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I have been listening to the Martha's Vineyard Beach and Book Club, which actually Elena recommended to me.
She did not listen to it, but she said, girl, this title sounds so you.
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Visit audible.com slash morbid. I am absolutely obsessed with a sweet treat after dinner, and my favorite sweet treat right now is my mochi.
It's mine, not yours. Just kidding. You can have some too.
This is a cool, creamy scoop of ice cream wrapped in a soft, chewy dough.
It's like a sweet little ice cream dumpling or ravioli.
I'm obsessed. It's pillowy. It's satisfying.
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My mochi is only around 70 calories per piece, which like, hello, that's amazing.
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Hey weirdos, I'm Ash. And I'm Elena. And this is always and will forever be Morbid.
Wow, that was intense. You're welcome. I liked it.
Yeah. Yeah. You know what? I do thank you.
Yeah, I figured. Thank you for that marvelous introduction.
I love it. Still in spooky season forever and always.
Sorry, Winnie. So here we are. We got another true crime episode coming at you.
Coming at you live from the pod lab except prerecorded.
There you go. It is not live. But maybe we'll have more of those next year.
Oh. Who knows? So today we are going to talk to, nope, we're not going to talk to him.
We're going to talk about him. You do not want to talk to him.
I already know I don't. Yeah. In fact, if this man comes up to you and says, listen, I have this amazing employment position in a fucking castle and it's going to pay you 300 or 200 maybe in 50 francs.
And you're going to get room and board. Doubt it.
And you're going to be able to live in a fucking castle.
No. Say no. No. Don't talk to him. Say no, no, no.
Don't go on a journey with him. Say no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Exactly. He is called, well, his real name is Martin du Moyard, and he is known as the French maid killer.
Oh. Yes. Yes. Or the monster of Ayn. Oh, I like that better.
Yeah, I always like the monster of. Yeah, yeah, he sounds like a monster already.
He is indeed a monster. Monster. So let's talk about Martin du Moyard, shall we?
We shall. He is the son of Pierre de Mola.
I hope it's de Mola. I think it's de Mola.
I like that much better. And Marie-Joseph Ray.
Gorgeous. This is going to be... A real experience, everybody.
I am not French. Yeah, we're in a place of France lately.
We certainly are. We're not meaning to be.
It just kind of happens. No, sometimes we do that with each other, though.
Yeah, like the vibes just make sense and we don't even realize it.
The vibes just correlate. So Martin du Maillard had a wild beginning.
Like his childhood was a wild, wild time.
The wild, wild west. And it kind of hinted at the kind of life he would lead up to his death, pretty much.
Yeah. So Pierre was a noble from Pest, Hungary, and his family had lost their status and power when the Austrian Empire was formed, and he was determined to gain it back by anything, including attempting to assassinate the emperor, Frank Joseph.
Okay. So that's bad. So he did this with a large group of rebels, and most of them were actually caught and executed, usually by dismemberment and other really intense and really gruesome methods of torture and death.
Because if you're involved in a plot to try to kill the emperor, that's one of the worst things you can do.
He, however, made his way across several states and all the way to...
Southeast France. Ooh. So along the way, he spent all of his money on bribes just to keep himself alive.
It had taken a year to finally arrive there, and when he did, he was poor.
He had nothing. He went from a noble to now on the run with nothing.
Damn. And he changed his last name to Dumoyard to maintain his anonymity, and with his noble education, he was actually really able to excel in business.
So although he still found himself now among the peasant class, he was still kind of like he could teach everybody things and he liked that.
So he met and eventually married Marie Joseph Ray, which is Dumayard's mom.
And they were happy by all accounts. And everyone saw them as a couple who truly seemed to enjoy each other.
They had their firstborn son, Martin, within a year in 1810 and were blissful.
They moved to Danube, and everyone seemed to love them.
They were a cute little family. Everyone thought Martin was really cute when he was born.
They seemed to dote on him. But when Martin was three, they had a second son, Raymond.
Right. And the village kind of doted more on Raymond than on Martin at this point.
And Martin became, like, slightly neglected in attention, at least.
And, you know, a new baby is fun and adorable, and Martin was kind of turning into this, like, troublemaking toddler.
He was screaming for attention, be it negative or positive.
That's sad. But he was also kind of... already getting into the life he would later live.
As a toddler? He was stealing things at three.
What? And he was getting into fights with other children, like physical fights.
He was like a very angry kid. Shit was wild back then.
Toddlers were just like stealing your belongings and squaring up to get ready to punch you in the face.
That's what was happening. I'm just picturing your youngest and I'm like stealing things and squaring up.
Punching someone in the face and stealing their car.
Like, what the hell? Grand theft auto. Yeah.
And Martin was a big kid, too. He became a big adult and he was a big kid.
So this didn't help things because he was turning into this like kind of like oaf of a kid that was just like. beating on people and stealing things.
Oh, my. So people started kind of not liking him around and kind of thought of him as a little bully.
They're like, hey, don't invite your three-year-old.
Leave that motherfucker at home tonight.
Then when he was like three or four years old, and this is really sad, Raymond got sick.
Oh. And he ended up passing away eventually.
Was it Martin's fault? I don't know, but the family was devastated, including Martin, by all accounts.
And everyone seemed to really find sympathy for him during this time, like the villagers kind of rallied around him.
But when the dust had settled, they began doing something really cruel.
So once Martin turned back to his troublesome ways, because once he had gotten through the beginning stages of grief, he went right back into stealing shit and beating people up.
So whenever he would get in trouble, they would call him Raymond as a way of punishing him. uh don't you love how like psychological torture was a punishment way back when they would punish this toddler by calling him his dead little brother's name yeah that's on some weird shit do a study on these assholes please like get this whole village do a study on it who the hell thought that was cool call someone like my god everybody oh that makes me sad so it bummed him out and when Martin was four there was also political upheaval all around him which ended in real tragedy for his family and when I say real tragedy I mean like the most tragedy so at this time Napoleon was attempting to unite Italy so that they could be a bigger power and they could aid France and stopping the expansion around them but the Austrian Empire was also invading to stop this from happening and Now, with the Austrian Empire in France, Pierre is freaking the fuck out.
Because remember, he ran away from Hungary because he tried to kill the emperor.
Oh, yeah. Like, this is not good. Don't forget that key piece of information.
Yeah, so he's been living, like, relatively normal life.
Like, obviously a tragic death of his youngest child through no one's fault.
But, like, he's been living this quiet life normally.
But he decides to pack up his family and decides they need to head to Italy.
Okay. And I think it's Padua, Italy. I hope I'm saying that right.
But when they reached the border, the Austrians recognized him from a painting.
Because remember, he was noble before. Oh, shit.
And he was caught. So the whole family was thrown in jail together.
And since it was Pierre who had committed the crimes, they released Martin and his mother, but they had nowhere to go.
Yeah. Yeah. And after a month of staying in jail, they actually brought one of Pierre's old servants from Hungary into jail to identify him in person and say that is him.
So this is where it gets really rough. He was dragged into the town square in a padua.
I'm going to look it up just to make sure I'm saying that right because I'm afraid I'm going to be like, padua.
And then it's going to be like, that's not how you say that.
It's like, it's poudoir. It's like poudoir.
Actually. it is uh padua she's been saying padua i've been saying padua my dudes the most american shit i've ever heard that's why i stopped i was like i know me saying like padua italy is definitely not what it is i know this i know this so padua padua which sounds a lot better So he was dragged into the town square of Padua in front of everyone in the village, including Martin, who was four years old, and his mother.
They watched as he was drawn and quartered.
Literally, they tied ropes to all four of his limbs and then tied those ropes to four horses.
Oh, my God. Someone fired a gun, which made the horses startle and run.
And normally, what this does is it rips the person limb from limb.
But in this case, it was a small area. And the horses didn't have enough room to really get running.
Oh, so it just, like, scratched him? So they just, like, stopped and they slowly popped every joint in his body.
Oh! Slowly popped them all. That's on some Hellraiser shit.
And I'm talking like shoulders, legs, pelvis, hips, like all those things.
And everyone heard it. Everyone watched it.
It was agonizing. It was slow. And they wanted this because this guy had done it.
He was part of a conspiracy to assassinate the emperor.
So as far as they were concerned, a slow and painful death is what he was going to get.
Put out. So they weren't done. So now they went and they said, oh no, he didn't get ripped limb from limb, which is what we were hoping for.
So someone went and said, does anybody have an axe?
Because they didn't even have like an axe on site.
They did not come prepared. Somebody said, yeah, I have an axe that I chop firewood with.
And they were like, that'll do. And so they decided to dismember and behead him manually with this axe in front of the crowd.
They just chopped and chopped with a blunt axe used for chopping firewood.
As he is still alive, screaming in pain while his wife and his child are looking on.
Oh, yeah. So in that moment, Martin became a serial killer is what you're telling me.
Yeah, this is pretty much it. What the fuck, dude?
Yeah. What's worse is Marie and Martin, neither one of them could speak Italian or Austrian.
So they were hearing all these things being yelled around them.
They couldn't understand what was happening.
So they just, she held him up to see what was happening because she couldn't understand like what is going on.
I can't see. So he watched as all of that was happening.
Oh, my God. Yeah. So they were run back to France because they were not welcome there anymore because people knew they were the family of a traitor, quote unquote.
And where luckily they were taken in by French forces and then finally returned back to their home village and Marie's family.
Well, that's good. Now, Martin had to take care.
This is just sad. His mother was so despondent and so upset that he had to take care of her through their entire journey.
He was four, and he was literally learning to kill animals with his bare hands for food and to bring to his mother because she couldn't even feed him.
Damn. Yeah. So he was already, like, the light went out then.
Like, he was gone. That was it. So when Martin was old enough, he ended up getting work as a shepherd and was literally isolated in the mountains with sheep.
And he stayed to himself and didn't like to talk to anyone else.
He would literally stay up there for months and months until winter.
And it was at that time that he took the sheep to the pastures in the village, and then he would work jobs on farms.
Right. But during this time, he also fell from a hayloft at one point and severely injured himself.
And it never really healed properly. And so he walked like hunched forever after that.
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Why are there ridges on Reese's peanut butter cups?
Probably so they never slip from her hands.
Could you imagine? I'd lose it. Luckily, Reese's thought about that.
Wonder what else they think about. Probably chocolate and peanut butter.
So he spent the season breaking into homes and stealing food and other items of value before he went back up to the mountains with the sheep.
And at this point, as he's breaking into homes and stealing shit, he fled when the villagers began to call authorities because all of a sudden the villagers are like, we're missing all this shit.
Like somebody's stealing our shit. It wasn't like I misplaced this.
Right. So they're calling authorities. He got out of there and he sold the stolen goods on the way to get by.
Makes sense. This is what he ends up doing his whole life.
So he ended up taking odd jobs doing hard labor at a ton of different farms and earning a reputation as a very hard worker, but a strange and silent man as well.
Well, if he told you some of the shit he went through, you might understand.
He's seen some shit. He's definitely seen some shit.
So he ended up getting a job in a castle in Shur.
Oh. Yeah. And he worked with the animals outside.
He ended up just meeting somebody who was associated with it somewhere.
And they were like, wow, you're a big guy.
You could probably do this work. But he didn't speak to anyone at all.
It was there, though, that he did meet a maid who worked on the property named Marie Ann Martinette.
Oh. She was the only one that he would talk to.
And soon they fell in love and had quite a romantic courtship for years there.
I love. They got married. And when they left the castle to form a life together, they stole silver from the person they had worked for.
And yeah. And he had like taken care of them.
Like he was a really good employer. Yeah.
And they stole from him when they left. Okay, that's not good.
And he found it out and he was like, I'm not going to pursue it.
I'm not going to press charges because they obviously need it more than I do.
Wow. Yeah. Like it was actually like a really sad, you're like, man.
But he said it really like bummed him out that they did that to him as they left.
Like he was like, I would have given you the silver.
And it makes you lose like faith in people.
Yeah, you're just like, damn. Basically, they stopped working in the castle because once they were married, it became really hard.
They wanted to start their own life. But times became desperate because now they're not working.
And neither one of them were able to make a living.
Martin decided, you know, I'm just going to turn back to robbing people because my marriage is strained right now because we don't have any money and we're not...
Making a living. So instead of just going to find an actual job, I think I can just rob people.
Oh, okay. Because I'm good at that. Let's take other people's hard-earned stuff.
Yeah. And he's like, I'm good at that. I think it could happen.
Yeah, that's on my resume. Yeah. So he would wait on traveling roads and then violently rob travelers as they came by.
He was a highway robber. He was literally a highway robber.
Damn. And this is how he started. Now, soon he realized he didn't just have to go after men who had come from market.
He could attack, beat, and rob women traveling on the road.
Oh, come on, Morgan. And then he would sell their clothing.
And he did, and he would make a good amount because he could sell dresses and shit.
When he went home to Marie, he admitted how he had got the money because at first she was like, how are you getting this money?
And he was like, okay, so I might have beat up a woman and stolen all her shit.
Oh, my God. And she was like, sounds great.
Yeah. Yeah. What? Yep. She was like, cool.
That works. Okay. So these two found each other.
So they found each other. And she helped him formulate a plan on how he could just get better at this whole thing and how he would never be caught.
And they formed a plan together. And this is how the French made robberies and the French made massacre began.
So his wife was in on it? She was. And she knew the whole thing.
And, like, you'll find out later, like, how much she knew.
So, in early February 1855, Martin set out looking for a victim and came across his first choice of Marie Kurt.
He met her in Lyon, and he acted as if he was a manservant of a wealthy man from the country, and he offered her a job, saying that he was sent into town to recruit some maids.
And she told him she had to think it over because it would mean leaving, you know, everyone she knew, going to a different city.
And so she was like, you know what? How about I meet you back in Lyon in March?
Because this is like early February. She was like, I need to get my affairs in order.
I need to figure some stuff out. So he was like, sure, sure, sure.
I'll meet you back in March. But at that point, he's like, whatever.
He's like, I'll come back in March, but I got to do something in the meantime.
So he had failed the first time he tried to plan.
Right. This failed him. So now he's on to the next victim while this one just like idled, basically deciding her own fate unknowingly.
Oh, my God. That same day, he found his victim.
Oh. February 28th, 1855. Yeah. two deer hunters were walking through a forest in the village of Tremois when they saw a person lying on the ground in a clearing in the forest.
And it was clearly a woman, and she was motionless.
So as they walked closer to investigate, they could see that she had definitely dealt with some kind of very violent attack.
It was very obvious. She was naked, for one.
And she was described as being bathed in blood.
Oh. Seeing the violence associated with this attack, they knew they needed some help.
So one hunter left to go get help while the other one stayed at the scene.
Because they were like, I don't even know if we'll be able to find her again.
And the woman's belongings were all like thrown around her.
There was a handkerchief, a collar, a black tulle bonnet, the remnant of a blue ribbon, and a pair of shoes.
All just tossed. Oh, man. And all of them were soaked in blood.
Oh, yeah. Now, Magistrate Genoux was brought to the crime scene, and it was determined that the victim had been stabbed multiple times in the body and had been beaten in the head by a blunt object.
Oh. Yeah. After staging everything, Genoux determined that this woman had been hit in the back of the head hard enough to knock her out.
After she had gone unconscious, she had been tripped, she had been raped, beaten, stabbed, and then left to bleed alone and naked in the woods.
So he also escalated to rape at this point.
Yes, exactly. Now, unfortunately, initially, no one could identify this woman.
So Jeannot believed he should share a photograph of her to try to get someone who knew who she was.
Oh. But, yeah. So he had photographer Camille Burnaby literally reset the crime scene, but in front of a church in Tremois.
What a choice. And they laid the woman out naked still.
They didn't even dress her. Nice. In the same pose they found her in and took photos.
It is so disturbing and wild. Yeah, I'm all good.
You can actually see these photos. Like, there are photos of it.
Oh, that's fucked up. And it's very disturbing.
Now, they then used these photos as they traveled around to different villages to see if anybody could identify her.
I guess the reasoning is noble, but the method is wow.
Yeah, that's the thing. Like, I see what they were trying to do, but there was a much better way of going about it.
You could have put clothes on her. Yeah, and, like, maybe not pose her in front of a church.
That's a weird church. It's a very weird thing.
Yeah. Now, at one point, people thought she was Marceline Ganelli, who was a young woman who was missing weeks earlier.
But then they determined she was not, and it was back to the drawing board.
Okay. When news spread of this mystery woman, the family of Marie Bidet contacted authorities, and they said they believed that might be their daughter who had been missing.
Oh, no. Oh, no. Now, once they got the description of Marie and heard that one of the items she had on her when she went missing was a black lace cap, which was given to her as a gift from her mother, it was clear this was Marie.
Yeah. That item was found like literally with her corpse.
So they were able to speak to Marie's landlady, who she had spoken to February 25th before she went missing.
She had actually been in an argument with her, and she had packed her things and said she was leaving because a man from the country had offered her a job as a maid in some country estate, and the salary was more than 200 francs.
So they worked to find a lead and did come across a man named Jacques Verger, who apparently had tried to date Marie before she went missing, but he had an alibi and was ruled out.
The next viable suspect was a man named Martin Moriat.
So Moriat was a convicted rapist who would literally lie in wait and attack and brutally rape women.
Jesus. And he would leave them knocked out.
That was his M.O., This obviously rang as pretty similar, but he had never murdered before, so this would be a significant escalation to, like, beat a woman to death.
Definitely. Obviously, that happens a lot.
People escalate. So they tried to locate him and were having trouble, but this seemed to be the guy to everyone involved.
They were like, I think this is him. But after a ton of searching and a ton of optimism, they found out that he was in prison when Marie was killed.
So the trail went cold. Went cold. Went cold.
I don't know why I said it like that. The trail went cold.
It went ice cold. You said it kind of like the corn kid.
It's cold. So now the news of this horrific crime went straight into Leon.
Everyone heard about it. Women were terrified.
What the hell happened here? Yeah, I wouldn't be going anywhere.
So March 4th comes, and Martin waits in Lyon for Marie Kurt, the one who told her she just needed some more time.
She showed up. No. But she told him she would not be taking the employment opportunity because she had actually met a man in Lyon, and she decided to stay there.
Hell yeah, girlfriend. She was like, I'm not leaving this guy.
I love it. But she did tell Martin she would introduce him to a good friend of hers who was looking for work and would likely accept.
Oh, no. Her name was Olympe Aloubert. Ooh, what a pretty name.
I know, isn't that pretty? Yes. So off he went to meet with Olympe.
And when he did, she told him she already had a job and Marie just didn't know about it yet.
Oh, okay. So he was like, oh, shit. But then he was like, is that job paying you 250 francs and giving you free room and board?
And she was like, no. So it was pretty tempting.
But she knew about this murdered woman and she was hesitant.
But the offer was too good to not accept.
Yeah. So she agreed. But as soon as she agreed, he slipped in, well, you have to come with me immediately.
That's part of the deal. You have to come meet the employer of the country estate.
And she was like, Okay. Yeah. So they left Lyon heading to Tremois.
She was still pretty nervous, but she was leaving Lyon with a stranger promising the world after a woman had been found raped and murdered nearby.
So it was, I mean, I get it why she was a little nervous, but he was acting nice.
He was being kind. He was a little imposing looking, but she was not getting any angry vibes from him.
Well, and she's probably, like, the fact that he kind of walked with a hunch probably threw her off because she's thinking, oh, this man has a bad back.
Like, he's not capable of beating the shit out of someone.
Yeah, it kind of helps him out to, like, just go undercover.
And you should know that Martin Dumoyard was, like I said, he was a big man.
He was tall. He was just, like, a girthy man.
Thickums. He had one of those huge 1800s beards that go all the way around the face.
Oh, those freak me out. Yeah, and it was like very bushy and like, but it was only a beard, not the mustache.
You know what I mean? Like that big 1800s beard.
You have to have the mustache. And he had kind of like shaggy hair.
They're very dark, almost black, everything.
I'm picturing Sam from Game of Thrones. No.
But with a beard. No. No? No. No. Yeah, no.
He was more, if you look him up, he was an interesting looking fellow.
Okay. He has eyes that are a little scary.
Like, he looks like he's hiding something.
Because he is. He also had a swollen upper lip that everyone, it was a very main feature on his face that it almost made him look like he had a split lip.
Oh. But it ended up, they found out later, it was a benign tumor that he had in his lip.
Oh, shit. Yeah, so it was like this swollen piece of lip.
So either way, she wasn't getting angry vibes from him, but he was a little scary looking, so she was like, oh, I don't know if this is a great idea.
Yeah. The sun begins to set, though. They're still going.
Remember, they have to walk everywhere, so they're walking through the forest.
Sun is setting further and further and darker and darker, and she's getting more nervous by the second.
So she told him, you know what, I'm not going any further.
And she was like, we got to take shelter for the night.
There's a nearby farmhouse. I'm going. Like, we're going or I'm going.
Something's happening here. And he was caught off guard.
So he tries to tell her, you know, it's just a little further.
I think we can make it. And then he says, if we keep walking through the night, we'll be there.
And she's like, I'm not walking through the night.
No, I'm tired. Now she knew something was strange as fuck here, and she was starting to regret coming from him with him.
Yeah. So she dropped everything she had and she just ran.
Good for her. Because she immediately got the bad vibes and she was like, you know what?
I'm out of here. She trusted that gut. She did.
And she ran towards the farmhouse and she was almost there when he threw a large stone that cracked right into her head from behind.
No. So she lurched forward. There's, like, crushing pain searing through her, almost falling right over, but she caught herself.
Oh, my God. She caught her balance, and she didn't fall.
She kept on fucking running. He hurled a fucking rock that hit her in the skull, and she kept keeping on.
Kept running, but now... He's running too.
So he's this huge Goliath of a man running after her after he has just thrown a rock.
He's after her now, loudly breathing, slamming his feet into the ground.
As he runs, he's also picking up rocks and hurling them at her.
So they are missing her by like a hair each time, like whizzing by her face.
This is so scary. She kept running, not even looking behind her, and she runs straight to the front door of the farmhouse she saw, throwing herself at this farmhouse and screaming until the owners open the door and quickly just usher her inside.
Damn. And Martin was shut out. So she stayed with the woman in the farmhouse all night while this woman just, like, calmed her.
And the next morning, the woman called, like, so she, like, helped her out too, like, helped her head.
Turns out she didn't have like a cracked skull or anything, but she got a good head wound, like a big bump.
So the next morning, the woman called a bunch of big dudes from nearby farms, like a bunch of farmers.
Big dudes are us. Yes, big dudes are us.
1-800-BIG-DUDES. That's what she did. And she was like, I can get them in bulk if I order them all together.
Yeah, they're a little special. Yeah. Amazon.com.
She got like a variety pack. Buy three big dudes, get one free.
So she calls and all these dudes come and they escort her back to Lyon together.
I love that. Like miles and miles together.
Hell yeah. Now once there, they helped her report her story to authorities too.
And she was able to give a full description of the man and said he was very big and he had a very distinctly swollen and split upper lip.
Nice that he had like such a... Very distinct thing.
Exactly. It was honestly the thing that that's how they knew that all these were connected because everyone described, people who survived described that.
And that was the first thing they said was he was big and he had that swollen lip.
Right. Now, this failure was pretty debilitating for him, so he had to regroup if he was going to be successful at this, and so he did.
After this horrible attack, Martin tried and failed several times to attack other women.
In September 1855, Joseph Charlotte was out shopping in Lyon when a strange-looking man approached her.
He said he was actually looking for a maid in his castle.
And it was from Ain near Travaux. And she was like, wow, that sounds rad as fuck.
Like, that's a castle. But I'm already a domestic servant.
So like, I don't know. She was like in a house in Keown.
So he was like, well, it's a castle. And I can also triple what you make and I'll give you free room and board in a castle.
Damn. And it took some nudging, but she finally agreed and said, you know what?
I just need a few days to get my affairs in order.
I'll quit my job for this new one in a new city.
It's going to be like a big deal, so I got to have a couple days.
He agreed to meet her back in a couple days to take her to his castle.
No. On September 22nd, 1855, the two met in Lyon and started the journey to this new life in a new castle.
So he offered to put all of her belongings in a trunk on his back for the journey.
Damn. That's what he would do. He was like just a mule.
Yeah. And she accepted. She was like, sure, why not?
And they were not going through the woods at this point.
They went through a bunch of really open roads where there were like military officers patrolling.
So she's feeling like this is legit for a while.
He's not taking her anywhere weird. Yeah.
Walking right by authority figures like nothing's weird.
Yeah. nothing to indicate that he was a monster, until he started asking whether she had brought any money with her and whether she kept it in the trunk that was now on his back.
Oh. So he kept asking about that, and it was starting to make her feel weird.
And as she started feeling weirder and weirder about this, they were now moving away from the populated areas of the city and were starting to walk through isolated areas as it got darker and darker.
And she was expressing these fears to him, but he was ignoring them and kind of brushing them off.
She even mentioned Marie Bidet's case. And finally, when she couldn't get him to speak or to stop, like just for a second, she said, you told me you were bringing me to Travaux, but I begin to think that you're taking me away from it.
Oh, no. This time he tried to calm her down and he said nothing weird was going on.
They were going to be at the castle shortly.
And she told him, you know what? No, I'm staying at a nearby farmhouse.
Same kind of thing. She's like, I'm not doing this.
And then they could meet up. She was like, we'll meet up tomorrow when the sun comes up.
I'll meet you back. But I'm going to get a room at a farmhouse.
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Luckily, she was able to get a room at a farmhouse, and the people in the house were like, yeah, that sounds like some of the recent attacks that have been happening.
You might not want to meet that guy. Oh, thank goodness that she was able to stop.
Exactly. So she didn't meet him the next morning.
Good. And she did report this, but technically nothing had happened, so there wasn't a lot that they could actively do.
Right. Because they were like, he didn't attack you.
Yeah. You don't know. Maybe he was going to take you to a castle.
Exactly. But, you know, they were like, we can't really arrest him for being weird or try to find him just for being weird.
But hopefully they wrote it down. Well, that's the thing.
They were, however, interested when she mentioned that split and swollen upper lip, just like the other women had specifically mentioned about their attacker, and putting it together with how she was brought on the trip with him, the offer for employment.
It's all the same. The 250 francs, very specific.
It was pretty safe to say this was the same guy, and she was very lucky.
Now, at this time, Jacques Berger, who we talked about before, he had actually been the, like, kind of, he had, like, tried to date Marie.
Oh, right, right, right. Yeah. But he was, like, I guess they had gone out maybe once.
It was, like, one of those things. He had been looked at as a suspect, but they let him go.
Now they were looking at him again. Oh. Because, again, they're not getting any leads on that.
So I think they're really scraping, and they're like, you know what?
They want to make people feel safe. He has a connection to her, so we're just going to hang on this.
They were really unable to nail it down on him, though, and they were unable to connect any of the other victims to him either.
But he's all they had. So he was in jail.
They held him in jail for now. Oh, man. So, and they're not saying he's the guy at this point.
They're saying we have someone in jail. We don't know if he's the guy, but let's, you know, everybody still keep your eyes peeled.
Right. So October 30th, only a month later, Martin tried again.
He offered a live-in domestic servant position to Jean-Marie Bourgeois.
She was 22 and was unemployed at the time, so this was actually a huge blessing and opportunity in her eyes.
He arranged to travel with her the next day to Travaux.
They began their journey, and much like all the other women he had lured along with him, she felt pretty weird about him pretty quickly.
She could feel his anger, she said, like he was frustrated and angry.
And he was playing at being polite, but she was like, eh, it wasn't really working.
So they walked a long time, nearly 12 miles.
Damn. Like, long time. And they were nearing the village of Mionet, I believe that's how you say it, when it began to get dark and Jean-Marie was feeling more and more unsafe with this man.
So she asked him, you know what, can I hold my things now?
And he was like, sure. So he handed them over and she took them and ran the fuck away.
Hell yeah. This is really, I like a lot of these are the women just being like, no, no, listening to my gut, see you later.
Yeah, I love that. Yeah. So she ran the fuck away.
She just ran because she knew that there was a monastery up ahead, and she was like, I'm just going to someone who can help me.
She didn't even look to see if he was chasing her.
When she got to the farm that bordered the monastery, she literally collapsed at the feet of the farmer.
Benoit... Benoit. I'm just going to say Benoit.
Okay. I can't say his last name. Benoit.
She explained what had happened and how she just knew that this man was up to no good.
She didn't want to go back with him. Like, please save me.
Yeah. And she said, quote, after traveling some distance with him, she suspected he had some sinister motives towards her.
She could just feel it. So the farmer brought her inside and gathered more farmers and they looked for the man.
They couldn't find him. So they were like, I think he just left, which is good.
So they let her stay the night at the farm and then they all escorted her back to Leon.
I love like all these dudes actually being good dudes.
It's like farmers. They're all just like, sure, we'll do this for you.
Hell yeah, farmers. This is 12 miles away.
They walked her. And then she reported her experience as well.
Again, just a bad experience. No real crime here.
Just the fact that it was very similar in almost every way to every other attack.
We're going to see this a lot. They just couldn't find this guy, though.
But, guys, it was Martin. Yeah. It was?
It was Martin Dumoyard. Oh, my God. Just in case you were like, who is it?
I did not realize. And each time he was able to secure the women's things when they fled.
Like most of the time he was able to take the stuff.
Right. And he would bring, and luckily this time she was able to get it back.
But nine times out of ten, he got all their stuff.
Not the case. And all these times, they were bringing everything they owned with them.
They were bringing their most valuable things.
He stole everything from them. That sucks.
Their entire life. That's so fucked up.
And they probably even had like special keepsakes and everything.
And the worst part is he would bring these things back home to his wife and together they would sell them or she would wear them.
What a weirdo. Like wear them out in public.
Like, are you good, sis? Yeah. Now this time, instead of just saying, wow, this is similar to all those other ones, Magistrate Genoux actually came to talk to Jean-Marie himself.
He was like, I got to get more information.
We got to stop this guy. So he brought her to see Jacques Verger, the guy who's sitting in jail right now.
And again, this was Marie Bidet's somewhat sometime date, I would say.
The man she had been seeing. Yeah. And he was being held in jail.
So he brought her in. She took one look at him and said, I have never seen that man before in my life.
That is not the man. So they were able to release him from prison.
That was like the easiest way to tell. Yeah.
Because this is very clearly the same guy.
Of course. They're talking about the swollen lip.
The shock didn't even have that. So they were pretty sure they didn't have the, like, this wasn't him.
Yeah. But that kind of sealed the deal. That poor dude.
I know. He was just sitting in there just because he had a connection to her.
Right, like that's shitty. So the month after this, 22-year-old Victorine Perrin made a report to police that was exactly the same as the others.
He met her in Lyon, offered her work, had to leave immediately, the same 250 francs officer offer, and they set off.
Weird. Weird. Like no warning, just jumped a fence and off he went.
Do you think he was like fighting an urge?
I think he definitely was. Yeah. And she said she screamed and ran after him because that's everything she owns.
But she eventually stopped because she was like, yeah, I don't know if I should be chasing this giant man who's very unhinged.
So she ran to a nearby house. And the farmer who lived there was named Jean, Jean Perret.
And he lived there. He escorted her back to Lyon.
Of course he did. And this is where she made the report.
But again, it's getting stranger. He's acting stranger.
Yeah. He's already killed. Like, when is it going to happen again?
Killed and raped. Exactly. Now, this kind of stuff kept going till like the end of the year.
He was just doing this over and over again, failing sometimes, like succeeding other times.
Same story, and he wasn't caught. Some of them were physically attacked.
Some of them were raped. At the end of 1855, it seemed to stop.
So they hoped he had either moved on, got arrested for something else, died, like something happened.
Unfortunately, they were wrong. Damn it.
So December 1858. Now that was the end of 1855.
So we have a little leap. Things happened between this, but a lot of them either weren't officially reported and were reported later during the trial.
Like people would come out and be like, oh no, he also stole shit from me, I just didn't report it.
Yeah. Or there's also some unidentified bodies that they believe might, and girls that are missing.
During that time period. This was that time period.
That makes sense. So this is when Martin walked into the home he shared with his wife, Marie-Anne, and he just handed a silver watch to her and a giant pile of bloody women's clothing.
And he looked her in the eyes and said, I've just killed a young girl in the woods of Montmain.
Excuse me, Montmain. I'm going to bury her.
And then he just grabbed a shovel and left.
Okie dokie. He came back hours later, and his wife had questions.
She just wanted some details here. So he told her he had met the girl at a train station in Montlouel, and he did the same song and dance, but this time he was planning to take it further.
He had gone into it with the plan. Intent.
He offered her employment. When she accepted, he checked her luggage at the train station so that he could come back for it later.
Wow, that was kind of a bold move. He then led her to the Montmain Woods, and when they had come to a clearing, he hit her from behind and knocked her out.
He then stripped her, raped her, and then killed her in the same way he had killed Marie years before.
Damn. He told her that he buried her a few feet underground, and it wasn't anywhere that she would be found.
Then he said he was planning to go get the baggage, but his wife, Marie-Anne, said, oh, no, no, no, you can't.
And she didn't say that because, like, it's wrong to kidnap, rape, and murder women and to steal their shit.
No, she was just like, oh, no, you'll get caught.
She was like, no, no, the baggage guy at the station saw you with her when you checked the bags.
Oh, my God. Like, you can't go. And he was like, you're right.
And then together they were like, okay, I guess we'll just have to find another one.
So just killed that girl for literally no reason at all.
Yeah, for literally no reason because now they can't even get the bag.
What the fuck? Not that it was a good reason to begin with at all.
But their, quote-unquote, their reason, like, quote-unquote.
Yeah, it's like, you killed this girl because your plan, which he killed because he was also a monster.
He enjoyed it. He was a rapist. Like, he enjoyed inflicting pain.
He grew up with pain. So a few weeks after this, he was back at it again.
He went to Lyon on January 17, 1859, and he found Julie Fargo.
Julie was pregnant, and she had been recently fired because she was pregnant.
Oh, no. Isn't that fun? So she was an expectant single mother and was desperate.
So of course she took the bait. Duh. They set off, but after some time, Martin said they would not be able to make it all the way to the house and they should stop at a farmhouse on the way up there.
So Martin tried to sleep in her bed with her, but she was like, no, get the fuck out of the bed.
What the fuck? Like, you creep. Yeah. Nothing happened that night, but they set out the next morning, and it wasn't long into the trip that he turned on her very suddenly.
Oh, no. He grabbed her. He started to pull.
She was wearing this big, heavy apron that was, like, wrapped around her and carrying all her stuff.
And he started ripping it off of her. Oh, no.
And it had all the money she had. And she screamed.
They were fighting. He was able to actually rip the apron off of her after a struggle, and then he ran with it.
And she was alone in the forest at this point.
And pregnant. Pregnant. Pregnant, alone in the forest, and just starts yelling and crying for help.
Because she's like, I don't even know where to go.
Luckily, Simon Millay, who was a farmer, and his son Louie...
Found her. They happened to just be like wandering through.
Brought her back to their home. Heard what happened to her.
They were like, we'll bring you back because, of course, farmers, that's what they do.
They escort you back to Lyon. I just love the farmers.
That's what they do. The theme of farmers helping gals.
Yeah. So while they were doing this, they passed the farmhouse where the two of them had stayed the night before.
And Julie was like, we got to go in there really quick.
So they went in there and Julie told the innkeeper, Marie, that the man she was there with that night was a robber and had tried to assault her.
And she asked him, she was like, do you remember him at all?
And the innkeeper was like, oh, I would definitely remember him.
Like, absolutely. She was like, I remember the swollen lip.
And she said, and I heard some of the patrons when you guys walked in, one of them was like, wow, she's really nice.
He has a very strange gait. Like, basically being like, he's a lumbering oaf.
Like, that's very nice of her to spend some time with him.
And he did. He had this very strange gait because of his back.
Right. Just the way he walked. So she was like, I would definitely be able to point him out.
Just letting you know. And she's like, cool.
Good to know. Mm-hmm. So the farmers brought her back to Lyon.
She reported the whole thing. Again, her description matched perfectly with the other ones.
Like, you guys need to go on a fucking hunt.
And that's the thing. They were like, he evaded them for so long.
It's crazy. So long. You feel like he would just be walking about and you would very much see him.
Yeah, that's the thing. Now, he kept attacking women through 1859 with the same method.
Sometimes people would intervene and he was scared off, but he would always steal the items.
All the items and the women owned, leaving them with absolutely nothing.
So sad. Now, sometimes people just came across women stranded in the woods crying, saying all their things had been robbed.
And again, they had the same story. Fake employment, 250 francs, just come with me.
We have to go immediately. It's like he never, which it's wild to me.
I mean, it worked. I guess if it's not broke, don't fix it.
But like the fact that he went with the same story every time, it's like that's bold.
Right. Yeah, that's going to get you caught sooner rather than later, you would think.
Which I'm glad he's dumb. Yeah. Like, that's great.
Now, February 1860, Martin showed up to the Laborde Inn in Lyon, and he had a young woman with him.
He told the innkeeper it was his niece, and unfortunately, they didn't get her name down.
Oh, no. The girl heard him call her his niece, and she ran from the inn screaming.
Oh. Was like, no, I'm not. And then ran out of here.
Was like, I don't know why he just told you I'm his niece, but I'm fucking out of here.
She was like, that's not normal. He chased after her.
No. And later the innkeeper was put on the stand when the trial happened and was shown bloody clothing and a bag and a dress and the innkeeper confirmed that they belonged to this girl.
So he just like chased her out of there into the woods and probably murdered her?
Yeah. What the fuck? These bloody items were found in their home, and that girl was never seen again and was never identified.
Yeah, but the innkeeper was like, I saw her.
Like, he chased her. That's what she was wearing.
April 29th, 1860 was his last robbery. He did the same thing he always did to a woman named Louise Michelle.
But instead of walking, he insisted they take a coach together this time, and they did.
But once they were on board, he was like, I don't have any money on me.
You have to pay for this. Nice. And she was like, okay.
Like, what the fuck? Like, okay. So he just, once they got, like, in between where they were going, they got off the coach and they started walking.
And he walked her to a very isolated area.
All the while, he was being kind of an asshole.
He was telling her to be quiet and shut up.
Rude. Like every time she was like, are we close?
He was like, keep quiet. Like just bleh.
I'd be like, nah. I'd be like, bye. But again, they're desperate.
Of course. They need the money. Yeah. When they go to the darker area, he raised a large branch above his head out of nowhere and grabbed her by her dress.
Then he demanded that she give him all her money and she just handed it over.
He took it. He waited a minute, she said, and was about to like, she was like, I know he was about to hurt me.
And then he looked around and ran. So he was like fighting another urge.
She reported it immediately. This is when he starts escalating a little more.
So he kept going, but that was the last reported one, like officially reported one.
There was definitely more after that. Right.
There were witnesses who said they saw many more women with him once he was found out later.
People came forward and were like, I saw him with this woman walking with luggage, blah, blah, blah.
Right. So by February 1861, he was ready to kill again.
Martin had met a woman named Marie-Joseph Boussard, who was a silk worker in Lyon.
He had tried to pull the same shit with her, but she was employed as a silk worker.
So she said, hey, I have a younger sister, and she'll probably be very excited about this opportunity.
Oh, God. So she invited him to dinner in her home.
Oh, my God. She fed this man in her home.
Yeah. This guy is the worst. The worst, yeah.
He revealed, you know, the great money, the room and board.
It's in a castle. It's going to be amazing.
And he was explaining all this to her younger sister, Yulily, Marie Yulily.
And she was so excited. Of course she was.
And she was like a young girl, you know, like...
Probably like her first job. Yeah, it's like she's like basically teens kind of thing.
And she already had a job at the time as a domestic servant to a family in Lyon, but this was paying more.
And she was like ready. She was like, let's go.
They had dinner, and then Martin and her sister helped pack her up to go.
Before they left, Marie Eulalie asked Martin if it would be okay for her sister to visit from time to time.
Oh, this is like hurting my heart. And Martin said, certainly.
And besides, I shall pay her fare and that of the children.
He's such a fucking monster. Fuck this guy.
Oh, no. Oh, no. She was raped, and her earlobes had actually been torn away from her head during this.
Holy shit. Yeah. That's how brutal he was.
Oh, my God. He took her clothing and all of her belongings with him and then went back to Marie Ann and told her, I just killed another girl.
I got to get my shovel. And he grabbed a shovel and left.
What the fuck? This lady's a piece of shit.
Yeah. May 26, 1861, very late in the evening, Monsieur Joly was at home when there was a series of loud and frantic knocks at his farmhouse door.
This was the Joly farm in Balin, which was a very small and very quiet village, so this was very unusual.
He, like, opened the door kind of, like, peeking out of it.
He was like, what the hell is going on here?
When he saw a woman crying, bruised, bloody, and panicked.
Her clothing was ripped and strewn all over her, and she was begging for help.
And this is not Marie Ulali. Marie Ulali was killed.
This is Marie Pichon. And she said, I'm Marie Pichon, and she said she had met a strange man at the train station in Lyon.
He had approached her, said he was a gardener at a chateau in a nearby country, or a county, I mean, and he said he had been sent into Lyon by his master of the chateau because he was looking to recruit a domestic servant.
He asked her for nothing of her qualifications, but immediately told her she could have the job.
It would pay... 200 francs. 250 francs a year.
Come on down. She was like, holy shit, that's great.
And they got on a train together. Then as they got to a village near Montlouel, they got off to walk.
Immediately it was here that she was having second thoughts, she said.
She had a heavy trunk with her, but he said they could get it later, and he left it at the train station.
So this is how we know what his plan was here.
Right. So he just left it there, red flag number one.
Then she said as they were walking, he would just randomly pick up rocks and stones and large sticks.
What the fuck? And she said he had tried to, quote, pull a stake out of the ground on which the vine grows.
Oh. And she was like, okay. So she asked him several times, like, are we close?
Where exactly is this? And like, what the fuck are you doing with the rocks?
Like, what are you doing with all that? And he would just say, be quiet, we'll be there soon.
Fuck off. Then she noticed that he all of a sudden had like started going slower and was falling paces behind her.
We know exactly what he's about to do. He's about to hit her behind her head.
Like this is his MO. Luckily, she was able to notice all this.
And she said it was here that she stopped and said, I see you have deceived me.
I will go no further. To which he replied, we have arrived.
What? As soon as he said, we have arrived, he threw a literal, it's called like a lariat, but a lasso, essentially, around her neck and tried to strangle her.
I'm sorry, what? Yep. The second, I'm not even joking you, the second you said, we have arrived, my stomach actually flipped.
Can you imagine? You're like, you know what?
You're bullshitting me. I see that I'm not going any further.
And he just says, we've arrived. And you're in the middle of nowhere.
And also just like, you're, oh, like, fuck you.
Well, and luckily he's a lumbering oaf. So she saw this coming.
Like she saw the, like a noose essentially coming.
So she was able to throw her hands up over her neck.
So smart. to form a barrier between her neck and the rope.
So smart. So she was able to pull it out a little bit and not have it strangle her.
But he was pulling it, trying to get it tighter and tighter.
And he's like cutting her hands with the rope.
And she told him, so she tells this farmer that she escaped after a terrible fight for her life.
They had fallen to the ground and she had been able to slip out of it.
And she just ran. And she said, he chased me all the way to this farmhouse.
I threw myself at your door. When he saw you coming to the door, that's when he ran.
Oh, my God. Yeah. Which like, imagine if that man hadn't been inside.
Yeah, seriously. He was horrified. The farmer was like, oh my God.
And he called the country guard, like local law enforcement in Balin.
And when they came to the Jolie farm, she told them the story and described him as, quote, a man from the country dressed in a blue blouse and a black hat with a high crown.
She said he was huge and his shoulders were stooped over and he had a scar on his upper lip.
So they're listening to this and they're like, wow.
And this is the local law enforcement. This isn't Leon where he is from.
This is like the local one. And he just dipped.
Exactly. So they're listening and they're like, huh, that's weird.
This sounds like this guy that's like been in town lately.
His name's Raymond. Right. Yeah. Are you shitting my dick?
Yeah, or Raymond. Yeah. Yeah. So then as the story went on, they realized, yeah, like, this sounds like what happened to the other women, too.
Like, it must be Raymond. Killing in your dead brother's name is a new fucking level of low.
Your dead little baby brother's name. Like...
Wow. It's like he used that punishment that they gave him and like turned it into a punishment against everybody else almost.
Yeah. It's like this weird psychology thing.
Definitely. So this was only, this is just wild.
So Magistrate Jeannot was starting to connect all of these, obviously.
He had been working on this for years at this point.
And especially with that physical description, he was like, we got to get this guy.
Yeah. So they're determining he's likely from the area.
He knows it well. He's able to escape so quickly.
He's agile, even though he's huge. And he can easily navigate these forests, these side roads, and he's going undetected.
So they determined from the reports that this man, again, was huge.
He had a noticeably unusual gait. He dressed in like...
Kind of like domestic worker clothes or very casual, plain farming clothes.
And that upper lip thing. So that's what they were looking for.
And they begin their search for this man in Danube, where Mary Pichon had been attacked and almost murdered.
When they spoke to the people there, they all said that description sounded like Martin Dumoyard.
Sorry. Wouldn't you know it. Who had lived in the village for several years.
And they all said he and his wife, Marie-Anne, were kind of despised, actually.
And they fought a lot, were very loud, horrible to each other.
Like screaming matches. Surprising. They said that he was just like, they were just not nice.
Like they were not nice people. And they also said they noticed, quote, the unexplained and mysterious absence of the husband from his house at night.
And when he would come back, they said they always saw him with new stuff, like trunks and luggage.
Like, after a while, that's going to start to cause some alarm bells to go off, dude.
Like, what are you doing? How are you just bringing trunks and luggage home all the time?
Right, like, luggage is expensive. Yeah.
They were also able to find out that he had been arrested for robbery before.
So they went off to Martin's house to chat with him.
Ding dong. They were like, yeah, this is definitely the guy as soon as they saw him.
Yeah. Yeah. But he was like, no, I wasn't out the night of Marie's attack.
Yeah. But when they asked both him and Marie Anne what was going on that night, neither one of them had come up with a story, so they were flustered and started contradicting each other.
I love it. Like they couldn't even keep a story straight.
Good. Then they started just doing a quick search of the home.
Missing girls' items and girls who had reported attacks' items were everywhere.
Oh, man. Including Mary Pichon's. Mm-hmm.
Martin was arrested immediately and taken to a jail in Travaux.
And Marie Pichon was brought in, and she identified him as the man who robbed and tried to murder her.
So investigators returned to the Dumoyard home to conduct a more thorough search.
And in addition to items matching the description of Mary Pichon's belongings, they found, quote, innumerable quantities of clothing worn by servant girls, several which appeared to have been soaked with blood.
And from the sizes and colors, it appears they belong to different people.
Among the items found, there were as many as 40 bonnets, 57 pairs of stockings, 14 dresses, tons of corsets, petticoats, chemises, They found 560 items that were stolen from random women.
What's a chemise? I think it's like stuff you wear underneath.
Oh, okay. I think. I'll Google it. I was going to say because I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure.
I didn't know if it was one of those puffs that you put your hands in.
No, I don't think so at least. Let me see.
But only 60 of those things were identified as having belonged to specific victims.
Damn. Yeah. So they had a ton of stuff that came from either missing girls, murdered women, or women that weren't even reported yet.
That's so fucked up. And you were correct.
It is undergarments. It is. Okay. That's what I thought.
And it's like a flimsy undergarment, right?
Yeah, it's like a white, like, long shirt.
So now they interviewed Marie Ann because what the fuck?
Right. They knew she was part of this whole thing.
She was even wearing a victim's dress. I was going to say, I know that she was trying this shit on.
Exactly. At first, she said she knew nothing and just thought that he had bought, you know, all those pretty blood-soaked items for her.
Delish. Yeah, it's like, where the fuck did you think he got those?
Right. Right. And Magistrate Jeannot kept pushing her because he knew this was bullshit.
And she finally said, you know what? I'm afraid of him.
He has a violent temper. So I do what he wants me to do.
And I sell these items or I do what he wants me to do.
That is not true. No. They were very much both in on this.
Now, he at this point is denying, he's not denying everything, but he's like not admitting to everything either.
He's like in this weird middle ground. Like he's not being like, I've done nothing wrong.
He's like, yeah, sure, I've robbed people.
Okay. Like that's, he's just like not going to give you the whole thing.
I was going to say, he's not showing all his cards.
Exactly. Exactly. But she, Marie-Anne, started selling him down the river.
Good. Pretty quickly. Like, I hate her, but good.
Yeah. She told them one night he came home from being gone for days and gave her a pair of his own pants that were soaked in blood, and he told her, make sure these are never found.
And she was like, when asked if she knew about the murders, she said, yes, I did.
And when asked, in your opinion, his motives for murdering those girls was to violate their persons, she said, yes, sir.
And then she said, I said so, and I think so yet.
Wow. She said she knew where bodies were.
And she led them to a couple of bodies. And she's like, yeah, I just, you know, I didn't know anything was going on.
Yeah, whoops. And then she's like, actually, yeah.
Like, if you know where your husband's burying bodies and you're in on it, don't do that.
That's the thing. So she led them to actually the forest of the communes to where Marie Ulili's body was found.
She found, she was buried five feet underground.
Wow. And he had done it in the winter when the ground is frozen.
Shit. Jesus. Yeah. Because he's such a, he's like massive.
He's an oaf. Also, they found more disturbing details about her death.
She had fractured fingers, which they believe she got when she fell after being hit.
And also one of her hands was clutched around like clay from the ground, like she had grabbed at the ground.
And they said they believe that Martin had buried this poor girl alive.
Wow. He had fractured her skull, raped her, and then buried her alive.
Oh, my God. And she had clawed at the clay.
Oh. Yeah. And they were able to show her sister some of the items from the Dumoyard home, and she confirmed that these belonged to her sister.
Her poor sister, because it's obviously not her fault in any way, shape, or form.
She was trying to give her a better life.
She thought she was doing her a favor. Exactly, with the survivor's guilt she must have had.
Oh, my God. Oh, I can't. Unreal. That poor girl.
Unreal. Now, Marie-Anne was put in jail as an accomplice, and she did admit finally to knowing everything.
Yeah, rot in jail. Martin du Moyard was charged because they couldn't find... They were trying to gather as many as they could, but they just ended up charging him with 15 counts, including robbery, murder, and attempted murder.
So the trial... Martin and Marie-Anne's trial began on January 29th, 1862 at the Assize Court of Borg.
It was a circus. Crowds of people came to see.
Somewhere between 4,000 to 5,000 spectators came.
It was wild. They had like 70 witnesses in this case.
Like, it was wild. And according to the Morning Post, Martin came to court with, quote, his hair and beard looking unkempt.
And the press described him as regarding, quote, the court audience with a dull and stupid gaze.
His countenance depicting only the lowest passions.
Yeah, fuck him. The press was all over what he looked like.
They always are. Saying Martin was, quote, stupid looking.
His features are coarse. His eyes, forehead, and a very projecting chin only denote their basest development.
So they were like pretty gnarly. They're pretty gnarly.
It's also, like, so easy to go after somebody else's looks.
Exactly. Like, get creative. That's the thing.
It's like, I don't know. Maybe you can make fun of the fact that he's, like, a disgusting murderer.
Yeah, exactly. Like, by all means, he's an ugly monster.
Of course. For sure. Inside. But it's like, that's such a low-hanging fruit.
Right. Like, it's just like, we know what he looks like.
Right. Talk about what a fucking monster he is.
Exactly. He's awful. Exactly. Like, he's depraved.
He's vile. He's just like, go with that shit, you know?
Because it's like, if he looked like that and he wasn't raping and murdering anyone, that would be really fucking mean to say.
Yeah, exactly. Like, I know we make fun of murderers and, like, we should.
Yeah, 100%. But it's like, that's just that particular one.
I'm like, can you throw in anything about him being a murderer, too?
Yeah, exactly. Add it in there. Let's make fun of the things that make him a terrible human, not the things.
Say he's an ugly murderer. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Just add it in there. Yeah. Now, when questioned about their marriage on the stand, they told Martin that witnesses said they heard screams from their home.
Oh. And he asked, so that he was asked directly, do you abuse your wife?
I'm sure he did. And he replied, never in the nighttime.
And then he said, it was always in daytime.
Does that make it better? Like, what? Which, what, sir?
What? Yeah. Yeah. And the prosecutors were like, okay, well, your problems, according to your wife, are because you have a loose way of living.
That's an understatement. Yeah. So they brought in victims' families who identified the items found in the Dumoyard home.
And they said, yes, those are the ones belonging to my missing loved ones.
And these are ones that Either they found the bodies or ones that just are missing.
Yeah. And they have now picked out those items and said, those are my missing loved ones.
So it's like, where are they? Right. And there was also survivors there who had all positively identified him as that's the guy.
He tried to claim at this point he really just reached for the stars.
Oh, God. And he was like, okay, yeah, I did this.
And he was like, but here's the thing. I did this because I was paid to provide these girls to a vicious band of three men who gave me all their belongings and money in return for bringing me the women.
Bringing them the women, excuse me. Yeah, totally.
That did not happen. What happened to the ones that you killed then?
Exactly. And you showed up at the house and said to your wife, I just killed a girl.
I gotta get the shovel. What was that about?
Yeah. Yeah. So altogether, they believed he murdered at least six young women.
Wow. Three had been found, and then there was evidence of that one that he said that was his niece at the inn, who was never seen again.
Then there was also an unidentified woman in Mount Main Woods, besides Eulalie, and another in St.
Croix Mill, apparently. They found another one who was unidentified that they believe is attributed to him.
I couldn't find the names of these. This is from the 1800s, so the reporting on it is not exactly up to snuff.
But the trial lasted three days, and now Martin was claiming that this band of three killers was now 80 people.
Oh, okay. And the crowd was like going nuts being like, this guy's an idiot.
Like, are you kidding me? No one believed this random story because it was changing daily as well.
And his wife had already sold him up the river and then some.
And in fact, the authorities believe that she was way more involved than just covering up and selling the items.
I do too. On one day of the trial, they had a woman named Isard who was called to testify.
And she testified about a conversation she overheard when she was sharing a cell with Marie-Anne.
And she said this was in the weeks leading up to the trial.
And according to her, Martin had approached the bars from the yard one day.
And she heard him say to Marie-Anne, I don't know why it begins with hussy.
Hussy, what have you done? If I wanted to say as much as you did, they would cut off your neck as well as mine.
Ooh. So that's him being like, you are just as guilty as I am.
I mean, she is. Also, she was wearing some of the dead victim's clothing.
Right. And she had led the guards to locations of the buried bodies.
They were in remote areas. She was likely there when they were buried.
He was not giving her this detailed of instructions of where he left.
Yeah, like six faces to the left and then four miles out.
Exactly. The authorities were like, she had to have been there.
There's no way. It also makes sense then that one of the girls was buried five feet deep in the middle of the winter.
They did that together. He had help. Yeah, he's a big guy and he probably could have done it.
But now I'm like, no, she was probably there.
Now it makes a little more sense that there might have been two shovels there.
Yeah. On February 1st, 1862, the jury deliberated, and when they returned, they announced that they found both Martin Dumayard and his wife, Marie Ann, guilty.
Yeah. Judge M. Marahat... I'm saying this wrong, I'm sure, and I apologize.
But you tried. I am giving it my all. Returned from his chambers and read his decision.
He said Dumouillard is sentenced to death and his wife to 20 years hard labor.
Good work, bitch. The prosecutor added that the execution, quote, should take place at a public place by means of beheading.
Nice. Yikes. Now, on March 7th, 1862, the guillotine slash guillotine.
Which one do you say? This keeps coming up in my life.
I don't know why. I think guillotine sounds better.
I think we need to ask a French person. I think we have asked, so maybe we'll get an answer.
But I think I've said guillotine my whole life, but guillotine does sound like it's smoother.
I've always said guillotine. But, you know.
It was brought into Mont Lowell, and Martin drank a cup of coffee that day.
He had a final glass of wine. He was able to have dinner with Marie Anne before his execution.
Weird. Yeah. And March 8th, in front of a crowd of over 8,000 people.
Damn. And they had done the thing where taverns sold, like, tickets.
Oh, my God. All these, like, apartment places, like, were selling tickets out of windows, like, you know, that kind of thing.
It's like today's firework shows when they, like, rent out a parking space.
Exactly. He said his final words, which were, I pray for other people, I die innocent.
Yeah. Not so much, my dude. I don't know about that.
He went to the guillotine guillotine, cool and unconcerned, according to press.
And then he kneeled before it, kissed the crucifix, and was beheaded at 6 a.m.
His head was actually sent to Lyon Medical School.
And it got lost at one time in history. How do you lose somebody's whole ass head?
And it was found again in the 1960s. Damn.
Isn't that wild? Where was it found? I'm not really sure.
It was like in the archives somewhere, I guess.
It's like wild. It's like when you put something in like a good spot and then you forget what that good spot was.
John does that on the daily. Yeah, so does Ash Kell right here.
Yeah. But you can actually Google it if you want to.
It's like a mummified head. It's nothing like gruesome or anything like that.
I actually, I saw it by mistake and I thought it was fake.
Yeah. Turns out, like I said, this is when they found out that that split lip he had was a tumor.
That's how they found out. It was benign.
But Marie-Anne was sent to Auberive Prison, I think it is, in the northeastern region of France.
She had to do daily hard labor. She had many illnesses, and she died in 1875 in prison.
Also, Madame Tussauds' wax museum, she made a wax tableau of him for her Chamber of Horrors exhibit.
Remember, she had done a couple of them before.
Yeah, that was like a big thing in the 1800s.
In like early 1900s, her Chamber of Horrors exhibit was like... That's kind of cool.
Basically like the... I don't even know how to describe it.
It was just these wild tableaus of like real killers, which is like...
Oh, like it was all real killers? I think it was all real killers.
Oh, I thought like... Like horror movies now?
Yeah, yeah, that's why I said it was cool.
That would be cool, sorry. No, that's why I was like, I'm pretty sure it's like... You were like, you are not picking up what I'm putting down.
You will not think this is cool. No, no, that's not.
If it was like horror movies, that'd be sick.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that is the case of the French maid killer, Martin Dumoyard.
I apologize for all the French mispronunciations.
I think you did a great job. Did my best.
French is hard. It's really hard. I want to take French though, so I'm going to make it up to you.
Use the best. I'll use babble and I'll take some French and I'll make it up to all of you.
I gave it my best. Well, guys, we hope you keep listening.
And we hope you keep listening. It's weird.
But not so weird that you help your husband murder a bunch of people and then say that you didn't help him because I don't believe you.
And also not so weird that like after you killed a million people and you're about to get beheaded, you kiss the cross and say that you pray for everybody because like I don't need your prayers.
No, we don't. Bye. Bye. If you like Morbid, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
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