered that her husband had raped their eldest daughter, Émilia, who at the time was only 10 years old.

Clémence immediately sought and obtained a divorce from Gustave. Her actions, however, were not taken out of concern for her daughter's welfare, but a desire to punish her husband for his infidelity. Clémence apparently believed that Émilia had seduced her father and in order to discipline her, sent her to an orphanage, run by the convent of Le Bon Pasteur, that was known for its harshness. In addition, she pulled Christine out of the care of her aunt and also placed her in Le Bon Pasteur. She also relieved herself of the burden of caring for Léa, who was but a toddler at the time, by giving her over to the care of a great uncle.

Émilia and Christine grew very close to each other in the orphanage and when Émilia became a nun as soon as she was old enough Christine had every intention of following in her sister’s footsteps. However, Clémence, who was depending on her daughters to help support her as soon as they were legally able to work was furious with Émilia for denying her a third of that potential income and forbade Christine from doing the same. She immediately pulled Christine out of Le Bon Pasteur and found her work as a maid in the bourgeois households of Le Mans. Because the sisters of Le Bon Pasteur had tutored her in cleaning, mending and cooking, she was very well-suited to the life of a domestic worker. However, Christine changed employers many times in the first years of her career because the wages they paid were never enough to suit her mother.  Like her older sister, Léa was taken from the care of her relative and put to work as soon as she was able and the two sisters, who though they had been separated, were still very fond of each other and attempted to work together whenever possible.

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.

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.