She Stands Accused | Page 9

chaff by
frequenters of the taberna. Few people in the day-time, either men or
women, would pass the house if 'Fina happened to be showing without
stopping to have a word with her. She was not at all gentle in manner,
but children ran to her. And yet, without being enormously fat, 'Fina
must have weighed close on fifteen stone. She had forearms and biceps
like a coal-heaver's. She was black-haired, heavy-browed, squish-nosed,
moled, and swarthy, and she had a beard and moustache far beyond the
stage of incipiency. Yet those two British seamen, fairly decent men,
neither drunk nor brutish, could not have been more attracted had 'Fina
had the beauty of the Mona Lisa herself. I may add that there were

other women handy and that the seamen knew of them.
This in parenthesis, I hope not inappropriately.
Where the selected victim, or victims, is, or are, feeble-bodied you will
frequently find the murderess using physical means to her end. Sarah
Malcolm, whose case will form one of the chief features of this volume,
is an instance in point. Marguerite Diblanc, who strangled Mme Reil in
the latter's house in Park Lane on a day in April 1871, is another.
Amelia Dyer, the baby-farmer, also strangled her charges. Elizabeth
Brownrigg (1767) beat the feeble Mary Clifford to death. I do not know
that great physical difference existed to the advantage of the murderess
between her and her older victim, Mrs Phoebe Hogg, who, with her
baby, was done to death by Mrs Pearcy in October 1890, but the fact
that Mrs Hogg had been battered about the head, and that the head had
been almost severed from the body, would seem to indicate that the
murderess was the stronger of the two women. The case of Belle
Gunness (treated by Mr George Dilnot in his Rogues March[1]) might
be cited. Fat, gross-featured, far from attractive though she was, her
victims were all men who had married or had wanted to marry her. Mr
Dilnot says these victims ``almost certainly numbered more than a
hundred.'' She murdered for money, using chloral to stupefy, and an axe
for the actual killing. She herself was slain and burned, with her three
children, by a male accomplice whom she was planning to dispose of,
he having arrived at the point of knowing too much. 1907 was the date
of her death at La Porte, U.S.A.
[1] Bles, 1934.

It occurs when the female killer happens to be dramatical-minded that
she will use a pistol. Mme Weissmann-Bessarabo, who, with her
daughter, shot her husband in Paris (August 1920), is of this kind. She
and the daughter, Paule-Jacques, seem to have seen themselves as wild,
wild women from the Mexico where they had sometime lived, and
were always flourishing revolvers.
I would say that the use of poison so much by women murderers has
reason, first, in the lack of physique for violent methods, but I would
put alongside that reason this other, that women poisoners usually have
had a handy proximity to their victims. They have had contact with
their victims in an attendant capacity. I have a suspicion, moreover, that

a good number of women poisoners actually chose the medium as THE
KINDEST WAY. Women, and I might add not a few men, who would
be terribly shocked by sight or news of a quick but violent death, can
contemplate with relative placidity a lingering and painful fatal illness.
Propose to a woman the destruction of a mangy stray cat or of an
incurably diseased dog by means of a clean, well-placed shot, and the
chances are that she will shudder. But--no lethal chamber being
available--suggest poison, albeit unspecified, and the method will more
readily commend itself. This among women with no murderous
instincts whatever.
I have a fancy also that in some cases of murder by poison, not only by
women, the murderer has been able to dramatize herself or himself
ahead as a tender, noble, and self-sacrificing attendant upon the victim.
No need here, I think, to number the cases where the ministrations of
murderers to their victims have aroused the almost tearful admiration of
beholders.
I shall say nothing of the secrecy of the poison method, of the chance
which still exists, in spite of modern diagnosis, that the illness induced
by it will pass for one arising from natural causes. This is ground
traversed so often that its features are as familiar as those of one's own
house door. Nor shall I say anything of the ease with which, even in
these days, the favourite poison of the woman murderer, arsenic, can be
obtained in one form or another.
One hears and reads, however, a great deal about the sense of power
which gradually steals upon the poisoner. It