FULL TEXT: Marie Emilie Raymond, 63, spends her days reading the Bible and her 12 prayer books, but police think shepoisoned two women and may have committed several other murders.
In a guarded hospital ward at Tarbes, high among the Pryenees mountains, the dumpy spinster continues her devotions from dawn far into the night.
Yet a couple of weeks ago she told Dr. John Ueberschlag, director of a nearby psychiatric hospital: “I love looking at dying people. The last smile on a dying face gives me a great thrill.”
Marie, who even in warm weather wears four pullovers and six petticoats under her woollen skirt, was a night orderly in an old folks’ home at the village of Galan.
Police say that when Marie was arrested she had £100 in Francs pinned inside her bodice and bottles of mole and moose poison in her room.
She also had a rake because, “I love raking freshly filled graves.”
~ ACCURATE FORECASTS
Witnesses from the old folks’ home have testified that Marie would stop passing nurses and murmur: “The dying, they’re so inspiring.”
Sister Therese, head of the home, first reported Marie to the police, after noting that the old spinster was uncannily accurate in forecasting death.
“He will die to-night,” she would say, pointing to a patient. He usually did.
Particularly, Sister Therese told of Mme. Anna Galy, who had appeared to be in normal health until one day she became very sick while in Marie’s charge.
That night Marie ran to Sister Therese’s room, crying:
“Mme. Galy is dying. We need the priest.”
Mme. Galy was in agony and died two days later.
Marie raised a similar alarm within a few days, but this time the patient recovered.
But Sister Therese was perturbed and transferred Marie to another part of the home.
Ten days later another of Marie’s charges, Mine. Berthe Peyronnec, who had been in good health, asked for a glass of wine.
Almost at once Marie raised the alarm again. “Mme. Peyronnec is dying.” In two hours she was dead.
Sister Therese went to Dr. Ueberschlag, who drew from Marie a confession of her fascination with death.
Marie was charged with the murder of Mme. Galy and Peyronnec, then transferred from jail to hospital for fear of pneumonia.
Now police are investigating the sudden violent sicknesses that struck other patients in Marie’s care and also the deaths of several priests in whose homes Marie worked.
[“Marie Pointed Finger Of Death At Patients,” Charleville Times (Australia), May 29, 1952, p. 5]
