Radio play »The Poison Woman« | The Greed of the Fine Lady

Before I write a new radio play, I always go through a phase of introspection: Why am I writing this text? So why another crime radio play? Because I'm writing about real cases and real people—and because for years I've been alienated from anything fictional, which is why I'm writing more and more radio features and less and less prose.

And why this text, a crime radio play about a French female poisoner? Because so far, I've always had male protagonists in my crime radio plays about historical cases, most recently Fritz Haarmann in my radio play "Vampire Haarmann." I want to challenge the cliché that women are the worse murderers.

I became aware of the French poisoner Marie Besnard by chance. My research into her is now proceeding explosively: Since books about her case are only available in French, and my school-aged French isn't very robust, the internet is becoming my main research source. I'm now immersing myself in this world, and there you'll find countless meticulous portraits of Marie Besnard on the websites of crime podcasters and nerds, historical newspaper articles about her case from German, English, and French publications, film footage in the German and French national film databases, photographs from the three trials against her, even an entire pulp novel about her case.

Everyone in the Vienne department and throughout France is now talking about the “poison woman,” the “black widow of Loudun,” the “queen of poisoners.”

I then bring the case into a rough form, recount it chronologically, and enrich it with initial aesthetic ideas. Before doing so, I delve into the fascinating subject of female criminality and poisoning. I'm helped by the French criminologist Catherine Ménabé, who, in her paper "La violence des femmes judiciarisées," published in 2021 in the "Revue québécoise de psychologie," examines in detail the extent of women's homicidal capacity. As she describes, while the number of convicted female violent offenders is lower than that of convicted male violent offenders, their proportion compared to convicted female offenders of nonviolent offenses is identical to that of men, and their violent offenses are just as diverse: they include murder, intentional violence, and even sexual violence.

Poisonings are particularly quiet, meticulously planned, very efficient and insidious murders that have been carried out throughout human history – by both men and women.

Léon and Marie Besnard, farmers and pensioners in the small town of Loudun, located in the heart of France near the Vienne River, married in August 1929. When two of Léon's great-aunts died in 1938, his parents inherited most of their substantial fortune, even though one of them, Louise Lecomte, had generously left her great-nephew Léon in her will shortly before her death. Interestingly, traces of arsenic were later found in Louise's body. This division of assets was humiliating for the young couple, who, unlike Léon's parents, lived in modest circumstances.

Then, more deaths occurred in their circle: in 1939, a neighbor of the Besnards, the pastry chef Toussaint Rivet, died, and in May 1940, Marie's father, Pierre Davaillaud, died. Again, traces of arsenic were later discovered in their bodies. In September 1940, Léon's grandmother suddenly died, and he was now the sole heir. And shortly after the Besnards invited Léon's parents to live with them that autumn, his father also died, allegedly from eating a poisonous mushroom. The couple inherited another 227,000 francs.

Three months later, Léon's mother is also dead; they inherit another six-figure sum, and for the first time, the neighbors are talking about a family curse. Their parents' inheritance was logically divided between Léon and his sister Lucie. Unsurprisingly, Lucie, who had recently become so wealthy, dies shortly thereafter in March 1941. She is found hanged in the attic, which somehow seems out of character for the devout Catholic.

There was no peace after that, and in May 1941, the next poisonings occurred: Pauline and Virginie Lallerone, two cousins ​​who had sought refuge from the German troops with their relatives, died within a week of each other after making Marie their sole heir. Both, she claims, had accidentally consumed bleaching powder. The couple's financial needs were far from satisfied: Blanche Rivet, the wife of the poisoned pastry chef, whom they had taken in as a lodger after his death, died in December 1941, having previously transferred her house to the Besnards in exchange for a small annuity.

When Marie, who remains childless, falls in love in 1947 with the former German prisoner of war Alfred Dietz, who works as a laborer in Léon's rope factory, an attractive man from Hamburg whom Marie affectionately calls Ady, her own husband becomes the next victim of the poison woman that same year.

Now, however, it's too late for Marie. Shortly before his death, Léon expressed the terrible suspicion to Madame Pintou, the postmistress of Loudun, that his wife might have poisoned him. After Madame Pintou reported herself to the police, an investigation into the mysterious deaths in Marie Besnard's circle was launched.

During these investigations, her mother, who had lived in the Besnards' house for nine years, died in January 1949. However, a flu epidemic was raging in Loudun, leading the doctor to assume the 87-year-old died of natural causes. This Marie-Louise Davaillaud was the 13th and final victim of the series of murders that began with Auguste Antigny in 1927 and claimed the lives of twelve more people by 1949, with intervals of eleven and six years, respectively.

Everyone in the Vienne department and throughout France is now talking about the "poison woman," the "black widow of Loudun," the "queen of poisoners," and—because the woman always appears at her trial wearing a black lace mantilla over her head and shoulders and expresses herself very elegantly—the "fine lady from Loudun."

But the first trial against her in 1952 in Poitiers came to nothing: There were no witnesses to the crimes, no one saw Marie Besnard buying the arsenic, and none of the dead had typical symptoms of arsenic poisoning before their deaths. The defendant, now extremely wealthy, also hired four defense attorneys, including a top lawyer from Paris, who successfully sowed doubts about the accuracy of the toxicology reports – she was, in fact, not convicted of any of the murders.

In 1954, at the second trial in Bordeaux, the same picture unfolded: In the end, the court only demanded a new toxicological report and released Marie until a third, decisive trial on bail of 1.2 million francs, which she could easily raise.

The third trial began in November 1961, and nuclear physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie was even appointed as an expert witness for the prosecution. He was able to prove that the hair of the Loudun victims contained lethal amounts of arsenic. But star attorney Gautrat and his colleagues once again managed to discredit this expert opinion. Nine years after the first trial began, in December 1961, Marie Besnard was acquitted of twelve counts of poisoning due to a lack of evidence – so little arsenic had been found in the remains of Léon's grandmother that it hadn't been enough to justify a murder charge.

My true-crime radio play "The Poison Woman" recounts this bizarre series of murders, one of France's most famous criminal cases, through radio. It explores the psyche of a female perpetrator, the titular Poison Woman, Marie Besnard. It also paints a moral picture of rural France, where tradition, complex inheritance, agriculture, crafts, village life, wine, food, and gossip dominate everyday life, and where the horrors of World War II are just beginning to shake off. To this day, Besnard remains one of the world's most notorious serial killers.

Broadcast of "Die Giftfrau": June 21, 7:04 p.m., SWR Kultur; also available in the ARD audio library.