Noble Blood - The Arsenic Wife (Part 2)

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

Marie Lafarge's trial was a sensation. But when chemists begin to disagree on their conclusions, who's to say what the real story is? NOTE: This is the second part of our discussion of the trail of Marie Lafarge. If you haven't listened to last week's episode, begin there.Support Noble Blood:— Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon— Merch!— Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, The cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. This is part two of our series on Marie LaFarge. If you haven't yet listened to last week's episode, I would go back. and start there. Marie LaFarge arrived at the gravesite of her husband, Charles LaFarge, wearing morning clothes. She, 24 years old, was by all accounts a striking woman, with long, dark hair tucked under her hat, and a complexion that looked particularly elegant against her all-black wardrobe. It might have looked, at first glance, to an onlooker, that she was at her

husband's grave site for his funeral, or perhaps more realistically in this case, to pay her respects, to quietly place flowers down on the grave of a man who had passed away from illness a year earlier. But no, Marie LaFarge was wearing black at her husband's grave because his body was being exhumed as part of a trial. Her trial. She was accused of murdering her husband, and her case had captivated the country. There were literally hundreds of spectators crowding the grave as it was dug up, with the judge of the region, Lubersak, supervising the digging.

Savvy vendors were selling smelling salts. As soon as Charles Lafarge's coffin was pried open, those salesmen began pulling in. in a hefty business. A sea of handkerchiefs were lifted to noses in unison. Marie LaFarge swooned and seemed so faint that someone shouted that court should be postponed for the day. The jury decreed that the trial should continue to proceed. When Marie LaFarge had first been charged with the murder of her husband, local apothecary men had tried to test her husband's body for arsenic, but they were completely unfamiliar with the latest scientific method.

A chemical test for identifying arsenic created by the Scottish doctor James Marsh. Not only had the local men used old-fashioned inexact methods, but their test had been completely bungled anyway. A glass tube had broken halfway through. So the judge had determined a new test would be performed, the marsh test, done by professional chemists, in full view of the court, so no errors would be made this time around. Unfortunately, by this point, Charles Lafarge's body had decomposed to the point where a newspaper described it as paste rather than flesh. The expert were forced to use a spoon to scrape what they could into small pots. Those pots were swiftly transported to an open-air laboratory in tool,

where a group of chemists were going to be faced with the most high-stakes experiment of their careers. With the court, a crowd of spectators, and the nation waiting, these chemists scurried around their charcoal furnaces. They painstakingly added the proper chemical reagents and set up a piece of porcelain at exactly the right distance from a flame, and then they held their breath, probably both from the stench of Charles Lafarge's remains and from the anticipation of what they were doing.

The Marsh Test was deceptive in its sense, seeming simplicity. Though the chemistry involved wasn't particularly complex, there were a number of factors in its methodology that had to be absolutely perfect in order for the test to work. And the French chemists and tool who had read about the procedure, in translation, were performing it for the first time. Finally, after a day of waiting and anticipating, The chemists returned to the palace of justice. They turned to the judge and the jury and announced they had reached their scientific conclusion as to whether there was arsenic in the body of Charles Lafarge.

Marie LaFarge looked as though she were about to faint, as she and the rest of the room waited to hear the determination that would all but seal her fate. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. The evidence against Marie LaFarge was building a very compelling case against her. She had been miserable in her marriage to Charles LaFarge. She was lied to and forced to live in his decrepit, crumbling estate, out in the country, far from her friends and her well-connected social scene in Paris. On the first night she had arrived, she had barricaded herself in her bedroom and threatened to kill herself with arsenic if he didn't release her from the marriage.

Less than six months later, her husband was dead. Marie had ordered arsenic from an apothecary a few days before she sent her husband a cake in the mail, a cake that he seemed to become ill immediately after eating. and Marie had procured arsenic again once her husband was back home. She had sent Charles's clerk, Denny Barbier, to get a sizable amount of arsenic, allegedly to kill the rats that still ran about their home. When the investigators had arrived after Charles's death, they found a bag of arsenic buried in the garden, seemingly hidden away from private eyes.

A servant told the magistrate that Marie LaFarge had told him to bury it on her account, so law enforcement wouldn't be able to find it, presumably. And the friend of the family who worked as a housekeeper, Mademoiselle Braun, had seen Marie LaFarge putting white powder into broth that she was preparing for Charles. And then there was the case of the missing jewelry. Years before Charles' death, back when Marie was still unmarried, she had visited a friend of hers, the Vicomtesse de Lyotou. Not long after the visit, the Vycomptess noticed that some of her diamonds were missing. Though she and her husband didn't have Marie investigated, they were always suspicious, and once news of this massive murder trial hit newspapers,

the vicomte reached out to investigators and let them know that perhaps Marie's room should be searched for diamonds. And what should they have found right in Marie's room but those very jewels? Of course, stealing jewels is unrelated to the possible murder of one's husband, but it painted a damning picture of an amoral woman who would steal and possibly even murder out of resentment for the fact that her lot in life had led her to marriage with a broke iron master. But of course, with regards to the actual murder, when Marie's case was going to trial, there was one piece of evidence more damning than anything else. Investigators on the site had tested Charles's body for arsenic. They tested the cup of broth, Madam

Ms. Elbrun had put aside, and they tested the little white box that Marie LaFarge had claimed contained gum Arabic. They had determined arsenic was present. Sure, they, the local men in Breve, had not been expert forensic chemists, and they hadn't used the more sophisticated march test, and yes, a tube had broken. But they had found arsenic, and that had to me. And that had to mean something. But did it? At the trial, Marie LaFarge's defense counsel cleared his throat one morning in court and read out a letter that had come directly from Paris. There was a rarefied air around the letter. People knew it was important. It was from a man who was nothing short of a scientific celebrity.

Mathieu Orphila was the dean of the Paris medical faculty, and he served on a number of influential committees. He edited important medical journals and, less important but still interesting, he had a beautiful singing voice and would often hold musical salons that were considered centers of culture. The defense counsel began to read the letter that Orphila had sent to court. You ask me, he wrote,

if it is sufficient proof of the present of arsenic and the digestive organs, if the liquor produced by boiling them in distilled water, yield, when treated with sulfurated hydrogen, a yellow precipitate, he was describing the old method, the non-marsh method for finding arsenic. I answer, no, he said.

Orphila referenced a pre-oenix, previous case, where the yellow precipitate that is so often mistaken for arsenic, had been something completely innocuous. The test that those men had done in Breve, Orphilac included, was completely meaningless. In 1840, an English doctor writing about the case reached the same verdict, stating, no weight can be attached to the report of the Breve Commission, the members of which evidenced the grossest ignorance of the truths known to the merest Tiro in legal medicine. They had found arsenic, maybe, sure, but factoring in the old unreliable method and the broken tube, the entire thing was bunk. And if there was no proof that Charles LaFarge had actually

been poisoned with arsenic, then there was only circumstantial evidence of a woman who might have been unhappy in her brief marriage, but wasn't a murderer. And so those were the circumstances that led to the judge ordering a second examination of Charles Lafarge's body. This time, experts from Limoges would take whatever samples they could from the decomposed corpse, use their spoons to scoop it into jars, and use the marsh test, which could detect each. even the tiniest trace of arsenic. By this time, the trial had become a sensation. If you were imagining something out of the musical Chicago,

where an accused murderous becomes an object of tabloid celebrity, you wouldn't be far off. People crowded into the courtroom to get a glimpse of the young widow, dressed all in black, who was known to swoon and to require smelling salts at various points, during the proceedings. As the trial went on, Marie LaFarge would begin to be carried into court on a settee so delicate were her sensibilities. And so finally, with anticipation as high as it possibly could be, the L'Amage Commission issued their report. Using the incredibly

scientific marsh test, they found no arsenic in Charles. Lafarge's body. Marie and her counsel both burst into tears. She was vindicated. At least for now. With the scientific consensus that Marie Lafarge was actually innocent, the events of the preceding year began to tell a slightly different story. Sure, Marie had been unhappy when she had arrived at her husband's crumbling estate to find that he had lied about his financial situation. Wouldn't you be? Yes, she had threatened suicide that night, but she had been overwhelmed, foolish, embarrassed, childish. Her husband Charles had responded kindly, and from that point on, he and Marie began to get along. It was at least amiable, something that slowly developed over the

weeks into friendship and then maybe even devotion. Of course, Marie's mother-in-law was suspicious and resentful of her from the start. Marie wrote in her memoirs that when Charles was away, he would write sweet love notes to Marie in his letters home. For a time, it was an evening tradition that Marie would read Charles's letters out loud, but she noticed how her mother-in-law stiffened and bristled when she read anything sweet or romantic. Marie stopped reading those parts. The fact that Charles had gotten sick after eating cakes they sent, well, Marie's mother-in-law had baked those cakes.

She was the only one in the family who baked the desserts. And if the cakes had been replaced or tampered with by the time they reached Charles in Paris, there was no evidence it was Marie who did that. It could have been anyone at that point. In fact, it seems unlikely Marie would have poisoned the cakes at all because she wrote in her letter to Charles that he should invite her favorite sister over while he was in Paris, where it seems really likely that she could have shared the cake.

You don't want to suggest your favorite sister go over to a house where poisoned cake is lying around. As for ordering all of her, arsenic. Arsenic was used as rat poison, and Le Glendier, their home, was full of rats. They scampered everywhere, ate Marie's clothes. It's completely reasonable that Marie would try to make it so that the home that she lived in might be slightly improved. And then when Charles came home, ill and bedridden, the rats were bothersome. They made noise and kept it. They made noise and kept it. Charles up when he needed bed rest. If Marie had actually planned on poisoning her husband with the

arsenic, then why would she have told him about every step she was taking to get arsenic and get rid of the rats? She told him when she sent his clerk, Denny Barbier, to get the arsenic, and she showed Charles how much had come when Barbier had returned. There was nothing sneaky about it. Well, what about the arsenic that was buried in the yard when the investigators came. In Marie's memoir, she says a young servant panicked by the thought of either Marie or anyone else in the household being accused of arsenic poisoning, had buried it without telling Marie. When the investigators interrogated the servant boy, they had intimidated him. They had threatened him with the scaffold unless he told them that he had buried the arsenic on Marie's orders. By then, the investigation had already set its sights

firmly on Marie, who had been accused by Charles' suspicious family members who hated her from the start. But sometimes people get cholera. Sometimes people die of cholera. The matter of the vicomtesse's missing diamonds was a little more complicated. But even then, Marie had an explanation. You see, when the investigators were given the tip and arrived to search Marie's rooms for the jewels, well, they hadn't actually needed to search at all. Marie LaFarche told them outright. Yes, she did have the Vecomtesse's diamonds and told them exactly where they were.

She hadn't stolen the diamonds from her friend. Her friend had given them to her to sell, to help. to help her friend out of a tricky financial situation. The Vecomtesse was being blackmailed by an ex-lover, and she had asked Marie to secretly sell some of her diamonds to pay him off. The V-comptess had not expected her husband to even notice that the jewels were gone. In the meantime, Marie kept the diamonds safe in her room while she figured out what to do with them.

When Marie was arrested for the alleged jewel robbery, she wrote to her friend, May God never visit upon you the evil you have done to me. Alas, I know you are really good, but weak. You have told yourself that I am likely to be convicted of an atrocious crime. I may as well take the blame of one which is only infamous. I keep our secret. I left my honor in your hands, and you have not chosen to absolve me. The story is a little far-fetched, I admit.

While waiting for the murder trial to proceed, Marie was actually tried and found guilty for stealing the jewels. In the end, it was her word against her friends, and the vicomtesse maintained that there had been no ruinous blackmail plot. But even if Marie was guilty of stealing her friend's diamonds, as Marie had pointed out in her letter, that crime was merely infamous as opposed to the atrocious crime of murder. And the chemists came back with the Marsh Test and absolved Marie LaFarge of murder. There was no arsenic in Charles LaFarge's body.

And so no matter how likely a suspect Marie LaFarge's body, and so no matter how likely a suspect Marie LaFarge's was, it was going to be very difficult for a jury to convict her. Still, the prosecution was convinced that Marie LaFarge was a murderess, and they were determined to do everything they could to win their case, even if the defense was already doing a metaphorical victory lap after the test results. Wait a moment, the prosecution said. There was one test that said there was arsenic, and another that said there wasn't. That's not very definitive at all.

Sure, the Limoge Commission had used the brand-new Marsh Test, but it was famously tricky, and they had done it for the first time. There's no guarantee that they did it right. The prosecution had an idea, a Hail Mary, a tiebreaker test done by none other than the celebrity of the French chemistry world, Matu Orfila himself. By this point, there was nothing left of poor Charles Lafarge's body, but something I read described as a milkshake-like preparation of organ mash.

But Orphila was the expert. If anyone in France could do the Marsh Test and do it absolutely correctly, it was him. Orphalot was a distinguished-looking man, with a bald head and fuzzy tufts of hair circling his temples, Contemporary drawings of him highlight his small, sharp nose and thin, serious lips. When Orphila entered the courtroom, I imagine his celebrity brought the room to a hush. The undisputed expert on arsenic poisoning stood before the judge and the jury. He had tested the remains of Charles Lafarge. All the organs that his team had managed to extract.

from the decomposing corpse. They had done the Marsh Test and done it correctly. Before Orphila offered his conclusion as to the fate of Charles Lafarge, he gave the court some context. Over years of experimentation, he had determined that human bones contain trace amounts of arsenic, and that sometimes arsenic can also be found leached from the soil. And so he had been extraordinarily careful in his analysis of Charles Lafarge's body to ensure that his samples taken from the organs were unspoiled and did not include any bone or soil. So, what was the conclusion? Arsenic. Matu Orphila had found arsenic in Charles Lafarge's organs. Half a milligram, an amount so tiny it could have only ever been detected using the Marsh test.

The courtroom erupted. The defense scrambled and tried to call one of Orfila's rivals, a man named Francois Vincent Respale, to the courtroom to offer a counter-analysis. But Respale didn't make it in time. He arrived at the court four hours after the jury had reached its verdict. Orphila's testimony sealed Marie LaFarge's face. and she was found guilty of the murder of her husband and sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor,

though the labor would later be commuted. Marie LaFarge, 24 years old, would spend the next 12 years of her life in prison. In 1852, she became ill with tuberculosis, and she was released from prison on the orders of Napoleon III. she died a few months later. That was forensic toxicology in action. Orphila had found arsenic and so it meant that Marie LaFarge was guilty.

But did it? And did Orfeela actually find evidence that Charles LaFarge was poisoned? The question was a little more complicated than it had appeared that day in the courtroom. The chemist, Francois Raspel, possibly guilty over arriving at court a few hours too late to offer his own testimony, would spend years publicly challenging Orfila and criticizing both his methods and his results. Orphila had claimed he found half a milligram of arsenic in Charles Lafarge's remains. Respal determined that amount to be a hundredth of a milligram.

And there were a number of points in Orphila's testing where a small amount of, of arsenic might have snuck in. For Orphila's final test, the one where he had found the arsenic, he had sent one of his assistants to a neighboring town to get some reagent. That reagent hadn't been tested for arsenic before it was used in the experiment, and it's conceivable that it was contaminated. As for Orphila's claim that human bones naturally contain arsenic? Well, they don't, actually. We know that now. And the fact that Orfila believed that they did indicates that there was some point in his earlier testing procedure where phantom arsenic was able to sneak in. Two years after Marie LaFarge was found guilty, another woman, Madame Lacoste was accused of murder by arsenic.

Of course, the famous Marie LaFarge case was the closest point of comparison. and the court invited a chemist named Monsieur Chevalier to testify. Chevalier had been one of two of Orfila's assistance during the Lafarge investigation. For this new trial, a juryman asked Chevalier, Was the quantity of arsenic found by you in this case, equal to that which served as a ground for conviction in the Lafarge case? Chevalier thought for a while, and then answered extremely carefully.

I cannot reply to a question so put, he said finally. What was said to be the poison found in the body of Lafarge was imponderable. It was so infinitesimal that it could not fulfill the conditions of a standard comparison when we use words more or less. The jury was dumbfounded. They declared Madame Lacoste, innocent. Marie LaFarge heard the news of Madame Lacost's exoneration while she was still in prison.

Allegedly, Marie remarked, My ghost has saved her. Whether or not Marie LaFarge actually was guilty of murdering her husband, and whether or not Charles LaFarge was even poisoned with arsenic, are both mysteries that, barring new information or a historian with Sherlock Holmesian powers of deductive reasoning will probably elude us. But in the aftermath of the trial and in recent years, a number of theories emerged. The theory I find interesting, although, again, not necessarily convincing beyond a reasonable doubt,

but interesting, is that Charles Lafarge actually was poisoned, but by his clerk, Denny Barbier. According to some sources, Charles Lafarge, our victim, had been somewhat of a more nefarious character than he had been made out to be in the wake of his death. Some claim that Lafarge wasn't merely an iron master who fell into debts, but that he was also a forger, as in he used forged bills of exchange

in order to procure advances. His right-hand man in that endeavor was Denny Barbier, according to one unverified claim when Barbier heard that Charles was close to death, he was heard saying, Now I shall be master here. If he had been working on shady dealings with his boss and was nervous that those crimes might be revealed,

it's plausible he had a motive to do away with Charles Lafarge, especially when he imagined he might be the one to, take over Charles's business after he died. Barbier also had access to all of Charles's food and drink, and he had been the one who procured the arsenic that Marie had asked for to kill the rats. Barbier easily could have kept some or all of it for himself and given Marie something harmless in its place. The Edinburgh Review published an examination in 1842 two years after the trial, laying out the case against Barbier. According to them, Dennis Barbier, quote,

lived by forgery and was the accomplice of Lafarge in some very shady transactions, by which that unhappy man sought to cover his insolvency. Barbier had also conceived a violent hatred against Madame Lafarge as her presence was likely to hinder his nefarious practices and weaken his hold over his companion in crime. end quote. They continue to explain that Barbier

had unrestricted access to everywhere in the house that arsenic was found. If Dennis Barbier committed this foul crime, they concluded, he escaped without any punishment, save that which would be inflicted by an outraged conscience. In the end, the Marsh Test,

exact as it might have been, simply couldn't tell us everything. That's the story of Marie LaFarge, but keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more about how the legacy of science in courtrooms continues to affect us today. What's up, everyone? I'm Ego Wodeham. My next guest, you know from Stepbrothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had a line. with them one day and I was like and dad I think I want to really give this a shot I don't know what that means but I just know the groundlings I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent he said if it was based solely on talent I wouldn't worry about you

which is really sweet yeah he goes but there's so much luck involved and he's like just give it a shot he goes but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore it's okay to quit if you saw it written down It would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that.

There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell.

Woo. Woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with him one day. And I was like, and Dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come look for up and coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you.

Which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there.

Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2004, USA Today reported on a phenomenon that seemed to be affecting the ways juries rendered their verdicts. It's called the CSI effect, and according to researchers, what was happening was that the average person doing jury duty started watching a lot more TV, specifically a lot more crime TV like CSI. And in shows like CSI, DNA and other forensic evidence is ubiquitous and airtight.

The CSI effect, then, is the alleged phenomenon that jurors expect forensic evidence in any trial. And when it's not present, either because it wasn't available or prosecutors thought it wasn't necessary, jurors are more likely to acquit, even when there's plenty of other compelling evidence that someone committed a crime. The CSI effect has definitely informed the way that legal professionals today build their cases, but it's also just as possible that watching crime television shows might be more responsible for jurors wanting to convict more often. Professor Tom Tyler at NYU argues that television shows offer stories of catharsis and closure, of justice being done, which jurors would try to replicate with a conviction.

Tyler suggests that increased rates of acquittal might have to do not with police on television, but with the public's decreasing confidence in police in the real world. Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio, and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is created and hosted by me, Dana Sports, with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman.

The show is edited and produced by Noami Griffin and Rima Il Kali, with supervising producer Josh Thane and executive producers Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What's up, everyone? I'm Ego Vodam.

My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot. But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.

Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast, guaranteed human.