Written Inn Red: the Murders at the Red Inn
Interestingly, the next major scandal we turn up concerning a serial killer again takes us to France, though now we’re well past the time of Louis XIV and into the reign of Louis Philippe I, and the Second French Revolution, or July Revolution. Pierre and Marie Martin ran L’auberge rouge, or the Red Inn, and for years had been staunch supporters of the royalist King Charles X, helping the aristocracy returning after the First French Revolution to reclaim their lands and hiding priests, but when Charles was deposed and his cousin Louis Philippe put on the throne, their usefulness to the monarchy ended, and they became enemies of the state. Not literal ones: they weren’t wanted by the law or anything, but like I guess a family who had supported the House of York became an enemy of Henry VII and would be out of favour.
When a local man, Jacques Enjolras, went missing, the justice of the peace in the area investigated and found the last port of call for the man had been the Red Inn. His body was found the next morning in a river nearby, head stove in and knee crushed. Pierre and his nephew Andre, along with their servant were arrested, but oddly enough the reason given for the wife not being taken was that the magistrate did not believe a woman capable of murder. Had he not heard of the Affair of the Poisons, two hundred years ago? And what about the women who sat in judgement as part of the Assembly during the French Revolution, famously knitting in Dickens’
A Tale of Two Cities while hundreds or thousands of aristocrats and other “enemies of the Republic” went to the guillotine? Seems a weak excuse to me, but that’s what it says.
June 18 1833 was the date the trial began, and initially it hinged on the testimony of two eye-witnesses, one of whom, a local beggar, said he had been turfed out of his bed and kicked into the street, where he saw the whole thing from hiding. Neither man of course knew the identity of the slain man, but it was pretty obvious it was Enjolras. His murder, however, turned out to be the merest tip of a very dark and bloody iceberg.
More witnesses came forward, testifying to having seen bodies of the dead being cooked and used in pies, hands floating in soup, smelling terrible aromas and seeing foul, pungent smoke coming from the inn’s chimney. Children were said to have been roasted in the ovens and blood was seen on sheets and walls. Allegations of murder, rape and cannibalism were all accepted on face value. In effect, it seems there was no actual concrete evidence against the Martins, and some historians believe they were railroaded in a sort of Salem witch-trials manner. They were hated by their neighbours, and now that they were out of favour at court it is possible that those neighbours decided to take their chance to exact revenge upon the couple. The possibility of Enjolras having died of a heart attack was dismissed by the court without any real notice given to it, the testimony of the beggar, unreliable at best as he was a drunk, was allowed despite the protestations of the defence, and the judge more or less instructed the jury to find the four accused guilty.
Which they did.
Not helping their defence, the lawyer representing the servant accepted that his client was a murderer, but placed all the blame on his employers, claiming he had no choice. Given that the servant did not challenge or take issue with this claim, the obvious conclusion is that he believed and admitted to being a murderer, therefore so were the other three, but they were the masterminds behind it and he just a poor pawn, having to do as he was told. That’s curious enough, because if Rochette had believed his employers not guilty, why put his own head on the block, literally? Such an admission would be unlikely to save him, and if this was all a big misunderstanding and Enroljas had died of natural causes, why support the theory of murder? What would he gain from such a plea?
Not much, in the end. Though the jury acquitted Andre Martin, the other three were sentenced to death and the execution was carried out by guillotine on October 2 1833, in front of their own inn. Many have called the trial a sham, the evidence weak at best, made-up at worst, and consider this one of the biggest miscarriages of French justice in the nineteenth century.