Some say that Marie Besnard was cursed. However, it really seemed that luck was on her side in the end.
Marie Davaillaud was born on August 15th, 1896. She was the only daughter of a farming family located in Loudon, France. She was educated at a convent school, where her classmates and teachers described her as mean, vicious, amoral, and wild with boys.
In 1920, she married her cousin, Auguste Antigny. They remained on the family farm until 1927, when Auguste died of pleurisy. This was not an unusual turn of events, as he was known to have suffered from tuberculosis throughout his life.
Following the passing of her husband, Marie’s friends and family pushed her to find another husband, and fast. They needed another set of hands on the farm, and the best way to accomplish this was to have Marie remarry, and bring her husband to the farm.
In 1928, Marie met and married a wealthy man named Léon Besnard. Much to her family’s dismay, Marie did not move Léon out to the farm. Rather, she moved in with him.
From the early days of their marriage, Marie and Léon, though more so Marie, acted as the caretakers for various family members as they aged or fell ill. Marie would care for them, hoping that they would be left a little something in the family member’s last will and testament. However, time and again, whatever was left would go to other family members – predominantly Marie’s parents, or her in-laws.
Family member after family member went to Marie to be their caretake. And family member after family member did not leave Marie with what she felt she was entitled to.
As this pattern continued into the 1940s, Marie and Léon invited his parents to live with them. They were aging, and needed looking after. Not too long after moving in, Léon’s father, apparently, ingested poisoned mushrooms, and passed away. However, Léon and Marie saw nothing of his estate. He left it all to his wife.
Three short months after the passing of her husband, Léon’s mother passed away, supposedly of pneumonia. The remainder of the estate was split between Léon, and his sister, Lucie. Just a few short months following the death of their parents, Lucie allegedly committed suicide. The Besnard fortune was finally, finally inherited by Léon, and his ‘long-suffering wife’, Marie.
No longer burdened by ailing family members, Marie and Léon sublet rooms to Touissaint and Blanche Rivet. They were friends of Léon who needed a place to stay. Marie was especially pleased with the fact that they were a childless couple. So moved the the generosity of the Besnard’s, the Rivet’s made Léon and Marie the beneficiaries of their wills.
On July 14th, 1939, Toussaint Rivet passed away. The official cause of death was documented as pneumonia.
Not long after this, Pierre Davaillaud, Marie’s father, passed away on May 14th, 1940. The official cause of death was documented as a cerebral haemorrhage.
Roughly a year and a half later, on December 27th, 1941, Blanche Rivet passed away. Her official cause of death was documented to be aortitis.
After over a decade of the Besnards suffering loss after loss, the community of Loudon began to refer to them as cursed. They believed a curse was following the family. And The Besnard Curse was nowhere near over.
Marie’s cousins, Pauline Bodineau and Virginie Lalleron named Marie as not only their caretake, but also their beneficiary. In an odd turn of events, Pauline passed away on July 1st, 1945 at the age of 88. She had apparently mistaken a bowl of lye on the counter for her dessert one evening.
A few days later, Virginie also mistook a bowl of lye for her dessert. She passed on July 9th, 1945 at the age of 83.
Not long after, The Besnard Curse struck again, taking Marie’s mother, Marie-Louise Davaillaud on January 16th, 1946.
Through nearly two decades of The Besnard Curse, no one even suspected for a second that Marie and Léon could be the ones responsible for The Besnard Curse in the first place.
They were more than happy to proceed undetected. Until Marie’s world turned upside down, and her skills, and rage, took over her logic and reason.
In late 1947, Marie discovered that her husband had been unfaithful. He’d been carrying on an affair with family friend Madame Louise Pintou. Léon believed that he was being discreet. But then he began to feel more and more ill. He confided in Louise that he believed his wife to be poisoning him.
On October 25th, 1947, Léon Besnard passed away. The official cause of death was documented as uremia.
Devastated by the death of her lover, Madame Pintou send a letter to the public prosecutor, detailing Léon’s suspicions. Initially, her letter was dismissed. No one believed that such a thing could be possible. It was just another case of The Besnard Curse.
However, Madame Pintou was insistent. She recruited others who shared her suspicions, and they kicked up a fuss around Loudon, accusing Marie of not only poisoning her dearly departed husband, but of being a mass poisoner. Finally, the public prosecutor was motivated to investigate the death of Léon Besnard.
On May 11th, 1949, Léon’s body was exhumed. In the course of an official autopsy, forensic surgeon Doctor Béroud discovered 19.45 mg of arsenic in Léon’s body. Startled, this prompted investigators to exhume the bodies of every single person who had died in the care of, or around, Marie Besnard. And what they found rocked the community of Loudon to its very core.
The Besnard Curse was real. And her name was Marie.
The ailing family members who had all passed all had arsenic in their systems. Her first husband was found with 60 mg if arsenic in his body; her father’s body contained 36 mg of arsenic; Toussaint Rivet’s body contained 18 mg of arsenic; Blanche Rivet’s body contained 30 mg of arsenic; Pauline Bodineau’s body contained 48 mg of arsenic; Virginie Lalleron’s body contained 20 mg of arsenic, and; her mother’s body contained 48 mg of arsenic.
On July 21st, 1949, Marie Besnard was arrested, and charged with thirteen counts of murder.
In February of 1952, the trial of Marie Besnard gripped Loudon, France in a vice.
Analysis of the bodies, as developed by Marsh and Cribier, and further analyzed by professors Fabre, Kohn-Abrest, and Griffon, showed that the exhumed bodies of Marie’s victims each contained severely abnormal levels of arsenic. In 1954, professor Piedelièvre analyzed the bodies again, and wrote his own report, confirming the reports from 1952.
Through the course of the trial, René Hayot and Albert Gautrat, Marie’s attorneys, went on the attack against Doctor Béroud, and the results of the various reports. They claimed that the lab not only mishandled the evidence, but that the evidence was outright lost in some cases.
An investigation of the cemetery wherein the bodies were interred also showed abnormal amounts of arsenic in the ground soil. Therefore, the defence claimed, the bodies absorbed the arsenic through the soil. Marie Besnard had not poisoned anyone.
The jury was unable to come to a verdict, asking for more time to review the evidence. Marie Besnard, who had been in prison for five years by this point, posted a 1,200,00-franc bond, and awaited her next court appearance.
Marie Besnard was called back into court on November 20th, 1961, 12 years after she’d been arrested for murder. The prosecution and the defense presented their cases again. However, many of the witnesses who had testified against her the first time around either recanted their statements, or simply could not be of assistance due to ailing memories.
On December 12th, 1961, by some stroke of pure luck, Marie Besnard was found not guilty on all counts of murder. She, along with The Besnard Curse, fell to obscurity until her death in 1980.
— — —
Like what you’re reading? Follow me on Twitter or Facebook for the latest updates!
Sources:
Marie Besnard – Murderpedia
France: Arsenic & No Case – Time
Criminalia podcast – Marie Besnard: Undertaker’s best friend?
Marie Besnard Wikipedia page