PAST CRIMESyoung, breaking the ankle, which had never properly healed. His shoemaker
confirmed that he always adjusted the right shoe to accommodate the slight
distortion that had resulted. His doctor also added his medical records,
revealing a history of leg problems, including gout.
Monsieur Goron had a replica of the trunk made and displayed. Twenty
five thousand people visited it in the Paris morgue in the space of three days,
and one was able to identify it as having come from a shop on the Euston
Road in London. The shop still had the original receipt–it had been bought
by Michel Eyraud a few weeks before the disappearance.
By now, Eyraud and his lady friend were on the run. Agents from the Sûreté
followed their trail across the Atlantic, through the US and Canada, until in
1890 Eyraud was seen in Havana, and the Cuban police were notified.
Bompard was tracked down in Vancouver, where her new lover persuaded her
to turn herself in.
Now the truth began to emerge. Monsieur Gouffé was a prosperous man, a
man of habits, but also one who enjoyed sexual adventure. He always went to
the same bar on a Friday night after taking the cash from the office safe. Eyraud
heard about this and prepared the scene. In Bompard’s apartment, a rope was
passed through an iron ring in the ceiling above the lady’s bed, and Eyraud
himself hid behind a curtain at the end of the bed with the end of the rope.
Bompard went to the bar and picked Gouffé up with the offer of sex. She
brought him back to the apartment, disrobed and slipped on a dressing gown.
Sliding the sash of the gown around his neck in apparent play, Eyraud was
able to take the ends, attach them to the rope, and haul, hanging their victim
quickly. But a search of his pockets was a great disappointment–his takings
were not there. He had already put the money in a safer place.
They put the body in a sack and then in the trunk, and the next day took the
train for Lyon. They stayed with the trunk overnight in a guesthouse, and the
next day hired a carriage. At the point where the road met a cliff over the river,
they dumped the body out, believing it would sink. Unfortunately for and
unknown to them, it snagged on a bush. They smashed the trunk with a
hammer and dumped it in the woods.
Eyraud went to the guillotine, and Bompard received a twentyyear prison
sentence. The execution was a massive public event–street vendors were
even selling miniature copies of the trunk, complete with a tiny metal corpse
inside.
Dr Lacassagne’s meticulous approach, his willingness to employ new
methods, and his readiness to consult a number of other experts, mark him as
one of the pioneers of medical forensics, and raised the bar for investigations