The Arsenic Wife (Part 2)

of her husband, Charles Lafarge, wearing mourning clothes. She twenty four years old, was by all accounts, a striking woman, with long, dark hair tucked under her hat and a complexion that looked particularly elegant against her all black wardrobe.

It might have looked, at first glance to an onlooker that she was at her husband's gravesite for his funeral, or, perhaps more realistically, in this case, to pay her respects to vietly placed flowers down on the grave of a man who had passed away from illness a year earlier. But no, Marie LeFarge was wearing black at her husband's grave because his body was being exhumed as part of a trial. Her trial, she was accused of murdering her husband,

and her case had captivated the country. There were literally hundreds of spectators crowding the grave as it was dug up, with the judge of the region Lubersac supervising the digging. Savvy venders were selling smelling salts. As soon as Charles Lefarge's coffin was pride open, those salesmen began pulling in a hefty business. A sea of handkerchiefs were lifted to noses. In unison, Marie LeFarge swooned and seemed so faint that someone shouted that court should be postponed for the day.

The jury decreed that the trial should continue to proceed. When Marie LeFarge had first been charged with the murder of her husband, local apothecary men had tried to test her husband's body for arsenic, but they were completely unfamiliar with the latest scientific method, a chemical test for identifying

arsenic created by the Scottish doctor James Marsh. Not only had the local men used old fashioned, inexact methods, but their test had been completely bungled anyway, a glass tube had broken halfway through, so the judge had determined a new test would be performed, the Marsh test done by professional chemists in full view of the court, so no errors would be made. This time around. Unfortunately, by this point Charles LaFarge's body had decomposed to the point where

a newspaper described it as paste rather than flesh. The experts were forced to use a spoon to scrape what they could into small pots. Those pots were swiftly transported to an open air laboratory in tool where a group of chemists were going to be faced with the most high stakes experiment of their careers. With the court, a crowd of spectators, and the nation waiting, these chemists scurried

around their charcoal furnaces. They painstakingly added the proper chemical reagents and set up a piece of porcelain at exactly the right distance from a flame. And then they held their breath, probably both from the stench of Charles l Lefarge's remains and from the anticipation of what they were doing.

The Marsh test was deceptive in its seeming simplicity, though the chemistry involved wasn't particularly complex, there were a number of factors in its methodology that had to be absolutely perfect in order for the test to work, and the French chemists and toul who had read about the procedure in translation were performing it for the first time. Finally, after a day of waiting and anticipating, the chemists returned

to the Palace of Justice. They turned to the judge and the jury and announced they had reached their scientific conclusion as to whether there was arsenic in the body of Charles Lafarge. Marie LeFarge looked as those who were about to fame as she and the rest of the room waited to hear the determination that would all but seal her fate. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is noble blood. The evidence against Marie LeFarge was building a very compelling

case against her. She had been miserable in her marriage to Charles Lafarge. She was lied to and forced to live in his decrepit, crumbling estate out in the country, far from her friends and her well connected social scene in Paris. On the first night she had arrived, she had barricaded herself in her bedroom and threatened to kill herself with arsenic if he didn't release her from the marriage. Less than six months later, her husband was dead. Marie

had ordered arson from an apothecary. A few days before. She sent her husband a cake in the mail, a cake that he seemed to become ill immediately after eating, and Marie had procured arsenic again. Once her husband was back home. She had sent Charles's clerk, Denis Barbier, to get a sizeable amount of arsenic, allegedly to kill the

rats that still ran about their home. When the investigators had arrived after Charles's death, they found a bag of arsenic buried in the garden, seemingly hidden away from private eyes. A servant told the magistrate that Marie LeFarge had told him to bury it on her account so law enforcement wouldn't be able to find it, presumably, and the friend of the family who worked as a housekeeper, Mademoiselle Braun, had seen Marie LeFarge putting white powder into broth that

she was preparing for Charles. And then there was the case of the missing jewelry. Years before Charles's death, back when Marie was still unmarried, she had visited a friend of hers, the Vicomtesse de Leotto. Not long after the visit, the Vicomtesse noticed that some of her diamonds were missing. Though she and her husband didn't have Marie investigated, they were always suspicious, and once news of this massive murder

trial hit newspapers. The Vicomte reached out to investigators and let them know that perhaps Marie's room should be searched for diamonds, and what should they have found right in Marie's room but those very jewels. Of course, stealing jewels is unrelated to the possible murder of one's husband, but it painted a damning picture of an am a moral woman who would steal and possibly even murder out of resentment for the fact that her lot in life had

led her to marriage with a broke iron master. But of course, with regards to the actual murder, when Marie's case was going to trial, there was one piece of evidence more damning than anything else. Investigators on the site had tested Charles's body for arsenic. They tested the cup of broth Mademoiselle Bron had put aside, and they tested the little white box that Marie LeFarge had claimed contained

gum arabic. They had determined arsenic was present. Sure, they the local men in Brieve had not been expert forensic chemists, and they hadn't used the more sophisticated March test. And yes, a tube had broken, but they had found arsenic, and that had to mean something, but did it? At the trial, Marie Lefarge's defense council cleared his throat one morning in court and read out a letter that had come directly from Paris. There was a rarefied air around the letter.

People knew it was important. It was from a man who was nothing short of a scientific celebrity. Metuophila was the dean of the Paris medical Faculty, and he served on a number of influential committees. He edited important medical journals and less important but still interesting. He had a beautiful singing voice and would often hold musical salons that were considered centers of culture. The defense council began to read the let letter that Orphila had sent to court.

You ask me, he wrote, if it is sufficient proof of the presence of arsenic in the digestive organs, if the liquor produced by boiling them in distilled water yield when treated with sulfurated hydrogen a yellow precipitate. He was describing the old method, the non marsh method for finding arsenic. I answer no, he said. Orphela referenced a previous case where the yellow precipitate that is so often mistaken for

arsenic had been something completely innocuous. The test that those men had done in brief Orphela concluded was completely meaningless. In eighteen forty, an English doctor writing about the case reached the same verdict, stating no weight can be attached to the report of the brief commission, the members of which evidenced the grip josest ignorance of the truths known to the merest tyro in legal medicine. They had found arsenic, maybe sure, but factoring in the old, unreliable method and

the broken too, the entire thing was bunk. And if there was no proof that Charles Lafarge had actually been poisoned with arsenic, then there was only circumstantial evidence of a woman who might have been unhappy in her brief marriage, but wasn't a murderer. And so those were the circumstances that led to the judge ordering a second examination of

Charles LaFarge's body. This time, experts from Limoge would take whatever samples they could from the decomposed corpse, used their spoons to scoop it into jars and use the marsh test, which could detect even the tiniest train of arsenic By this time, the trial had become a sensation. If you were imagining something out of the musical Chicago, where an accused murderess becomes an object of tabloid celebrity, you wouldn't

be far off. People crowded into the courtroom to get a glimpse of the young widow dressed all in black, who was known to swoon and to require smelling salts at various points during the proceedings. As the trial went on, Marie LeFarge would begin to be carried into courts on a setae. So delicate were her sensibilities and so finally, with anticipation as high as it possibly could be, the Lamoge Commission issued their report. Using the incredibly scientific Marsh test.

They found no arsenic in Charles LaFarge's body. Marie and her counsel both burst into tears. She was vindicated, at least for now. With the scientific consensus that Marie LeFarge was actually innocent, the events of the preceding year began to tell a slightly different story. Sure, Marie had been unhappy when she had arrived at her husband's crumbling estate to find that he had lied about his financial situation, wouldn't you be Yes, She had threatened suicide that night,

but she had been overwhelmed, foolish, embarrassed, childish. Her husband Charles had responded kindly, and from that point on he and Marie began to get along. It was at least amiable, something that slowly developed over the weeks into friendship and then maybe even devotion. Of course, Marie's mother in law was suspicious and resentful of her from the start. Marie wrote in her memoirs that when Charles was away, he would write sweet love notes to Marie in his letters home.

For a time, it was an evening tradition that Marie would read Charles's letters out loud, but she noticed how her mother in law stiffened and bristled when she read anything sweet or romantic. Marie stopped reading those parts. The fact that Charles had gotten sick after eating cakes they sent, well,

Marie's mother in law had baked those cakes. She was the only one in the family who baked the desserts, and if the cakes had been replaced or tampered with by the time they reached Charles in Paris, there was no evidence it was Marie who did that. It could

have been anyone at that point. In fact, it seems unlike Marie would have poisoned the cakes at all, because she wrote in her letter to Charles that he should invite her favorite sister over while he was in Paris, where it seems really likely that she could have shared the cake. You don't want to suggest your favorite sister go over to a house where poisoned cake is lying around. As for ordering arsenic, Arsenic was used as rat poison, and le Glandier their home was full of rats. They

scampered everywhere, ate Marie's clothes. It's completely reasonable that Marie would try to make it so that the home that she lived in might be slightly improved. And then when Charles came home ill and bedridden, the rats were bothersome. They made noise and kept Charles up when he needed bed rest. If Marie had actually planned on poisoning her husband with the arsenic, then why would she have told him about every step she was taking to get arsenic

and get rid of the rats. She told him when she sent his clerk, Denny Barbier to get the arsenic, and she showed Charles how much had come when Barbier had returned, there was nothing sneaky about it. Well, what about the arsenic that was buried in the yard when the investigators came. In Marie's memoir, she says, a young servant, panicked by the thought of either Marie or anyone else in the household being accused of arsenic poisoning, had buried

it without telling Marie. When the investigators interrogated the servant boy, they had intimidated him. They had threatened him with the scaffold unless he told them that he had buried the arsenic on Marie's orders. By then, the investigation had already set its sights firmly on Marie, who had been accused by Charles's suspicious family members who hated her from the start. But sometimes people get cholera, Sometimes people die of cholera.

The matter of the Vicomtess's missing diamonds was a little more complicated, But even then Marie had an explanation. You see, when the investigators were given the tip and arrived to search Marie's rooms for the jewels, well they hadn't actually needed to search at all. Marie Lafarcee told them outright, yes, she did have the Vicomtessa's diamonds and told them exactly where they were. She hadn't stolen the diamonds from her friend. Her friend had given them to her to sell to

help her friend out of a tricky financial situation. The Vicomtess was being blackmailed by an ex lover, and she had asked Marie to secretly sell some of her diamonds to pay him off. The Vicomtesse had not expected her husband to even notice that the jewels were gone. In the meantime, Marie kept the diamonds safe in her room while she figured out what to do with them. When Marie was arrested for the alleged jewel robbery, she wrote to her friend, May God never visit upon you the

evil you have done to me. Alas I know you are really good but weak. You have told yourself that I am likely to be convicted of an atrocious crime. I may as well take the blame of one which is only infamous. I keep our secret. I left my honor in your hands, and you have not chosen to absolve me. The story is a little far fetched, I admit. While waiting for the murder trial to proceed, Marie was

actually tried and found guilty for stealing the jewels. In the end, it was her word against her friends, and the Vicomtesse maintained that there had been no ruinous blackmail plot. But even if Marie was guilty of stealing her friend's diamonds, as Marie had pointed out in her letter, that crime was merely infamous as opposed to the atrocious crime of murder. And the chemists came back with the marsh test and

absolved Marie LeFarge of murder. There was no arsenic in Charles LaFarge's body, and so no matter how likely a suspect Marie Lafarge was, it was going to be very difficult for a jury to convict her. Still, the prosecution was convinced that Marie Lafarge was a murderess, and they were determined to do everything they could to win their case, even if the defense was already doing a metaphorical victory lap.

After the test results. Wait a moment, the prosecution said, there was one test that said there was arsenic and another that said there wasn't. That's not very definitive at all. Sure, the Lamoege Commission had used the brand new Marsh test, but it was famously tricky, and they had done it for the first time, there's no guarantee that they did it right. The prosecution had an idea, a Hail Mary, a tiebreaker test done by none other than the celebrity

of the French chemistry world, met to Orphila himself. By this point, there was nothing left of poor Charles LaFarge's body but something I read described as a milkshake like preparation of organ mash. But Orphila was the expert. If anyone in France could do the Marsh test and do it absolutely correctly, it was him. Orphila was a distinguished looking man, with a bald head and fuzzy tufts of hair circling his temples. Contemporary drawings of him highlight his small,

sharp nose and thin, serious lips. When Orphila entered the courtroom, I imagine his celebrity brought the room to a hush. The undisputed expert on arsenic poisoning stood before the judge and the jury. He had tested the remains of Charles Lafarge, all the organs that his team had managed to extract from the decomposing corpse. They had done the Marsh test and done it correctly. Before Orphila offered his conclusion as to the fate of Charles Lafarge, he gave the court

some context. Over years of experimentation, he had determined that human bones contain trace amounts of arsenic, and that sometimes arsenic can also be found leeched from the soil, and so he had been extraordinarily careful in his analysis of Charles LaFarge's body to ensure that his samples taken from the organs were unspoiled and did not include any bone

or soil. So what was the conclusion arsenic meteu Orphila had found arsenic in Charles Lfarge's organs half a milligram, an amount so tiny it could have only ever been detected using the marsh test. The courtroom erupted. The defense scrambled and tried to call one of Orphila's rivals, a man named Francois vincent Resbail, to the courtroom to offer a counter annal, but Rispel didn't make it in time. He arrived at the court four hours after the jury

had reached its verdict. Orphila's testimony sealed Marie LaFarge's fate, and she was found guilty of the murder of her husband and sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor, though the labor would later be commuted. Marie Lafarge, twenty four years old, would spend the next twelve years of her life in prison. In eighteen fifty two, she became ill with tuberculosis, and she was released from prison on the orders of Napoleon the Third. She died a few months later.

That was forensic toxicology and action. Orphila had found arsenic, and so it meant that Marie Lafarge was guilty. But did it and did Orphila actually find evidence that Charles Defarge was poisoned? The question was a little more complicated than it had appeared that day in the courtroom. The chemist Francois Raspel, possibly guilty over arriving at court a few hours too late to offer his own testimony, would spend years publicly challenging Orphila and criticizing both his methods

and his results. Orphila had claimed he found half a milligram of arsenic in Charles Lefarge's remains. Respel determined that amount to be a hundredth of a milligram, and there were a number of points in Orpheli's testing where a small amount of arsenic might have snuck in. For Arphela's final test, the one where he had found the arsenic, he had sent one of his assistants to a neighboring

town to get some reagent. That reagent hadn't been tested for arsenic before it was used in the experiment, and it's conceivable that it was contaminated. As for Orphila's claim that human bones naturally contain arsenic, well they don't. Actually, we know that now, and the fact that Orphela believed that they did indicates that there was some point in his earlier testing procedure where phantom arsenic was able to

sneak in. Two years after Marie LeFarge was found guilty, another woman, Madame Lacoste, was accused of murder by arsenic. Of course, the famous Marie LeFarge case was the closest point of comparison, and the courts invited a chemist named Monsieur Chevalier to testify. Chevalier had been one of two of Orphela's assistants during the Lafarge investigation. For this new trial, a juryman asked Chevalier was the quantity of arsenic found by you in this case equal to that which served

as a ground for conviction in the LeFarge case. Chevalier thought for a while and then answered, extremely carefully, I cannot reply to a question so put, he said, finally, what was said to be the poison found in the body of Lafarge was imponderable. It was so infinitesimal that it could not fulfill the conditions of a standard comparison when we use words more or less. The jury was dumbfounded. They declared Madame Lacoste innocent. Marie LeFarge heard the news

of Madame Lacoste's exoneration while she was still in prison. Allegedly, Marie remarked, my ghost has saved her. Whether or not Marie LeFarge actually was guilty of murdering her husband, and whether or not Charles Lafarge was even poisoned with arsenic are both mysteries that, barring new information or a historian with Sherlock holmesy in powers of deductive reasoning, will probably elude us. But in the aftermath of the trial and

in recent years, a number of theories emerged. The theory I find interesting, although again not necessarily convincing beyond a reasonable doubt. But interesting is that Charles Lafarge actually was poisoned, but by his clerk, Denny Barbier. According to some sources, Charles Lafarge, our victim, had been somewhat of a more nefarious character than he had been made out to be.

In the wake of his death, some claim that Lafarge wasn't merely an iron master who fell into debts, but that he was also a forger, as in he used forged bills of exchange in order to procure advances. His right hand man in that endeavor was Denie Barbier. According to one unverified claim, when Barbier heard that Charles was close to death, he was heard saying, now I shall

be master here. If he had been working on shady dealings with his boss and was nervous that those crimes might be revealed, it's plausible he had a motive to do away with Charles LeFarge, especially when he imagined he might be the one to take over Charles's business after he died. Barbier also had access to all of Charles's food and drink, and he had been the one who procured the arsenic that Marie had asked for to kill

the rats. Barbier easily could have kept some or all of it for himself and given Marie something harmless in its place. The Edinburgh Review published an examination in eighteen forty two, two years after the trial, laying out the case against Barbier. According to them, Denis Barbier quote lived by forgery and was the accomplice of LeFarge in some very shady transactions by which that unhappy man sought to

cover his insolvency. Barbier had also conceived a violent hatred against Madame LeFarge, as her presence was likely to hinder his nefarious practices and weaken his hold over his companion in crime end quote. They continue to explain that Barbier had unrestricted access to everywhere in the house that Arsenic was found. If Denis Barbier committed this foul crime, they concluded, he escaped without any punishment save that which would be

inflicted by an outraged conscience. In the end, the marsh test, exact as it might have been, simply couldn't tell us everything. That's the story of Marie LeFarge, but keep listening. After a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more about how the legacy of science in courtrooms continues to affect us today. In two thousand and four, USA Today reported on a phenomenon that seemed to be affecting the

ways juries rendered their verdicts. It's called the CSI effect, and according to researchers, what was happening was that the average person doing jury duty started watching a lot more TV, specifically a lot more crime TV like CSI, and in shows like CSI, DNA and other forensic evidence is ubiquitous

and air tight. The CSI effect, then, is the alleged phenomenon that jurors expect forensic evidence in any trial, and when it's not present, either because it wasn't available or prosecutors thought it wasn't necessary, jurors are more likely to acquit even when there's plenty of other compelling evidence that

someone committed a crime. The CSI effect has definitely informed the way that legal professionals today build their cases, but it's also just as possible that watching crime television shows might be more responsible for jurors wanting to convict more often. Professor Tom Tyler at NYU argues that television shows offer stories of catharsis and closure of justice being done, which

jurors would try to replicate with a conviction. Tyler suggests that increased rates of acquittal might have to do not with police on television, but with the public's decreasing confidence in police in the real world. Noble Blood is a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is created and hosted by me Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick,

Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is edited and produced by Noemi Griffin and rima Il Kahali, with supervising producer Josh Thain and executive producers Aaron Manke, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen your favorite shows.