Edmond de la Pommerais

Background

Edmond de la Pommerais presented himself as a count and married a woman from a family of means, Mademoiselle Dubiczy. He retained a mistress, a young widow named Séraphine de Pauw, after Pommerais had treated Séraphine’s ill husband. Pommerais was described as a spendthrift and gambler and was said to have bankrupted his wife’s estate. He was also described as having poisoned his wife’s mother to get the inheritance.

Séraphine de Pauw had a large life insurance policy in which Pommerais was the beneficiary. Pommerais was described as being in financial trouble at the time and as having been inspired by the failure to make a fortune with homeopathy to take a more sinister route to wealth.

Séraphine de Pauw confided to her sister that her “illness” was supposed to have been a pretense, part of an elaborate scheme to defraud the insurance company and enrich both Séraphine and her lover. The sister believed the scheme was a deception and that Pommerais had inserted himself into Séraphine’s will for his own purposes.

The offence

Pommerais persuaded Séraphine de Pauw to fake an illness in order to collect an insurance settlement, and to write a letter describing her phony problems. After that, he poisoned her with digitalis/digitalin.

Séraphine de Pauw died within hours, after one day she mysteriously fell ill.

Investigation

An anonymous note alerted police to foul play. The forensic pathologist Professor Ambroise Tardieu suspected poisoning from the victim’s odd symptoms, especially her racing heart. Tardieu injected several frogs with the extract he had obtained using the Stas method, as well as with a standard solution of digitalin/digitalis. The reactions from those frogs injected with the standard and those injected with the extract were exactly the same.

On the suspicion of poisoning, Tardieu requested that Séraphine’s body be exhumed. Testing for arsenic and antimony was negative. Tardieu faced the possibility that a poison had been used for which there was no test.

Tardieu performed further experiments based on the racing heart symptom. He took an extract from the victim’s organs and injected it into a large dog; after a few hours the animal vomited, lay down, and for the next 12 hours showed symptoms of a racing heart, but the animal survived.

Investigators also found poisons and drugs among Pommerais’s remedies, including digitalin for regulating the heart, which in high doses could be lethal. The “count” had purchased digitalin not long before the victim died, and investigators said it was clear that he had used up a considerable amount. In love letters that Séraphine had written, she mentioned taking this “remedy” for “stimulation.” Tardieu then injected the dog with digitalin from Pommerais’s stock; this time, the animal died from heart paralysis.

Tardieu tested traces of vomit from the victim’s room. Using three frogs, he conducted a test: one control, one receiving a pure extract of digitalin, and the other receiving an extract made from the vomit. The frog test subjects receiving the pure extract and the vomit extract both showed the same symptoms and both died in half an hour, while the control showed no symptoms. Over the course of 2 weeks, Tardieu repeated the experiment several times to be certain.

Tardieu also took specimens from floorboards from the victim’s room on which she had not vomited so as to deflect any suggestion that the floorboards themselves contained a toxic substance. This extract had no effect on the frogs.

Trial

The celebrated trial began in the spring of 1864. The defense attorney questioned Tardieu’s methods from every angle, focusing specifically on the lack of digitalin in Madame de Pauw’s body tissues and claiming it was ludicrous to compare the reactions of a frog with a human being.

Tardieu’s decision to extract the poison from the vomit won the day, trumping arguments about the lack of presence of digitalin in the body. The evidence held up in court, and the suspicious circumstances were described as giving further weight to the prosecution’s case.

Pommerais was convicted of murder.

Sentencing

Pommerais was executed.

Outcome

Pommerais was convicted of murder and executed.

Pommerais was convicted on June 9, 1864.

Other details

The murder was described as the murder of the young French widow, Madame de Pauw, whose alleged murderer was the homeopathic doctor Couty de la Pommerais, described as her lover.

Investigators supervised testing for arsenic and antimony and it was negative. Traces of vomit were scraped from the victim’s room. Tardieu supervised the testing and used the Stas method to obtain an extract.

A forensically significant part of the case was the method used to demonstrate digitalin through frog reactions and the Stas method extract. Tardieu’s logical, patient approach and his determination to support his intuitions with firm and repeatable methodology were described as becoming a standard for future forensic scientists.